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

[TwoSix]

It's the GM's choice to agree with the player and then author that fiction. It's not the player's choice to author it, and it's not baked into a dice roll mechanic the players use.

Maybe not in your D&D games. I've been doing that for a long time.

How else am I supposed to know if there's a cleric in the town? I certainly don't bother to do that prep ahead of time.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

@Pedantic's "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."

But on re-reading it could be that what is impossible in 5e is an ideal for knowing the outcomes of actions, which according to the ideal ought to come in whole from the rules structures. I don't know of any examples of that in TTRPG rules texts... does anyone?

But what this has to do with me or 5e spell rules?

 

[Thomas Shey]

But on re-reading it could be that what is impossible in 5e is an ideal for knowing the outcomes of actions, which according to the ideal ought to come in whole from the rules structures. I don't know of any examples of that in TTRPG rules texts... does anyone?

Could you elaborate on what you mean here? I don't think I understand the question.

 

[TwoSix]

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.

Exactly. Which is why I generally don't look for that sort of gameplay in the TTRPG space, and scratch that itch with boardgames and computer games instead. Negotiation-heavy story generation play is much more strongly suited to TTRPG play, on the other hand, and boardgames and computer games can only produce a crude facsimile.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Maybe not in your D&D games. I've been doing that for a long time.

How else am I supposed to know if there's a cleric in the town? I certainly don't bother to do that prep ahead of time.

The classic answer for people with pretty hard-edged player/GM responsibility separation is "The GM will decide when its needed."

 

[Thomas Shey]

Exactly. Which is why I generally don't look for that sort of gameplay in the TTRPG space, and scratch that itch with boardgames and computer games instead. Negotiation-heavy story generation play is much more strongly suited to TTRPG play, on the other hand, and boardgames and computer games can only produce a crude facsimile.

The problem is that some of us really do want out chocolate with our peanut butter.

 

[Pedantic]

@Pedantic's "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."

But on re-reading it could be that what is impossible in 5e is an ideal for knowing the outcomes of actions, which according to the ideal ought to come in whole from the rules structures. I don't know of any examples of that in TTRPG rules texts... does anyone?

The ur-example is the 3e climbing rules. They're pretty action complete. I wouldn't overindex on "knowing the outcome" here though. Randomness in resolution, hidden elements on the board state, baffling actions by other parties and so forth could lead to undesired or unaccounted for outcome, all of which is fine and interesting.

I don't care if a player makes it to the top of the wall; it should be clear why and how they didn't, in a way they could have accounted for given perfect information before they tried, and that the potential consequences of not making it to the top that come from taking the climb action in the first place should be encoded in the climbing rules and known to them before they make the attempt.

 

[TwoSix]

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

Filling in the words in a Mad Lib is both "contributing to the fiction" and a railroad.

 

[clearstream]

That being said, from this I would not conclude (like some designers seem to) that as we cannot cover every eventuality we should not endeavour to be comprehensive and have the rules to cover common (and hopefully many uncommon) cases. And doing so also makes those rare cases not covered more predictable, as we are at least operating within system that has benchmarks for comparison.

To my observation the more specific a game text tries to get, the less able it is to cover a much wider range of situations.

That's a motive I suspect behind backing away from a combat minigame in many contemporary designs, and extending a more generalisable system to cover it. Rare cases can be made more predictable through designing such a system that isn't too specific.

The benefits of being specific seem to me stronger when the designer has in mind a singular world and experience that the rules should sustain. Something like RuneQuest and Bushido that are comprehensive in regard to their subjects, even if some of that specificity wouldn't be relevant to wider play.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't understand this. The character has the fictional ability to persuade the cleric to cast the spell. The player has no ability to persuade the cleric of anything, so deciding that the player will persuade the cleric to cast the spell doesn't make sense.

The player decides that the character who has the fictional ability to persuade, will try to persuade the cleric. In that way he is acting though his character to change the fiction.

Contras that with the runes example where the player is deciding to use his ability to potentially make the runes say whatever he wants them to say. All he has to do is succeed at a roll and have a relevant ability(cunning isn't relevant) on his PC. That's a purely out of game decision and roll. The roll to author the runes has nothing to do with what the character is doing. The PC on the other hand is only attempting to read the runes and hope that maybe they tell him how to get out. That hope has nothing to do with the authoring of the runes.

Those are two different decision spaces.

Yes. The player decision to author has risk involved, which is why it isn't really abusable the way unfettered authoring would be. If a player runs around trying to get advantage after advantage after advantage, he's going to miss a good number of rolls making the life of his character fairly difficult, perhaps fatally difficult.

That doesn't change where the decision spaces are, though. They still remain two different decision spaces. One for the player enacting the mechanic in an attempt to author, and one where the PC isn't doing that at all and is just trying to translate runes he hopes will help.

I’m glad you said most of this but I think you must be careful in that in that narrativist games do tie the ability for player authoring of non character fiction to either player action declarations for their character or character actions in the fiction.

Talking about that distinction is difficult because I don’t know if a great term or word for it. I’ve been calling it overloaded, where a mechanic to author the fiction piggybacks on an otherwise unrelated mechanic dealing with a characters action.