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

[EzekielRaiden]

And yet in all four of those examples the "underlings" can suggest ideas or courses of action that the "leader" can then choose to accept.

--- a VP can suggest to a CEO that maybe this isn't the best time to be buying out Company ZZZ due to [reasons], and the CEO is persuaded and agrees
--- a kid can suggest going down to the park to play; mother agrees and takes the family for a day in the park
--- a colonel can suggest a different strategy and the general, on realizing it's in fact better than what they had, can agree to it
--- a grade-school student might volunteer to do some in-class task, the teacher - who was about to choose someone else - chooses the volunteer instead.

In all these cases the leader has the final decision, sure, but is also able to accept input into that decision before making it. An "absolute" rules neither accepts nor acts on such input; and that's the difference people are getting at, I think.

I'm not the one who laid claim to the absolute status.

You, Max, and others were and are.

 

[Lanefan]

....

When someone unrelentingly insists on having something, it is so they can use it. That's why one would insist on having it--so that it can be used. Otherwise, why be so bloody insistent about it???

If I'm going out on the ice to play hockey it's a safe bet I'll insist on having a stick in my hands when I do.

That I can then hypothetically use that stick to slash someone upside the head doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to have one.

 

[Lanefan]

Isn't the bigger issue with FTL settings that even if you have something like an Alcubierre drive that is powered by some kind of negative energy unobtainium it's then also a time machine with significant implications for causality?

Which touches on something of the nature of rpgs - that in a work of fiction you can make things function through a selective process of overlooking and avoidance, but in a rpg this is more difficult unless the players are on board with that also.

I mean, in a space opera, you're probably safe - FTL is such a genre cliche that you probably don't have to worry about players trying to fly their space ship to last week, but there are other situations in which this kind of thing can be an issue.

May I introduce you to this wonderful invention called the Tardis? It jumps all over the place through both time and space, and it's bigger on the inside too!

(Eg you give your players a decanter of endless water which is supposed to be a useful and wondrous magic item and the players realise that it's an infinite source of energy.)

I love it if-when players come up with that sort of thinking!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If I'm going out on the ice to play hockey it's a safe bet I'll insist on having a stick in my hands when I do.

That I can then hypothetically use that stick to slash someone upside the head doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to have one.

Disanalogy.

It takes extreme effort to "slash" anything with a stick.

It is trivially easy to abuse literally absolute authority. That's one of the most commonly-discussed problems with it.

I love it if-when players come up with that sort of thinking!

So do I, but I also prefer that they don't then go out of their way to dismantle setting conceits or tonal elements of the experience simply because they theoretically, potentially could.

Exploiting a decanter of endless water to do cool/fun things on their adventures, only to then donate it to people who need (or at least could benefit from) its endless nature more than they do, awesome. Or sell it, or pass it on to another adventuring group (e.g., their successors whom they can then start playing, or whatever). Doesn't matter that much what happens to it. Hell, maybe they destroy it to go out in a blaze of watery glory. Fine by me.

Exploiting a decanter of endless water to become non-adventuring sedentary merchants who sell the water, use it to generate electricity, and force-march the setting through a coal-free industrial revolution? Pretty not-awesome, bordering on that piquant combination of dull and irritating.

 

[Lanefan]

Okay. So...given I had only recently been talking to others about how one goes about building an environment (or "atmosphere" but I think we can let terminology slide? Maybe? Please?) of understanding and trust, how could one do that if all of one's worldbuilding and GM decisions are hidden behind a veil of "I literally can't answer that question because I cannot explain my thought processes."?

My world's notes are online here if you want to check them over:

Decast World Page

There's loads of info there, and I'd say most of it's at least vaguely coherent with itself, but were you to ask me what specific thought processes led me to come up with any specific detail there's a better-than-even chance the answer will consist of a shrug, either because I don't remember (most of this was done 17-ish years ago) or never had any process in the first place other than dreaming it up out of nothing as I went along.

The players to actually believe that it is, in fact, the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth things: fair, run honestly, in a consistent setting, on a consistent basis.

Well, they do keep coming back for more every week, which tells me something.

It's really hard to determine that someone is being fair if they do things that look unfair, and when you ask for an explanation, they tell you either "You just have to trust me for the next several months that this was the right thing to do", or "I literally can't explain my thought process to you, even if I wanted to do so I'm incapable of doing so."

