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

[Lanefan]

More importantly, I think most people who play TTRPGs would be deeply confused why anyone would care that much about most of the things people who know what "simulationism" and "gamism" and "narrativism" mean.

They just want a game that:

Lets them have a cool (and often, humorous) fantastical adventure
Doesn't require them to memorize too much
Won't induce nasty arguments over stupid Rules Bovine Feces
Lets them come up with a fun and/or funny and/or awesome character
Helps them make that aforementioned character feel good to play

So far, I agree. We tend to overthink the crap out of some of this stuff, forgetting (or ignoring?) that most of the player-base is just here for a good time and a few laughs every week or two.

Produces an overall satisfying arc in a reasonable amount of time (presumably, between a few months and a year-ish)

I'd put this as "produces an overall satisfying run of play for however long it lasts - a few months, a few years, a few decades, however long it remains enjoyable", to allow for open-ended games where there is no single definable 'arc' with a closed end.

 

[Enrahim]

Thank you for being so kind to keep this up! I feel like there is some progression here, and I enjoy this more than it might seem. I hope you are not finding this frustrating in any way though! I will not give a full reply, as I actually think we are close to a mutual understanding on most points now.

OK. Do you understand that most gamers make at least a very minimal map?

Yes.

Personally, I found my games to be a lot more immersive and interesting once I started doing this--which I did before PbtA was a thing, by the way. It may be something you want to be more conscious about.

Interesting. I want to add a note. Some of my language is heavily influenced by Mentzer(IIRC) red box advice related separating player and character. I hence do tend toward using character name in some situations it might be more common to use "you". This might serve some of the same purpose?
Not “Tony, is Dunwick doing something about that wight?” nor "“Dunwick, what are you doing about the wight?” nor "There is a wight, what are you doing?" (Looking at Tony), but rather "There is a wight, what is Dunwick doing?" (Not necessarily looking at Tony).

This isn't specifically a move thing. It's literally what I said: The PCs do X, you respond with Y. I mean, I assume that, as GM, you take on the role of NPCs, right?

I feel sad, but I don't see how to make progress on this. The text is not directly transferable to D&D context. It uses the term move in it's title 3 of its sentences, refered to trough "they" in the fourth. The only sentence not directly involving "move" is "What’s going on?". We both have made attempts of reinterpreting into a D&D context with wildly different results. I think diving into the distinction here could be interesting from an understand DW point of view, but it doesn't seem worth it in this context.

Do the first zombies or goblins get that treatment?

Probably to some extent. It say "each monster" not "each monster type" though. Again I guess you could water it down?

Do your players not take notes?

Player's note taking make the situation worse?

Probably because DW was, like, the second PbtA game created and was addressing a potentially very different audience (D&D players) than AW was, and so they felt that they had to explain it.

They need to explain D&D players what they are doing all the time in their game? (Ask what do you do?)

No, but I personally have to wonder why you feel the need to gloat at someone who fails in some way. That sounds bizarrely petty.

"Theatrical" Is a keyword here. Ever heard about the infamous GM smile when something bad is about to happen? It is similar to that. It is part of making the players feel like their character inhabits a hostile world. Feigning antagonism is a quite nice atmosphere building tool in the right context (even when the players are fully aware of this being a feign - human subconscious social instincts are a solid pathway for building certain experiences.)

DW doesn't use Inspiration.

Exactly. D&D does, and inspiration is actually a underapriciated tool in the toolbox that can really shape the experience if effectively used. The claim was that DW didn't do anything not already done by D&D GMs. Prohibiting the use of one of their key tools, or indeed anything like it really seem like something different from what D&D GMs already does.

In case you don't understand, a move is something that moves the game along. You generally don't use a move to do something off-screen, because that doesn't move the active game along.

You'll also notice that "think offscreen" is a principle, not a move.

Think offscreen uses the keyword move in 2 of 3 sentences. Among them the last sentence I think is the key functional description of the principle. Indeed, this is indeed expanded on under the heading "choosing a move"

If your first instinct is that this won’t hurt them now, but it’ll come back to bite them later, great! That’s part of your principles (think offscreen too). Make a note of and reveal it when the time is right.

