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

[AlViking]

...

Are you seriously not noticing the demand for game design that satisfies the simulationist desire? The utter rejection of anything that offends such sensibilities?

People have expressed their preferences. If you take that as a demand that you change it's on you.

 

[Maxperson]

Then why is absolute authority for GMs--meaning, absolute obedience from the players--so goddamn important?!

Because you are still wrong about what it means. Not one of us has ever required the bolded part of it at all.

Absolute authority for X means absolute obedience from the people over whom X has that authority.

Nope. Still does not mean that no matter how many time you repeat it. Can =/= do. Nobody here abuses their authority in that manner.

Oh, and it's absolute authority over the game, not the players. I doubt very many of us have any authority over our players, and any such authority for those few who do certainly doesn't extend from the game.

 

[Enrahim]

Then why is absolute authority for GMs--meaning, absolute obedience from the players--so goddamn important?!

Absolute authority for X means absolute obedience from the people over whom X has that authority.

The judge in the court case, the moderator of a debate and speaker in parlament typically expect a level of obedience. In these formalised settings you might argue that the required obedience is not "absolute", but for a layperson it still seem pretty near.

Still in all of these settings the person to be obeyed is far from the main contributor to the activity at hand. Rather their function and the required obedience is to help everyone else being properly heard.

As such I cannot see how you can from a request for obedience deduce a wish to take over the content of the activity?

 

[Maxperson]

The judge in the court case, the moderator of a debate and speaker in parlament typically expect a level of obedience. In these formalised settings you might argue that the required obedience is not "absolute", but for a layperson it still seem pretty near.

Still in all of these settings the person to be obeyed is far from the main contributor to the activity at hand. Rather their function and the required obedience is to help everyone else being properly heard.

As such I cannot see how you can from a request for obedience deduce a wish to take over the content of the activity?

It's not even obedience. The players always have the options to walk away from the game if the DM is abusing his authority. I have absolute authority over the game, because the rules give it to me. That doesn't mean that I exercise that authority commonly, or even uncommonly. It's very rare for me to bring it out. Like once every several years rare. However, I have no ability to make a player obey me. Ever. The game doesn't grant that, because it can't.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Though I find that there are still times where even those for whom this gets "stuck in their craw" will do things that are retrocausal, and handwave the issue.

As said previously, the way that perception checks are handled is usually like this. The things which cause the perception to go well or poorly occur before the roll, thus producing the effect required. This is rarely, if ever, commented upon as being any kind of problem, and I'm still really not sure why. Retrocausally concluding that the character must have been distracted by something because they didn't observe well doesn't look any less problematic by these lights than retrocausally concluding that the runes did in fact say something like what a well-trained expert would expect them to say, or to at least contain useful information that the expert was hoping to find.

I am not quite sure what sort of retrocausality you see happening here. I don't see it. The events that could be noticed, the noticing (or lack of it) and the roll all happen basically at the same time. That we cannot practically do and describe all of them at once doesn't indicate any retrocausality.

 

[Umbran]

I don't mind inconsistency--when people aren't making demands or expecting something that everyone else must live with.

The only people who can make demands or set expectations for what happens at your table must be sitting at your table.

The rest is rhetoric.

It's not "whataboutism". It's "you cannot declare an absolute line in the sand that must never be violated....and then accept plenty of violations of it when you didn't feel that strongly about it."

Cannot? Says... you?
Or else... what, exactly?

So, if you don't mind me asking - is drawing lines in the sand over what other people can and cannot do... getting you anywhere?

 

[Pedantic]

I don't understand why scale and responsibility matter when the (claimed) issue is one of principle. If it is principle that is actually the problem, then these things should not happen. If principle is not actually the issue, then several things people have taken umbrage with in this very thread should not have been--great example being how badly people reacted to the "you failed on a Climb check, so you struggled and stumbled and took way too long to climb to the top, finding your friend you were trying to save already dead". That was so widely opposed we spent at least a hundred posts arguing about whether it was in the least acceptable.

What are we to make of this?

I don't really care? I'm more interested in exploring the what's and how's of what turns people off and working backwards to a design principle than I am interested in forensic review of their proposed rationales. I'm pretty comfortable with my personally principled stance on this, rooted entirely in player agency, but I have no reason to believe it's anything but idiosyncratic.

 

[AlViking]

Yeah, kinda same for me.

It is frustrating how these discussions go:
"I think I'd prefer a tad more simulationism than a game X offers"
"How curious you play game Y then, which is not perfectly simulationistic in all aspects. You hypocrite!"

It might be the Edwardsian fallacy of incoherence that causes this, that game preferences are all or nothing, whilst in reality they rarely are.
I think was an idea that has been very harmful to the discourse.

I'm pretty much in the same boat. I don't care for several aspects of narrative games, they just aren't what I want.