Such answers would guaranteed come across as evidence that it wasn't a fair, honestly-run, consistent-setting, consistent-basis world. Not necessarily smoking gun...it would depend on the severity of the initial concern. But I would, without doubt, come away significantly more concerned than I was beforehand.

Innocent until proven guilty, says I; and in this case guilt can only be proven in hindsight if-when things go off the cliff.

If I screw up then I screw up, and I'll cop to it if-when either a) I realize on my own that I've screwed up or b) someone calls me on it. A relatively trivial example from a month or so back: the party found a magic item with a maker's mark on it; the mark was of someone known to some of the PCs as a big-time artificer active for the last 4 centuries or so (he's a lich), but I narrated the item as being about 700 years old as for in-game reasons it had to be that old: nobody had been in that room since then. Oops.

I realized this mistake after the session, and next session had to correct myself.

But I'm not going to reveal in-game secrets just to satisfy someone's concern about perceived unfairness in the moment, and most (as in, almost all) such situations are due to as-yet-unrevealed in-game secrets.

 

[Don Durito]

I love it if-when players come up with that sort of thinking!

It's not a problem as such - more like a structural constraint of the medium.

I'm reminded of Greek Tragedy where the audience would sit through 3 days of serious high tragic poetry, and then it would be followed by comedy in which the gods had the same flaws and foibles as everyone else and everything is brought back to earth in comedy

There is an element of the same comic structure in rpgs. If you really want to run a game in a highly serious epic tone it's likely to be naturally undermined by the basic process of play unless everyone at the table puts in a real effort to maintain a serious and epic tone. Rpgs tend to take place in the comic mode (which is not the same as saying they are necessarily funny).

For example the players can visit the city of the high elves and you can go to your best effort to describe it as ethereally beautiful and unearthly but if the players decide to sneak into the city by the sewers suddenly you are knee deep in high elf sewage.

 

[Lanefan]

Disanalogy.

It takes extreme effort to "slash" anything with a stick.

"Slashing" is the penalty assessed for striking another player with one's hockey stick, thus the action is usually referred to as a slash.

And from experience I can tell you it takes very little effort indeed, relative to everything else you're doing on the ice.

It is trivially easy to abuse literally absolute authority. That's one of the most commonly-discussed problems with it.

If someone's determined to abuse authority then it's going to happen, no matter how many checks and balances there are to theoretically prevent such abuse.

So do I, but I also prefer that they don't then go out of their way to dismantle setting conceits or tonal elements of the experience simply because they theoretically, potentially could.

Exploiting a decanter of endless water to do cool/fun things on their adventures, only to then donate it to people who need (or at least could benefit from) its endless nature more than they do, awesome. Or sell it, or pass it on to another adventuring group (e.g., their successors whom they can then start playing, or whatever). Doesn't matter that much what happens to it. Hell, maybe they destroy it to go out in a blaze of watery glory. Fine by me.

Exploiting a decanter of endless water to become non-adventuring sedentary merchants who sell the water, use it to generate electricity, and force-march the setting through a coal-free industrial revolution? Pretty not-awesome, bordering on that piquant combination of dull and irritating.

Best - and at the same time worst - use I've seen for a decanter was when a party got to the entrance of a dungeon complex where the entry passage sloped down, turned the hose on, and left it running for a few days until the entire dungeon (which was all on one level) was full of water.

They flooded out the dungeon and drowned/drove out some occupants, sure...but then realized they'd just cut off their access to all that sweet sweet loot down there. So they spent days doing everything they could to get rid of all the water, then (literally!) waded in, only to find a lot of the dungeon occupants were undead and didn't care a bit about having been submerged for a few days!

Lesson learned, I guess. They certainly never tried that approach again.

Edit to adD: I should probably note this was a canned module run very close to stock (in fact I think the only thing I'd changed was to have that entry passage slope down such that the dungeon would in fact be underground like it was supposed to be) so it's not like I was changing anything in response to what the characters were doing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Innocent until proven guilty, says I; and in this case guilt can only be proven in hindsight if-when things go off the cliff.

