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

[AlViking]

See, but here's the problem.

What do you do when the player rejects the DM's narrative. When the player finds the DM's post hoc justification to be not simulating the world?

For example, let's use the rope example. You talk about the rope being cut by a rock. Now, I've done some climbing with the army. I know pretty well that no, any rope that is strong enough to be used for climbing is not going to be cut by a sharp rock. At least, not accidentally. Unless your rocks are made of diamond (or perhaps obsidian) it's just not going to happen. You cannot cut a 3/4 inch rope with a rock. Not going to happen.

But, the DM thinks it's perfectly plausible. The DM thinks that this is totally normal and can be done.

At this point, the simulation is not functioning. The only way it works is if the player must accept whatever the DM makes up at the time. Which, in cases where the player may be more knowlegeable than the DM, means that many times the narrative isn't possible from the player's POV.

Unfortunately, there is nothing to resolve this because the mechanics provide no information.

If they don't accept it then they need to either accept the limitations of the game or find a different game because they want something I don't. If you want a mountain climbing simulation, D&D isn't for you. Personally I don't know what it would even look like because as soon as you figure that out then you'll have figure out tree climbing, scaling a castle wall, a giant beanstalk, the giant furniture you find and occasionally a giant. Then you have to have a swimming simulation, be able to calculate exactly how far you can swing from a rope. The list of abstractions is endless.

I don't care about that level of detail because I don't see why an author of the rules that doesn't know the current situation can do any better. All simulations use abstractions that don't go into granular detail I don't see any value in a game attempting to go into detail when it can't possibly do a very good job of it.

 

[AlViking]

Not me.

I'm not the one being asked to change.

The game is what is being asked to change (or, where it already pleases such folks, to never change nor expand).

No one at WOTC is going to read this thread and pay any attention to what we're saying. Meanwhile the game can't be everything for everyone and D&D is not chasing after niche desires. If WOTC decides that the majority of customers new and old want something you don't then you'll either have to accept what they sell or continue shopping.

 

[AlViking]

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.

My cat sneaks up on me all the time. The other day I was looking for my keys and they were right in front of me. I don't expect any explanation for it other than I didn't notice. Take a look at this article to see how much we miss on a regular basis Why We Stop Noticing the World Around Us.

Why would I need a detailed explanation in a game when there is no explanation in real life? Why would it matter? How would it work?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Then we're missing steps. Perhaps whatever the "simulation" (probably the wrong term, but we're stuck here) thing is we're taking about rests entirely on broad fictional authority resting in one person, but even then it's obvious there are some constraints on what they can propose, and there must be a reason authority has to be organized that way. We should be curious about those things, if for no other reason than to figure out how to design games to better fulfill them.

Frankly, it's not even really my thing; I think it's mostly just a convenient design starting point to ensure player decision making is interesting and matters to outcomes.

The most interesting this thread has gotten is when all the contrived situations get treated as experiments instead of as attempts to litigate the opposition out of the room. "It's when the GM has all the authority over the fiction" isn't useful unless you're trying to draw a bright line to differentiate something else. I want to know where the boundaries of the thing itself are from the inside.

I think the core fault line is whether one wants to try to correlate the player decision space with the character decision space or not. If one wants to do so simulative mechanics might not be the only way to get there, but they certainly help, as they model things that are diegetic and thus true to the characters as well. Similarly this sort of approach requires that the external reality of the character is not in the control of the player. And while the GM controlling that external reality might not be the only method of making it independent of the player, it is easy and effective one.

 

[Umbran]

I mean yeah, you'd think. But every time someone says that "personally I don't like a narrative game due this difference" then certain people will go for thousand pages trying to claim that there is no actual difference!

That is not an accurate description of the dynamics of this thread.

 

[FrogReaver]

That is not an accurate description of the dynamics of this thread.

Are you saying it’s not happening at all or that the amount @Crimson Longinus suggested it’s occurring was hyperbolic?

 

[AlViking]

Players declare actions to confer benefits on their PCs all the time.

The runes case wasn't mechanically easier than any other candidate action: it had a cost in the action economy the same as any other action declaration would have had; it required the player to roll their dice pool against the Doom Pool, just as would have been the case if (say) they tried to become unlost (mechanically, reduce or eliminate the Lost in the Dungeon complication) by turning into a wolf (the PC was a werewolf) and trying to smell where outside air might be coming from.

