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

[pemerton]

It just depends on the scenario at hand. I don't give exact DCs but I do give out "looks easy, don't roll a 1" to "might be possible but it's going to be really difficult".

Aren't those DCs by another name?

 

[Faolyn]

Ok, I'm Waaay behind on reading this thread (I'm currently at comment 4760 as I type this) so, this might be very out of context.

I see two pretty serious issues with this discussion that are getting ignored.

1. This is a biggie. Most players have more than 1 DM. They have played with other DM's and will play with more in the future. They are not judging the DM based entirely on that DM alone but by their experience with other people in similar situations. Meaning that advice to "trust your DM" is a much higher hill to climb for a lot of players. Law of averages says that some DM's are bad, some are average and some are good. In probably equal amounts. So a given player has been burned, and probably repeatedly, by this advice - they've trusted the DM/GM, only to have that trust broken by bad game masters. Which is going to lead to players being far less open to just "trust the DM" advice in the future.

And this leads me to my second point:

2. Good and Bad sometimes don't look very different from the perspective of the player. Because games like D&D rely on "black box" DMing, where a lot of information is withheld from the players, the events of the game can look virtually identical regardless of the quality of the DM.

Take the example of the unbribable guard. Sure, it's an old chestnut, but, it highlights what I mean quite nicely. The Bad DM makes the guard unbribable because the Bad DM wants to railroad the players into a specific path and allowing the party to bribe the guard would allow them off the rails.

THe Good DM, on the other hand, has decided beforehand that the Unbribable Guard is a member of some order, or has taken some oath or whatever reason, and has made the guard unbribable.

But, and here's the kicker, the players can't tell the difference. Good DM and Bad DM look exactly the same here. After all, the Bad DM can just as easily claim that the guard belongs to some order or has taken some vow, or whatever, and railroad the party. The Good DM isn't railroading the party. Totally not what the Good DM wants. But, from the player's perspective, there's zero difference.

I disagree with this. The difference between the "Good DM" and "Bad DM" is that the Good DM will tell the players why the guard is unbribable. This may be in character where the guard says something like "I am a member of the temple guard! Our honor is beyond reproach!" or "Do you have any idea what the punishment is for a guard who takes a bribe?" Or possibly another NPC says "Don't even try bribing the guards--they don't take bribes, and they get real creative with the idiots who try." Or this may even be out of character--one of my GMs likes to tell us their reasoning behind their rulings or why they have NPCs that act in various ways.

Whereas the Bad DM won't because they don't have a reason for it beyond railroading. Or if they do give a reason, it will be a bad one ("the guard and all their loved family will go to hell if they take a bribe" ), or inconsistent with established fiction ("wait, the temple guards don't take bribes? But you let us bribe the last two temple guards. What gives?").

If the Good DM made up the thing about the guards not being bribable on the fly and forgot that the PCs had already bribed some guards, then when the PCs go "what gives?" they'll go "whoops, my bad, I forgot." and let the PCs bribe the guards.

And more importantly, this (edit: Bad DMing) will be part of a pattern of behavior that the players will grow to recognize. They've done it in previous adventures. In this adventure (we'll call it "the high priest is secretly evil"), it's not just that the guard can't be bribed; it's that they're also a far higher CR than they should be and have super high Perception scores so that the PCs will have a ridiculously hard time fighting them or sneaking past them. The GM will use meta-knowledge to stop the PCs. The rogue specialized in lockpicking so the doors are all magically locked and warded; the PCs like to sneak round invisibly so the clergy all somehow have see invisible prepared ("it's a domain spell for them"). The PC's class abilities mysteriously don't work properly because of a homebrew divine protection. And so on. Because the Bad DM has a Plan for a Cool Reveal that will be ruined if the PCs figure things out early.

In other words, bad GMing isn't a one-off and the railroading will become obvious.

Whereas the Good DM, who has the same plot going on, will let the players learn the secret early. They throw out the idea of the Cool Reveal, no matter how cool it was, and the game changes to be about how PCs manage to prove to the Queen that the High Priest is evil, or how they destroy the priest's Evil Macguffin that gives him his powers. The temple will be no more anti-PC-intrusion than makes sense. The Good GM may even say something like "Wow, I wasn't expecting you to figure out the priest's secret so quickly."

 

[Faolyn]

AW and DW don't use conditions at all. At most one PC can convince another to do something, but all that does is mean you will get an XP if you actually follow through, you can still ignore the other character's argument.

In Monster of the Week, when you use Manipulate Someone on another PC, on a hit, they get XP if they decide to listen to you. On a miss, they get XP if they decide to not listen to you. (On a 12+, they have to make an Act Under Pressure roll to not do what you ask them--but they also get XP for doing it, and you have to take a particular advancement to even be able to get to use this special advanced ability in the first place).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Trust isn't unlimited. It's just that in 40 odd years of gaming, my personal experience is that trust does not get abused or used up over elf games.

Again, I think you're conflating trust-in-intentions with trust-in-judgment. They seriously, seriously aren't the same thing. People toss up failures on the latter on occasions in all kinds of contexts, ranging from the serious to the trivial.

I'm again baffled that this is contraversial.

If there are any doubts, there's no secret process to clearing them up. You have a quick chat and move on. No one is interested in stopping the fun over some petty disagreement (and I would categorise any disagreements I've ever had over gaming as fairly petty. It's just not that important, certainly not enough to damage friendships over).

I haven't damaged a friendship over it in a long time, but I'm not going to claim that people wanting the game to move on fast over every other problem that may crop up is going to go over well, and I don't think its an intrinsically reasonable expectation. If you do, that's your choice, but at least accept what those of us who feel otherwise are talking about and don't join the crowd that acts like we think every GM is malevolent.

