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

[EzekielRaiden]

What are you on about? Too late to back out? This isn’t a fight to the death. It’s not a duel to determine who is in the right and who is not.

It’s a discussion about personal preferences. No more, no less.

Well, that and pixies for an unfathomable reason.

It's a previous debate Max and I had. I tried, desperately, to get him to accept anything--anything at all--that was less than the GM having "absolute power" over the game. He refused. This is the inevitable result.

 

[Maggan]

It's a previous debate Max and I had. I tried, desperately, to get him to accept anything--anything at all--that was less than the GM having "absolute power" over the game. He refused. This is the inevitable result.

The inevitable result that you don’t agree.

Maxperson won’t change his ways, and neither will you. That’s all. No need to play this up as the next great schism in the roleplaying hobby.

 

[Emerikol]

It's a previous debate Max and I had. I tried, desperately, to get him to accept anything--anything at all--that was less than the GM having "absolute power" over the game. He refused. This is the inevitable result.

I think for those of us "raised up" in that style we are pretty wedded to it if we didn't abandon it long before now. Even so, that does not prevent you from playing in a different style. Even as a player, as soon as I determine the DM is not that way I tend to want to leave the game.

 

[Emerikol]

The inevitable result that you don’t agree.

Maxperson won’t change his ways, and neither will you. That’s all. No need to play this up as the next great schism in the roleplaying hobby.

In fairness it does divide the playerbase though I think the view that the DM is the final authority is the dominant view if you consider D&D and D&D adjacent games.

 

[FrogReaver]

In some cases my players have said "I try to...." That isn't necessary because it is implied either way and not everyone says that all the time of course.

I will note in d&d players don’t say ‘I kill the orc as an action’. They may say ‘I attack the orc’ or the dm may say they kill the orc, describe how you did so. Etc.

Seems important to point out. This is the player conforming their action declaration to the mechanics.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

There is no divergence.

Yes there is.

The character wants to read the runes, having conjectured that they may reveal a way out, and hoping that they do. The player wants to read the runes, hoping that they will reveal a way out, and knowing that there is a chance - based on the resolution of their declared action - that they will.

But the player deciding what their character hoped, made that decision based on information that the mechanics can make that hope to become true even though the character in the fiction has no power to cause this.

The player has knowledge that the character doesn't: namely, that this is a fiction being authored. That's the same in all RPGing: it's not unique to this case.

The specific knowledge is not just that the fiction is authored, but that the player will be one authoring it in a manner that is causally disconnected from what their character can affect. There is also knowledge that that character's hope being fulfilled, and the odds of it depend on which character reads the runes. The decision based are disconnected in unusually stark manner. I really wish you would stop trying to deny this rather obvious fact, so that the discussion could get anywhere.

When did I ignore it.

Yet you seem to be blind to its implications. It is weird to me that for all your supposed expertise in game theory, you often seem to unable to grasp the very basics, even when they pertain your own game.

In the fiction, the runes could have been X or Y. But once the GM rolls on the "random runes" table, they are "locked in" as X rather than Y. And now someone else can't prompt a re-roll on the table.

All this shows is that, in a game, if one person makes a move, that shapes the "play space" in ways that affect future moves by that participant and other participants. Which is pretty standard for a game.

And if that chart was one that would not be affected by who examines the runes, no disconnect would be created, as then the situation would be the same in the fiction than it is in the rules: what the runes say is independent from who is reading them.

Characters of course can take all sort of actions that shape the play space, but here the disconnect is that the reality is different to the players and the characters. If a character uses an explosive to collapse a dungeon exit, then in the fiction was shaped, and the characters in the fiction know this. But they do not know that the character reading the runes "locks" the runes and their skilol and hopes determined the form they took, as that is not part of the fiction.

Again, this is not some trivial difference, it is a significant and fundamental one.

This comes back to the point of play. Most of the time, when I am playing a RPG or GMing a RPG, the players are not trying to beat a scenario that the GM has authored and presented to them. Or to overcome obstacles set by the GM in the way of getting to some "finish line".

Typically, the players are playing the game to have their PCs do things and to find out what happens to their PCs.

Yet, they were trying to overcome "the obstacle" of the dungeon by trying to find a way out!

Here, again, is an example of play from Torchbearer 2e:
The impression that I get from your post is that, when you read this, what you see is (i) Telemere's player creating risk by declaring an action that is unlikely to succeed, and (ii) Golin's player compounding that risk by not helping with the check. "Disadvantageous by the rules".