Which is the main reason why I don't take the idea of "getting out of jail free" or "cheating" seriously. It wasn't easier or structurally any different from any of numerous other action declarations which no one in this thread would bat an eye at.

The only difference in the runes case is that the resolution of the declared action also generated, on the way through, a bit of previously unspecified backstory. Which is why I have arrived at the conclusion that it is player as opposed to GM authorship that is the source of objections.

Again, you're missing the point and I doubt you will ever accept what I say at face value. So let me try a slightly different explanation. When watching TV or movies I have a low BS meter. For example I think The Matrix movies are stupid even if they are pretty. There are so many things that just don't make sense from why would the AI feed humans to generate electricity when they could just burn the food to generate more to how impossible it would be for a person that had been born and live their entire lives in a pod sack to develop proper bone and muscle, much less just pop out and start running around. People raved about the movie Snowpiercer, I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. Don't even get me started on all the alien invasion movies that are coming here to steal our water or terraform the planet. The list goes on.

I can accept some genre conventions like the plot armor required for the protagonists until they have to die in a shocking twist, but still groan every time people with guns rush up and use them as crude clubs instead of just shooting the martial arts expert in the face. It's the same with the runes that could have had untold number of meanings the just by coincidence was what the player hoped for. Much like the writers of these shows to "Gee, the enemy has fully automatic assault rifles but the hero is a martial arts expert so we'll have them all rush in and try to club the hero", doom points have no logical connection or reason in the fictional world.

You want a narrative game where things like doom points can be spent to get something the player wants. I don't. I accept a certain amount of what effectively boils down to plot armor for the characters because that's the genre. Meanwhile I don't want any doom points, I don't want the players to have control over the fiction that is not expressed through their character. Fill in a bit of color or details from their backstory? Sure. Deciding what the runes mean when they should have no clue (even if it was gated behind chance and meta-currency)? No thanks. The fact that you don't accept that we just want different things or that what your game does is just like what I do when it doesn't even come close is what leads to the frustration.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think that what elements make for ‘good sim’ depends on what you want to simulate. I think it also depends on whether there are other major game components that interfere with whatever you want to simulate.

I thought I’d jump off here. Perhaps the elements I most consider ‘good sim’ or essential for sim from an rpg perspective aren’t granular mechanics governing combat, climbing, runes, etc, (I think those things can be described as ‘more sim’) but the essentials are world independence (the runes example fails this), high alignment of player and character decisions space (the runes example fails this), and abstracted detail narration is limited to details in the immediate fictional context of the present (the runes example also fails this).

Now maybe that list of properties isn’t best described as sim. But I think it’s these kinds of properties that people in this thread concerned with the runes example not being sim are trying to refer to.

I can even try to explain why I’d describe those things as sim. It’s because the goal of sim for me is for the player to inhabit a character in an independent world where character/player decisions only directly affect the fictional present and possibly sometimes fictional future.

It’s not the only way to do things, but the runes example isn’t this. I’ll try to go more into why in a future post.

 

[AlViking]

I think the issue here is the following: Either it was a move that was done fully according to the rules of the game with approperiate stakes and balances, in order to confer a benefit to their PC. I that case the example is perfectly valid and good play, the rules allow for a good consistent experience, but some people feel this breaks their sense of how a simulation should behave.

Or, the move was supposed to be a step in a simulation, where the player was supposed to honestly provide what they thought was the most likely meaning of the runes, disregarding their own preferences. In this case this seem now to mostly be accepted as a perfectly ok way of simulating things. However this is the case in which someone feel this smells like cheating, as they have trouble believing that the player indeed was honest in their guess.

You seem to in this post argue for the first perspective, while you in other posts appear to be arguing the other perspective. In terms of this analysis these two scenarios are contradictory. A player cannot both be supposed to try to pursue the benefit of their PC at the exact same time as they are supposed to try to disregard their own preferences.

This is why I tried to get clarity if we were talking about "conjecture" or "hope", as that could at least be a indication which of these scenarios we are looking at. That is, are the player supposed to try to fully disregard their preferences when stating the proposed meaning of the runes in this game?