Well, you might want to give it a shot. Your players may have extra fun if they get to show off their abilities every once in a while.

My players are competent enough to be able to show off their abilities even if I do not serve it up as an intended opportunity Indeed, that is what I love most in this game, is seeing the players use their resources in ingenious ways I would never have thought of. Adding anything tailored to one approach or character doesn't make any sense at all to me.

 

[AlViking]

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.

Eh. It's a matter of preference and degree. Most games are not particularly "realistic" because they wouldn't be fun to play. It's still just a set of rules to represent what our characters are doing in-world.

 

[Lanefan]

I never said it was bad D&D. Far from it. I consider it D&D--without quality qualifier. It simply is. Whether you like that it is or not is irrelevant. We cannot deny that the Dragonlance modules are D&D; we cannot pretend that their approach was somehow utterly unacceptable to anyone who played; in fact, we can't even deny that it had a long-term impact on the hobby, because it one million percent DID, just (generally) not in that specific area of "scripted to the point of almost being a theatrical performance".

Yes, bad D&D is still D&D. We've agreed Dragonlance is railroady as all hell, which makes it bad. It's still D&D, but not D&D that I'd want to use as an example of how anything is done best.

And so saying Dragonlance proves death isn't necessary kinda shoots your point in the foot; as you're in effect tying "death isn't necessary" and "bad D&D" together at the hip. I'm going to guess that isn't what you intended.

I don't think threats are the only, or even best, way to motivate people. I find that persuading them to care about something is dramatically more motivating. Fear simply makes people run. That's what it's for; fight-or-flight, after all, defaults to flight unless you don't think flight is possible. But people who care? They'll run into the fire willingly, even if they know they'll be burned, because they have discovered what C.S. Lewis wrote about friendship: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” They have discovered that survival without the things that give it value is worthless.

And that, in my not-so-humble opinion, is where the best roleplay occurs. Since I know my way isn't for everyone (and, indeed, is as much a minority as the meatgrinder early-edition style), I've never said that everyone should think this. I do, however, think that people have an inappropriately high appreciation for death and only death with absolutely nothing else as the thing that gives games meaning, while rejecting to the point of open disdain the possibility that maybe something else could be more appropriate for some specific groups. (Different things for different groups, most assuredly!)

Death shouldn't be the only true-loss condition; we can blame 3 editions of WotC D&D design for getting us to the point where it is, as all the other true-loss conditions have been steadily stripped away.

You have it backwards. I am saying the players are invested before the characters are finished. Even if we were doing OSR-style games--which I have no interest in running--I know my players well enough to know that they WOULD invest before the character sheet was complete. Hence, in order to do what you told me to do--kill the character before the player has invested into it--I would need to kill their characters before they were even created.

Depends how much they enjoy the imagination side of the creation process, I guess. The process of mechanical char-gen has become far too complex and time-consuming, I'll freely grant that; there's something systemically wrong if you can't get a non-exceptional character from blank-page to fully playable in well under half an hour, with 10-15 minutes being the ideal.

And yet you've said that such players are boring. This is hard to square!

I can see how it would be. Players can take interesting approaches to doing boring things, and-or can eschew the boring for the exciting if they're willing to risk it; the latter being my own preference.

But this is real life. The real-life risk of one's investment and participation in the experience (I would say "story" but I know that has baggage a bunch of people here outrightly hate.)

You're risking your character maybe. You're in no way risking your own continued participation in the ongoing experience of the game, in that you can always roll up something new or, at higher levels, wait a while until your party can get you revived.

We're not talking about the Chick Tract game where Black Leaf's player gets kicked out of the group just because her character dies. Real games don't work that way; if they did, this hobby would have collapsed before it ever got off the ground.

 

[Lanefan]

Do your players not take notes?

Usually, no; or the notes they do take turn out not to be what I in fact later need to remember.

No, but I personally have to wonder why you feel the need to gloat at someone who fails in some way. That sounds bizarrely petty.

I sometimes jokingly cheer for my monsters during a combat. I mean, hell, it's the only support they're ever going to get!

