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

[Pedantic]

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.

I think there's an issue of timing at least. The sort of clarification as fictional creation you're talking about happens before action declaration and certainly not as part of resolution. I think there's also a question of contingency, though the GM closing to use a random table does complicate that somewhat.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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,

Yes, this happens.

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.

This on the other hand doesn't.

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.

To do this fully is impossible in any RPG, and not even desirable. However, one certainly could (and I'd argue should) have far more structure than 5e does.

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.

I think 5e would benefit from having far more detailed skill rules. But I do not think such can ever be fully exhaustive, they're more like guidelines that help to extrapolate consistently.

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.

Perhaps it is more important. But both are still important.

 

[Pedantic]

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.)

I am not totally sure what point about spells you're referring to, I think I'm just missing the post looking back, but I'm not sure my point about negotiation should be bundled broadly into that discussion.

I think negotiation is an unpleasant gameplay experience that eats up a lot of design space, I don't necessarily think it lacks whatever nebulous quality of simulation is at stake. Your model here seems solid.

 

[Maxperson]

Really? The player doesn't (in 3E) pull out their Power Attack spreadsheet? Or (in any version of the game) check that the cleric has enough cure spells to keep their PC up? Or draw inferences from previous damage rolls made by the GM for the opponents, so as to inform decisions about which PC risks taking which blows?

I get your point, but I do have to say that I've never seen or heard of a Power Attack spreadsheet. Why would power attack need a spreadsheet?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.)

Disagree with me on what? What you think my opinion on D&D spell rules is?

 

[Pedantic]

To do this fully is impossible in any RPG, and not even desirable. However, one certainly could (and I'd argue should) have far more structure than 5e does.

I think that's more dogma than fact, but more importantly I think directionally wrong for design. Starting from an assumption that your game is necessarily incomplete and will be subject to adhoc rules design later encourages bad design thinking.

I think 5e would benefit from having far more detailed skill rules. But I do not think such can ever be fully exhaustive, they're more like guidelines that help to extrapolate consistently.

I don't think we fundamentally disagree here, I just think such extrapolation should be a deprecated rarity that prompts further design thought, not a norm of play.

Perhaps it is more important. But both are still important.

I actually do disagree here. I think the salient features of a role-playing game are not embodied in having an incomplete or ill-defined ruleset, and that we should be looking elsewhere for them. Elevating that distinction to a medium definition limits the design space.

 

[AlViking]

I get your point, but I do have to say that I've never seen or heard of a Power Attack spreadsheet. Why would power attack need a spreadhseet?

In 3e I had a chart for how much to power attack based on the target's AC because you could subtract from the attack bonus and add that number to the damage. But that was years ago.

 

[Maxperson]

They can contribute to a shared fiction. That's called playing a RPG.

At least you've finally admitted that players in a traditional RPG are contributing to the shared fiction instead of being railroaded.

 

[FrogReaver]

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.

Right and what if the DM says no to the players suggestion, doesn’t that capability prove it’s the GM that is authoring the world. Or would it be better to say co-authoring there? And if the activity is best called co-authoring, then I think it’s worth exploring what is gained and/or lost by co-authoring in different ways.

 

[Pedantic]

I get your point, but I do have to say that I've never seen or heard of a Power Attack spreadsheet. Why would power attack need a spreadhseet?

To calculate the most efficient DPR trade-off once you've determined the enemy's AC, especially if you're using and extra stuff that adds on modifiers, like Shock Trooper. It's not a wild idea, though a "spreadsheet" is a bit of hyperbole for what was mostly a set of benchmarks. I definitely had character sheets with reference numbers written down the side.