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

[hawkeyefan]

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?

No, but @pemerton was playing a fantasy hack of MHRP. In a more standard game., the condition or situation would be more genre appropriate. There’s a doom pool of dice that the GM gets to use to complicate things for the characters.

What matters, though, is that it’s a negative situation that the players likely want to address. So, the characters are lost in the dungeon… they find some mysterious runes… one of the players incorporates the runes into his attempt to resolve being lost in the dungeon.

Like, lost in the dungeon is an active thing in the game. It’s actively happening, immediately relevant. So the player used the information they had to try and resolve the situation.

Claims that the runes could have been interpreted to do anything are, I think, misguided. The GM used the doom pool to inflict the lost in the dungeon condition… so that’s something the players are likely to engage with.

But again, my experience with the game is almost as minimal as possible. @pemerton can correct me if I’m off base.

 

[clearstream]

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.

Negotiation is component of a great many multiplayer boardgames and videogames like Age of Wonders and Dune. It overwhelms the gameplay loop only if the material effects of negotiation are not well considered against other effects. For example, the rules for Dune limit Alliances to two players (it's a six player game) and increase their win conditions by one stronghold. Allies gain a range of ways they can cooperate, regulated by rules.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I thought the argument against "Be fan of the PCs" etc wasn't an argument against pithy phrasing itself, but rather a complaint that this was poor phrasing in the context. That is it might have been an attempt at pithy phrasing, but it failed to be communicative for them. I assume it is these kind of objections you have in mind?

I think "GM is reality" phrasing might be open to the same objection. That doesn't mean pithy phrasing as a concept is bad. It just means that care must be used when using them. Using them in a context where the meaning is likely to be not understood should generally be attempted avoided. Recognising when you are in such a context might be really hard.

Edit: Recognising exactly what a complaint is about might be hard though, especially when it is compounded by someone strongly against the meaning (actual, misunderstood or both) of the phrase. I seem to tend to use most generous interpretation unconsciously when interpreting text - sometimes to the point of not really seeing the right words.

Okay. More than a little frustrating, then, for the very people who took others to task for allegedly unclear phrasing, to then use unclear phrasing, and get persnickety when that unclear phrasing results in apparent holes in their arguments.

One should think that, if an interlocutor has previously expressed that unclear phrasing from others was bad and meriting criticism or rejection because it was unclear, they would be more receptive to others pointing out when their phrasing was unclear and thus bad and meriting some form of criticism (and possibly rejection).

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.

Sure.

The way GM power has been described by fans of the "traditional GM" has almost exclusively looked authoritarian. The demand for absolute power. The insistence that there will always be serious issues. The inherent stance of suspicion about player motives. The consistent rejection of even a little bit of concern, let alone suspicion, regarding GM motives. The claim that collaboration is the enemy--the GM must exercise their authority totally individually. And the frequent emphasis on the use of punishment as the means by which the GM not only can but must control player behavior.

That is what looks authoritarian, not authoritative. The interest is consistently on punishing any deviation and ensuring absolute compliance--not on respecting others as fellow people who have their own interests and interpretations and desires.

It's vanishingly rare to even consider whether the "traditional GM" should think about what the players actually think, like, or want. And I know for absolute fact there is at least one participant in this conversation who thinks that doing that is not only bad, it is actively harmful to any form of play, full stop.

 

[pemerton]

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?

By telling all the other participants that I (as my PC) am picking my nose, and getting them to agree.

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.

If all the players agree that my PC is picking his nose - suppose they start calling my PC "pemerton the picker", explain the nickname to NPCs that the PCs meet, etc - what is the GM going to do? Tell them all that they're wrong about my fiction.

I guess the GM can take their bat and ball and go home. So can the players, individually or en masse. No one can have a shared fiction on their own.

 

[pemerton]

There is no more fiction to measure the runes against. We’ve got some runes on a wall, we’ve got a cunning expert and some genre constraints. In the practical sense the fiction established is just enough that the player can say the runes mean anything.

This isn't accurate.

There is all the information the player, and their PC, has about the dungeon. There is the fact that the PC is subject to a complication: d12 Lost in the Dungeon. There is the fact that one of the PC's distinctions is Solitary Traveller.

