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

[Maxperson]

Have you read this post from over a month ago?

I saw the words, but it doesn't say how you deceive those traps and writings to get your way. Traditionally thieves were cunning, but that doesn't make cunning applicable to everything a thief did. Cunning is for social deceptions and picking pockets where deceptions made it easier to get things off of your mark.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm roughly in agreement with @Emerikol... it's down to dislike; which is a fact about a given player's relationship with the game, rather than a fact about the game. I think it's worth resisting assumptions that it's about the game, in order to also resist pernicious norms.

Responding to something @FrogReaver asked earlier, I am not dismissive of differences. Upthread I attributed them to unwritten rules ported into play with players. Where that says more than @Emerikol's take is that unwritten rules are often strongly and at the same time unconsciously normed.

I don't see why that is hard to accept? I'd prefer to get onto proposing some analytical diagrams of game mechanics.

I think there’s a lot that can be said about why the dislike. My proposal is that such likes and dislikes go quite a bit deeper into the preferred structures of the activity itself and as such we can suss out the why’s and why nots there.

 

[FrogReaver]

I saw the words, but it doesn't say how you deceive those traps and writings to get your way. Traditionally thieves were cunning, but that doesn't make cunning applicable to everything a thief did. Cunning is for social deceptions and picking pockets where deceptions made it easier to get things off of your mark.

Right? How does one cunningly interpret runes?

Though overall I don’t find this line of inquiry that interesting.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So I agree with the basic premise, negotiation can lead to degenerate gameplay and yet in practice I observe most 5e play doesn’t degenerate to being decided by negotiation with little meaning on actions outside that, unless you mean something far more all encompassing by negotiation than I do.

Yeah, this is my experience as well, there is not much of it going on in my D&D game. On the other hand in the Blades in the Dark game I play in, negotiation is almost constant. Part of it of course might be due different approaches of different GMs, but I doubt it is just that.

 

[Maxperson]

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

So you and the other players agree, but the DM does not. You all can imagine your PC picking his nose all you want, but it doesn't happen in the GAME'S fiction. It happens in your heads, but not the game. A DM who is going to disallow the nose picking like that isn't going to allow the game to continue with a player revolt like you describe below.

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.

The DM can get new players where your PC did not pick his nose.

I mean, regardless of how it got there, if the players and DM are feuding like that, the game needs to end. Something has gone terribly wrong(in this example by the DM) and continued play isn't going to go well.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

A few things.

First, while you might view it as disobedience, it's still due to the social contract(and how you personally view it) and not the game itself. The DM's authority in that moment is because of the social contract in agreeing to play the game where he's the DM and you are the players. The game itself gives no such authority over the players. It can't.

Second, I would not feel disobedient in the slightest if I refused such a request. Having to stand or sit while saying a speech is a purely out of game element. My standing or sitting has not bearing on whether or not my PC is standing or sitting, and I control the actions of my PC, not the DM. The DM has no right to expect that I would stand up for a speech my character was giving, and no right to be upset at my refusal.

Lastly, the difference between the first and second above might be cultural. I know America tends to stress individuality and personal freedoms more than many other countries out there, so I imagine that the social contracts would be different.

 

[Pedantic]

So I agree with the basic premise, negotiation can lead to degenerate gameplay and yet in practice I observe most 5e play doesn’t degenerate to being decided by negotiation with little meaning on actions outside that, unless you mean something far more all encompassing by negotiation than I do.

I might simply be more sensitive to it, but I routinely have players asking if they can do something, and then expecting a DC to be produced, and then possibly feeling the DC is unreasonable, or alternately succeeding on a check, and then being disappointed with how I describe their success which they imagined to be more total. My preferred play would involve them knowing the outcomes of their actions not through asking me about them, but by having internalized the rules structures for those actions (an impossibility in 5e, which does not have such structures). The abstract nature of any given action's impact to the gamestate is something I very much find to the game's detriment.

More broadly, it creates a strange tension with actual player abilities. Some players lean in to trying to use them as often as possible to avoid the above situation, others don't bother with them even when they might be obviously applicable, preferring the above game, and yet others attempt to use them as resources to negotiate (can I spend a spell slot to...).

If anything, I'd give the narrativist derived games a leg-up, in that they're doing this intentionally, and from what I can tell, largely because they don't care about the gameplay in the sense I do. If you don't actually want players decision making to be a significant factor in character success, then you're dealing completely differently with incentives, and it doesn't really matter.

