D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think Micah is running sandboxes.

I am, actually (when I get to do what I want). Thanks anyway.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Moral: pertaining to how people should treat one another (perhaps also themselves; perhaps non-human animals; perhaps "the world"; etc). The domain of obligation and value.

A line is a boundary, a limit. To cross a line is to depart, to trespass, to transgress.

I gave an example of conflict across a moral line. Most choices that involve more than expedience, or estimation of the optimal solution in the face of uncertainty, involve a moral line of some sort. The typical D&D module has few or no such choices - unless they've changed a lot in the 5e era, these tend to foreground expedience and optimisation in the face of uncertainty. But they are the mainstay of a lot of RPGing.

Ok. For my part, I feel those sorts of choices should only come up when player decision and setting logic dictate, as opposed to constantly at every turn.

But that's just my preference.

 

[CreamCloud0]

In Monster of the Week, there's a move called Manipulate Someone. It can be used on another PC. If the manipulator succeeds on their roll, the target PC can choose to agree to be manipulated. If they agree, they get an XP and +1 forward. If the manipulator fails, the target PC gets an XP if they don't do what the manipulator wants.

I've run games where the target PC refused to be manipulated, even though it meant missing out on the XP and bonus.

reading the bolded am i understanding this correctly, so what happens if the manipulator succeeds but the target PC doesn't choose to be manipulated? is there some penalty or otherwise consequence?

 

[Micah Sweet]

How can D&D be both a simulationist game and worship at the altar of the hp god?

See my post above about the spectrum so many seen to ignore. Also, houseruling to make the hit point system more sim is a thing. As it turns out, there's more than one way to play traditional games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mentioned it upthread that D&D sadly trains players to act in ways that many DMs feel is out of character for their creations. Lanefan mentioned a similar thing that only rational choices are made which always happen to be the most optimal. The game promotes min/maxing due to its style of play and limited loss conditions of real consequence. Their characters are cardboard cut-outs, 2-dimensional, hollow...
I'm not saying all players are like this but enough are and it takes some time to weed players off this character-sheet stat mentality.

In my recent game...
Underdark bugbear ranger decides to abandon the Underdark, the only home he has known, to the demon threat (OotA), abandon his personal quest of vengeance vs an Illithid that he had been a thrall for many years, to join a surface party he had known for a day to deal with their issues.
Now I can make it work in the fiction, but there was NO attempt made by this player. The idea never crossed his mind. This dude is an old player who has just joined our table after many years. He is in need of desperate retraining IMO.

EDIT: He had a surface character ready to go in the other destination but because he played this bugbear twice he wanted to stick with him and the other character becomes a NPC now.

Maybe he likes his playstyle. Is it necessary to push your desire to "retrain" gamers who play differently than you on them?

 

[Campbell]

reading the bolded am i understanding this correctly, so what happens if the manipulator succeeds but the target PC doesn't choose to be manipulated? is there some penalty or otherwise consequence?

They just give up the XP

 

[thefutilist]

Ok. For my part, I feel those sorts of choices should only come up when player decision and setting logic dictate, as opposed to constantly at every turn.

But that's just my preference.

Well if a hypothetical you were interested in that type of stuff happening then you could create characters and setting that made it far more likely to happen. Then you could also use a system that operated on a granularity where those decisions weren't undercut by tactical choices, or put another way, renders player tactical skill irrelevant.

Then that's a kind of base line Narrativism, or one variant anyway.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't get to talk about the way I like to play and run games? I've never told anyone one style of play is objectively better or worse than another, but I also won't back down from defending my preferences, or explaining why other styles don't appeal to me.

It's all preference remember?

Yes… that’s my point. If I say that modern conventional wisdom should be X, where X is something fr games you consider narrativist, you would argue against it. You’d remind me that it’s all preference and there shouldn’t be one way to do things.

But if the conventional wisdom from 25-30 years ago should be exempt from your crusade against one-true-wayism?

If it’s bad in your eyes now, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be bad in your eyes then.

 

[FrogReaver]

Moral: pertaining to how people should treat one another (perhaps also themselves; perhaps non-human animals; perhaps "the world"; etc). The domain of obligation and value.

A line is a boundary, a limit. To cross a line is to depart, to trespass, to transgress.

I gave an example of conflict across a moral line. Most choices that involve more than expedience, or estimation of the optimal solution in the face of uncertainty, involve a moral line of some sort. The typical D&D module has few or no such choices - unless they've changed a lot in the 5e era, these tend to foreground expedience and optimisation in the face of uncertainty. But they are the mainstay of a lot of RPGing.

I often find in d&d the expedient choice conflicts with the moral choice. In that sense d&d often features a ton of choices across moral lines.

 

[CreamCloud0]

The actual play doesn't record everything that was actually said by the players for their PCs, nor by me for Lareth. In particular, it doesn't spell out what was said for the characters during the extended (Convince) conflict. The key thing in any extended conflict in TB2e is that the actions taken in each volley have to contribute to that character's overall goal in the conflict, and then the consequences established once the conflict is over (via the compromise rules) must follow from what actually happened during the resolution (eg if, during the resolution, someone makes a promise, then a consequence might be that they are obliged to keep it).

this sole last paragraph provides degrees more illumination on how things work than that entire liveplay snippet besides the few things i could pick out about there being convince conflicts? in which relate to ranks of precedence that determine who can usually order who around and something about a manipulator vs manipulator check.

while i'm grateful you tried to respond to my question it answers very little about how things actually mechanically get resolved in how who wins and what the consequence rules are/work.