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

[pemerton]

I’m in disbelief that I’m even having to point out that a d&d persuasion check involving an established cleric that can cast remove curse doesn’t require the player to author anything outside his character, but that a player deciding what runes mean does require the player to author precisely that way.

@clearstream may have a different reply to make from this one.

But as I read @clearstream's posts, the point is quite simple: players in RPGs are capable of (i) establishing immediate goals relating to the removal of afflictions, conditions etc, and (ii) declaring actions that, if successful, will those goals. And those action declarations will often contribute to shaping the shared fiction.

The reason for choosing a generic cleric using a pretty generic spell is to point out that the fictional constraint on the player's declared action is pretty modest, and that the real determiner of whether or not their affliction-removal goal is achieved is the result of their roll. I take that to be the import of this post:

I'm surprised to hear you'd rule out the possibility of a cleric in say Tilverton (while it was extant), if one were not expressly pre-authored there. I've observed DMs agreeing to the presence of NPCs that were not pre-authored. Players regularly migrate fictional possibilities into actualities through their play.

And of course, "established cleric" just means GM-authored cleric. That is the difference, that for some reason cannot be acknowledged!

I mean, it’s the entire point of doing it that way. It gives players more agency over the fiction.

I would say that "agency over the fiction", in a generic sense, is secondary.

The most immediate point is to support player-driven rather than GM-driven play. For instance, in the rune example, play is not as you and @Lanefan and other posters have posited is the better way to do it -the players trying to work out what the GM has in mind with the dungeon, and the PCs being lost, and so on. Rather, it is driven by the players' ideas, which include that strange runes might indeed reveal a way out.

The cleric need to exist to be persuaded!

And the runes need to say something to be read. And they did!

You get irritated when I post that people seem to confuse fiction and reality, but this is exactly an example of that. In the fiction, a cleric can only be found and persuaded if they can exist.

But at the table, a player can trivially declare "I am going to find a cleric to persuade" without any cleric having yet been authored. And if the GM replies "OK, there are clerics at the temple but it will be DC 18 to persuade one of them to help you", that is completely bog standard. It is unremarkable that the player's action declaration prompts the GM to author some clerics.

More generally, it is utterly commonplace, in RPGing, for fiction to be authored in response to action declarations, although in the fiction that existence of those fictional elements predates the action declaration and is something on which the success of the declared action depends. (Eg a person can't find a cleric if no cleric exists.) The difference between the runes case and the cleric case I described in the previous paragraph is simply that in the runes case there is a mechanical procedure that the player contributes to whereas in the cleric case the GM is responding to a player prompt.

Neither is more or less "meta" or more or less "dissociated". But one is more player-driven than the other.

 

[Enrahim]

It seems hard to understand, because posters - eg @AlViking - keep posting that the character determined what the runes mean.

Oh, I must have missed that!? I have not recognised that at all!

I tought they repeatedly stated the character cannot determine the meaning of the rune, but the player can, and hence there is a difference? (This seem to strongly contradict the notion that the character determined the meaning of the runes, as the claim is they plain cannot do such a thing)

 

[pemerton]

For me, D&D means something

For me too. It is the game that Gygax and Arneson invented, and that Gygax developed. And that has been further developed in 4e D&D.

It's not and has never purported to be a "process simulation" game. Gygax's PHB and even moreso his DMG is full of essays of apology and explanation for the non-simulationist core mechanics - PC level gain; hit points; saving throws; the way the combat round and action economy work; the surprise rules.

D&D has some essentials. One of them is DM authority over the fiction and the campaign world.

I posted the example of player authorship of setting upthread, straight from Gygax's DMG.

Gygax's DMG affirms GM authorship over the puzzle. Where something is not a puzzle - eg How to defeat an Orc in combat? or Can I find the terrain I want to build my stronghold? - then GM authorship isn't a component of resolution. Rather, other methods are used: dice for the fighting; GM acquiescence to the player request in the case of the stronghold.

 

[pemerton]

Of course not. But some of us prefer the map and key, puzzle-solving style, and don't care for your MHRP play because it doesn't work according to those principles. That doesn't mean your preference is any less (or more) legitimate than mine, but it does affect how we feel about it, and we should be allowed to explain why we don't care for it.

I'm just a bit fed up with you (and other posters) misdescribing it.

I mean, you say it's not hard to understand that it is not map-and-key, GM-authority-over-backstory based. And then you say that the character "manipulated reality" and talk about "quantum runes".

It's doubly frustrating because you post apologetics and special pleading for similar phenomena in your own play.

 

[pemerton]

How does one cunningly interpret runes?

From Gygax's PHB, p 18: "Thieves use cunning, nimbleness, and stealth."

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.

Just to be clear: are you saying that I'm wrong about the rules of my own fantasy hack of MHRP? or are you just complaining about my use of the word "Cunning"?

 

[pemerton]

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.

I don't know what RPG you are describing here. But this is not something that I have experienced in GMing Burning Wheel, Torchbearer 2e, Prince Valiant, Marvel Heroic RP (or my Fantasy Hack of it), Agon, 4e D&D or any other RPG that gets labelled "narrative". I don't see how it would come up in Apocalypse World either.

To me, this sort of thing suggests a basic lack of understanding or consensus at the table as to what the resolution mechanics are for, how they work, what the nature of action declaration is, etc.

I struggle to see how to avoid negotiation in TTRPG in a good way.

Well, the things that @Pedantic describes as "routine" are not things that I see. And I think it's because I play RPGs which do support a consensus on what the resolution mechanics are for, how they work, and what the nature of action declaration is.

 

[pemerton]

If the player is doing something the PC isn't, he is already outside the PC.

I assume you don't mean this literally, because while reading runes to find out if they show the way out is a thing the PC can do, of course the player isn't reading any runes - they're just imaginary.

Similarly, a PC might fight an Orc with a sword, but what the player does is roll dice and manipulate numbers.

But the player declares an action to read the runes to see if they might show a way out, and puts together a dice pool that corresponds to this action.

 

[pemerton]

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?

@clearstream is identifying a difference similar to the one between these two ways of getting a chip from a friend:

*A friend comes to visit you at your house, and brings a bag of chips as a gift for you the host.

*A friend is eating some chips from a bag, and you ask if you can have one, and they then offer you one.

 

[Hussar]

That's in a different section. Personally I don't think it's really a big change, it still comes down to uncertainty and whether or not it matters. The actual text

"When the outcome is uncertain and narratively interesting, the dice determine the result."

It's in the SECTION YOU QUOTED!

 

[Maxperson]

From Gygax's PHB, p 18: "Thieves use cunning, nimbleness, and stealth."

But not all three for everything. Cunning has nothing to do with runes.

Just to be clear: are you saying that I'm wrong about the rules of my own fantasy hack of MHRP? or are you just complaining about my use of the word "Cunning"?

The usage of the word is incorrect. You can't deceive the runes to get your way, but I absolutely believe that you ran it that way.