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

[Micah Sweet]

Then why do they need "absolute power"????

That's what absolute power is! That's what nailing everything down IS! There is no contribution from players except their actions, and every single one of those actions can and will be vetoed at any time for any reason or no reason at all.

Who vetoes player actions made within the confines of their PCs in an active game?

 

[Umbran]

You're either missing my point or making what seems like a pretty pointless semantic argument. "Need" in this sense is meaning you don't know if you can do it until you try.

I was missing the point.

I still don't really agree with what I now understand to be your point. It isn't all that hard to figure out if you're gonna gaff it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

They certainly act like that cost is functionally zero for players, while pretending that it's some ENORMOUS social cost for the GM.

In my experience, these parameters are almost precisely reversed. The person with power pays almost no cost for the stuff they do. The people without it pay dearly.

Perhaps the social cost is significant (but not overwhelming) for both sides.

There's that excluded middle you were talking about.

 

[Micah Sweet]

@Micah Sweet

The issue with "reality warping powers" is two-fold from my personal perspective:

1. You are applying the standards and play methodology of an unrelated style of play to one where those standards and methods are not in effect. No reality is being warped because there is no game world or objective reality to be explored (or even an illusion of one). There is just shared fiction that has been established and undefined setting. We're just defining things that have not previously been defined.

2. It's usually used in a way that presumes a desire for content authority (or more likely an expectation to have the GM use their content authority in certain ways) is something that will be used to the player's character's advantage to achieve aims rather than to setup compelling situations. It's assumed that players cannot be trusted within AW style prompts where the GM temporarily cedes their content authority in a targeted way.

There's a whole lot of venom in "I don't need reality altering powers" that seems to be laying a lot of judgement on people who desire some amount of creative collaboration from their GM.

Fair enough. I have explained more than once in this eternal thread that I don't desire player collaboration in worldbuilding in games in which I participate, either as a player or a GM, once the campaign begins. Having such makes playing the game less fun for me, because it feels to me that the player has reality warping powers I don't want players to have, even if the system allows for it in some way. That is all I'm saying.

What I'm not saying is that anyone else's game is objectively worse because it may have those things (among other things I don't care for). It is worse for me, but that's it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You know the old AD&D cartoon?

That.

(It's typically a person getting transported to a fantasy world of some sort, often by dying, while keeping all their own memories but also often being some sort of chosen one). Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz would count as isekai.)

I've always thought those stories were fun.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I thought the "rune" case was pretty orthogonal to PC history.

I though the issue with the runes was the the GM defined them simply as "runes", and the PC used their successful roll to identify them as "demon-summoning runes". And that for trad play, either A) the GM shouldn't be introducing runes without also defining their intent and execution, OR B) the player executing a move to define the fiction space outside of their character wasn't a valid move.

Those were my issues with the runes example, yes.

 

[Enrahim]

People who want to belong don't want absolute power over others, even in restricted domains.

But how about people that want absolute power over a fiction? What about people that want someone else to have absolute power over a fiction?

I find this claim quite extraordinary even without this modifier. With these modifiers (that need to be there if talking about what has been the topic of this thread) I cannot see how such a claim can have any merit at all. Indeed I am worried you might start feeling like an outsider given the number of people here stating a preference for someone having absolute power over their shared fiction.

 

[clearstream]

I think you can absolutely both have an inhabitation of the character and subconsciously author at the same time. Like, I can imagine myself in character walking into a bar, and start describing what my character is seeing without any sense of "trying to author". The sensory impression is simply there in my head, just like the sensory impression from my current surroundings (this laptop screen, right now).

I find that too. Earlier today I was reflecting on playing Ironsworn solo and coop, and it struck me that there is probably a fourth category to add to @pemerton's three, which is roughly

(4) The players, during play, author the fiction from another side of themselves, separate from their agents/agency within it (except by having the in-fiction causal consequences of their agents' actions worked out); prompted by foregoing fiction and sometimes cues from a text.​

@Gimby might be describing something of this sort.