 

[Thomas Shey]

"Hey there. This thing you just stated doesn't make sense to me. Can you please explain why this happened?"

"Well, I figured this is how it would work based on my understanding of X".

"X doesn't work that way. Its actually more like Y".

Cue discussion that ends when one side capitulates or a compromise is reached.

Most other conversations people have that involve a disagreement IME also break down to something like this. No matter what the subject. Strangely, neither of us need an external rules framework to keep the GM in check.

That's actually a perfectly reasonable approach from my POV--if the GM will have the conversation. And a big part of that turns on how often that conversation needs to happen.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Then allow me to rephrase:

Of course I'd argue that two things are going on here:
1. A demonstration of the problem with D&D style hit points; and
2. Reifying what's essentially a system convention into an in-world knowledge thing, when its essentially the player making a decision his character shouldn't be aware to make. On a purely gamist ground, its perfectly rationale, but that doesn't mean I think its good (but then, I go back to my first thing).

 

[pemerton]

I dont think that it makes sense that any and all guards can be bribed. It's just an odd assumption to me.

No one is assuming that any and all guards can be bribed.

The conversation - at least as I understand it - is about the process for determining What happens when a player has their PC attempt to bribe a guard in circumstances where it is not already established that the guard in question cannot be bribed.

This is a question about game procedures, not what is, in the fiction, possible or not.

There are lot of similar examples:

*The player rolls to see whether or not their PC can climb a cliff. The roll fails, and the GM narrates crumbling ledges. In the fiction, it was true before the PC made the attempt that those ledges would crumble under weight. At the table, that bit of fiction is authored in response to the roll.

*The player rolls to see whether or not their PC knows <this fact>. In the fiction, the PC's knowledge, or ignorance, already obtains - thus, if the roll succeeds, that doesn't mean that, in the fiction, a new bit of knowledge suddenly popped into the PC's head! But at the table, it is the roll that determines what the true state of affairs is vis-a-vis the PC's knowledge or ignorance of <this fact>.​

Some Perception rolls are similar - as in, if the roll succeeds that tells us that the PC was already noticing the thing in question.

And the attempted bribing of the guard can be handled in much the same way.

 

[AlViking]

Ok, I'm Waaay behind on reading this thread (I'm currently at comment 4760 as I type this) so, this might be very out of context.

I see two pretty serious issues with this discussion that are getting ignored.

1. This is a biggie. Most players have more than 1 DM. They have played with other DM's and will play with more in the future. They are not judging the DM based entirely on that DM alone but by their experience with other people in similar situations. Meaning that advice to "trust your DM" is a much higher hill to climb for a lot of players. Law of averages says that some DM's are bad, some are average and some are good. In probably equal amounts. So a given player has been burned, and probably repeatedly, by this advice - they've trusted the DM/GM, only to have that trust broken by bad game masters. Which is going to lead to players being far less open to just "trust the DM" advice in the future.

And this leads me to my second point:

2. Good and Bad sometimes don't look very different from the perspective of the player. Because games like D&D rely on "black box" DMing, where a lot of information is withheld from the players, the events of the game can look virtually identical regardless of the quality of the DM.

Take the example of the unbribable guard. Sure, it's an old chestnut, but, it highlights what I mean quite nicely. The Bad DM makes the guard unbribable because the Bad DM wants to railroad the players into a specific path and allowing the party to bribe the guard would allow them off the rails.

THe Good DM, on the other hand, has decided beforehand that the Unbribable Guard is a member of some order, or has taken some oath or whatever reason, and has made the guard unbribable.

But, and here's the kicker, the players can't tell the difference. Good DM and Bad DM look exactly the same here. After all, the Bad DM can just as easily claim that the guard belongs to some order or has taken some vow, or whatever, and railroad the party. The Good DM isn't railroading the party. Totally not what the Good DM wants. But, from the player's perspective, there's zero difference.

This is why we keep arguing about this idea of the "objective" DM being a fiction. Because, in play, Good or Bad DM often look exactly the same. Even though the Good DM would absolutely recoil at being called a Bad DM and would completely reject the notion of railroading as an intent (after all, no railroading was intended at all - it was a "natural consequence" of the setting), from the player's perspective, there's simply no difference.

No GM will ever be perfect but it typically becomes pretty obvious when the GM is just making decisions to direct play. On the other hand if they're open about it that we're playing a linear campaign? It doesn't bother me.

I know your a big fan of the procedural approach, I just don't think that approach, or narrative, or story first, or any other approach is going to always lead to a better game. So celebrate what you enjoy but I don't see a reason to tell others their style is flawed.

 

[AlViking]

I dunno if you both were/are rock climbing prodigies.

But my sense is that these stories tend to show that the likelihood of falling to your death from a climb that you start on is not super-high.

So imagining a D&D character with STR 18 (+4), that is one of the strongest people around, and trained in Athletics for a +3 bonus (5th level or higher), thus with an overall +7 bonus, the likelihood should be even lower. All the situations you're describing thus look like they are DC 5 to DC 10 at the outside.

So what would a DC 15 climb look like? And would that trained person not know that they are looking at something that any normal person would not even consider attempting?

Every time you climb more than 10-20 feet you risk serious injury if you fall. Not sure why you feel compelled to diss our personal experiences.

As far as how difficult? A typical scramble? I might call for a check just to see how long it will take. Free climbing El Capitan? Probably at least a DC 25. It's just a judgement call like everything else.

 

[AlViking]

Aren't those DCs by another name?

Your point?