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

[pemerton]

In that fiction the character found runes that were useful but in no way did they decide what the runes would be or do.

Nor did the character in my game.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No. That's just wrong.

It is not.

There is no "reversal of causality".

Yes there is. The conjecture causes the reality rather than the reality causing the conjecture.

 

[pemerton]

I associate negotiation with narrativism.

I seem to have played and GMed more Burning Wheel, Torchbearer and Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic than any other poster in this thread. I have never encountered this ostensbile "negotiation" issue.

Of course sometimes action declarations can take a bit of back-and-forth so that everyone is clear on what is going on, both in the fiction and in terms of how it is to be resolved. That is typical in RPGs. I see lots of discussion of that sort of thing in the context of completely conventional 5e D&D play.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Nor did the character in my game.

Yet the player did. Thus the player and character decision spaces were divergent. Like I have been saying for pages and you keep baselessly denying.

 

[pemerton]

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 agree.

 

[pemerton]

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?

So, as I posted, this was a fantasy hack.

In MHRP played literally as superheroes, something like Power-Dampening Collar might be more appropriate. Or Trapped in Arcade's Garbage Collector.

But in something a bit more gritty, maybe Lost in the Tunnels of Nanda Parbat would make sense.

 

[FrogReaver]

isn’t the whole point that on a success the player gets to author (create) the runes meaning? The character certainly isn’t authoring or creating the runes meaning. The character is simply interpreting runes that have been there for centuries.

Authoring/creating the meaning of is not interpreting the meaning of. The player and character are doing different things here.

 

[pemerton]

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

Yet you have managed to say some sensible things about how it plays!

 

[pemerton]

There’s not really much to say if you can’t be specific about what is inaccurate.

You posted "The players is, if I successfully interpret these runes what do I want them to mean (given whatever constraints are in the game)." That's not accurate. As I've posted repeatedly, from when I first posted the example, and most recently in reply to you in post 20205, the player was making a roll to reduce or eliminate a d12 Lost in the Dungeon Complication.

 

[pemerton]

IMO, I shouldn’t be having to deal with new mechanical information regarding an example you introduced 10000 posts ago and I’m not going to. If it was actually relevant it should have came up before now.

From the post where I introduced the example:

In a fantasy variant of Marvel Heroic RPG (first session set out here), the PCs had travelled to the bottom of a dungeon, the vault of the Drow. While most of the PCs fought Drow, one of them - the trickster - duped one of the Drow into telling him where the gold was cached, and then ran off with the gold. Mechanically, in that system, this was about creating assets.

I already posted this example, which has some resemblance to documents, upthread; it happened in the same Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy game:

the PCs had been teleported deep into the dungeon by a Crypt Thing (mechanically, when the PCs confronted the Crypt Thing the Doom Pool had grown to 2d12 and so I spent it to end the scene), and all were subject to a Lost in the Dungeon complication. As they wandered the dungeon looking for a way out, I described them coming into a large room with weird runes/carvings on the wall. One of the players (as his PC) guessed that these carvings might show a way out of the dungeon, and made a check to reduce/eliminate the complication. The check succeeded, and this established that his guess was correct. (Had it failed, some further complication might have been inflicted, or maybe the carvings were really a Symbol of Hopelessness, and the complicaion could have been stepped up to a level that renders the PC incapacitated.)

If you haven't read the example, or noted that the action declaration is about reducing or eliminating a complication - something reiterated by me in many posts in this thread, probably some in reply to you - why is that my fault?

I've hardly kept secret that I was not playing a game of D&D, and that the game is not played using map-and-key.