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

[EzekielRaiden]

So when you are at a resturant and ask for another glass of water - and the waiter happens to be free to immediately and without question fulfill your request, you have exerted absolute power over the waiter?

Certainly. That's why they're service workers. They are literally there to service you...like that's literally what they are paid to do, attend to whatever it is you want from them. It's also why our culture has pretty strong social norms about what is and isn't appropriate behavior toward your server(s). It's an extremely common trope, for example, to show that a person is actually morally awful, despite appearing to be a good person, because they treat their server(s) badly for no reason. Conversely, a person who has had a morally-dubious presentation is easy to give a "hmm...maybe there's more than there seems to be" moment because they go out of their way to be kind to their server(s) (or other workers, e.g. cleaning staff at their home) when they don't need to be.

Like the very idea that a waiter could talk back to a customer who has ordered something? That waiter would get fired VERY quickly. The one and only permissible "talking back" type thing would be a reminder of important concerns, e.g. "just so you know, that dish isn't vegan" or "that comes with an extra surcharge because it contains shrimp" or the like. Indeed, almost the opposite of "pushback" is expected--a very good server should be

Or have you by chance at any point in this conversation with me started to respond immediately once you saw one if my questions?

No. I'm too slow for that

Did I somehow exert some absolute power over you in you honoring my wish for you to reply?

No. I'm baffled why you'd ask. "Honoring a wish" is radically different from "following instructions". I mean, as merely the very lowest-hanging fruit here, that wish is something you hope will happen. If I just elected to stop participating, what then? The fact that I happened to go along with your wish is a nice thing happening. Again, utterly unlike what it means to carefully follow someone's "clear instructions" and to instantaneously change your behavior the moment they voice any new opinion.

Indeed I would say you have been very good at following the "instructions" laid out in what the topic of yor texsts should be.

There were no instructions. Certainly not "clear" ones. Instructions look dramatically different from conversation, as I should hope you would know from having received instructions in, for example, a classroom.

But think I can remember you asking once why you should answer something, so I guess my power isn't absolute all the time.

Even if I granted that there were instructions etc. here (which, again, I don't), your example DID involve someone having absolute power all the time. At any moment where non-owner children were interacting with the toy, the non-owner children were obligated to obey not just the "clear instructions" of the toy-owner, but every "opinion" the owner expressed the very moment that it was expressed.

And just in case that is not abundantly clear. I find the perspective expressed in the two previous paragraphs utterly ridiculous. I hope the analogy to what you wrote is apparent.

I agree that it's ridiculous. I disagree that it is even remotely analogous to what I described.

The toy-owner:

• Provided "clear instructions". Instructions, outside of the context of teaching, are not part of friendly interaction. They are dictates.
• Expected--and received--instantaneous deference to ANY expressed opinion with regard to the relevant subject (here, the toy).
• Expected--and saw--a complete absence of any form of questioning or pushback. Zip zero nada.

Instructions, instantaneous deference, and a complete absence of being able to voice one's alternative opinion is the operative thing here. Yes, I think a server is going to receive instructions from a dining customer. Yes, I think that server should show instantaneous deference to any customer instruction, request, or opinion, so long as the thing in question isn't something illegal, immoral, or in violation of company policy or the like (since those are higher-tier obligations). Yes, I think that diners expect, and usually see, a complete absence of challenge to their dining choices.

Hence--with the caveat that the employer in some sense "outranks" the customer--a dining customer at a sit-down restaurant DOES have "absolute power" over their server. Doubly so because, just as with my previous answer of "the toy-owner is using their status, so that the non-toy-owners are desirous of being associated with that status", here there's a very clear "the service employee desires something from the customer who has power over them", namely, gratuity payment. It's inherently transactional. Friendship is not.

 

[FrogReaver]

These two phrases don't say the same thing:

(A) The players declare their PCs actions, and everything else is worked out by the GM (either directly or, as you say, mediated via the mechanics).

(B) The players declare their PCs actions and everything else is worked out by the directly or mediated via the mechanics.

For a start, (B) contains no reference to the GM.

mediated via mechanics seems to be doing the heavy lifting here. It would include mechanics telling the dm to decide it even the players to decide.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Mate! You are the one who has been filling this thread with pages of hysterical rants about tyrannical straw GMs!

And others never ever ever have put up pages of hysterical rants about how utterly god-awful players are and how they NEED to be subject to extremely tight constraints or else they'll destroy things.