Good example! So was the pirate attack consequence of the failed check? I assume so.

This indeed is two cases of a player doing something that is "disadvantageous" bot only one case of a character doing it. There is no reason for Telemere to assume that even if his stonemasonry skills were mediocre. searching for a secret door would cause anything more harmful than not finding it, and certainly not pirate attack! So assuming I'm correct about my assumptions, here we have similar disconnect than with the rules. Now Golin has no reason to assume searching secret doors leading to pirates here, but here he certainly contributes to the door not being found, and that is true in the fiction too.

But it is not "disadvantageous" to declare actions in TB2e. If players didn't declare actions for their PCs, everyone would just be sitting at the table silently. Given that the whole reason for playing is to find out what these characters are going to do and what will happen to them, declaring actions is the core of play.

So obviously I do not assume that characters do nothing, and I do not even assume that characters always do "optimal" things. It is interesting when characters make choices that cause trouble, but I think it is far more interesting if it is part of the fiction! Then the characters can know of it, have regrets and they can argue about it. But if the a character with poor rune reading skills read the runes and this resulted something bad, then it certainly was partly the players fault, especially if more skilled reader was available. But it was not the character's fault, as in fiction they did not cause anything! Again, you must see the difference here!

To me, you seem to be assuming that play will look - in its structure - like a D&D dungeon of 45 to 50 years ago: there is a pre-authored set of latent situations (the dungeon rooms, or the GM's notes about the obstacles in the way of <this goal>, or whatever) and the players' job is to (i) identify those latent situations, and (ii) defuse/defeat/overcome them as efficiently as possible.

No, not really.

But I very rarely play or GM RPGs that have that structure. The situations are not predominantly pre-authored. In MHRP or BW they are not pre-authored at all. In TB2e some are, but the rules for "twists" mean that many are not. And there is no pathway for players to "win" the game by minimising their action declarations, their engagement with situations, etc. Engaging with situations is the play of the game.

Yet the characters have goals, are the players not supposed to pursue them? In doing is it bad form to try to do so effectively given the realities of the rule system or not?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

See, I generally prefer more simulation that D&D offers, which is one reason why I play and enjoy Burning Wheel and Torchbearer 2e.

Then I get told they're not simulationist, whereas D&D is!

Given that both systems have bucketloads of process sim (in PC build, in action resolution) compared to D&D, I conclude that for the poster in question "simulation" means "backstory/setting only ever flows from GM to players".

You break the sim by drawing acausal odds from stats that supposedly measure diegetic things.

 

[Umbran]

... doing everything they can to drive them out of the hobby as much as physically achieveable...

Mod Note:

Your rhetoric here is hyperbolic, and not acceptable.

This is a discussion on a messageboard. Nobody is getting "driven out of the hobby" by what is said here.

If you cannot disagree with folks without accusing them like this, it is time for you to take a break from the discussion.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

We learn that the character did not observe the thing...

And then, only AFTER knowing that the character did not observe the thing, we invent the preceding events which led up to that failure to notice. In particular, if someone who has a high bonus rolls poorly and thus fails to notice, that narration will invent things which would interfere with their skill such that the expected result didn't happen. That is textbook retrocausality: we invented the origin of the effect after learning what the effect was.

What is happening that there is a die roll that determines whether the thing succeeded or failed followed by description of the event of success or failure. Almost all skill checks and similar work like this, and there is not anything retrocausal about it, the narration and the dice roll are the same event.

But like I have said many times, the issue with the runes is not that it is retrocausal, but that it is acausal. What is happening in the mechanics and what is happening in the fiction are disconnected, creating divergence in decision spaces. This is not some trivial technicality, but something has an actual observable effect on how the game will be played.

 

[FrogReaver]

You break the sim by drawing acausal odds from stats that supposedly measure diegetic things.

To be fair there are probably alot of simulation elements in those games. I don’t dispute that. What I say is that if this kind of runes-like procedure is common then that part devalues the rest of the simulative elements. It’s basically the elephant in the room at that point. If it’s not common I’m probably fine if something like that rarely happens, but to my understanding it’s fundamental to narrativism, which is where I see the conflict with sim as a whole.

Now I would ask the resident experts on narrativism if any such narrativist game that doesn’t do this or commonly do this exists, but given their take that there is no difference with runes-like examples and d&d then they aren’t really in a position to answer such a question for me.