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

[Maxperson]

Just to add to this, and to address some comments about skill systems (which have come from @Crimson Longinus and @Don Durito):

Here is the entry for Climbing skill in Burning Wheel Gold Revised (p 264):

This skill allows the character to navigate sheer surfaces using rope, harnesses and really strong finger muscles. In addition, rougher surfaces can be scaled with bare hands.​

D&D:Athletics. Your Strength (Athletics) check covers difficult situations you encounter while climbing. You attempt to climb a sheer or slippery cliff, avoid hazards while scaling a wall, or cling to a surface while something is trying to knock you off.

Obstacles: Easy climb (a rocky hill, a tree or a fence), Ob 1. Moderate climb (inclined rock wall, a treacherous tree), Ob 2. Difficult climb (straight rock wall), Ob 3. Dangerous climb (sheer rock wall), Ob 4. Impossible climb (ice climbing), Ob 5. Suicidal climb (bad conditions, overhangs, etc), Ob 7.​

This is just DC.

FoRKs: Knots, Rigging​

D&D doesn't say these two words, no.

​

Skill Type: Physical​

Use strength.

​

Tools: Yes, expendable.​

Rope and pitons are in the equipment portion of the book.

This is what I expect a classic simulationist skill entry to look like: it identifies what the skill bonus represents (ie skill with climbing gear and/or strong fingers); it locates it within the broader context of possible actions (this is a physical skill, and it is aided by skills such as Knots and Rigging - Fields of Related Knowledge); and it characterises obstacles that the skill might be used to overcome (like different sorts of slopes and surfaces) in game-mechanical terms (the list of sample obstacles).

There's pretty much no difference between that and D&D. D&D just puts it in various areas and the mechanics refer to one another to give the simulation.

If that's simulationist, so is D&D's athletics skill used to climb.

 

[Maxperson]

Exactly.

I see this as precisely, 1:1 identical to a player building their SUPER AWESOME AMAZING character, with 50,000 words of backstory, feats selected from literal years of poring over every "official" source (read: published by WotC...or in Dragon Mag, which is notoriously unbalanced), extensive physical description backed up by commissioned art (no AI-generated slop will do!), extensive personality analysis, etc., etc., ad nauseam, and then getting upset when their buddy says they're going to run D&D, looks at that character, and says, "I'm sorry, this is unbalanced and deeply flawed, I can't accept this character."*

Every time I've seen this sort of thing, where a person crafts a ludicrously detailed, nailed-down-to-the-mile geography etc. etc., it reveals itself to be a dramatically over-precious labor of love. It's the GM's baby. We have the infamous "DMPC" concept. The same concept can apply to the campaign setting. Not sure what snappy name it could have though. "Dungeon Master's Setting Character"?

*And, to jump in front of a response I'm dead certain I'll get: no, this is not the same as blanket bans on whole concepts. Blanket bans are a whole different beast. "This one specific character, as written, is unbalanced" is a fixable issue--the same concept might still work with fixed balance. "Deeply flawed" is of course more complicated, but could be addressed, probably with fixes to particular behaviors or attitudes that are likely to cause problems for the group. "You can't play a dragonborn because I hate dragonborn and thus forbid them" is not a fixable issue. It's a rejection of the other person's interests. Very different thing, though I wouldn't be surprised if people take umbrage with this distinction anyway.

Dragonborn in 5e are an insult to the might of dragons and dragon blood. Accordingly, in my game they got a massive boost in power that makes them inappropriate as a PC race. I just don't have the weak and pathetic dragonborn race 5e put out.

And before you react poorly to my action above, if a player had an idea for a cool race that had a breath weapon, I would not be opposed to using the dragonborn stats from the PHB, since they are not the dragonborn of my game and are basically stats without attached lore.

 

[Maxperson]

Heh. It's really funny. Wayyyyy back early in the thread, I commented that D&D was a poor system for sandboxing because of the amount of work required to get the game off the ground. Now, here we are, thousands of posts later, and you're talking about needing six MONTHS of work to get a sandbox off the ground using D&D.

I got absolutely taken to task for suggesting that D&D was a difficult system to use for sandboxing because of the work required, and now, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that every sandboxing D&D Dm is nodding their head with what you said about needing six months to get ready. But, suggest there might be a faster way to do it? HERESY!!!

I can start a sandbox game in waaaaaaaay less time than 6 months. If you've gathered anything from this thread, it's that tradtional/sandbox DMs run their games in a variety of sandboxy ways and with a significant variety of prep involved.

You can't use @Lanefan as some sort of baseline. He preps a lot more than most DMs I've encountered.