I think you'll find there's plenty of digital ink spilled here about how bad behavior from players completely requires GMs to suspect misbehavior from all fronts, while simultaneously demanding nigh-infinite trust that the GM would never, ever abuse the powers they lay claim to.

Edit: May as well combine this with the other response I have for you.

No. D&D is just a game system, which can be used to represent many different worlds. Not every world needs to include everything the game has rules for, any more than a Regency romance game using GURPS needs to include mechas because GURPS has rules for them.

Aaaaand here we have the goalposts moving at the speed of light.

Sorry, not gonna accept this line of reasoning. It's a default ancestry that has been present in some degree for at least three editions running. (IIRC there was something in...1e, from Dragon mag, that looks shockingly like a dragonborn in race-as-class form, sans scaly dreadlocks of course, except that they "ate" magic items instead of wearing them directly. Neat idea, not really my cuppa but I could work with it if the GM expected only "in-edition" content.) It's been a core ancestry for, at this point, 18 years. It's one of the most popular non-human options in the game; as of the most recent statistics, behind only half-elf and elf, and half-elf got straight-up deleted in 5.5e, so...dragonborn are theoretically now the second-most-popular non-human ancestry in D&D? I mean, if you believe the statistics coming from the official sources.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

BTW, why did we keep getting stuck on Runequest? Did I make the mistake of bringing it up? I'll freely admit, I've never played it and know next to nothing about it other than by reputation. But, for some reason, it's become the main example. No idea why, and if it was me, I'm really sorry since I honestly cannot comment on it.

Because it is relatively popular game so a lot of people actually have some idea of how it plays. You apparently not among them.

But, no, it's not "any information" in D&D since it doesn't provide any information that discounts other narratives. Why did the attack miss? You have no idea. No one has any idea. It could have beend dodged, it could have bounced off armor, the attacker could have stumbled, or magical combat pixies rose up and defended me. Any and all narrations are equally valid as far as the system is concerned, although, to be fair, typically the table is going to limit those narrations somewhat. OTOH, you can easily play D&D combat with zero narration. You don't need to narrate anything in D&D combat and it works perfectly fine.

No, magical pixies is not valid justification, as none of the stats used to derive the odds include pixie protection among them. Also, we have "any idea" as we know what various things these numbers compose of represent. That certain things are lumped together is matter of detail.

Furthermore, you can play combat sections of a lot of RPGs with merely referencing the rules if you want to be boring. I'm pretty sure you can do this with both RQ and GURPS.

In more sim leaning games, that's not possible. We KNOW that you dodged that attack because you succeeded on that dodge check. We KNOW that the attack bounced off because you made that Toughness check. So on and so forth. The system might not tell you in detail what happened, but, it does give you enough information that you can say X is true and Y is untrue.

Take GURPS skills. (I'm using the 4e rules here). You have a rating in a skill. So long as you roll 3d6 under that rating, you succeed. And because almost every check you make will give you a different result based on your margin of success or failure, the system itself is going to give some information as to why things happened. In D&D, because the die roll includes so many possible justifications - anything from you were hungry to the rock face collapsing - we can't actually know anything about why you failed your check. Just that you failed.

So it has been ages since I've played GURPs, but the basic structure of skill use is same than in D&D and RQ: odds derived from numbers measuring skill and the difficulty of the task. It also has degree of success, which is an optional rule in D&D 5e as well (and one I frequently use.)

 

[TwoSix]

And that's totally fair. I 100% agree.

Follow your joy. Of course. If you enjoy that degree of world building? Knock yourself out. I'm simply offering an alternative. Do I think the alternative is better? I dunno. It's certainly a heck of a lot faster and requires a lot less work, so, yeah, I prefer it to traditional world building. Is it "better"? Meh, that's too loaded and I frankly don't care.

It’s definitely the “why are you spending all this time on something virtually no one cares about” aspect I’m arguing.

If making tons of notes about a campaign setting is fun for you, then by all means, follow your bliss. But don’t expect that your players are going to be super interested in your custom classes and species when they just wanted to play an elf ranger.

 

[FrogReaver]

Yes, there is a long history. And if you review that history, you'll see that games like RM, RQ, C&S, GURPS and the like are characterised as simulationist, generally in contrast to D&D. I 100% agree with @Hussar that this notion, basically dating from 2009, that D&D is a simulationist RPG makes no sense.

