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

[clearstream]

It is that someone who nails down that much of their world is taking meaningful agency away from their players by turning the world into something so heavily fixed, the players are merely pushing around the preconfigured elements.

I'm having trouble understanding the arguments here because they seem so tied to what imagined subjects of play the group have chosen to entertain. For instance, it'd seem pretty strange to me to want to play a literal tiefling in Stonetop or Glorantha.

As @The Firebird pointed out...

Tieflings, for example, imply something about the cosmology, the existence of demons and devils, and the existence of and role of alignment.

On the other hand you seem to have in mind a world with

"beyond-the-horizon", a "not-fully-known", from which things may arise as more is learned.

In your proposed world there doesn't seem much reason to object to tieflings. But what leads me to accept your world? Why can't I accept a world where tieflings are excluded?

The implied objection to groups agreeing what world they will imagine and excluding things that don't fit in it troubles me. And this should include where one of their number proposes a world to play in that they accept.

Is the issue really a doubt about the likelihood a group could form such acceptance?

 

[Enrahim]

You answered "no", and then proceeded to explain to me, "but actually yes".

I think the point might be that limiting away Thiefling is ok, but doing so because having mapped out everything is not ok. The reason for this is that according to this stance having mapped out everything is not ok, and that is implied in the first sentence.

A bit convoluted. But I guess maybe it might be ok to disallow thieflings because it doesn't match the feel you were going for with your world?

 

[Enrahim]

What is the isekai vibe?

Playing a character that doesn't seem to know the world is what I get from the context.

 

[FrogReaver]

Because we don't know how would the disproof has been rendered?

To put it another way, what - in the universe of Star Trek - is the false premise, or error of method, in the special relativity thought experiments? Eg is the speed of light in a vacuum not constant? But then what does it mean to accelerate to a speed that is faster than light? And if the starship is travelling faster than light, how is illumination within the vessel even occurring?

Star Trek gave an explanation. A Warp drive

 

[Enrahim]

That difference has been almost totally ignored in this thread.

Really? In that case maybe this because noone has been aware of ultra fixed settings with everything being nailed down to extreme detail up front being a relevant situation to discuss, so no reason to adress this difference?

(Edit: The closest example I can think of somewhat relevant to this thread was living world play, and there I for one has assumed not even the entire planet has been mapped out, but rather just the "game relevant" area)

Particularly when people are so keen on "absolute power". And yes, I put quotes on that for a reason. It is not an extreme thing I have ascribed to others. It is something I tried desperately to get people to step back from.

What are you trying to get people to step back from? Desiring "absolute power"? Why would you even try to do such a thing if "absolute power" is indeed good or even neccessary for the kind of game they prefer?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Is the social contract easy to ignore or not? You've called it useless for keeping the DM from being Thanos to his players, but here you say rejecting someone's offer is not free because of the social contract. This seems to be inconsistent arguing.

When one person has an enormous amount of power, that person can usually ignore the social contract on the regular.

When a different person has almost no power, or only power equal to anyone else, that person is often incapable of ignoring it, and pays a hefty price for trying to do so.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You'll note my post did not say "memories".

But if you are declaring what your memories are, how could you not be declaring what is in the world...?

If the world is completely fixed by GM effort, how could you ever have memories that were not also fixed by that same GM effort? You would need to confirm with the GM every single time you "remembered" anything from before the moment the campaign started.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Really? In that case maybe this because noone has been aware of ultra fixed settings with everything being nailed down to extreme detail up front being a relevant situation to discuss, so no reason to adress this difference?

(Edit: The closest example I can think of somewhat relevant to this thread was living world play, and there I for one has assumed not even the entire planet has been mapped out, but rather just the "game relevant" area)

It has seemed to me to be quite clearly implied or required by the other things already said many times over (e.g. the "you just HAVE to trust your GM that this faction which explicitly has doctrines that would support your cause is, for reasons no one will explain and which you cannot figure out yourself, completely opposed to helping you"), but perhaps I am mistaken on that front.

What are you trying to get people to step back from? Desiring "absolute power"? Why would you even try to do such a thing if "absolute power" is indeed good or even neccessary for the kind of game they prefer?

