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

[Maxperson]

I think you might be confusing "to obey" and "obedience" ref:

"Willing to obey" indicate obedience can be found even in a situation someone doesn't actually obey anyone. How would you envision such a situation?

I don't see players in that light, either. If they were obedient, they wouldn't say anything if I made a bad decision or was DMing in a manner that they didn't like.

As I said earlier, I have 0 authority over the players, so they are not obedient to me. I do have authority over the game, but because they are not obedient, if I do something they don't care for, they bring it up to me for discussion and resolution outside of the game.

People claiming that players are obedient to the DM are incorrect about that. There's no such authority over the players, and authority over the game doesn't reach that level.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I’ve only played MHRP a couple of times, and I’ve never really engaged with Cortex beyond that… but I’m reasonably sure that using the runes to address the “lost in the dungeon” condition (affliction? Bot sure what term the game uses) plays a big part in the process.

Like, that’s the situation… the characters are “lost in the dungeon”. How can they resolve that?

Again, my experience with the game is limited (at best) but I feel like that is an important element that just about everyone who’s objected to the game process in some way has ignored.

I did not know - I have no experience with the game.
Is that really a theme in a superhero roleplaying game? "Lost in the dungeon"
Like they get captured and have to figure out how to escape etc?

 

[Enrahim]

That's directionally a good start, but you'd also need to spell out the consequences and risks preemptively and absolutely. I suppose you could have a bundled read runes action, but I think you're losing more than you're gaining by not having a pre-specified board state.

Wait a second - are you staying full information is needed for a TTRPG to be gamist?

 

[Enrahim]

I don't see players in that light, either. If they were obedient, they wouldn't say anything if I made a bad decision or was DMing in a manner that they didn't like.

Have you instructed them to stay quiet if they find anything objectionable? If I am sufficiently present of mind in session I would rather instruct my players clearly to inform me if I do something not to their likeing. That is what you describe sound like the opposite of obedience in my case.

As I said earlier, I have 0 authority over the players, so they are not obedient to me. I do have authority over the game, but because they are not obedient, if I do something they don't care for, they bring it up to me for discussion and resolution outside of the game.

I agree this is the fruitful take. This message has gotten lost in a semantics debate about a word.

People claiming that players are obedient to the DM are incorrect about that. There's no such authority over the players, and authority over the game doesn't reach that level.

I think the take above is fruitful as I think it can be neuanced into a common stance. There is a level of authority over players in terms of procedural issues. I expect some obidience if I ask other players to quiet down so I can hear what the player who's turn it is speaks. This is far from the near absolute authority the game provides me over the fiction. As such I think it is useful to clearly distinguish and be open about this as a phenomenom.

 

[Maxperson]

Have you instructed them to stay quiet if they find anything objectionable? If I am sufficiently present of mind in session I would rather instruct my players clearly to inform me if I do something not to their likeing. That is what you describe sound like the opposite of obedience in my case.

I think the take above is fruitful as I think it can be neuanced into a common stance. There is a level of authority over players in terms of procedural issues. I expect some obidience if I ask other players to quiet down so I can hear what the player who's turn it is speaks. This is far from the near absolute authority the game provides me over the fiction. As such I think it is useful to clearly distinguish and be open about this as a phenomenom.

I think this sort of request has nothing to do with the game. It's a social situation and the social contract requires mutual respect. If the DM is asking for quiet so that a player can speak, it's not game authority so much as the DM reminding the players of the social contract.

If I ever went to my players and instructed them to stay quiet if they found something objectionable, they'd say somethin to the effect of "Who the hell do you think you are?" and then I'd have no players.

I don't have any authority over them.

 

[Enrahim]

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.

What seperates negotiating over fiction from the negotiations of diplomacy or Catan? Especially Diplomacy provide me plenty of motivation for mechanical engagement. The mechanics is what informs the negotiation, and the outcome of the negotiations is important in informing my mechanical decissions.

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, there's no mechanics for it. But if (generic) you won't accept "broken rope" as the reason a climb failed, because a hemp rope is too strong, you might be more likely to accept it if that rope was also ingested by a gelatinous cube last week and then got caught in a cone of cold yesterday. We don't need mechanics to accept that things like that would weaken a rope to the point that it might break.

Agreed; as DM I'd be all over this and would be fine with it as a player.

However, without rules to back it up a player has a legit case to argue that while gelatinous cubes and extreme cold damage people they do not damage rope, thus forcing the DM to either accept that argument or invent item-damage rules on the fly.

 

[clearstream]

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

There'd be vanishingly few TTRPG mechanics that could validate that their sensitivities to modelled factors and distribution of their results were predictive of the real world.

As I said upthread, in the wargames tradition that could be true. Wargames designers were sometimes military analysts or historians and effort was invested in validation. That did not carry over much to TTRPG design.

An accompanying problem is how to prove it anyway? It may turn out that the more accurate mechanics are the less obviously diegetical ones. Another perspective is that what's diegetic in the imagined world perforce fits the results of the mechanics... but that only goes so far. This is another reason why I avoid seeing the mechanics themselves as diegetic. It's safer to say that they will usefully determine the result in specific cases, without being generalisable.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

That's been my usual experience, generally along the lines of:

Player: "I try to do [something impossible in the fiction]"
DM (me): "You know that's impossible, right?"
Player: "So what - I try it anyway!"

End result is usually that the character merely makes a fool of itself, though occasionally someone gets hurt in the process (shooting an arrow straight up in a crowded town square in an attempt to hit a high-altitude bird = not a very bright idea...).

 

[Enrahim]

I think this sort of request has nothing to do with the game. It's a social situation and the social contract requires mutual respect. If the DM is asking for quiet so that a player can speak, it's not game authority so much as the DM reminding the players of the social contract.

If I ever went to my players and instructed them to stay quiet if they found something objectionable, they'd say somethin to the effect of "Who the hell do you think you are?" and then I'd have no players.

I don't have any authority over them.

This might be true for your game. I don't think this is true for my games. I know as a player am considering my GM as an authority in how the game should be conducted. If the GM for instance ask me to stand up when holding a speech, I might refuse. But I would myself consider that an act of disobedience, even if you might not have recognised it as such if watching the group from the outside. I would not expect that disobedience to have any serious consequences beyond mild disapointment and slightly reduced social standing.

As you say there is a social contract at play, and I believe a common part of that among many tables involve implicitely giving the GM a role of authority over more than just the fiction.

In my education as a teacher I was thought an important distinction between being authoritative and being authoritarian. Being authoritative involves people submitting to what you say due to them recognising that what you say is worth listening to. Being authoritarian involves people submitting to you as you demand it, on pain of some sort of punishment.

I think this distinction might be relevant for this conversation.