What is at stake in the players decision and what is at stake in the characters decision? What is the basis for each? Etc.

The characters decision is can I interpret these runes. The players is, if I successfully interpret these runes what do I want them to mean (given whatever constraints are in the game).

That is not an accurate description of the play of Marvel Heroic RP, or my fantasy hack of it, where the runes episode occurred.

Maybe it's an accurate description of some other RPG that I'm not familiar with?

The paramount question is ‘how are they wanting to overcome said obstacle’. In the runes example the player must decide what he wants to runes to be on a successful roll. The character must never decide that. Not only is that a different decision, it’s a completely different decision space. The things it impacts and that inform it are all different.

I don't agree with this.

What the player of the character actually has to decide, in the game I'm talking about, is what they want their effect die to do: which, in this case, is to reduce or eliminate their Lost in the Dungeon complication. And they have to decide what they are doing to achieve that result, which in this case is to read the runes hoping that they will reveal a way out of the dungeon. Obviously in deciding to do this, they (as their PC) have conjectured that it is at least possible if not likely that the runes will do this in some fashion. And of course the PC's attempt to confirm their conjecture is motivated just as the player's action is, namely, by a desire to become unlost.

 

[clearstream]

I think the problem in the cleric example is - do the cleric have remove curse memorized?

Yes, but also, that's beside the point; in D&D clerics can change their spells with a long rest (or the characters could have sought a different cleric.) It's nickel-and-diming the example, rather than focusing on the observable fact that players use Charisma-related skills to determine fiction that was not yet settled. @FrogReaver fo vis.

 

[Maggan]

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.

My mistake then. I’m not taking part of the simulation track of this thread, mainly because I don’t understand what is being discussed. Same with the diegetic track.

My angle was GM authority. I apologise for misreading the context of your post.

 

[pemerton]

I'm just not seeing what being an expert on deception has to do with what runes in a dungeon are most likely to be.

Have you read this post from over a month ago?

Does this character know about dungeon runes? Either in general, or what these particular runes are likely to say? He's a Solitary Traveller, and a Cunning Expert. In a game that is deliberately playing on classic D&D tropes, Cunning includes the thief's traditional ability to deal with traps and read strange writings.

 

[pemerton]

Player A is changing the reality of runes that were created by long ago

No. No more than you, as a GM writing up a dungeon description, are "changing the reality" of the imaginary world you are writing about.

The player is resolving a declared action in the play of a RPG. The character knows that there are no runes, just people sitting around a table imagining runes.

The character is reading runes that (in that character's world, which is an imaginary one) were created long ago. And all that the character changes is their own knowledge - by reading the runes the character learns something.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Negotiation is component of a great many multiplayer boardgames and videogames like Age of Wonders and Dune. It overwhelms the gameplay loop only if the material effects of negotiation are not well considered against other effects. For example, the rules for Dune limit Alliances to two players (it's a six player game) and increase their win conditions by one stronghold. Allies gain a range of ways they can cooperate, regulated by rules.

You're speaking of diplomacy, as in, the mechanically-expressed process of establishing mechanically-defined relations between participants in play.

Pedantic, if I understand him correctly, is speaking about freewheeling revision, as in, the GM and the players ad hoc rewriting the content of the situation purely on the basis of discussion between them, with the one and only standard being "the people at the table agree to do X".

While I do not go quite as far as Pedantic does on this, unfortunately, he is more right than wrong here. This is the problem with "the rules are suggestions". When the rules are nothing more than suggestions, when literally everything within the actual gameplay space boils down to "what you can persuade another person to agree to", then it is always, bar none, without exception, the most effective strategy to avoid any mechanic that isn't instantaneously favorable to you, and instead to negotiate an external bespoke solution. Especially if you've got some rhetoric training. Then it just becomes easy mode (unless the GM also has rhetoric training, but I find this is pretty uncommon).

Rules serve several important functions, and one of them is defining the limits of what you can or can't do. Sometimes, that is unfortunate--we know there's something that would make sense, that is fitting and appropriate, which the rules cannot express. But sometimes, that is not only good, but necessary--because it prevents us from trivializing the game out of existence.