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

[The Firebird]

How would you know if the cook had been established?

If you had managed to look inside the kitchen ahead of time and established it was empty, then it's not particularly logical. But did you look inside?

This was also discussed a month ago:

Hello folks. I have something to add. There is an argument being presented that it is not meaningful to ask "what would have happened on a success", because the player does not know. Therefore there is no awareness, from the player perspective, of 'weird correlations'. I quoted some posts but will put them at the end.

I want to bring in my own experience. As a player, the first games of BitD I played were really enjoyable, even though the GM was using these weird correlations, because I didn't quite get them at the time. There was enough of a disconnect and enough of a veil that the world seemed organic.

But, this fell apart when I tried running BitD myself. The illusion is only player facing. As the GM, when the player says "I want to open this lock", I start thinking:

ok, what will a success look like? I guess they get in clean. What about fail forward? Hmm, we've established that this is an estate, and the lord will want to eat breakfast early, so maybe the cook is getting in to start working on that. That's nice, it follows from the fiction.

Then there is no illusion and I know exactly what happens on success because I decided it. This made me feel dishonest and like I was cheating my players.

Once I had this experience, I started seeing the "what would have happened on a success" question everywhere, and because I had run it as a GM it felt bad to me as a player. The veil was lifted and the mechanics no longer worked for me.

 

[Umbran]

Allowing people to roll even though there's no chance at success has been a bit controversial in the past.

Note that I didn't mention rolling.

I am asking about allowing the attempt or not. How we mechanically resolve the attempt is another question, and may be ruleset dependant.

The question is whether the resulting fiction contains the attempt that fails, or not.

 

[Umbran]

Is it reasonable for a dragon to be at all interested in a humanoid bard?

Not all love or seduction is sexual, folks.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Not all love or seduction is sexual, folks.

Trues that. I was going to say that the best kind is epistolary.

But the I remembered that when Sabine finally met Griffin, she found out that it wasn't his name. He was, in fact, a Griffin, and she was lunch.

...which sheds some light on the whole, "Bards meeting dragons" meme.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Fair enough. I disagree, but I see your point.

I think focussing solely on bad DMs makes it too easy to conflate people who are actively disruptive from people who aren’t intentionally making their game unfun. In other words, it’s pretty easy to say “well, they are a bad DM, so any attempts to address behaviour are bound to fail” rather than to say “the are a DM who have some pretty bad habits/tendencies, and maybe, they could benefit from rules that constrain them or published tips that guide them”.

I've said essentially that probably approaching half a dozen times across this thread now, yet it always circles back to assuming binary terrible GMs or good ones, like no middle cases exist.

 

[AlViking]

Is it reasonable for a dragon to be at all interested in a humanoid bard?

It's a common meme and a joke.

 

[AlViking]

Note that I didn't mention rolling.

I am asking about allowing the attempt or not. How we mechanically resolve the attempt is another question, and may be ruleset dependant.

The question is whether the resulting fiction contains the attempt that fails, or not.

As I just said, it's a common meme. But if I'm not using some random determination then it's even more up to the GM, group expectations and genre.

 

[Faolyn]

Depending on the person though that would be sim, narrativist, or gamist. You don't have to know the terms to enjoy what they stand for in a group.

As I've said before, nobody is purely one type of gamer. We all switch between those three gamer types--and probably others not covered by GNS--as we need to.

 

[Maxperson]

Fair enough. I disagree, but I see your point.

I think focussing solely on bad DMs makes it too easy to conflate people who are actively disruptive from people who aren’t intentionally making their game unfun. In other words, it’s pretty easy to say “well, they are a bad DM, so any attempts to address behaviour are bound to fail” rather than to say “the are a DM who have some pretty bad habits/tendencies, and maybe, they could benefit from rules that constrain them or published tips that guide them”.

I don't think it's as easy to conflate as you do. Recently one of my other players wanted to try his hand at DMing. During the game it became apparent that he was completely disregarding both stat bonuses and proficiency for trained skills when resolving skill checks. Basically if you rolled higher than him you succeeded and if you didn't, you failed. He was rolling behind the screen, so it took a couple of sessions to figure out.

We talked to him and explained how what he was doing was invalidating player choice in skill selection for their character, as well as making skills basically meaningless since skill had no meaning at all and it was just random chance. We let him know that it wasn't enjoyable to us and he quickly replied that he didn't want to do that, and started running the skill checks like the book stated.

I think he was just a bit overwhelmed with all that he had to keep track of and that was the easier way.

That mirrors the other experiences I've had when DMs make bad decisions on how to run something or with a ruling. If you just talk to them, it quickly becomes apparent that they really want to make things fun and enjoyable for everyone and will alter how they do things.

Contrast that with an actual bad DM who when you talk to him refuses to listen and basically says my way or the highway when the players are not having fun and try to talk to him about it.

 

[Maxperson]

It's a common meme and a joke.

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