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

[Emerikol]

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.

The assigned role of the DM though is to run a campaign fairly and to have fun. He has no "in world" objectives. It is why he determines what magic items get into the game. The players have characters in the world and they have an agenda. Now, I fully expect them to be honest and fair but they have temptations not to be. As a DM, I've seen it happen.

Now, I've also seen bad DMs and to be honest, I've never felt they were containable by the players threatening and browbeating them. Any DM this would work on is likely a very poor DM anyway. But sure the players can decide if they feel the DM is unfair to fire him as DM for their group.

My experience with power outside the world is very limited. If we are playing at my house then I have homeowner power but that is not DM power. I do expect some level of civility at the table but that goes both ways. I've heard a player shush everyone because they've been trying to get a word in edgewise for too long. That is the social construct. The dominant personalities of this slice of humanity will be what they are but it's not because they are the DM.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm not dismissing that there are differences, I am resisting wrongly attributing those differences.

When I propose a difference you say it’s not. So if you aren’t denying differences altogether, then what differences in your cleric persuasion and the runes do you see?

 

[AlViking]

Nor did the character in my game.

They just hoped for what the runes meant and then because the roll was successful the runes matched what they hoped for. That' fine. It's your game. I don't understand why you refuse to follow the most basic of logical conclusions.

 

[Emerikol]

Of the games I have played, I have never seen freewheeling negotiation in them. There are pretty hard limits on what you may negotiate over, how you may negotiate, and when you may negotiate. You cannot, for example, negotiate that you will stop using a hex-grid and instead use an octagonal grid drawn as squares (meaning, every square is adjacent to all of its cardinal neighbors and all of its ordinal neighbors, aka, the squares that it only touches at a single vertex, not an edge.)

I'm not supporting anyone's argument here with this statement. I am just informing because I have played Diplomacy. Negotiation is required to be successful at Diplomacy. Thus the name of the game. Everyone is constantly negotiation and they do so in secret.

 

[Emerikol]

The player authors a fiction. The character discovers a reality. How is that hard?

It's not hard to understand. People just don't like it.

 

[Emerikol]

You want to argue that because the player contributes to the authorship of something (the meaning of the runes), whereas their character does not causally affect the authored thing (ie the meaning of the rune), their decision space must be different. But you're wrong. It's not. That's part of the measure of good RPG design - it allows a player to contribute to the fiction without having to step outside of their PC. 40 years ago that was a design puzzle, but it got solved in the intervening years.

No. You cannot rewrite reality (our reality) and make words say things they don't. If a player chooses to author some fiction, that is absolutely something their character cannot do. Their character would "discover" what was authored by the same player. The disconnect is very clear.

 

[clearstream]

It’s not clear what you see established about the cleric before the persuasion check. If it’s just that this is a level 5 cleric that can cast remove curse and then the persuasion check determines whether he does then I’d say that’s significantly different than the runes.

Playing in Faerun it could be as limited as conjecturing there is a cleric in this settlement that can cast it and be influenced to do so for our benefit. Something about runes might allow an expert character to discern the way out. Something about settlements in Faerun might allow a persuasive character to solicit a spell cast.

The character has the fictional ability to persuade. The decision space for player and character remains the same. And maybe most importantly, a check to persuade isn’t a guarantee depending on the backstory or other in play established fiction.

The character has the fictional ability to glean information from, among other things, runes.

Contrast to the runes. The character only had the fictional ability to read the runes. The player decides what they mean. That’s a different decision space and as far as I can tell a guaranteed check.

The character only has the fictional ability to persuade. The player decides they will persuade the cleric to cast the spell.

On the DC the runes example doesn’t appear to have a variable or dm determined dc that depends on the intent, only on the interpreting. The clerics persuasion check dc would depend on the intent of what you wanted the cleric to do in d&d.

The dice pool for the complication always includes the complication, in this case a d12, and your effect if successful reduces the complication that many sides, making a d12 hard to reduce completely. Any 1s on your roll lets GM step the complication up, and stepping up from a d12 means they narrate how you're overwhelmed by it.

In this sort of way the check difficulty (chance of success) depends on the intent of what you wanted to do with the runes. Here players took quite a risk!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The character has the fictional ability to glean information from, among other things, runes.

But not to decide what that information is.

The character only has the fictional ability to persuade. The player decides they will persuade the cleric to cast the spell.

No. The character decides that they try to persuade the cleric to cast the spell, and they speak words to do that. It is all in-character, there is no divergence to meta decisions like there obviously is in the rune case.

Like this exact thing happened in my campaign a while ago. The priestess agreed to cast the spell for free once the characters promised to make a generous donation to the temple!

 

[FrogReaver]

Playing in Faerun it could be as limited as conjecturing there is a cleric in this settlement that can cast it and be influenced to do so for our benefit. Something about runes might allow an expert character to discern the way out. Something about settlements in Faerun might allow a persuasive character to solicit a spell cast.

The character has the fictional ability to glean information from, among other things, runes.

The character only has the fictional ability to persuade. The player decides they will persuade the cleric to cast the spell.

They do this not by authoring the cleric exists and has the spell they want him to cast but by persuading an already established cleric that’s already established to have the spell to cast it.

Contrast that to the runes where nothing of this sort is already established.

The dice pool for the complication always includes the complication, in this case a d12, and your effect if successful reduces the complication that many sides, making a d12 hard to reduce completely. Any 1s on your roll lets GM step the complication up, and stepping up from a d12 means they narrate how you're overwhelmed by it.

In this sort of way the check difficulty (chance of success) depends on the intent of what you wanted to do with the runes. Here players took quite a risk!

There’s some steps missing here for me to really understand this part fully. I don’t know how or when a dice pool for a complication is used. I don’t know what your effect if successful means in terms of die sides. Nor do I know what being overwhelmed by the complication means. Some may very well be natural language but I’m not sure.

Then there’s the notion that these things combine such that the task is more difficult depending on your intent. Like what if the runes were used with the intent to summon a helpful ally? Does that change the difficulty? What about if it was for a hot meal?

 

[FrogReaver]

But not to decide what that information is.


No. The character decides that they try to persuade the cleric to cast the spell, and they speak words to do that. It is all in-character, there is no divergence to meta decisions like there obviously is in the rune case.

Like this exact thing happened in my campaign a while ago. The priestess agreed to cast the spell for free once the characters promised to make a generous donation to the temple!

I’m in disbelief that I’m even having to point out that a d&d persuasion check involving an established cleric that can cast remove curse doesn’t require the player to author anything outside his character, but that a player deciding what runes mean does require the player to author precisely that way.