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

[hawkeyefan]

Sure. I make decisions, but not as many as the players. They are capable of and often do make many decisions all based on one decision of mine.

You can't be correct here. I know what I decide and how often my players make decisions. Maybe you make more than your players do, but I do not make more than mine..

I would think it’s trivially obvious that the GM makes more decisions than the players. I mean… you’re running an entire world. Each player is running an individual character.

I absolutely make more decisions than my players when I run D&D. And I don’t even prep heavily!

 

[hawkeyefan]

That’s fine.

I still prefer my take to “20 page character backstories and 300 page setting gazetteers make the game better.”

Don’t get me wrong, I like detailed setting guides. But I can recognize that liking something doesn’t mean its inclusion makes a game better.

Yeah, I won’t fully detail a setting without involving the players, and any game I GM will have group character creation. I want collaboration on both.

 

[pemerton]

Is the player doing those things, or the GM?

As I posted, in Classic Traveller it's identified as a procedure for GM-less play. (Traveller calls that playing without a referee.)

 

[Lanefan]

EDIT: Also, in response to ‘Runes cannot be read without first assigning them a meaning’: this may be true. But a fiction about runes being read can be authored without first assigning them a meaning. That doesn't mean that the reading is not something that occurs in the fiction.

If the runes have no meaning when the PCs see them (assuming they either fail or never try to read them), what do they say if-when the NPC baddies secretly following the party try to read them?

I can think of situations where the pre-determination of the runes' message could make a pretty big difference. The baddies succeed in reading the runes wehere the PCs failed, then they assume the PCs also read them and expect the PCs to be heading out of the dungeon. Baddies take a shortcut to cut the PCs off, and there's no PCs because, having failed to read the runes, they went another way and thus unintentionally shook off their pursuers.

But if the runes are still in Schroedinger state when the baddies try to read them and succeed, how on earth do you determine what they say and, in extension, what the baddies do next?

 

[Lanefan]

No. Experience tells you that it is POSSIBLE for people who were your players to later become GMs.

It does not tell you that, solely by playing, you are GUARANTEED to not only make GMs,

Well, obviously.

Potential is nothing until it's realized; and if it's never realized that still doesn't deny its existence.

plural, but that you are going to make GMs who will specifically share all or almost all of your preferences and thus run games you'd be ecstatic to play.

If playing in my game makes them want to start running their own, it'll almost certainly be for one of two reasons:

--- they think either my DMing or my game sucks and have in theory identified ways to improve on what I do and-or what I run, or
--- they really like my game and-or system and have ideas for something similar to it

The latter group are fairly likely to run something I'd want to play in.

No. Some players are potential GMs. Some players will never want to be GMs, no matter what else happens.

Theoretically I have the potential to be (or become) a half-decent skydiver even though I've exactly zero desire to do so.

Ditto for DMs.

And, to speak to your concerns about absolute power, oftentimes the best people to give that power to are those who never wanted it in the first place.

But that's not what was proposed.

What was proposed was enticing people to play solely for the purpose of turning them into GMs to run for you. That is coercion. I refuse to behave that way.

I didn't read it that way.

 

[Lanefan]

Why?

I have genuinely no idea why you think this is "something not good".

You act like anyone who speaks up for their interests is somehow a subversive saboteur.

Because in this example that's exactly the correct interpretation: a player is using the blank areas of the map as an entry to a) subvert and b) sabotage conceits of the campaign that are already in place.

And if I said what I really think of that I'd get (quite rightly!) modded from here to Jupiter.

Why? Isn't that exactly as antagonistic as acting like a GM who has preferences about their world is a vicious tyrant?

My game. My world. If that makes me a "vicious tyrant" in your view, then so be it.

 

[SableWyvern]

My game. My world. If that makes me a "vicious tyrant" in your view, then so be it.

Welcome. I will send my Minister of Correct Thought around shortly to teach you the secret handshake.

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, you are the one who very specifically said this was a person who had a world they would have used as a novel, they just decided their skills weren't adequate, so they decided to run it as games instead.

History tells us a setting can quite well support both activities (novel-writing and game-play) at once.

Forgotten Realms is first and foremost a game setting and yet has how many novels set in it?

I don't feel like it's somehow a blatant misreading to say, "If you made a world for being a novel, you're probably going to be much too precious about that world."

Were I a better novelist (i.e. were I novelist at all!) I could easily write novels set in my current game world. Those novels would, however, be about events in the setting's history and thus be completely separated* from anything being played.

* - other than providing some deeper detail and insight on how things got to be as they are/were when met by the played PCs.

 

[Hussar]

No bullet flies out of a gun because there is no bullet. You point and click and depending on the game some calculations are made. A lot of games use hitscan where they don't calculate wind or bullet drop. The bullet also hits immediately after you click to fire, many base it on percentage chance to hit. Some do actual ballistics calculations but again there's no actual bullet because its a game. That bullet? You're adding that bit of narrative because you know how it works in real life.

Cars and driving? The responses may give you the feel of driving a car and they can get pretty detailed. But they don't model the engine, most barely model the damage to the car in any realistic fashion. They abstract out a great deal and only care about whether it feels like you're driving.

Umm, you are mistaking the method of the simulation with the fact that the simulation is providing a very clear amount of information to inform the narrative. How that information is generated isn't really the point. The fact that none of it is "real" isn't the point. It is a simulation after all. None of it is "real". Realism isn't the point at all.

The point is that the narrative - the wheel of your car fell off because you hit the wall in the game - is made perfectly clearly by the game. Again, you failed to answer my question. Would you play a video game where the wheel of your car falls off the car without any explanation or cues from within the game as to why?

Because that's what D&D is. It's the wheel falling off the car - the result - without any explanation provided.

So you have a definition of diegetic that Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn't know about? Where did you get that from? Why do you assume anyone else would use that definition. What caused the fall? Your roll was under the target number that indicated success. Anything else you add, whether from a book, the top of your head, a dartboard is just fluff added after the fact.

Again, considering others have also corrected your misunderstanding of diegetic, I would suggest you go back and look up what diegetic is.

 

[Lanefan]

If they said they were going to jump the Grand Canyon I would ask them if they really wanted to commit suicide because they aren't going to survive the fall to the bottom. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the player who says they're going to lasso the dragon flying overhead because it should be obvious that there's zero chance of success. It's the character with a belt of ogre strength saying he's going to pick up a building. The monk that thinks that if someone casts haste on him while he's wearing boots of speed that he can run so fast that he'll turn back time.

If people want their characters to make fools of themselves, why should I deny them the pleasure?

Sure, go through the motions of trying to pick up a building if you like. At least we'll all get a chuckle, and your character might need some curing to its spine afterwards.