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

[AlViking]

There isn't a better system.

But the point is that you and others have openly rejected this kind of thinking in other places as utterly unacceptable.

So there isn't a better system and because I think the current system works fine for me ... anything else is completely unacceptable? I don't care what you do in your game. If there's a better system I'd interested but you just said there isn't one. So because I don't want to use some other hypothetical system which doesn't exist ... wait ... what was the issue again?

Like this is precisely why the lock picking failure resulting in an encounter with the cook was unacceptable. The abstraction didn't specify super ultra hard. It was dependent on context, on the GM making a reasonable judgment call about the extended situation aroundthe attempt, not the ultra-narrow singular act of inserting lockpicks into the tumbler of a lock.


Horrible awful affront to all that is good then.

Now it's necessary.

I hope you can see why I would find that turnaround infuriating.

The lock picking resulting in a cook appearing when they would not have otherwise appeared is a separate topic. The cook was added because just failing to open the lock was boring so the blog post suggested making it "interesting". But once again in that case I was just stating my personal preference other people have different preferences.

What's infuriating mildly annoying is that you take my saying "What I personally prefer is X" and you responding "Why do you hate Y and why are you telling me I must use X!" I happen to have a system that works for me and I've seen no evidence to justify switching. I don't care what you do or what you prefer in your game.

So I still don't understand what your issue is.

 

[Lanefan]

I think you’ve just described the issue with the word “simulation” as it applies to RPGs. I think that when we talk about something being a simulation, we’re generally expecting such elaboration… we want to know how things are calculated and how they inform the game.

A general handwave “we’ll do it this way and that’s close enough, everyone’ll get it” isn’t really what I think of as simulation.

Same here, for the most part; but if a general handwave is enough to provide a vaguely-simulative experience on the player side, that's good enough for me - and takes a lot less work than the other options.

You don’t rely on knowledge checks and the like? History, Religion, and the like? I know a lot of times this kind of skill is just used to gate information behind higher DCs or something similar.

I’ve started using them to determine the nature of the information revealed. Not just the quality, but the specifics and if it’s generally good news or bad news.

I’ve been doing this in trad games for a while now and it works just fine.

Agreed. I don't break it down by specifics (History, Religion, etc.) but the general idea of "make a roll and we'll use that roll to inform us if you know anything about the topic at hand and if so, in how much detail" has always done me fine.

The odds of someone already in that field possessing knowledge are better than the average Joe; for example a Cleric is more likely to know religious stuff while a Fighter is more likely to know details about arms and armour, etc. But if the experts don't know, the non-experts still get* a long-odds roll just in case they happen to have stumbled across that bit of trivia somewhere along the line.

* - with rare exceptions e.g. a character just arrived from off-world isn't going to know this world's history in any detail whatsoever.

 

[Lanefan]

The assigned role of the player is to participate in a campaign fairly and to have fun. She has no "out of character" objectives. It is why she determines information about her character. The GM has everything else in the world and they have an agenda. Now, I fully expect them to be honest and fair bit they have temptations not to be. As a player, I've seen it happen.

Now, I've also seen bad players, and to be honest, Ice never felt they were containable by the GM threatening and browbeating them. Any player this would work on is likely a very poor player anyway. But sure, the GM can decide if they feel like the player is misbehaving, to eject them as a player in their group.

Perhaps, but IME* most player ejection requests are initiated by one or more other players rather than the DM.

* - fortunately, all long in the past: other than one instance in the early 2010s I haven't seen a motion to eject since the 1990s, and as a fellow player in that more recent event I voted against the motion (but lost).

 

[Lanefan]

Does that mean "negotiation about the assignment of a specific narrow set of resources or the specific deployment of defined forces"?

Or does it mean "negotiation over the fundamental structure of the rules and the game, up to and including how victory is defined "?

Because pretending the two things are 100% identical is an equivocation fallacy.

They're not the same, to be sure, but I've sure seen the first discussion turn into the second on more than one occasion on a one-thing-leads-to-the-next basis.

An example: a discussion about the functionality of one element of one class (e.g. Druid shapeshift) draws in other elements and factors etc. until the next thing you know the discussion is about upending or rewriting the entire class system in D&D.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So there isn't a better system and because I think the current system works fine for me ... anything else is completely unacceptable? I don't care what you do in your game. If there's a better system I'd interested but you just said there isn't one. So because I don't want to use some other hypothetical system which doesn't exist ... wait ... what was the issue again?

I...literally said....? And it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else you said in this paragraph.

I gave examples. You have argued, just now, that it is 100% perfectly acceptable to just let it ride when the dice tell us something incongruous, that there can be just "no explanation at all", period, end of discussion, nothing more said, nothing more needs be said. Others joined you in this.

You, and others, had previously argued stridently against various things BECAUSE they did that exact thing. You were one of the strongest voices against ANY form of "fail forward", for example, VERY specifically because it DIDN'T specify this stuff. Because it DID rely on a loosey-goosey, just-roll-with-it, reasonable-judgment-call process.

