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

[Micah Sweet]

They're certainly there to minimize the impact of inconsistent rulings or bad judgment calls. I certainly don't think that's malice, and "incompetence" seems a stretch since I've seen it from otherwise excellent GMs.

Basically, seat belts aren't just there for bad drivers.

I've always felt a big reason for seat belts is to protect insurance companies, but at least wearing them has a proven significant increase in safety and little to no negative impact. I can't say either of those things are true in this case.

 

[AlViking]

Well, I was running 4e for my friends for a few years like that. Same people I gamed with all through most of the '80s, and '90s too. I'm sure we would still be doing it if I hadn't moved away. There's no secret to it except having a stable group of friends.

Even if the people I play with don't start out as a stable group, I'm still playing with most of the same people that I started with 7 years ago after I moved. Not sure that I have any secret though other than mutual respect, I've just found that once I get a core group of players together we tend to stick together.

 

[Pedantic]

Feel free to not respond of course but I still don't know what you mean. If someone is not following RAW there's nothing stopping them from not following it in any game, even if D&D is more open about it. What rules can stop bad judgement calls?

The rules that don't permit them. If the procedure for jumping is laid out, it is not given the GM to tell me I can or cannot jump over the pit, and it is not possible for the GM to be inconsistent about which pits I can put can't get over. The (somewhat valid) narrativist critique is "but the GM decided how big that pit was!" which is what all this building a world from consistent, plausible principles and treating it as an objective place you relate facts about is supposed to help combat.

D&D's problem (especially 5e) is that it rarely actually writes rules for things and doesn't take responsibility when those rules aren't very good, precisely because it wrote them to be vague and malleable.

We can't stop anyone making up new rules, but well written rules should, even in the hands of a poorly skilled or mildly malicious GM, produce reasonably consistent gameplay when followed. The problem with a normative rulings culture is that it undermines and prevents the necessary design to get those rules in the first place.

Houseruling is fine when it's not a normative part of design and play culture; that leads to incomplete and poor design and/or discarding any gameplay outside of negotiation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't assert the things you're claiming I assert, so I ignored the irrelevant sections where you ascribed an extremist viewpoint to me.

Y'know. The thing you and everyone else in this thread constantly accuses me of doing to you?

So you're saying my assertion of your conclusions and attitude is without merit and will not engage with it? That's fine, but you can't really expect folks to engage in your points about their posts in that case.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, of course the game designed with the specific intent of constraining the GM does so more than a system that empowers the GM to make judgement calls as they see fit. I can't see anyone disputing that.

I will dispute any claim that one method is inherently superior to the other.

I don't believe you actually get more 'power'. It's a game anyway, seems weird to me to even talk in those terms. DW more clearly defines the process of making the game work, for everyone.

And who decided that your judgement is better than anyone else's? The whole way questioning any of this orthodoxy is resisted is strange to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't see how you can get to "that human [using] personal and group standards of plausibility and verisimilitude" without "what would make a good story".

Because, as it turns out, group standards of plausibility and verisimilitude are literally what most stories are built on. People get annoyed, even upset, when they realize that a story they like has failed to uphold group standards of plausibility and verisimilitude at the broadest possible definition of "group", namely, society at large.

And you'll note that the "story" games you pooh-pooh here...literally do explicitly run on group plausibility. Like they explicitly call out "what makes sense" over and over again as the standard for when things happen and why.

I don't want my game to explicitly put any attention to making a good story. That's all there is to it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But remember, Mr.(?) Constantine, it's only the narrativists who get prickly, who act like everyone should live by their standards, who see insult where insult isn't present, etc., etc., etc.

And folks wonder why I get so annoyed by the double standards present in such discussions...

Well, I certainly don't think everyone should play like I do. I also don't ask ceaselessly demand explanations for other people's playstyles, and take it personally when those explanations don't meet my seemingly impossible standards.

I do get prickly, to be fair.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, the hope would be that it is not a rant.

Instead, the hope is that it is an explanation of why this is a problem, in a way that those who have not realized that it is a problem could truly grok--understand at an intuitive, gut level, rather than what is often dismissed (in other terms) as "highfalutin' nonsense" or the like. Further, my intent is not to say "HOW DARE YOU HAVE BADWRONGFUN", it's to point out an unfortunately pervasive problematic behavior that many do not realize is a problem, because it is subtle and its effects only manifest over long stretches of time. Ideally, I would further provide specific, useful advice, strategies, and tools to not only avert such a problem in a given DM's own games, but to help DMs work with players who have already been "trained" by such problematic DMing, so those players can un-learn the bad, unhelpful coping/defense mechanisms they've built up, and thus working more productively with DMs and groups in the future.

I know this is a perennial problem for DMs, and this is a forum frequented more by DMs than by players. Presumably, someone who could benefit from it would see it. Ideally, it would also attract others who can add their own hints, tips, etc., or provide their own experiences and how they resolved similar issues. Speaking more practically (some might say cynically), it will also invite a score or two of people who fundamentally reject the premise, deny that this is ever a problem, question whether I am smearing their preferences, etc., but I prefer to focus on the positive hope rather than the cynical-but-probable.

I wish you luck then, but cynical-but-probable is very hard to ignore.

 

[JConstantine]

See my comment about constantly being lumped in with the more narrative group just because I share a couple positions with them. [snip]
The desire of people to draw lines in the sand and firmly put people on one or the other side is tiresome.

Personally, I think Ron Edwards is to RPGs what Freud was psychology - undoubtedly influential with some incredibly flawed notions - and GNS theory has been incredibly damaging to RPG discourse due to misrepresenting any style outside of Narrativism, and resulting in naughty word like this. Putting aside that it's original intent was for RPG design, not playstyle, I think if you're going to use it for playstyle (I consider GDS theory to be less flawed for this), then it's better to view it in the form of a ternary diagram where an individual is plotted based on proportions of each element, not neat little separate boxes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I genuinely don't see why I should.

I am not trying to be a crap-stirrer here. I genuinely don't see why I should agree to disagree, when I've seen cited page/post after cited page/post indicating this. Whole reams of threads about "Free Kriegsspiel" and how games would be better if players never actually saw any rules at all, and always just directly spoke to the DM and said what they're attempting. Page after page after page on "invisible rulebooks" and how super-amazing-wonderful they are because they let us get rid of rules entirely.

I know no other interpretation of this than seeing rules as nasty bad things to be destroyed. If the OSR overall is such a proponent of rules being good and useful things, where were such folks in those FKR threads? In the many conversations where people talked about how rules minimalism is always better no matter what?

I'm not talking about a culture and what they might write about online. I'm talking about the rulebooks that form the basis for their play. That's matters (to me, at least) a heck of a lot more.