Why? D&D shares many similar features to those games. What makes them simulationist but d&d not? The answers thus far have been extremely unconvincing. Like not using hp was once cited but some of those games do use hp…. So what’s common to all of them that makes them simulationist, but that d&d doesn’t have?

I think historically games have tried to define themselves as supporting some niche in contrast to d&d, in this case simulationist really means ‘more simulationist than d&d’ which isn’t a particularly useful label for describing what properties d&d possesses.

What RPG are you describing here?[

All

Also, what action declarations are you intending to exclude as satisfactory? I assume that hoping to kill Orcs, climb walls, read runes to learn what they say when the GM has already pre-authored that are all fine.

In d&d I don’t always and everytime get what I hope for no matter what I hope for in a successful roll. I hope I find 1,000,000 gold when opening this chest doesn’t occur because I as a player hoped for it and rolled a success.

 

[FrogReaver]

sorry for picking at this, but i just need to point out that there's no h in tiefling.

I want thief-lings now though. They sound fun.

 

[Enrahim]

Absolutely yes. Because none of that was an actual example.

You absolutely are introducing things into the fiction. WTF do you think inventing a narration means?

I am confused.

To the first, yes, I am absolutely introducing things to the fiction. I spelled that out in two of my examples. That was the entire point. I did it, not my support material.

I had a long reply to your second question, but I hope the essence is covered in the previous paragraph.

How do you narrate the cause of the result without introducing anything into the fiction? That's not rhetorical. That's an honest question. If the system is not providing any information about how a result occurred, how do you, as GM narrate those results without introducing anything into the fiction?

I don't? By definition I introduce something into the fiction when I am narrating, independently of the subject of narration?

I'm so tired of all this overly pedantic, ridiculous posturing. You're accepting that the GM can narrate the cause of results and clalming that this makes the system simulationist. It's ludicrous. That's just free form play. That's not simulationist because you can do this in EVERY SINGLE RPG.

Ref my reply to pemerton. Yes. If you absolutely must insist on labeling games (which I have repeatedly stated I do not think is a good practice at all) I find that a more coherent and practical terminology than your proposed segregation based on mechanics having a certain form, even if this suggestion indeed reduces to triviality.

Well, no, that's not true actually. You cannot actually do this in actual simulationist RPG's because the system will define, at least in some small part, how a result was achieved. Therefore the DM is actually constrained by the information the system itself is providing. That's what makes the system simulationist. "Make naughty word up" is not simulationism.

Nonono! Mechanics that actually do good simulation can be very supportive of simulation indeed! I just point out that doing something simulation like is not a sufficient condition for supporting simulation. Nor is it neccesary for something to support simulation.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And others never ever ever have put up pages of hysterical rants about how utterly god-awful players are and how they NEED to be subject to extremely tight constraints or else they'll destroy things.

I think you'll find there's plenty of digital ink spilled here about how bad behavior from players completely requires GMs to suspect misbehavior from all fronts, while simultaneously demanding nigh-infinite trust that the GM would never, ever abuse the powers they lay claim to.

Well, not by me. I do not suspect misbehaviour from my players. All these conflicts you imagine, just do not happen. I have friends, I ask them to play game in a world I made, they make characters suitable to the world and we play and have fun.

Edit: May as well combine this with the other response I have for you.


Aaaaand here we have the goalposts moving at the speed of light.

Sorry, not gonna accept this line of reasoning. It's a default ancestry that has been present in some degree for at least three editions running. (IIRC there was something in...1e, from Dragon mag, that looks shockingly like a dragonborn in race-as-class form, sans scaly dreadlocks of course, except that they "ate" magic items instead of wearing them directly. Neat idea, not really my cuppa but I could work with it if the GM expected only "in-edition" content.) It's been a core ancestry for, at this point, 18 years. It's one of the most popular non-human options in the game; as of the most recent statistics, behind only half-elf and elf, and half-elf got straight-up deleted in 5.5e, so...dragonborn are theoretically now the second-most-popular non-human ancestry in D&D? I mean, if you believe the statistics coming from the official sources.

So what? It is still not suitable for every setting. My current setting has no elves or dwarves, someone might want a run world without humans.

Also, I did not mention dragonborn, but due your fixation on them you apparently made this to be about them.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They play something that feels sufficiently like a tiefling to that particular player at least. Is it a tiefling though? I would say no in the context of what started this reply chain. Can it be called a tiefling? Sure thing!

