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

[pemerton]

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?

Here's a post where you talked to another posters about 3E Wildshape. They used a spreadsheet, and you seemed to understand why they did it. Power Attack in 3E also invites the use of a spreadsheet, especially to optimise damage against a given AC:

I wouldn't call that a broken game. It is a bit more complex than the rest of the game, but whether it's broken still depends on the person. Druids were similar with their Wildshape ability. I played a melee wildshape druid once........once. I don't use spreadsheets, so I had to figure out all of my bonuses with the most common shapes I changed into and keep track of those, plus any I might get from other players or NPCs. It was more work than play for me, so I didn't do it again. However, another player at my table loved tracking things like that and he played that sort of character more than once just fine. It worked for him.

 

[Maxperson]

It's in the SECTION YOU QUOTED!

Yes it was. It doesn't change that that section is still pure skill, but it was in the portion he quoted. The skill portion constrains the interesting narrative portion, though. It has to be an interesting narrative dealing with skill.

 

[pemerton]

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

So you think that AD&D thieves read runes using their nimbleness and stealth?

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.

"Cunning" does not mean simply "deceitful". It also implies cleverness and shrewdness. From Merriam-Webster:

crafty in the use of special resources (such as skill or knowledge) or in attaining an end . . . displaying keen insight​

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think the lesson here is that sometimes when you google something, you should look at more than the first result.

 

[Enrahim]

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

But the method of establishment is what is under scrutiny here! In the cleric example the existence was handwaved. I thought the point of the sentence you quoted here was to point out that this handwaving was inaproperiate in this context.

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.

You appear to be confusing if people are talking about fiction or reality. From my reading it appeared obvious that @Crimson Longinus talked about existence from an in-fiction perspective.

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.

Here you get to what I think is your good point. I hope it didn't get too muddled by the above.

I have two counter point to this:
The first is that I think there is a stronger incentive to engage in this kind of dissociated meta behavior if you sit in the driver's seat than the passager seat.

The other is that while a prompt to author might be as overt, meta and dissociated as actually authoring it yourself, it also can be devoid of these properties (while authoring seemingly cannot)

A clear example is that a character can decide to go check out the temple. A player can hence declare that their character go check out the temple without any dissociation. This declaration however might prompt GM authorship of temple details. As the player don't even know if authorship happened as part of this declaration, that cannot change their experienced absence of dissociation.

 

[Enrahim]

@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.

I thought I was the one pointing out that difference, while @clearstream appeared to assert it didn't really matter, as the GM end up with chips anyway?

 

[pemerton]

Because then you would likely have to go back and rewrite all of your history to match the newly created reality.

So, you say that you play PbtA games. The only one I remember you actually mentioning is Monster of the Week, which as best I understand is a pretty traditional game in its play structure, but that uses some AW-esque mechanics.

So I don't know if you use the AW technique of "asking questions and building on the answers". But here's an example, from John Harper who is a pretty serious expositor of AW and similar games:

In Apocalypse World, the players are in charge of their characters. What they say, what they do; what they feel, think, and believe; what they did in their past. The MC is in charge of the world: the environment, the NPCs, the weather, the psychic maelstrom.

Sometimes, the players say things that get very close to the line. Usually this happens when the MC asks a leading question.

MC: "Nero, what do the slave traders use for barter?"
Player: "Oh man, those [freaks]? They use human ears."

That's a case of the player authoring part of the world outside their character, however -- and this is critical -- they do it from within their character's experience and frame of reference. When Nero answers that question, he's telling something he knows about the world.​

Anyway, if you use this technique then you know the answer to your question already.

If you don't use this technique, it's pretty simple: as a GM you don't frame PCs into scenes, or invite action declarations, that will produce contradiction with established fiction.

 

[Maxperson]

So you think that AD&D thieves read runes using their nimbleness and stealth?

No, but that's also a non-exhaustive list. The 1e PHB also says this under thief.

"Thieves are principally meant to take by cunning and stealth."

Cunning and stealth are meant for taking, because you can deceive someone into giving you their goods or into leaving goods open to your theft.

"Cunning" does not mean simply "deceitful". It also implies cleverness and shrewdness. From Merriam-Webster:

crafty in the use of special resources (such as skill or knowledge) or in attaining an end . . . displaying keen insight​

Crafty also means deceitful. You have to reach pretty deep to get to keen insight, which if you do, turns that ability into a god ability. You can have keen insight into.....................just about everything. Players should take cunning expert in all your game so that they always have an ability to use no matter what the situation.

 

[pemerton]

I just realised: If you take Talisman, and remove the inner circle+gate. Would that pass your test for being an RPG? Play time is unbounded, as the normal victory condition is gone, and rules state a new character is drafted on death. In such a context players can still set goals (hoard gold, beat up a different player, obtain a particular magic item, become the first player to reach 20 craft etc). There are as such clearly emergent victory/failure conditions and ongoing failure/victory evaluation.

Am I missing something? This doesn't feel like a TTRPG to me, but I really cannot see which of your criteria it don't fulfill?

I don't see a problem with this. I don't think the roleplaying would be especially good, but I mostly see it as the tool we use to get to those victory conditions. If someone wants to explain why getting every item in the shop would be satisfying for their Elf, I don't see a problem here. That's definitely pushing toward minimum viable RPG.

I think that central to the RPG, in its most paradigmatic form, is two things:

*Fiction matters to resolution;

*Most of the participants (that is, the players) engage with the fiction from the position/perspective of one particular person within the fiction (their player character).​

The first is found in some wargaming. The second was a feature of some Chainmail and other wargaming - with figures representing particular individuals, rather than units; and thus the player "being" the character rather than being a "god's eye" commander of the character. Combining them creates the distinctive character of D&D and the games that followed it.

I don't think Talisman becomes a RPG just because the players pretend to be their characters and form their own goals. The fiction doesn't matter to the resolution.

 

[pemerton]

If the PCs are in a dungeon and you-as-GM don't know where they are within it, how on earth can you tell them what they see as they explore (and, if they're wise, map their progress) without risk of messing it up?

I make it up! It's not hard.

The players aren't drawing a map. If they want their PCs to make a map, they could do that by using a Specialty to create an appropriate Resource, which would then contribute a die to the dice pool for appropriate actions.