 

[FrogReaver]

I might simply be more sensitive to it, but I routinely have players asking if they can do something, and then expecting a DC to be produced, and then possibly feeling the DC is unreasonable, or alternately succeeding on a check, and then being disappointed with how I describe their success which they imagined to be more total. My preferred play would involve them knowing the outcomes of their actions not through asking me about them, but by having internalized the rules structures for those actions (an impossibility in 5e, which does not have such structures). The abstract nature of any given action's impact to the gamestate is something I very much find to the game's detriment.

More broadly, it creates a strange tension with actual player abilities. Some players lean in to trying to use them as often as possible to avoid the above situation, others don't bother with them even when they might be obviously applicable, preferring the above game, and yet others attempt to use them as resources to negotiate (can I spend a spell slot to...).

If anything, I'd give the narrativist derived games a leg-up, in that they're doing this intentionally, and from what I can tell, largely because they don't care about the gameplay in the sense I do. If you don't actually want players decision making to be a significant factor in character success, then you're dealing completely differently with incentives, and it doesn't really matter.

Consider this, would all those players like a game with no negotiation given they don’t even gravitate toward the no negotiation mechanics they have?

 

[Enrahim]

I should clarify that I'm saying if negotiation is a normative process of resolution (what is the possible impact of any given check? How bad is a failure? What are the board state costs of complications/mitigiated successes?) and especially if those states aren't knowable before resolution happens (ideally they should be knowable via the rules before play begins), then negotiation is inevitable. 5e is actually a great example, because it's inconsistent about whether a strong resolution mechanism exists. The general structure of skill checks encourages players to negotiate what they can achieve with their GM per action, instead of declaring the actions they believe would best get them to their goals.


This is a good summary, though I don't think you escape this problem just by putting writing negotiation formally into the act of resolution. You just end up decreasing the gameable space your mechanics offer.

To be fair, I am not keen on that game structure precisely because they involve unconstrained negotiation. In a competitive space that tends to lead to politics in the game sense, and those tend to be pretty degenerate. I'd point to the classic multiplayer free for-all problem of something like Commander in magic, or even a take-that game like Munchkin. The game decisions become significantly less important than the relationship management around the table, which I find deeply unpleasant. There is some value in gameplay there, but it's both not for me, and if I was going to engage with it, I'd pick a dedicated system like Chinatown or Sidereal Confluence that clearly puts that front and center.

This is perhaps too strident. Obviously I object to the structure of the game being up for negotiation, but more specifically I object to negotiation of outcomes being embodied in that structure to begin with.

Yeah, I'm not a huge 5e guy for this reason, and it's why I don't like rulings and don't see a lot of value in giving the GM broad rules redefinition authority. The goal should be to remove negotiation in resolution, though clarification before action declaration makes more sense and is probably inevitable in TTRPG. The point I'm making is that there is no value in putting together the best set of actions to achieve a desired goal if the most effective play is to negotiate for that goal directly. Once negotiation is an option, it cuts out a bunch of other gameplay.

I think I see where you are coming from. However I struggle to see how to avoid negotiation in TTRPG in a good way.

I think this might be due to the same issues as we had in our previous exchange about the nature of TTRPGs. At what point have you defined up so much structure that I would stop recognising it as a TTRPG, and rather think of it as some other kind of game?

(I here assume you are wanting to avoid negotiation due to removal of ambiguous outcomes entirely. Getting rid of negotiation by for instance strict speech control and clear decission responsibilities would be relatively easy, but would maintain the ambiguities to be resolved by human decission)

 

[Maxperson]

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 information about the dungeon? You didn't give any that I saw, though as usual, I have skipped many posts in this thread and could have missed it.

Did you tell us how the player was told before getting to the dungeon that the dungeon contained many runes, some of which were directions to locations within it or even the way out? If so, hoping that this particular set of runes was the way out would at least make some sense, though it wouldn't have anything to do with being a cunning expert or a lone wanderer in that case. What specific information was given that would have led that PC to believe that those runes could be telling the way out?

I don't see how deceiving the runes(are they intelligent and can communicate?) or wandering around by yourself(are runes in that world somehow connected to being a loner?) as somehow being connected to knowing about runes.