Well, the claim that the type of power required for the thing they were seeking was, in fact, "absolute power" and not some other kind of power. Such as, for example, final-answer power (or "determinative" power, if you prefer a single word adjective). Being the person who determines the final answer does not mean you have absolute power. An arbitrator has a great deal of power in an arbitration between two parties, for example, but that doesn't mean the arbitrator has absolute power. The Supreme Court of the United States has final-answer power over all legal questions which come before it, but that doesn't mean SCOTUS has "absolute" power any more than either of the other two branches do. It doesn't even have absolute power narrowly in the domain of court cases, despite being the place where the buck stops--consider, for example, if the Constitution is amended by the people, or if Congress passes a new law which explicitly covers something that was solely the subject of judicial precedent before.

"Absolute power" is not required for the kinds of things brought up in this thread. But it is always what is demanded. A power that is unnecessary for the claimed goals, but demanded nonetheless, means that something more than the claimed goals must be involved. Otherwise, why would it be demanded?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sorry, originally wrote this in a different post, accidentally responding to both Max and Lanefan. Separated out the Lanefan response here. My apologies.

What is the isekai vibe?

Isekai, lit. "another world", is a genre that grew out of manga and anime, for stories where a person from a fictional version of our real actual Earth (or at least an Earth that is extremely similar to our own) gets "sent to" a parallel world of magic and fantastical adventure. Although the stories long predate the term "isekai" being used, The Chronicles of Narnia would be an entirely Western isekai fantasy, with the titular Wardrobe acting as the first (published) story's "portal" for traversing between worlds.

It is stereotypical (but not actually required) in isekai stories that the main character has either died in our world and thus reincarnated or been soul-swapped to the fantasy world, often (but far from always) in a body extremely similar to their previous Earth body. This is where the meme "Truck-kun" comes from (truck + the Japanese honorific meaning something like "friend" or "buddy", meant for a male friend implicitly younger than the speaker). An extremely stereotypical beginning of isekai manga is that a depressed teenage boy in Japan gets run over by a speeding truck in the first few pages. He thus dies an almost instantaneous, painless, and (theoretically) blameless death so he can get to the other world quickly and cleanly, no muss no fuss, no icky implications, hardly even moral ambiguity for the truck-driver. As a result, people made fun of the over-use of this plot element by characterizing "Truck-kun" as an actual character, who appears in many different manga for the sole purpose of killing protagonists so that they can reincarnate in another, more interesting world.

I would assume "the isekai vibe" would thus be the feeling of the overall above fantasy--a character who is functionally "the actual player, just if they'd been born in the fantasy world and coincidentally developed the same personality". If so, then I'd guess The Firebird finds this a negative distraction, sort of the opposite of immersing oneself in the world--keeping oneself unchanged despite theoretically coming from this fantasy world.

I think you've mixed me up with someone else on this one.

There's loads of places in my setting that I haven't fully defined. Some of those places are vaguely defined e.g. I know there's a great big faux-Chinese empire to the far south but other than the names of a few big cities nothing's been defined about it at all yet; and the city names are only so I'd have something to put on a map.

And I don't even know the names of minor government functionaries in the city the PCs generally use as their base. There's about 40,000 NPC people in that city and I might at the most have named fifteen of them.

Then I sincerely apologize, and yes, I must have conflated you with another poster. I know quite well that someone on here does do this (it's come up in several threads), I just misremembered that being you. I appreciate your patience with that error on my part.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm having trouble understanding the arguments here because they seem so tied to what imagined subjects of play the group have chosen to entertain. For instance, it'd seem pretty strange to me to want to play a literal tiefling in Stonetop or Glorantha.

As @The Firebird pointed out...


On the other hand you seem to have in mind a world with


In your proposed world there doesn't seem much reason to object to tieflings. But what leads me to accept your world? Why can't I accept a world where tieflings are excluded?

The implied objection to groups agreeing what world they will imagine and excluding things that don't fit in it troubles me. And this should include where one of their number proposes a world to play in that they accept.

Is the issue really a doubt about the likelihood a group could form such acceptance?

No. It is that all of these things presume the GM bringing a world that nailed down before players can even have a chance to speak about it. "My way or the highway" at the setting level, since that is naturally the first (or possibly second) level at which the players can encounter it.

It isn't just "agree to play a game where I'm running <SYSTEM>". It's "agree to play a game where I'm running <SYSTEM> with a world I have completely predefined such that you have no choices except the ones I permit you."