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

Says who? The GM does not have unilateral authority over the shared fiction.
You are playing D&D in my game. You tell me that your character picks his nose. I say no he doesn't. How do you make it happen in the fiction when I said no? The game doesn't continue on without me, because I'm running it. If someone else starts running a game, it's a different game even if you use the same character in the same world with the same story up until that point. You'll be able to pick your nose in this new game, but that doesn't change what happened in mine.

In the game I'm running, I can go get 5 new players, have your character as an NPC who doesn't ever pick his nose. This is true even if you take your character sheet with you when you leave.

Your only recourse is to leave and go to a different game. There's no possible way you can make the nose picking happen in the game that I am running if I am being a jerk and not allowing you to do it.
 

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@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​
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”)​
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.​
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.)​
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.​
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.​
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.​
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.

I’d meant to say thanks for giving the needed background detail on the mechanic.
 

In my example players took parallel actions, required parallel abilities and skills, and had identical chances of success.

Can you help me to understand why rolling to force the trapdoor is not a get out of jail free card, but rolling to discern the way out from the runes is?

An exit makes sense in that it may have been used in construction of the dungeon or some other purpose. Perhaps it was used as an exit for the workers until it was sealed and they were either transformed into the undead or used in some dark ritual to create the undead, something I might hint at and describe the trap door as having old scratch marks from people that had previously tried to escape. But there's no reason for a temple dedicated to evil and undead would have a "By the way if you're trapped and about to be eaten by our glorious undead the exit is this way." It might be logical if this is a temple dedicated to balance, the idea that we need both darkness and light. But I would want there to be hints of that throughout the entire dungeon.

I don't care for additions to the fiction that don't fit the previously revealed facts. There are exceptions of course, but the reveal of some hidden truth needs to be convincing and hopefully hinted at previously. Like I said before (or at least I think I did), I would have the same response to reinforcements always arriving at the last moment either to rescue the characters or because the GM decided the encounter wasn't difficult enough. When it becomes obvious the GM is putting their thumb on the current scenario to get an outcome they desire it makes the game less enjoyable because it makes me feel like the decisions for good or ill we as players made that lead to this particular moment don't mean much. The GM had a predetermined plot in mind and we're going to follow that plot, it damages the illusion and my sense of immersion.
 

No it doesn't.

Yep. You CAN do those things. Not will.

And that's the definition of obedient, not authority. You see, if someone with authority does use to demand a person do something, then the person who is submissive will be obedient. Nowhere does it say that authority = demand for obedience, because it doesn't mean that.

Still false. You are very literally misinterpreting it badly.

No, it's straight up fact.

If a player says he wants his PC to pick his nose, I can say it doesn't happen in the game. And it wouldn't happen. I'd never do that since it would be an abuse of authority, but I COULD do it.

If I demand that the player pick his nose, he's going to tell me where I can put my demand. Why? Because I have no authority over him.

DMs have 0 authority over players.

Truth. You can pick your friends. You can pick your nose. You can't pick your friend's noses. :)
 


I’m not sure if you or I am misunderstanding here, but there’s quite a bit of denial that such a difference even exists.

And, I ask again, "Yes. So?"

And by that, I mean that there's moments we each should ask ourselves, "Okay, why am I engaging here? What's my rhetorical goal here? Are my reasons and goals reasonable in this context? If so, are my words and approach actually going to move towards those goals?"

And we need to do that, at least to ourselves, with a whole lot of honesty. If we are not very honest with ourselves, we go down acrimonious ratholes for bogus reasons, and that's not good for anyone.

So - there's denial. So what?
 

There are a lot of people here making various claims about various ways of describing games and whew this thread has ran a lot of pages just since last night.

So I will dispense with Simulationism, Gamism, and Narrativism. We all don't agree even on what the terms mean so we argue about that on top of our playstyle.

This is how I prefer my games to go:
1. The DM prepares a sandbox world in advance. What he can't write down he reasonably accounts for by random tables, etc...
2. Players interact with the world through the DM. The DM is their world reality interface. What they see, hear, smell, or even remember is from the DM. The DM should roll appropriately based on players skills to determine what to tell them.
3. It is a game and player (not character) skill also matters. So preparation, planning, and execution matter. This is what I think is the gamist side of me.
4. The DM is the final arbiter because he is the interface to the world. It goes dark without that interface.
5. The rules along with dice rolls are there to aid in consistency and a feeling that the world is not arbitrary.
6. Mechanics are not dissociative. This means that characters are aware of the rules not as rules but as truths of the world. The rules are the physics of the world. There has to be an in game explanation for anything the character can do.

So call that what you want. I think it is the dominant and traditional way D&D was played in the early days. Deviations started early though and now we have many ways to play. I fell in love with the original way and haven't really embraced the new ways as I personally don't think they are better. Now my opinion is that I am dominantly a mix of simulationist and gamist. Of course we all are at least a tiny bit of everything at times.
I like this take. However I find the features I consider important do not really align much with these at all. I can like board games, GM less, railroad and sandbox alike. The structure of the game setup just isn't that important to me.

However some things that I think I have identified as important to me independent of structure:
  • Taking the fiction somewhat seriously. Doesn't matter if we are even talking about Paranoia, Fiasco or even Munchausen. All participants should respect the fiction based on the fictional premises. Holy Grail references might be ok now and again as part of table talk, but don't make it diegetic!
  • Group cohesion over individualism. The game is a group activity. I find many modern euro board games hard for me to engage in as they feel like everyone is basically playing their own game with no interaction. There might be internal conflicts, and colorful characters - but when push come to shove the game is about the group. I have low tolerance for sequences where individual characters are spending significant alone time in the spotlight doing "their" thing.
  • Cerebral over emotional. I want any heavy-hitting emotional moments to be few and far between. Deduction, optimalisation, and creative uses of game elements are much better for engaging me than tense drama.
  • Variation over familiarity. I want a broad range of experiences. For long term play, dynamic campaigns suits me much better than episodes following a given formulae.

For some reason I have rarely seen these dimensions seriously discussed.
 
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DMs have 0 authority over players.

You say this as if the entities at the table are not primates with very complex social dynamics, behaviors, and pressures upon them...

...or, perhaps, as if it is rhetorically convenient to ignore or dismiss the realities of real-world human social dynamics.
 

It has been my experience that a DM that figuratively summons pixies to explain falling damage, and does that on a whim, will be lacking players, either after the session is done ("guys, this was silly, let's play something else") or after the adventure ("well, next adventure I wan't something else, not pixies all the way down, can we do that?").

Fair enough.

But, just to be clear, while I have used "Pixies" as the go to example, it's not really meant to be exactly that. My point has always been that since the narrative is not informed by the mechanics, any post hoc justification is equal. Whether it's pixies or anything else, it doesn't matter as far as the mechanics are concerned. If pixies bother you, feel free to substitute any somewhat ridiculous example tickles your fancy.
 

And, I ask again, "Yes. So?"

And by that, I mean that there's moments we each should ask ourselves, "Okay, why am I engaging here? What's my rhetorical goal here? Are my reasons and goals reasonable in this context? If so, are my words and approach actually going to move towards those goals?"

And we need to do that, at least to ourselves, with a whole lot of honesty. If we are not very honest with ourselves, we go down acrimonious ratholes for bogus reasons, and that's not good for anyone.

So - there's denial. So what?

Just curious, what’s your goal with
the ‘so what’? Why are you engaging here?
 

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