Better explanation than mine. If the player is spending meta-game points* to get what they want with associated risks, that's not a game I want to play but it makes sense for that game. If the game is trying to be even a crude simulation and the hope that the runes were a map has no power to change the nature of the runes then the odds of the runes matching the hope is infinitesimally small. I could hope that the junk mail I receive is really a check for a million dollars with no strings attached, my hope doesn't change anything.

Choose a lane. Don't pretend it's the same as a game using abstraction to determine if a character's attack does any damage and I have no problem.

* Or some kind of supernatural magical reservoir of world-altering magic.

 

[Maxperson]

@pemerton responded with "Cunning Expert d8" but that doesn't give the whole of the mechanic. Rather that's shows some relevant parameters of the mechanic. I don't know MHRP but I do know the Cortex System that it is based on.

Stripped down

Everyone writes down their character’s name and some things they’re good at doing, they may also have a metacurrency​

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Generic things a character are good at doing are represented by traits - descriptive labels with dice ratings attached to them (such as “Cunning Expert d8”)​

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Games like MHRP will structure traits into sets, which could include attributes, affiliations, distinctions, powers etc. Sets of traits have defining qualities that condition where and how they apply.​

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Traits are diegetic: if my character is a cunning expert, that's something they and others in the world can know about. I can include the die in my roll whenever it makes sense that it applies. I can't include the die in my roll where it doesn't make sense (and sets generally make that even clearer.)​

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A metacurrency -- in it's generic form, "plot points" -- is earned by players when they roll 1 on a die, and can be spent by them to add dice to future rolls. GM gets plot points too, but the generic way GM uses them is to introduce NPCs.​

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Games like MHRP can alter the way plot points work in the game using mods. A doom pool is a mod that swaps GM plot points for a dice pool.​

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And finally, when you want to do something and there’s something that might get in your way (such as the environment, another character, or time), you make a test.​

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Someone else picks up dice to establish the difficulty number you must beat to succeed.​

You assemble your dice pool, roll it and keep two dice to compare with the difficulty number.​

You may also nominate one die you didn't keep to be your effect level (the more sides the better, e.g. d12 is a stronger effect than d6 regardless of what was rolled on it.)​

Any 1s, whether you keep them or not, create complications (and earn you plot points.)​

In specific games, there can be numerous concrete details that make all this specific to some imagined world rather than generic. For example, a distinction "Your Life Before" may let you add a die to a crisis pool to double your attribute die when you connect to your old life.​

This general apparatus is tremendously versatile, and at the same time strongly diegetical. I say it is diegetical because every element of the game mechanic associates with something diegetic in play. If Cunning Expert doesn't matter in this situation, I can't include that d8 in my roll. If it matters, I can include it. If I include that d8 in my total and beat a test I can narrate that it made a difference. There's more to it of course, including an absence of assumptions some might port into it with their set of unwritten rules.

I think one could complain that it is not para-diegetic, meaning that the process itself is not set up to unfold in a sequence that feels like some imagined causal chain. That makes sense, because rather than a collection of sub-systems each bespoke to some phenomena significant to play (potentially and usually hung off a backbone system), the core apparatus is applicable to any phenomena that becomes significant to play.

I've observed that the quality of being diegetical matters to most who favour process-simulation, while the quality of being para-diegetic matters to some more than others (and doesn't in my opinion turn out to be all that robust... it typically relies on glossing over deviations.) Folk comfortable with traditional game system structures might count Cortex out from being proceess-sim just because it doesn't feel like those traditional structures.

Cunning is achieving one's ends by deceit. How does someone know what some runes in the middle of a dungeon are by deceiving them in an expert manner?

It also seems very broad. Can I win at chess? Cunning expert. Can I find out what grandma had for lunch? Cunning expert. Can I convince the mechanic to give me a discount? Cunning expert. Can I take candy from a baby? Cunning expert.

What I don't see is being able to trick the runes into revealing what they say, tricking the dungeon into revealing what the runes say, or any other way short of deceiving the writer of the runes into revealing what they say. In this case, though, there was no one to deceive in that manner. Though I guess you could expertly deceive yourself into thinking you know what they say, but then you'd be wrong as you are lying to yourself.

Anyway, thanks for the extra detail there on the mechanic.