 

[Micah Sweet]

For what it's worth, you are striking the right balance of bringing up level up sometimes and not overly criticizing games I like. It makes me a bit more interested in it, not less.

On a side note, how does it compare in power levels to 2024 d&d PCs? I always felt it had more powerful PC's than 2014 d&d.

Power levels are IMO a little higher than 5.0 PCs (still more options and versatility than raw power I think), and about even in power with 5.5 (although quite different in a lot of ways, and IMO far more interesting to build and play than WotC's offering).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No, they’re perfectly normal Tolkien dwarves in appearance, they are just called Dragonborn clan. They wear drake and dragon pelts though!

Then no. That would not be acceptable to me. Name only with absolutely nothing else physiologically associated, wouldn't work. If a GM seriously offered this to me as a "compromise" I would not take it very well. At all.

But my point was that MY must-haves are different from Jimmy's, which are different from Sally's, which are different from Suraya's, which are different from Chen's, which are...etc., etc.

"Dragonborn" is a collection of ideas. No single one of those ideas is universally required by all. That doesn't make it disingenuous to label a completely unrelated bundle as such and then pretend you've been showing respect to others' interests. Sally might exclusively care about mechanics and not at all about literally anything else. I, personally, don't really care about mechanics (especially since I preferred the 4e mechanics and those are almost totally gone now), but as I explicitly said, appearance and loose concept matter to me. Others, appearance might not matter (e.g. crocodile look could be fine for them, or skinny, or whatever) but concept might, or vice versa.

Being a bundle means it doesn't have a singular necessary piece. That's not weird or irrational. Plenty of things IRL actually do work like that. (Consider ring species, where neighboring subspecies can interbreed but distant ones cannot.) Your argument depends on every single thing always having a critical core that everyone agrees is 100% necessary or it stops being the thing in question. That simply isn't true.

I mean, for God's sake, consider dragons themselves. Even banal things like "has wings" (not true of Asian dragons and certain ancient Greek and Mesopotamian dragons), "has legs" (not true of various heraldic dragons and "winged serpent" dragons), "is completely reptilian" (some dragons have hair/fur), "breathes fire" (actually uncommon outside of northern Europe!), etc. Yet somehow we agree that these incredibly diverse things are really dragons.

About the only things "dragon" universally has, are "at least somewhat reptilian" and "powerful/important", which are so generic as to be useless for evaluating. Enormous swathes of fiction can include a powerful thing with at least one reptilian feature.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That is an excellent example of collaboration. All those steps. How does that sound to you @EzekielRaiden ? Does that pass your sniff test?

Taken at face value, yes.

Naturally, with essentially no details, I can't say for sure there couldn't be an issue somewhere. But taken as presented, that sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. I was under the impression this would be an utterly unacceptable, gross violation. You've just given the player "reality altering powers" to "rewrite" a god!

 

[AlViking]

So after a few dozen pages of people talking about the primacy of the setting and the role of the GM as the near-sole contributor of the setting... is anyone really surprised that for many of us, what's being described is a GM-focused and/or GM-led game?

Once again it depends on what you mean. Do you mean the the world and the inhabitants other than the characters and some things the players contribute for their background are created and controlled by the GM? Sure. As long as you also accept that the players have full control over what their characters say, do, feel, think. That the players in sandbox games like mine through their characters have almost unlimited freedom to make decisions, tromp all over the GM's plans and are the ones that actively drive the direction of the campaigns. That even in linear campaigns typical of purchased modules they still have significant freedom.

If you mean that the GM is a railroading control freak making he player's characters dance like puppets on a string or anything even close. No. Don't be ridiculous.

If you want to play and run games with collaborative world building, go for it. If you want more of a narrative game with both GM and players actively building on world narrative, have fun. I don't, whether I'm playing or running. Is any of that at all new or controversial? That we all have different preferences?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Do you think you should be allowed as a player to make significant changes to previously established world lore (established by the GM's worldbuilding efforts) so that your personal character concept can exist exactly as you envision it? Can you explain further what you mean by, "a character that's my idea, not the GM's idea"?

I felt their analogy was very good (GM creating a setting with "PC shaped holes" for players to fill), but let's get loquacious.

There are four things that matter the most for a player character. Physiology ("race"/species/ancestry/heritage/what-have-you, gender or lack thereof, vital statistics, etc.), culture (language(s), mores, values, aesthetic preferences, etc.), background (family, life experience, past employment, etc.), and class. Limitations on these things should be applied with extreme care from the GM, because that's very literally dictating to the player what they are permitted to express in the world. The harsher the limits, the more it looks like (at the most extreme end) handing out premade characters with dialogue lines to speak at specific times etc.