Sure. That was my point all along. We drill down to find what really matters to the player, and determine if that is compatible. If it's not--if there are genuinely, utterly irreconcilable conflicts that appear as early as character creation, the group needs to reevaluate. Maybe the player leaves, maybe the GM does, maybe they agree to do a different activity (whether a different setting, a different system, or something entirely unrelated).

Ah! I am so sorry! I misremembered your post when I wrote this last reply! For some reason I thought you had argued no lines was needed for this, while you indeed had argued something more fundamental was needed for this. My original "Who are in a position to not permit something?" Was meant to explore how this more fundamental mechanism would work in practice given you seemed to argue crazy stuff shouldn't be permited. (Full quote for reference, and for reminding myself)

Ah, okay. It seemed very odd in context so I understand. My apologies if I was excessively testy.

When it comes to the actual rules of the game, as in the written textual elements, I consider things pretty different compared to the unspoken abstractions or high-altitude things like "setting concept" or the like. Rules, assuming they aren't crap, are clear and relatively well-written. They communicate their function. Hence, by agreeing to a particular game, one is signing up to make use of the rules in question. Some leeway should be allowed since I don't expect anyone to have encyclopedic knowledge of any system, but that leeway should have limits. Hence, the GM (or whomever; could also be other players!) enforcing the rules--and trying to preserve the functionality of the game's rules--is an absolute bedrock element of "playing a game". If we don't have that, we don't have "a game" in the first place, so the activity can't happen. It's like saying that people taking a road trip need to maintain the vehicle they're driving in. If you don't preserve the functionality of the vehicle, your road trip ends. Probably very unpleasantly.

Hence, "permitting" here is a matter of evaluating the game-mechanical fit of certain things. Generally, this entails at least some degree of calculation. You can actually compare quantities, concretely. I prefer game design where players can determine, from their own efforts, that in general (not in specific!), they have several possible and truly distinct paths...and all of them evaluate to having pretty much the same calculated value. When that happens, you get magic: the players must make their mechanical decisions on the basis of qualitative, not quantitative, reasoning. When almost all reasoning occurs quantitatively, the player is thinking about what matters, not about what evaluates. By having multiple distinct paths with comparable arithmetic value, arithmetic value cannot be what decides, and that inherently puts anyone playing--whether "gamist" or not--into the right kind of mindset for great roleplaying. Your head stays in the fiction almost all the time, because worrying overmuch about mechanics makes no difference. (This is why I am so opposed to badly-balanced games. Bad balance encourages pure-mechanics thinking, rather than discouraging it! You get rewarded for thinking mechanics-first.)

As a result, it's very important to build and maintain healthy rules function. For games like D&D, it's usually the GM who is best-equipped to do that. Sometimes that's not entirely true; I know people on this forum who have said that they trust one of their players to be the big brain when it comes to game-rules stuff.

Fully agreed! Which is why I find this initiative exiting! If we can find some clear guidelines or processes that adresses the concerns I pointed to while requiering opening for less GM abuse than today's predominant practice, I think that might be a huge win for the hoby, and a good first step.

Well, I have some ideas on that front, but they require more brain than I have right now. Perhaps later.

Ok, I think my notion with regard to practicallity has to do with the problem that even if everyone might agree "don't steal from your family" is more fundamental than "Be considerate when parents are resting", this doesn't mean there are not families where members are stealing from each other. This agreement alone are also unlikely to deter anyone actualy prone to do such stealing.

This is my question about practicality. How to effectively deter, and what to do when these fundamentals are broken? The GM powers helps to some extent for these purposes, but are far from perfect. Replacing with something better would be great. But for instance just throwing it all overboard and trust each other to do the right thing, doesn't seem like something you would be advocating?

Okay. My concern was only limitedly practical here. More or less, the only practical concern I was voicing was that I see "bright lines" as being a purely personal thing, a "this would upset me, so please don't do that" kind of thing. Not instructions, more like...well, friends being friends with one another and recognizing that there are things it's okay to do and things it's not okay to do, though such things should be talked out rather than left to implication alone.

"Don't cheat and don't try to break the game", on the other hand, does not fit well into the "this is a personal request from me" mold. That's a thing everyone--including the GM--should be on board with from the beginning. While I do think it needs to be said at some point, given how deeply embedded it is, I think there's an argument that it can also be presumed to be true and anyone who pretends that they somehow don't know that you shouldn't cheat at games is probably being a disingenuous jerk.

(This is also, incidentally, a different aspect of why I personally am very opposed to fudging--noting that I define "fudging" slightly more narrowly than some do.)