What module? The original Ravenloft module? Never read it. It was in one of the boxed books, or maybe the MCA. But one doesn't need to read that module to think to address characters, not people. That's the first place I read it, but it's an idea that's been used many times since--and probably before--that as well.

Talking to the characters rather than the players is something I've just kinda naturally done all along, way before ever reading or hearing about it as any sort of best-practice guideline.

 

[Lanefan]

Interesting. I want to add a note. Some of my language is heavily influenced by Mentzer(IIRC) red box advice related separating player and character. I hence do tend toward using character name in some situations it might be more common to use "you". This might serve some of the same purpose?
Not “Tony, is Dunwick doing something about that wight?” nor "“Dunwick, what are you doing about the wight?” nor "There is a wight, what are you doing?" (Looking at Tony), but rather "There is a wight, what is Dunwick doing?" (Not necessarily looking at Tony).

In my view, the bolded is the best approach by far. Tony's not dealing with the wight, Dunwick is; and asking Dunwick what he's doing encourages Tony to think as Dunwick rather than as Tony.

Player's note taking make the situation worse?

Player note-taking, if they did such, could help cover off for lapses in the DM's memory.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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,

Correction: These are actions which involve rules. Well, plus the (several) generic moves.

Anything that doesn't involve rules is perfectly fair game. There just won't be any rolling involved because there won't be any need for it.

You keep acting like DW and other such games just forbid anything that doesn't have a discrete move. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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.

Is that what you think defines "sim" as a goal? Because that looks nothing like what people here, including you, have repeatedly demanded.

Because what people actually demand for "sim" is way, way, way, WAY more than that...and also somehow less than that sometimes! Which, yes, that is precisely why I think many players would be baffled by it. Baffled by the need for the procedure of play to be engineered to (for example) never, EVER involve the player making decisions the character couldn't. Because that's a critical requirement, and has nothing to do with "the world...operates more or less like ghe real world." It's that the gameplay rules have to be designed under extremely limiting requirements. No "meta currencies" (no casual player would even know what that meant and most would be baffled as to why it matters). No "dissociated mechanics" (casual players would need the whole concept explained and probably wouldn't understand why it matters that much). No processes that smell too much like playing a game. Etc., etc.

Everybody gets wanting a world that has self-consistent rules. I really, really don't think most of them would get why so many perfectly usable game mechanics are off limits.

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?

Who said anything about the players being denied the ability to see the rules? Like....what?

I genuinely have no idea how you got any of that out of what I said. Not only that, but I already quoted the book for DW which says that GMs should not speak the names of their moves, and should instead let the action speak for itself (as constantly putting little labels on everything is not an effective GMing choice.)

You used specific game design concepts and pretended that they have to be aggressively pushed into the players' faces. They don't. Just...give them actual rules that are well-tested for the purpose they were made for, and the results will naturally fall out just from using them. No need to bash them over the head with...what was the term? "Conflict on a moral line"? That will happen simply because that's what using moves is (well, most of the time.)

I don't see that happening with sim, because it has all these extra rules about how you can design and what is permissible vs impermissible design and what specific things can be done (even if a given game all too often gets pretty extreme grandfathering exceptions...)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So far, I agree. We tend to overthink the crap out of some of this stuff, forgetting (or ignoring?) that most of the player-base is just here for a good time and a few laughs every week or two.

I'd put this as "produces an overall satisfying run of play for however long it lasts - a few months, a few years, a few decades, however long it remains enjoyable", to allow for open-ended games where there is no single definable 'arc' with a closed end.

Anyone playing a single game for more than a year is, almost by definition, not a casual player anymore. They're in it for the (very) long haul at that point. They've joined the D&D "club" if you will, rather than just attending an event.

 

[Faolyn]

Morecambe Bay has plenty of fatalities.

According to Wikipedia, it also has "fast-moving tides," which I imagine help contribute to those deaths. You sink into the quicksand, have some trouble getting out, and then drown when the water comes in.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

So why does it bother them so much to learn that other people have taken those methods of play and given them a name?