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

[Enrahim]

And all of this is what most of the DW-specific GM agenda and moves are about. There are many of the agendas and moves you didn't follow, but this seems to use a fair number of them, and you certainly don't need to use every one in every adventure. You had a "map" in your head that you left blank in places, allowing you to create a sea cave as you needed it instead of rigidly adhering to a single floorplan, and offered them an opportunity to use it instead of the more rigorously defended castle sewer system. You gave the monsters life by creating frog-folk religion instead of keeping them as nothing more than bags of hit points to be killed. You thought dangerous by including the green slime, which isn't a monster to be killed the traditional way. You spoke an unwelcome truth by revealing that the heir had been keeping secrets.

Yes and in my breakdown of differences between how I run D&D compared to DW, I didn't claim to not use any of the moves. I singled out a subset I wouldn't generally do. It is the principles I pointed to as the main differentiator between what I have been doing and DW.

I reject the interpretation that I have a map with blanks when there is no map. (The idea of a harbour city with a castle do not qualify as a "map") I have fulfilled one half of the principle, just as those with a fully keyed map has fulfilled the other half of the principle.

I reject the notion that the green slime was thinking dangerously. I made it so obvious that I would have been really surprised if anyone or anything of value would get seriously damaged. If they had moved back trying something new, or spending their time getting tools needed to get around it, nothing bad would have happened as a consequence.

(As a side note, the heir reveal was not an unwelcome truth. I actually do not think that "move" fit any on the DW list, but that is secondary).

 

[Enrahim]

So in this case, the conflicts and threats have been set up by someone else. It's the same thing, really. Whoever comes up with the adventure needs to set those things up; the DW writers probably just assumed that most people would be writing their own adventures. There aren't a lot of pre-written adventures for PbtA games, after all. Or even for most non-D&D systems in general.

Well, the absence of pre written adventures for PbtA games might just be that the entire structure and philosophy behind basically makes pre written adventures impossible and nonsensical to write for (almost?) all of them?

As for not prewritten adventures for non D&D systems? They are almost in all trad games! Most off the big ones have tons of adventures.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, the absence of pre written adventures for PbtA games might just be that the entire structure and philosophy behind basically makes pre written adventures impossible and nonsensical to write for (almost?) all of them?

As for not prewritten adventures for non D&D systems? They are almost in all trad games! Most off the big ones have tons of adventures.

Well, there are a billion-and-one adventures for DW. They should pretty much all go into a dumpster with some gasoline. The people writing DW2e likewise have utterly no clue what Narrativist play is, and their 'improvements' to DW are a complete betrayal of everything the game is about.

Very few game designers, or GMs, seem to really comprehend actual Narrativist play. So we definitely agree on one thing, classic modules or APs cannot co-exist with it. That being said, setting, some general maps, creatures, NPCs, lots of resource type stuff is potentially fine.

 

[bloodtide]

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.

How long someone has played a game has nothing to do with how casual of a mindset they have about the game.

1. The first type of Casual Gamer is the Tag along. Their spouse, significant other, sibling or best friend is a gamer and they tag along. They just want to spend time with that person. They don't care about the 'game' at all, just spending time with that person. They might know a couple rules, maybe.

2. The second type is the JAG: The Just A Game person. To them an RPG is just a game, like any card or board game. A game is something to be played for a couple minutes and then to just be dumped. They have other things to do, things much more important then any game.

3. The third type is the Careless. They don't really care about anything, and sure don't care about some silly game. They are part of the group to socialize, relax and hang out. They would much rather just get together and do nothing: doing nothing is their favorite thing to do.


And most people that say they have been "playing RPGs for 10 years" are not saying 'I have been playing RPGs once a week for the last ten years', but are more saying "oh ten years ago I played for a couple weeks...then did not play at all utterly for seven years...then I got in to a game for a couple months...then did not play for two years...and started playing again a week ago"

 

[Hussar]

Not true. We know they failed because of something they did wrong.

Not true. If the cook pops in, it's something the cook did, not something the player did.

The cook might still pop in, even if you successfully pick the lock. It has nothing to do with the player's actions.

Not necessarily. The character might have fallen because magical pixies made him trip. He might have fallen because the rock face crumbled. There might have been a tiny earth elemental that pushed him. We have absolutely no idea. All we know is that he fell. Why he fell, what caused the fall? We have no idea. The system does not connect to the narrative at all.

The cook doesn't "Pop in" though. The cook was always there. The reason the cook was always there is because of a failed skill check, which is being used as an abstract means of generating an encounter, in exactly the same way that a random encounter is generated.

The point is, nothing exists in the game world until AFTER it's encounter by the players. It can't. If it did, then we couldn't have things like random encounters. We abstract all sorts of things in order to generate the illusion of a world, but, that's all that is, an illusion of a world. How that illusion is generated doesn't really matter.

 

[Hussar]

Why did the character fall? Because it was uncertain whether or not they could climb the cliff. When there's uncertainty the DM sets a target DC. Because that's how abstraction works.

Why was the cook there? Because it was uncertain whether or not the cook might be there. When there's uncertainty, the DM sets a target DC. Because that's how abstraction works.

See, no actual difference.

In a simulation system, you need at least some idea of how things work. The system should tell you something about how the result was achieved. So, in our climbing example, a simple system of, "If you fail by X, it's because of the environment, if you fail by Y it's the fault of the character" would do the trick. At least it would tell us something. A system that tells you absolutely nothing about how a result is achieved is not, in any way, a simulation.

 

[Hussar]

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.

Oh please. TSR-era D&D was about as far from simulation as you could get. It was pure wargame. Good grief, your character can't even jump without house rules.

There are very, very good reasons why other games of the era - Rolemaster, Warhammer Fantasty, Chivalry and Sorcery - all went with far more simulation based rules than D&D. It's because D&D has never been a simulation game. Not even remotely.

 

[pemerton]

In other words it's not diegetic because you don't like it. By your definition no complex system could ever be simulated because we're not actually doing it.

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

It's nothing to do with whether or not I like it.

Sequentiality is not an abstraction of simultaneity. It's an alternative to it.

To the extent that this is a departure from Sorensen it is a minor one compared to other examples in the thread. And it is an acceptable one for many players given the complex nature of what is happening.

Simultaneous combat resolution doesn't have to be complex: Classic Traveller is one example. Tunnels & Trolls is another.

I don't dispute that many RPGers find D&D combat "acceptable". But I think that's because most of them don't particularly care about whether or not their combat resolution is simulationist.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

That's very possible too, but it wasn't like there was a massive tendency in that direction early on or certain games would have ended up with more reach than they did.

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

I suspect that ship sailed by the time of 3e, even if there was a significant number in 2e.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Oh please. TSR-era D&D was about as far from simulation as you could get. It was pure wargame. Good grief, your character can't even jump without house rules.

There are very, very good reasons why other games of the era - Rolemaster, Warhammer Fantasty, Chivalry and Sorcery - all went with far more simulation based rules than D&D. It's because D&D has never been a simulation game. Not even remotely.

A few auxiliary rules and and systems leaned into simulation to some degree. They kind of stood out in that regard for pretty much the reasons you say.