Beyond a reasonable doubt. Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. We don't need a smoking gun, we just need enough reason to believe that no reasonable doubts remain. That doesn't mean there can't be any doubts, nor even doubts that are based on realistic possibilities (that is, ignoring ridiculous options like "fairies did it" or "he was actually killed by a meteorite impact"). Meteor impacts do in fact happen, for example, and it is possible that a murder trial where no body was found could've been the result of a flash flood that occurred after the (alleged) victim's disappearance. Is that a reasonable doubt, especially when coupled with evidence that the defendant secretly obtained a weapon and then disposed of it afterward, took out a life insurance policy on the victim mere months beforehand, and has extensive Internet search records about how to dispose of bodies in undetectable ways? That's what juries are for--and in many cases, they decide no, the "was just missing, died in a flash flood that happened while missing" explanation isn't reasonable, nor are various other realistic but unlikely scenarios.

That's the part that's extremely important here, and why (for example) circumstantial evidence, despite the huge stigma against it in fiction, is actually extraordinarily important in real legal proceedings.

As with an enormous amount of this stuff, you always presume that the player already knows you extremely well and would have an enormous backlog of reasons to trust you. Why? The vast majority of GMs out there don't have that pre-established background. Even if most of a GM's players are their friends, you never know how someone will handle a given responsibility until you see it in action.

Responding to someone who has a legitimate concern with "I literally can't explain it to you" or "You just have to trust me for several months" isn't going to fly in the vast majority of cases. It's that simple. You are advising people do something that is directly counterproductive to the goal of establishing player trust that the game will be run fairly etc.

 

[clearstream]

A Dodge/Parry roll in combat rules is a simple rule. It clearly demonstrates how the mechanics can inform the narrative. GURPS and Palladium and Warhammer Fantasy all have this mechanic.

The absence of simulationist mechanics in one aspect of the game does not mean that the game lacks any simulationist mechanics. So, pointing to a mechanic where the the mechanics do not inform the narrative does not invalidate the other areas of the game where they do.

I agree, for example D&D and WHFRP give information on the rates of travel and durability of boats, while RQ does not. On the other hand, D&D and RQ both give information about the weather that is absent from WHFRP. D&D includes Dodge as a simple rule for all characters to use, and reserves Parry for Defensive Duelists. When a character says they Dodge or a Defensive Duelist takes a reaction to Parry, and that causes a miss, it clearly demonstrates how those mechanics can inform the narrative.*

It's also interesting to consider what sorts of principles decide that parry, say, matters more to our subject and "simulationist" experiences than the weather. You have written up thread that "We want excitement. We want adventure. It's a heroic fantasy!" and I suppose that leads you to prioritise what happens in combat even if simulationist mechanics covering other potential play are absent.


*In this post I limit myself to @pemerton's first (1) and second (2) "simulationist" approaches to RPGing as I know you disfavour the third (3).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

"Slashing" is the penalty assessed for striking another player with one's hockey stick, thus the action is usually referred to as a slash.

And from experience I can tell you it takes very little effort indeed, relative to everything else you're doing on the ice.

Doesn't stop the argument by analogy from being a disanalogy.

Doubly so because people can literally, physically SEE you hurting someone else with a stick. Abuse of power is not directly visible. Triply relevant because the absolute-power "traditional GM" is specifically encouraged to hide their misbehavior from the players!

If someone's determined to abuse authority then it's going to happen, no matter how many checks and balances there are to theoretically prevent such abuse.

And again you do that same thing I keep complaining about and people keep telling me never happens: You are portraying this as a situation where there are only and exactly two extremes:

1. People who will never do anything wrong, so you should always trust them, and a failure to trust them is you being a bad player
OR
2. People who are determined to do the worst possible things, and thus you should get away as fast as possible.

The middle is feeling extremely excluded here. Your dichotomy is false. You can have someone who uses authority poorly without being, as you put it, "determined to abuse authority". You can have people who abuse authority thinking that what they're doing isn't abusive. You can have people who abuse authority thinking they genuinely have to, that there isn't any other way to make a good game. You can have people who abuse authority only in some specific circumstances, believing it justified when it isn't, but not doing it in most other situations where they correctly understand that it isn't justified. Etc.

There are other states beyond the extremes of "GM is a saint who deserves infinite trust" and "GM is a devil who shouldn't be trusted alone in an empty, locked room for fifteen continuous seconds."