That is why I'm so bloody frustrated right now. And you keep bringing up these utterly irrelevant nonsense things that are genuinely all from your own head, I didn't say or even mention anything like them.

The lock picking resulting in a cook appearing when they would not have otherwise appeared is a separate topic.

It is not. It is deeply, centrally relevant to my frustration.

The cook was added because just failing to open the lock was boring so the blog post suggested making it "interesting". But once again in that case I was just stating my personal preference other people have different preferences.

What blog post? I saw no such blog post.

But either way, that "inventing" is precisely, 100% identical logic to "inventing" reasons why a Perception check failed after the fact. There is nothing whatsoever different between that and "inventing"--say--a cloud passing by that distracted someone at a crucial moment.

That is THE problem I have here.

What's infuriating mildly annoying is that you take my saying "What I personally prefer is X" and you responding "Why do you hate Y and why are you telling me I must use X!" I happen to have a system that works for me and I've seen no evidence to justify switching. I don't care what you do or what you prefer in your game.

So I still don't understand what your issue is.

Because you 100% are doing that?

I spoke of the utility of "fail forward". You responded that it not only shouldn't be used for you, it shouldn't be used in general except for people who explicitly and specifically jump for it. And now you're accepting literally identical logic in a situation you approve of, when that logic was THE reason why you rejected it before.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Perhaps, but IME* most player ejection requests are initiated by one or more other players rather than the DM.

* - fortunately, all long in the past: other than one instance in the early 2010s I haven't seen a motion to eject since the 1990s, and as a fellow player in that more recent event I voted against the motion (but lost).

Never seen that happen. Ever. Not in 20+ years of gaming. Never. So I'm not really sure what you're on about there.

Also extremely surprised to hear there's even such a thing as a "motion" of any kind, to say nothing of it being binding on the GM! How do you tolerate such an imposition of player will on the GM? I thought that was beyond the pale--to have rules that limit GM authority of any knd.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They're not the same, to be sure, but I've sure seen the first discussion turn into the second on more than one occasion on a one-thing-leads-to-the-next basis.

An example: a discussion about the functionality of one element of one class (e.g. Druid shapeshift) draws in other elements and factors etc. until the next thing you know the discussion is about upending or rewriting the entire class system in D&D.

"I've seen a slippery slope before, therefore it's a slippery slope" is not a valid argument.

Yes. Sometimes, that might happen. It's far, far, far, far, far, far, far from guaranteed.

Not to mention....the thing you're describing is an abstract discussion of game mechanics when you aren't in thick of it playing them? "A discussion about the functionality of one element of one class" sounds dry and academic, at arm's length from actually using the thing. Not at all the same as starting from, "I'd like to haggle with the merchant" ("negotiation" of the first kind, the kind purely within the system of the rules) and somehow growing from there to "I want to persuade the guard by winning a game of poker against you-the-GM".

 

[Micah Sweet]

So there isn't a better system and because I think the current system works fine for me ... anything else is completely unacceptable? I don't care what you do in your game. If there's a better system I'd interested but you just said there isn't one. So because I don't want to use some other hypothetical system which doesn't exist ... wait ... what was the issue again?



The lock picking resulting in a cook appearing when they would not have otherwise appeared is a separate topic. The cook was added because just failing to open the lock was boring so the blog post suggested making it "interesting". But once again in that case I was just stating my personal preference other people have different preferences.

What's infuriating mildly annoying is that you take my saying "What I personally prefer is X" and you responding "Why do you hate Y and why are you telling me I must use X!" I happen to have a system that works for me and I've seen no evidence to justify switching. I don't care what you do or what you prefer in your game.

So I still don't understand what your issue is.

He has openly stated he's looking to sway hearts and minds to his views regarding RPGs. Perhaps he wants you to like Y?

 

[Maxperson]

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

First, a Mad Lib isn't an RPG, so it is not a railroad. Second, in an RPG if your only choice is what the DM wants to happen, you didn't contribute jack. The DM contributed it through you.

 

[Maxperson]

We were discussing the decision space and alignment between player and character intention. The character has the fictional ability to conjecture that they might discern a way out from the runes.

The character has the ability to conjecture that they may tell a way out, but the character has neither the ability nor intent to author the fiction in such a way that the fictional reality becomes what they conjecture. The player is doing that.

Exactly: the player decides that the character who has the fictional ability to make informed conjectures about runes, will try to discern a way out from them. Player is acting through their character to change the fiction (it's the character's ability that is being rolled for, not the players!)

The player isn't really acting through the character. The player is acting through the mechanic to change the fiction, which the character can't accomplish. The character is acting in a similar, but still distinctly different way in that he has no inkling that the fictional reality might be what he hopes for, or might not depending on how the roll goes. He's just hoping that when he reads them he is able to get out.