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

[Micah Sweet]

Do those things get shown to players?

In Dungeon World, the only things actually shown to players are that they need to have Bonds with stuff (typically, but not exclusively, other party members). That's it. Well, that and being told things like "if you want to use a move, talk about what you're doing, and if that's a move, it'll happen," but that's not really a thing "shown to" them IMO.

But, yes, they won't care about the concepts. The question is whether they will notice the practical action.

I'm of the opinion that simulation is particularly abstract as a gaming concept. It's a lovely ideal, and I don't at all fault its fans for being fans of it. (Believe it or not, I actually value a pretty good amount of simulation too! I just don't think that it is categorically more important than "a game that is fun to play as a game" or "experiencing a rich and satisfying story"). Gamism, of the three, is by far the most concrete, because it's...literally, "does it make a good game to play". Hence, that's the one I expect pretty much all of these highly casual players to care about to at least some degree.

They know it's a game (it's right there on the front page!)--so they're going to expect to do gaming, and they're going to expect to have fun, specifically BY gaming.

Do you think most folks are more ok with the playbooks and moves that constitute the visible actions that the rules allow in, say, PBtA games, but are baffled by the idea that the world they're playing in operates more or less like the real world in practice unless you make the point that, in this case, it doesn't? I simply don't agree.

And in any case, I thought we were supposed to be against hidden rules that only the GM knows. Are narrative players not supposed to know how the game they're playing is supposed to work?

 

[Micah Sweet]

It’s possible to read “simulation” from the inkblot that is modern D&D. But it’s an interpretation, at most.

Modern D&D, particularly WotC's brand, is no longer my concern.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Gamers can be weird but if we're talking the human population as a whole, maybe half of them. I don't think they'd describe it in precisely those terms though.

You're welcome to think so. Seems to me there's a lot of "I just want to have a good time" out there.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not trying to trick anyone into anything. I'm pointing out that the things you're complaining about are things you're already doing.

You're trying to convince people that they're beliefs and preferences are wrong. I don't see anyone doing that to the Narrativists. Who's the aggressor here?

 

[Micah Sweet]

And this is a pretty standard GMing tactic.

You know what? I want to know what the structure of one of your games is like. How do you set up conflicts and threats? Do you set up conflicts and threats?

Because this thread has a whole lot of heavily-narrative folks going into detail about their games and heavily-trad folks not actually talking about their games much at all other than to say "I don't do that." So lets hear how you do do it.

A lot of trad folks don't think about their play with the deep introspection and dissection the Narrativists seem to favor. That should be ok.

Have you noticed how defensive the trad folks are in this thread? It's because IMO they are being attacked.

 

[Enrahim]

So when the players decide they want to attack, you look at the situation and decide that they don't have to enter combat?

I have a couple of relatively recent examples for you.

A wandering monster goblin shot an arrow at the party and missed. Players reacted by withdrawing into a nearby room. Initiative was not rolled.

A player tried to cut a rope bridge and failed. I called for initiative with no hostile intentions declared, as timing of actions were essential. The situation defused in one round and some skill checks.

Neither of these would be "allowable" if the combat sequence were triggered if and only if a hostile action is attempted in fiction.

If you want to make a point of players initiated, I have also had longer time ago PvP instances where a character has acted out (for instance) unarmed attack, that has not triggered combat sequence.

I cannot offer the top of my head remember any cases the PCs initiated attack against monsters in a situation where the combat sequence was not the obvious tool for the job. I do not remember how I handled the evil party more or less executing some farmers more than 20 years ago. I likely would not have cared about initiative for that today (but do not see myself running that kind of game either).

 

[Enrahim]

And this is a pretty standard GMing tactic.

You know what? I want to know what the structure of one of your games is like. How do you set up conflicts and threats? Do you set up conflicts and threats?

Because this thread has a whole lot of heavily-narrative folks going into detail about their games and heavily-trad folks not actually talking about their games much at all other than to say "I don't do that." So lets hear how you do do it.

The easiest to describe is the kind of game where I run a third party module. Then I do not set up any conflicts or threat myself, I relly exclusively on the ones provided in the module. Common practice for this play style is to tweak and personalise the module to the characters. I hence make very sure to inform my players that I am doing no such things when running that module for them. Running a module has also always been a decission based on player wishes. (Edit: what I do though is to be more lentinent than than the module might assume in how the characters can engage with the threat and conflict it sets up)

In my most succefull homebrew it was seemingly relatively unique. I here used a variety of techniques, but the bread and butter was to look at where the characters were going, and try to think of something interesting that could be found there.

An example sequence of such were: they had found they wanted to enter a castle trough it's sever system. I decided it would make sense it did not use the general sever system, as that made sense from a defence perspective. So they gathered information to find there was a sea cave nearby where castle waste were likely to come out.

So they went to the cave; i thought of something interesting that could be in a sea cave mouth, and came up with some frog people. The players then wondered about the religious habbits of these creatures. I went with the first that came to mind which they were able to neatly exploit.

Then while traveling up the cave river I thought it would make sense to introduce some green slimy stuff consuming organic material. I had no idea if or how they would be able to get to the other side of this. They did admirably.

Once they entered the castle, I decided they would find the presumed regent had died, and that their underage heir had keept this info from the people. This came to me at an inspired moment when it struck me that this was a ploy that would make some of the previous issues the players had observed actually make more sense.

So absolutely nothing minding the party composition at all, but rich situations a proactive group can easily engage with.

 

[Lanefan]

This is the part that has always baffled me about the whole "I play D&D as sim" crowd. Why would you insist on playing a system that is so hostile to your stated goals? D&D is not a sim. Like, at all. There's a REASON that sim games exist. It's because they aren't D&D and anyone who is serious about playing simulation games would laugh themselves silly at the suggestion that someone is playing D&D as sim.

But, every since the edition wars of 4e, people have insisted, over and over again, that D&D is a sim game. It really is one of the most frustrating things about the conservatism of D&D fans.

Modern D&D might not be all that sim-friendly but it doesn't take much to push TSR-era D&D a reasonable distance toward sim; there's a whole bunch of little choice points that come down to "do I want this to work realistically or not?", and just choosing the more realistic option the majority of the time makes a decent-size difference.

 

[Lanefan]

Because it's an abstraction of simultaneous combat in order to simplify to the point of being playable.

Agreed, but pemerton's right in that WotC-era D&D combat resolution with hard-coded turns does overly break it down into stop-motion, leading to some bizarre and rather inexplicable outcomes in the fiction if done purely by RAW.

In other words, they've taken the simplification-abstraction process too far, sacrificing realism on the altar of efficiency.

 

[Lanefan]

Does it? Or does it just say that in the modern period there aren't that many sim-centered gamers in the RPG sphere?

That's very possible. It's a cause-and-effect situation: if the entry-point game - which also has by far the biggest influence on the direction of the hobby as a whole - doesn't promote sim and hasn't since 2008 then players coming in aren't very likely to see sim as a possibility never mind a priority, therefore there's an ever-decreasing need for the designers to cater to any sim conceits and sim spirals away into the darkness.

If the sim players are also a rounding error (and unlike many years ago, I suspect they are) most of them could still be in games other than D&D.

Within the 5e-sphere it's quite possible (and IMO rather sad) that they've become a rounding error.