Hence why I said I see that sort of thing as corresponding extremely closely to "player comes in with a mile-long backstory complete with gods and extensive important family trees and(etc., etc., ad nauseam.) Both things chain up others' participation.

Very specifically species (races, ancestries, whatever) are the point that looks extremely weird to me. Classes I can grok, that's about powers in the universe (to at least some extent). Nobody here seems to have any real beef with players having mostly free rein in backstory, so we aren't having an issue there (amazingly, it's almost like folks arguing that players can't ever be trusted to exercise their own judgment appropriately...do actually do that in some areas!) Culture is complicated, but people having a disagreement with their culture's values or overall behavior is a classic character conflict idea, so I don't think there's really an issue there either.

Which, as stated, that leaves species/race/etc. Which is why that's what gets all the attention in these threads. For me, harsh and absolute limits look like they add almost nothing whatsoever to world building in 99% of homebrew cases (especially since that is almost always just "cribbing from Tolkien without much/any further thought"), while putting extreme limits on the player's end. Again, I'm coming at this from the stance that species(/etc.) is a bundle and that bundle can be flexible, since different people value different things. By those lights, an "absolutely NOTHING even REMOTELY like X" stance looks incredibly harsh, since it is a total refusal to even come to the negotiation table. It might turn out that the conflict is utterly irreconcilable, though I find that that only happens when at least one person isn't participating in good faith. But even if it does, and nobody is there in bad faith, that just means the group has irreconcilable differences and probably wasn't going to be functional long-term anyway.

It takes a pretty significant, usually dramatic/extreme, setting conceit/theme to make species(/etc,) restrictions meaningful to my eyes. Dark Sun, for example, is an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic setting where genocide is a real and horrible historical fact. That's a good reason to forbid X: they were exterminated centuries ago and none remain. But just "generic pseudo-Tolkien fantasy"? I have never, not once, seen that cash out as "it is absolutely essential that no humanoids with scales have ever nor could ever exist in this world".

And when I do see that? It fails the smell test, as you put it. It's an early warning sign that my participation will be predicated on filling a PC-shaped hole the GM oh-so-graciously permitted me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Taken at face value, yes.

Naturally, with essentially no details, I can't say for sure there couldn't be an issue somewhere. But taken as presented, that sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. I was under the impression this would be an utterly unacceptable, gross violation. You've just given the player "reality altering powers" to "rewrite" a god!

They're not rewriting anything. The GM said themselves the information isn't fully fleshed out, and the GM has final say on whether or not the players suggestions are followed. Given that, I'm actually surprised you're in favor of it.

Compromise!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Which, as stated, that leaves species/race/etc. Which is why that's what gets all the attention in these threads. For me, harsh and absolute limits look like they add almost nothing whatsoever to world building in 99% of homebrew cases (especially since that is almost always just "cribbing from Tolkien without much/any further thought"), while putting extreme limits on the player's end. Again, I'm coming at this from the stance that species(/etc.) is a bundle and that bundle can be flexible, since different people value different things. By those lights, an "absolutely NOTHING even REMOTELY like X" stance looks incredibly harsh, since it is a total refusal to even come to the negotiation table. It might turn out that the conflict is utterly irreconcilable, though I find that that only happens when at least one person isn't participating in good faith. But even if it does, and nobody is there in bad faith, that just means the group has irreconcilable differences and probably wasn't going to be functional long-term anyway.

It takes a pretty significant, usually dramatic/extreme, setting conceit/theme to make species(/etc,) restrictions meaningful to my eyes. Dark Sun, for example, is an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic setting where genocide is a real and horrible historical fact. That's a good reason to forbid X: they were exterminated centuries ago and none remain. But just "generic pseudo-Tolkien fantasy"? I have never, not once, seen that cash out as "it is absolutely essential that no humanoids with scales have ever nor could ever exist in this world".

Whereas to me it is perfectly clear that intelligent species of the setting are on of its most defining features, and the idea that you should shove tortle into a gritty gameofthronesque human-only world or a Tolkien dwarf into a Kung Fu Panda inspired animal people world is ludicrous.

How on Earth you ever manage to play in games with published settings that come with their own set of species? Or games set on our real Earth, where playable species options tend to be a tad limited?

And when I do see that? It fails the smell test, as you put it. It's an early warning sign that my participation will be predicated on filling a PC-shaped hole the GM oh-so-graciously permitted me.

Whereas to me player whose first reaction is to ignore the premise is an obvious red flag. Also players who have the one pet character idea they need to try to shove into everything are a red flag too, and even worse if it is something as superficial as fantasy species. Like countless authors throughout human history have somehow managed to come up with a bunch of interesting characters even though most of them have been just boring old humans.