Circling back to the line of debate with @Hussar, in this way one might self-narrate simulatively using a game process for selecting cues that is not itself simulative (I'm thinking concretely of Oracles.)

 

[hawkeyefan]

Once in your entire life is "so rare it essentially never happens." You've encountered it once in the decades(?) that you've been playing. I've encountered it 0 times in the decades that I've been playing. Others here have been saying they have never encountered it at all in the decades they've been playing.

That's really, really, really rare.

It may be. But it’s also the extreme. People will have different thresholds of what is tolerable before we get to the extreme where we might all agree there’s a problem.

Like, for me, I expect my tolerance for the amount of GM authority would be exceeded way before yours. Now, my threshold for this will differ depending on the kind of game being played, but still.

Like I said earlier in the thread… I’m far less concerned with these mythical bag GMs than I am instances of bad GMing. Which I’d probably clarify as nit necessarily bad so much as not to my taste.

Fair enough. I have explained more than once in this eternal thread that I don't desire player collaboration in worldbuilding in games in which I participate, either as a player or a GM, once the campaign begins. Having such makes playing the game less fun for me, because it feels to me that the player has reality warping powers I don't want players to have, even if the system allows for it in some way. That is all I'm saying.

What I'm not saying is that anyone else's game is objectively worse because it may have those things (among other things I don't care for). It is worse for me, but that's it.

So what I’d like to say is that I don’t like the heavy GM authority of trad gaming because it makes me feel like I’m being railroaded. But I’m not saying that anyone else’s game is objectively worse because of this.

I would imagine that the above would typically get a reaction out of you, and not be accepted as just an opinion.

 

[Gimby]

So I don’t think the GM should have just told you what your character’s grievance was, though a potential suggestion shouldnt be a problem. Anything more is outside his authority.

This is a case where the player and GM really need to collaborate together.

In this case, it was a grievance against my character from the NPC. I'd agree that collaboration was needed, and we did, just during the course of play rather than outside it.

I don’t think letting someone else author details about your character is required for immersion. At best it’s orthogonal to it.

As to whether making up details (or extrapolating them) can be immersive, sure, but that’s not the kind of immersion d&d players usually mean by the word. I think what you are describing is much closer to actual theatre style improv and one can get quite immersed in that experience as well.

I think it’s fair to say that the kind of immersion typically referred to by the d&d player is one that requires thinking in character which cannot be done simultaneously while making up historical details about said character.

I'd agree on orthogonal - it's neither required nor does it necessarily prevent immersion. I'd also agree it was very close to theatre style improv and that that experience can be very immersive. And that not everyone will find it immersive.

To give another example where I've found delegated authoring authority immersive, I was in a Ravnica game, playing an Azorius guildmember. The GM and I agreed that I, as the player, could make up laws and regulations to represent my character's experience with the city's legal and administrative system - these were most often a bit ridiculous to represent the odd bureaucracy of the setting. The point being that I could come up with plausible sounding legal jargon as a player without having to continually run it past the GM in a way that would have been disruptive to the overall flow of the game. I certainly accept that it's not something everyone would enjoy, but it fit with the tone of the game (5e, in this case, though again the actual impact was fairly system agnostic)

I'd need more specifics to be sure. If they had no relationship to the PCs, then I wouldn't care for it. If it was the tradition in the PCs village or the location was something located in their town, that seems ok.

Digging out a log, in this case, it was the NPC's sister, another noble lady, an orchard in the NPC's lands and a firefly festival in a village on the NPC's land. The grievance (as we-as-real-people discovered together) was around courtly woo-ing, accusations of unfaithfulness, wounded honour and so on, all very chaste and Arthurian. In no way did my PC have a hand in the creation of the orchard or the festival, but they would have been familiar with them due to visiting the location before. Now, all this could have been created before hand, it just happened that it hadn't been.