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

[Enrahim]

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.

I don't think we disagree then. However I would point out that "game" has a lot of overloaded meanings. When I talk about game in this context I normally include the social contract as part of that term. It seem like you here use "game" in a way that excludes social contract. This was not obvious from previous context unfortunately :/

And another thing - in some cases acting out what your character is doing can really enhance the experience. If you one day are asked by your GM to raise for a speech, I would recommend you to comply. Having that excuse for acting a bit more "silly" than normal can be gold! (of course unless there for instance are physical limitations that make this less convenient than I would normally imagine)

 

[Pedantic]

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?

It's not a particularly valid experiment, but several of these players are also my board game friends; they routinely show up to play games without ambiguous resolution, some of similar length to an RPG session. My opinion is that this isn't a fixed preference so much as a received norm of the medium, particularly given they all started playing in the 5e age.

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)

I both think this is not that hard, and doesn't require the level of stringency you're jumping to here. I'd start with detailed skill rules. As a general principle, at no point should the GM be "setting" a DC, it should derived from the described situation through application of a detailed structure. I'm willing to agree that the social skills are generally an unsolved problem and might be better handled by simply talking things through with a heavier dose of abstraction, but that's a subset of a pretty resolvable task.

Fundamentally, I think it's more important that RPGs are unbounded in play time and have shifting, variable goals/fail states than it is they have unlimited action space.

 

[Enrahim]

I both think this is not that hard, and doesn't require the level of stringency you're jumping to here. I'd start with detailed skill rules. As a general principle, at no point should the GM be "setting" a DC, it should derived from the described situation through application of a detailed structure. I'm willing to agree that the social skills are generally an unsolved problem and might be better handled by simply talking things through with a heavier dose of abstraction, but that's a subset of a pretty resolvable task.

Fundamentally, I think it's more important that RPGs are unbounded in play time and have shifting, variable goals/fail states than it is they have unlimited action space.

Well, TTRPGs have a long tradition of having key play being structured. Early D&D could be played as a pure mechanical dungeon crawler with no negotiation (as demonstrated by the relative ease of computer adaptations). I can easily see a TTRPG being deviced so that hardly anyone would want to go outside the scope covered.

However as long as there are some way to break out of it, that way need to be handled. And before you know it there are some sub culture playing the game almost exclusively using this break-out handling, while treating the wonderful structure you built up as a mini-game to be mostly avoided

 

[Emerikol]

Do they? Or is it indeed the GM that listens to player input, and from that migrate fictional possibilities into actualities? The difference might be hard to spot in practice, but the difference say something about the nature of the game.

If the town is not preauthored, then the DM would have to author that fiction. He'd probably make some rolls based on the probability a cleric would be there. Super big cities fall into this category. No one is detailing every house or even every business unless maybe you are me. I love world building though so there is that.

 

[Maxperson]

It's not just imagination. You can negotiate the rules of the game themselves. You have ceased to play Dune, and you are now playing "whatever rules we have decided to replace Dune with, unless and until we decide to replace them with other rules", it just might be the case that that set of rules includes all members of the set "the rules of Dune" except those involving combat, or whatever.

This strikes me as the same argument folks use to say people aren't playing D&D because of some house rule or other, instead of just saying that the rule would make it not feel like D&D to them.

I've played very, very few games of Monopoly where free parking didn't have money for those who land on it and taxes didn't go into that pot. It's a very common house rule and the game was still Monopoly, even though negotiated rules were different.

There might be some point where changing enough rules causes it to cease being Dune, but it's not a clearcut point most of us will have different points where we consider the game changed sufficiently

 

[Maxperson]

I don't think we disagree then. However I would point out that "game" has a lot of overloaded meanings. When I talk about game in this context I normally include the social contract as part of that term. It seem like you here use "game" in a way that excludes social contract. This was not obvious from previous context unfortunately :/

Yes. The game is the rule set. The social contract is the social construct we are agreeing to when we sit down to play the game.

One of the reasons I keep them separate is that we can agree to play Vampire, D&D, or poker and the social contract will pretty much be the same no matter which one we choose. It really can't stem from the game itself in that case. Further, we can even just be hanging out watching T.V. and a very similar or identical social contract will be in place, because the host of the house has authority by virtue of it being his home. This is similar to the DM being in charge of the game.

And another thing - in some cases acting out what your character is doing can really enhance the experience. If you one day are asked by your GM to raise for a speech, I would recommend you to comply. Having that excuse for acting a bit more "silly" than normal can be gold! (of course unless there for instance are physical limitations that make this less convenient than I would normally imagine)

I agree. There's another game I play in that is a homebrew system that is set in Middle Earth. While you don't have to act out what your character is doing, it's highly encouraged and the group embraces that. It really helps immersion.

It's a special case, though, where we are all gathering to specifically play that kind of game. The social contract changes for that game. For bog standard D&D, there's no part of the social contract that says I should submit to instructions like that from the DM.

 

[clearstream]

Do they? Or is it indeed the GM that listens to player input, and from that migrate fictional possibilities into actualities? The difference might be hard to spot in practice, but the difference say something about the nature of the game.

Seeing as I've identified D&D DM as part of lusory-means, it makes no difference. But I can see why you picked up on my wording.

For avoidance of doubt then, players regularly employ lusory-means to migrate fictional possibilities into actualities.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

If the player is doing something the PC isn't, he is already outside the PC. In this case the player attempted to author the meaning of the runes, but the PC didn't. Those are different decision spaces. They literally cannot be the same space, because the two are making two different decisions.

Player: Decision to attempt to author the fiction into providing the way out. PC: Hopes the runes provide the way out. A decision to try and author is a different decision than to hope.

 

[clearstream]

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.

Do you agree with my proposal that the nature of those rules structures that avoids them being abstract in the wrong way is that they have the qualities of

concomittance when processing a written mechanic I want my experience of it as player and as character to overlap​

association parts of the written mechanic are associated with things that are accepted as diegetic​

entrainment processing the written mechanic follows patterns that map to the behaviours of those things​

So that to say 5e does not have such structures would be to say that it lacks structures with those qualities? (I assume this means you disagree with @Crimson Longinus about the D&D spell rules.)

 

[Enrahim]

Seeing as I've identified D&D DM as part of lusory-means, it makes no difference. But I can see why you picked up on my wording.

For avoidance of doubt then, players regularly employ lusory-means to migrate fictional possibilities into actualities.

That seem too easy. You surely not saying that the players author the entire world by asking the GM to run a game for them? In this context I think the GM's independence as a human in terms of creativity and subjective conceptualisation around the game can't be ignored.

(Edit: more simply put - i think the topic at hand is exactly the boundaries for when the GM can be considered a lusory-means)