I want games where the character I'm playing can only change the world based on what I say and do. I don't want the GM nudging the game in a specific direction in order to follow their previously defined story or because it will be more "interesting". I'm okay with linear games if I know it ahead of time, just let me know that I need to follow the cookie crumbs.

Meanwhile I think back to early days of D&D that leaned more into simulation. Things like some weapons were more effective against different types of armor or that some weapons did more damage against large creatures. Not to mention the disease charts an other bits here and there. We pretty much ignored them, they just weren't worth the overhead.

I don't want or need a rock climbing simulation. I want a fantasy novel or movie simulator. Growing up I wanted to play a character that can become Conan, The Gray Mouser or Aragorn. D&D does that for me even if I don't have a "why did you slip on the ice" chart.

 

[clearstream]

That would be a fertile area of investigation; we could do more of that, and less of trying to find the angle that allows us to declare it's all made up and doesn't matter.

Personally, I think there's two things going on. First, reactive checks are generally treated differently than proactive action declarations. I think they lead to an inversion of the normal process. Instead of declaration an action, evaluating, and then narrating results, the binary result is assumed, evaluation occurs, and then a small filler action is declared to justify the outcome.

I think the whole thing could be clarified by moving perception (and possibly knowledge type skills) to be defenses. That, and/or responsibility could be clarified around who actually narrates an appropriate interstitial action. You can certainly imagine the player rolling a 2 and saying "Darkelf is distracted by the bookshelf and not paying attention" without prompting.

The second thing going on is a matter of scale; the rune example reaches way further back in time and outside of the character. You're not filling in an interstitial action within the last minute or so, you're filling in an action taken by someone else an indeterminate amount of time in the past, whoever carved the runes in the first place.

To me the retrocausal worry depends on a dubious conception of game mechanics. That is, that the timeline of processing them around the table is the same as the timeline of events associated with them in world.

Rather it is two separate timelines A and B. That "you're filling in an action taken by someone else an indeterminate amount of time in the past, whoever carved the runes in the first place" turns out to be a valid way to look at it, given that events in A are neither in the past nor future of B. To the extent that any point in B is accessible from A, all points in B are accessible from any point in A. It can be that a step of resolution in A settles something in the distant past in B, rather than in the 'today' of characters in B.

This is a direct implication of the notion that TTRPG mechanics can be diegetical but not diegetic. And it is why I proposed the concept of para-diegetic upthread to get at the hope in some modes of play that the timelines run forward in tandem (which very often glosses over where they do not, as I showed with RQ combat.)

 

[Faolyn]

Well, I'm not @Hussar, and I can't claim to have followed every post up until now, but I'll have a go at it.

Simulation is an important method of communication. I will posit this: the rules of a TTRPG are incomplete. It's one of the factors that separates a TTRPG from a board game or a video game. There will be things in a TTRPG that are assumed, unsaid, or otherwise simply left out of the rule set that will be filled in later by a GM or the players. And, back to the original point, simulation is a way to communicate actions, reactions, and expectations beyond what is explicitly stated in the game rules.

One example of this is gravity. Very few TTRPGs have rules that are so complete they define gravity (what it is, how it works, exact calculations for acceleration, etc). Yet, in most TTRPGs the players can assume that if their (normal, human, etc.) character walks off the edge of a cliff, they will fall down. Unless otherwise explicitly stated by the rules or by the DM, the assumption of a realistic simulation of gravity clearly communicates to all involved the basic reaction of something falling if its weight is no longer supported.

Further to this example, what type of reality is being simulated can be used to communicate by having things in the game interact with gravity. Suppose the players watch an NPC walk off a cliff and not fall down. Knowing what is being simulated in the game will communicate things to the players. In a fantasy simulation, it communicates that magic is probably being used. In a superhero simulation, it communicates that defying gravity could be a power of the NPC. In a cartoon simulation, it communicates that the NPC hasn't looked down yet. But in any case, awareness of the simulation communicates details, even without explicitly saying everything that is going on.

The stricter a simulation is (whether it's simulating reality, fantasy, etc), the more everyone involved can rely on non-explicit communication from expectations. The looser a simulation is, the more a game will rely on rules, rulings, or other explicit communication so that everyone knows what's going on.

This isn't the only good thing about simulation, of course. But it's one that I feel is often overlooked.

I do agree, and sim is fine--I always like having some more information, as long as I'm not restricted to that info. It's just that Hussar seems to be taking it to an extreme level. That unless the game very clearly spells out how something worked, it's useless from a sim point of view. It's why I keep pointing out that you can do the math in 5e to show why you failed or succeeded. It's not spelled out, but the info is there. Or like in your example. I'd agree that in a fantasy game, if a character walked off a cliff and didn't fall, I would conclude it's magic (unless, of course, something else has or was about to be established--maybe it's not magic anti-grav, but an invisible bridge). But I get the feeling that Hussar would say that because you didn't specifically say that there was magic involved, even though it was a magical world, that it wasn't sim and that it was just the GM making stuff up.