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

[jayoungr]

Are your data from the US by chance? I have heard rumors there might be a difference in prevailing play style compared to Europe where most of my acquaintances come from.

I'm in the US and have not run across a huge number of tyrannical DMs. I think it's just random selection.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm in the US and have not run across a huge number of tyrannical DMs. I think it's just random selection.

While obviously not scientific, I'd buy that more if I was working from a small sample size.

 

[Lanefan]

@Don Durito has the right of it.

Your dichotomy is false, because there is a third path. That is, you have stated that the only things we can do are follow the rule no matter how stupid it might be, or secretly disregard the rule while pretending we are in fact upholding it.

The third path is to say, "Hey guys. I think this doesn't make sense, and we should do that instead. What do you think?"

Where are you getting the bolded from? Neither of my options even hint at that.

Your "third path" is my second path, whether done arbitrarily by the DM "I'm ruling this way" or with/after discussion with the table.

Further, what you said above emphatically is not equivalent to "does sensible fiction qualify as a goal worth achieving?" It is quite possible to have sensible fiction be baked into the rules themselves. Because that's quite literally what Dungeon World does. You flatly do not use the rules UNLESS the fiction actively calls for something that requires rules, and as soon as you have used the rules, you immediately return all of your focus to the fiction. The one, and only, purpose of DW's rules is to resolve ambiguous situations in the fiction, where the results of both success and failure are interesting enough to be worth knowing.

I suppose the question then becomes one of how often the fiction calls for rules use in DW vs D&D. For example, someone casting a Lightnng Bolt in D&D is invoking a raft of different rules in order to get that spell cast and resolved in the fiction: spell slots, spell prep or memorization, material components, casting time, interruption rules if relevant, targeting, range, area of effect, damage, saving throws, and the list goes on.

Now if DW doesn't have rules for all this then sure, they're not invoked. The question then becomes one of how does it get resolved, if I cast Lightning Bolt* there, without a lot of DM fiat?

* - if DW doesn't have Lightning Bolt as such, substitute some other ranged A-o-E damaging spell.

 

[jayoungr]

While obviously not scientific, I'd buy that more if I was working from a small sample size.

My sample size isn't exactly tiny.

At the end of the day, it's all anecdotal evidence. Which is considered unreliable for very good reasons.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That would come under "trash the rule".

To me it's one and the same, as rulings set binding precedents for the rest of that campaign.

As I've noted before, though I think doing it on-the-fly is a suboptimal way to do that, I can at least respect that from that point on as a player you know how things are going to go.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Indeed there is recourse beyond walking. Social enforcement has a lot more tools up it's sleve than that. First I would do is merely pointing out that I found the situation unpleasant. If you have a halfway decent DM that alone should be enough to trigger some emotional response in them that is likely to make them correct course.

Don’t even need to say anything. A decent DM pays attention to the emotional responses of the players, and will notice when a player is unhappy and make adjustments without them needing to say anything.

 

[Enrahim]

Mostly, though some of the groups involved (the second hand ones to be clear) where in the other Anglophone countries. Note also some of what I'm talking about is decades old at this point; I just don't have too much evidence that the changes here have been--dramatic.

Ah, I think I might have evidence something has changed in this regard though. The big one being if this data is prior to the advent of online play as a real option. I think many a tyrannical DMs might have found their player base evaporate with the advent of relative ease of seeking out alternatives. Even prior to that, play forums would have contributed to raising awareness about the problem which is likely to embolden counter-measures.

That this was a known and real problem during forge-times for instance I do not contest at all. We had almost an entire school of design obsessed with trying novel approaches to tackling the problem trough explicit rules and principles.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My sample size isn't exactly tiny.

At the end of the day, it's all anecdotal evidence. Which is considered unreliable for very good reasons.

Enough anecdotes are data, no matter what anyone tells you. In social situations, its all anecdotes in the end; its just a question of trying to screen for bias. In my particular case, I've come to this conclusion over a very long period in contexts where, while bias is not impossible, there's no particular reason to expect it to bias in this particular fashion.

So again, you don't have to agree with it, but as best I can tell I've come by the position honestly and I have every reason to believe its valid.

 

[Lanefan]

And my point is that these are not "the very rarest of in-game situations". We have already covered, just in this thread, how lockpicking is an example. I believe it was clearstream who brought up the "dragons are acceptable, but heroes falling 100 feet and surviving is not" example, because those two things are directly in conflict with one another--one depends on the square-cube law being false, the other depends on it being true. People just don't realize that they are bringing in self-contradictory beliefs

By the laws of aerodynamics neither bumblebees nor jumbo jets should be able to get off the ground and yet there they are, flying around like they often do. If one considers a dragon to be, aerodynamically, similar to a living breathing jumbo jet then it all works fine.

 

[Lanefan]

Irrelevant. That the production of baking powder, white flour, and refined sugar is prerequisite for baking a cake has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not a particular cake recipe is wisely-constructed or not. Prerequisite things certainly do come first. That doesn't mean they have any bearing on subsequent applications.

And yet without those prereq's the subsequent applications can't exist.

Okay...but the point remains, in order to employ this argument, you are having to grant that, at least some of the time, entertainment value trumps fidelity, whatever thing that fidelity might relate to (physics, history, biology, whatever).

Ah, but now you have fallen into the exact trap I was warning you about: Why is this privileged but other things aren't?

You have to actually defend that. If you have granted "sometimes, entertainment value is more important than fidelity", you must defend why this case is special, why this thing requires the maximum fidelity possible, while other things don't. Or, more commonly, why an extensive list of exceptions to fidelity are okay, but a different extensive list of exceptions to fidelity are not okay, which is an even taller order than the previous!

Well, no, I don't in fact have to defend anything.

The one thing I'll say is that physical things are vastly different than cultural. Culture is in the end entirely our own creation (both in reality and in fiction) and thus we-as-worldbuilders can freely mess with it all we like. Rocks and rain and planets and trees and gravity and air are not our own creation, however, and thus we have to be very careful if-when messing with them because if we do, suddenly our game setting is that much less relate-able to our player base.