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

[AlViking]

That's the way I see it with the risk being the higher the sought after power from the runes, the greater the DC but also the greater the chance one gets hit with a failure/complication etc.

For the more Trad GM who aren't fans of these runes because of the fictional manipulation it provides players, they may find they could work in planes or domains with concentrated chaos, desire or luck - where the runes may take the function the PC desires or least desires due to the particular setting/location.

One more time. It has nothing to do with the players having ability to manipulate the fiction, I have the same issue if the GM manipulates the fiction in a similar fashion. The players make dramatic changes in my campaigns, it's just through their characters and what the player decide to pursue. Meanwhile as DM once I establish fiction, I stick with it (unless of course I royally f*** up but that's a separate issue), even if the characters breeze through what I thought was a significant challenge.

It's really just a question of approach and preferences. From a gamist perspective if there's some sort of balance to the ability to make a declaration like the runes there's not really an issue. Different games have different approaches. Except I don't want to play a game where the player makes decisions about the world that has significant impact outside of what their character does. On the GM side, the GM should establish the fictional state before play starts even if the exact details of the interaction of character and the fiction is largely improvised. If there are ancient runes, the GM should know what they mean before the characters see them and they should make sense from the perspective of the NPC that created them long ago.

Having that fiction change on the fly with changes from anyone at the table makes the fiction about as solid as pudding to me and it makes it less enjoyable. If it doesn't matter to you that's fine. We don't have to see eye to eye. This repeated insistence that it doesn't matter is what gets tiresome. It doesn't matter to you, it does matter to me.

 

[Pedantic]

I may be mistaken but that is likely the case when gamism takes centre stage.
It is something I'm leaning more towards to break my own expectations and biases.

Oh, I'd argue the opposite, I associate negotiation with narrativism. I've been characterized as gamist a few times, and I've been pretty consistent in calling out negotiation as a pretty miserable gameplay experience. It's both parasitic and flattening; once you let negotiation about the fiction into the gameplay loop, it drives out any other form of mechanical engagement. If your explicit goal is to make an engaging game in the same sense one would describe a board game, negotiation should be rigorously avoided.

 

[Hussar]

Thing is, I don't feel any particular need to reach for ridiculous exemples to explain things like falling damage or being hurt by being hit in the head with a sword, or avoiding damage if my opponent doesn't beat my AC, or performing an exquisite dance move in front of the emperor, even if none if these things are described in detail in the rules.

I actually think that if the rules said "when you fall, you will take damage because when you hit the ground you will have accelerated 9,8 meters per square second and reached a velocity that means that your body mass is severly negative effected when it meets the hard ground below, which is why you are damaged*", I would feel that the designer should have focused on other things.

I'm perfectly happy with "when you fall, you take damage."

* Paraphrased to be an example, not a scientific theory as to why people damage themselves when falling.

I'd point out though that that's not the issue. No one, especially not me, has had any problems with the mechanics giving you results. That's fine. That's what mechanics are for. So, "You fall, take this much damage" is perfectly fine. Why did I take damage? Sudden deceleration trauma. No problems. The mechanics are 100% supporting the narration, even if the mechanics aren't particularly detailed or realistic.

The issue is why did you fall? What caused the fall? That you fell isn't in question. That you take damage, again, is a perfect example of the system informing the narrative. But, the mechanics are completely silent as to why you fell. Other than you failed your check by 5 or more. But, again, since the check isn't really defined - the d20 roll is a randomizer without any actual ties to the game world - then why you fell is entirely up to the DM. And, "make stuff up" isn't simulation. It's just free form play. Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with free form play. We do it all the time. Again, this isn't a judgement on the mechanics.

But, unless the mechanics provide some information about how and why something happened, then they aren't simulating anything. Which is my point - I could narrate magic pixies causing the fall and that would be perfectly fine. Not only is it perfectly fine, but, according to many in this thread, you as a player must not disrupt the game because it is not a case of life or death for your character. Disrupting the game is bad play. If it's not pixies, it could be anything else. No matter what the DM narrates here, it's 100% simulationist and the players must not complain about it. If they complain about it, they are bad players and should leave the game.

Again, not a definition of simulation I'm very comforatable with.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, that probably why it worked. But I think I can make donething happen with other games. One of my players suggested we all play Monster of the Week for Halloween and we all seemed to be on board.

Like I said, it shouldn't be impossible; I managed to do it back in the day when D&D was almost the only game in town. But I sometimes think there's a certain--gravity--exerted by decades of that dominance now that maybe didn't exist back then.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Hard to see why, given that such things are almost always good for a laugh if nothing else.

If you say so; mostly I'd say they're a waste of time and an exercise in frustration.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ok. I'm at Gencon right now, so I visited the Iron Crown booth and picked up a copy of Rolemaster Core Law. We'll see if everybody's right about how much I would like this.

I never managed to engage with any version of it, even back in the day when I leaned into sim a lot more, and as might be obvious from my participation in some threads, I was not (and really still am not) allergic to crunch.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Oh, I'd argue the opposite, I associate negotiation with narrativism. I've been characterized as gamist a few times, and I've been pretty consistent in calling out negotiation as a pretty miserable gameplay experience. It's both parasitic and flattening; once you let negotiation about the fiction into the gameplay loop, it drives out any other form of mechanical engagement. If your explicit goal is to make an engaging game in the same sense one would describe a board game, negotiation should be rigorously avoided.

While I don't think it can entirely be avoided without denying the fictional space in some cases, I outright say I'm pretty gamist and I tend to feel the least negotiation the better for multiple reasons, one of which is it tends to destroy a sense of consistency unless the GM is very, very good at managing that, and that's as rare as any other outstanding talent in GMing (probably moreso than some).

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If you say so; mostly I'd say they're a waste of time and an exercise in frustration.

In my experience players wanting to do flat out impossible things simply is not a thing that happens. In rare cases it does, it is almost always due some sort of misunderstanding about what the situation is, and then the correct course is to clarify the matters.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In my experience players wanting to do flat out impossible things simply is not a thing that happens. In rare cases it does, it is almost always due some sort of misunderstanding about what the situation is, and then the correct course is to clarify the matters.

Yeah, from the construct I was assuming a case of someone understanding that something was (at least functionally) impossible and wanting to try it anyway.

 

[Hussar]

/snip
Were I the GM, I would have listened to you and had taken your character's background into consideration, then I would in all probability said "yes, as you listen more intently, you can hear the jingle of a rider on a galloping horse" or "you only hear the hoofs of what might be beastmen, or maybe a riderless horse."

But then again, I've made so many mistakes when GMing, and GMing WFRP in particular, that I don't feel that me making another one is a big deal, and I rely on the players to help me making the right call.

But my final call is final ...

And that's where we part ways. If all simulation means is being able to post hoc justify a result, then the term is meaningless. So long as the narration must only come from the DM, then that's not simulating anything other than one person's understanding of how the world works. The whole idea of "independent setting" and "setting logic" goes straight out the window because all of that depends on one single voice.

That's not simulating anything. The point of my story wasn't that simulationist rules would suit the situation better, it's that a simulation that relies solely on the understanding of one person at the table is not a simulation at all.