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

[thefutilist]

I appreciate the relationship example and that you want to talk about character, I not sure how it addresses any of the questions I raised in the portion of my post you quoted. Those questions weren’t about outcomes in general or about theme arising from character interaction, they were about the procedural differences in how the game is run, including resolution mechanics, the use of clocks and timelines, and the role of referee adjudication.

What I’m asking for is engagement with those distinctions as system and method, not as tone or emphasis. If the claim is that our approaches are “not really different,” then those differences need to be addressed directly.

Taking your narrative example as a separate topic. I am going to attach the Golden House section from my Scourge of the Demon Wolf adventure.

In a normal weekly campaign, I would something about a fifth of the detail if it was the focus of the campaign. For example, me running a solo campaign for a player. So I would have the player make a character and either sub him in as one of the conclave's inhabitants. Or in the case of the character below an outsider who been invited to stay.


We would do a pre-game and the result would be a background like this. Note the background is worked out between us.

Marcellus of Alecto
Race: Human
Class: Mage of the Order of Thoth (4th level)
Age: 32

Background for Marcellus of Alecto
You were born in the city of Alecto, a modest port in the southern foothills of the Majestic Mountains, and showed talent in the arcane arts from a young age. At twelve, you were accepted as an apprentice into the Conclave of Cisora near Modron, a bastion of the Meditus Society known for diplomacy, negotiation, and keeping the Order of Thoth in balance with kings and clergy.

You rose steadily. By the age of twenty-five, you were drafting letters between conclaves, assisting in conferences with church envoys, and developing a reputation for calm competence. Then came the Baron's War on the borderlands, a dispute you were assigned to mediate. You failed. Or perhaps, more accurately, you couldn’t prevent the inevitable. The massacre that followed, over two hundred dead, left a mark on your reputation and your conscience.

Afterward, you requested a sabbatical, citing exhaustion. Your petition was approved, and Knifeada, a fellow Meditus mage whom you once aided during a mission in the Majestic Mountains, arranged for you to take residence as a guest scholar at the Golden House.

You have now lived at the Golden House for several months. Knifeada has vouched for you, giving you access to the Meditus correspondence, Swarton’s archives, and the lower library. You are not a full member of the conclave, but you wear the sigil of the Meditus Society with Knifeada’s personal mark, enough to open most doors and cause others to tread lightly.

Still, it is not a peaceful retirement.

For now, you read. You listen. You offer counsel. You join Knifeada for lunch, and from time to time you find yourself drawn into conversations in the library or the outer study. You’re rebuilding yourself slowly, discreetly.

But you can feel it: the Golden House is not a tranquil place. There are old rivalries, hidden ambitions, and something that festers beneath the surface.

Whether you stay, whether you leave, whether you act, that is for you to decide.

And perhaps, this time, you’ll do better.

---

Then we would start out the first session with something like this.

Me: Charles OK you are now settled in at the Golden House. It is May 1st and you are joined at breakfast by Knifeada. During breakfast she turns to you.

Knifeada (Me): Marcellus Good morning!

Marcellus (Charles): Good morning, Knifeada. You’re up early—have the scrolls started whispering again, or is it just the smell of the cook's bread?

Knifeada: I was up late getting reading for the expedition with Vainvid, I wanted to sleep in but today's is the last day of preparation before heading with Vainvid

Marcellus (Charles lowers his voice slightly):
I had a feeling that was coming soon. Are you expecting a quiet trek or something more... instructive? I can still recall our last “routine survey”—you, me, and that griffon’s nest that wasn’t supposed to exist.

Rob's Note: the griffon's nest is something that Charles improvised. Similar to what went on with Adam and Brendan.

Knifeada: Yeah, that was a mess, but Vainvid got hold of Crandell's Treatise on the wildlife of the Cloudwalls. He thinks that the area where the second ley line goes through is not as dangerous, so we are going to check there for the viz source.

Rob's Note: I accept the improvisation

Marcellus: Second ley line? You’re referring to the shallow convergence that runs south of the Bone Spires, right? I remember Eckart always said it was too diffuse to be worth the trouble. But if Vainvid’s right... that would place the viz spring near the old bear trails.
(Charles pauses, tapping a finger on the table)
You want me to keep an eye on anything while you're gone? I’ve noticed Swarton seems unusually preoccupied lately.

Rob's Notes: Another improvised detail. Note among my experienced players this will happen a lot at the start of the campaign but fade away as the campaign as by then the players would have built a social web complex enough that there is little need to flesh thing out further. But it doesn't entirely disappear.

If the player tries to improvise something that contradicts something they don't know about then I would take a break and quickly work out a new set of details with them. Maybe I already have an adventure locale prepared, it is not the bone spire but Raven's Crag. If I can work it in-game as a correction of the character's memory, I will do that as much as possible.

Knifeada: No you got it mixed up with Raven's Claw. But it is the one south of it. But with Vainvid's knowing how to steer clear of any local lairs, I should have the time to zero in on a source of viz. As for Master Swarton, he came to me last night and told me to put you on indexing and summarizing his latest batch of correspondence. Also, to make it more fun, he is having you do some of Grandmaster Master Witely's papers. He expects you in his office after breakfast.

Marcellus (Charles groans softly, but with a dry smile):
Ah, yes, Swarton’s idea of amusement. Indexing his letters is like decoding politics written in three dialects and a grudge. Adding Witely’s? That’s just cruelty with structure.
(Charles pauses, then adds with a shrug)
Still, better than copying safety procedures for Dwarlard again. I’ll stop by after I see you off, then. If anything important crosses my desk, I’ll be sure to note it in a way that looks boring enough for no one else to read.

Knifeada: OK, while I am done here, I'll catch you before the end of the day in case you have any questions. See you later

Me: OK Charles what do you do?

---

Then we will proceed from there, playing out the day. Prior to this, I would have a rough timeline for the next couple of weeks of in-game and let it play out as Charles as Marcellus interacts with the various NPCs. For example, Arbela's attempts at summoning a demon result in missing ritual components, and her taking an interest in summoning magic. Two apprentices get blamed for the missing ritual components by Fondvette, who loses her temper, causing discontent. Then there is Knifeada's expedition to the Cloudwalls. After each session, I would alter my notes in light of what Charles did as Marcellus. Using what I talked about earlier about outcomes and consquences.

And much of this, like the above, would play out in first-person roleplaying, similar to how it would play out verbally at a LARP.

Oh I think our styles are fundamentally different, I was just pointing to some similarities. I'll dig in a bit deeper with a somewhat contrived example. Contrived because I'm simplifying it a fair bit.

So this would be session two or three of Apocalypse World:


The player characters are:

Nils: A genius scientist

October: A psychic stripper

Midnight: A sexy assassin


The situation is as follows:

The PC's live in a holding (think post Apocalypse town) called the Cancer Pit, ruled over by a guy call Causes Cancer. Their holding has barricades and fortifications and a large gang again ruled by Causes.

Super Maximum is the leader of a large heavily armed gang and a religious zealot. He wants to take over the Cancer Pit and add it to the holdings he controls.

The situation was stable because if Super Maximum tried to attack, both gangs are equally matched and they'd just massacre each other.


My prep before the session:

There was a disease in the Cancer Pit that was making people sick, it caused huge purple blisters filled with little squirming insect things, to appear on the skin. It could kill you or at least take you out of action for a long time. Fortunately the cancer pit has a Doctor who has it under control.

As GM I decide that this has changed (I decide this because there are no status quo situations according to the rules so I have to come up with something. I decide the Doctor has joined the Super Maximum cult and will stop treating sick people until the holding is given over to Super Maximus IF I knew more about the Doctors personality I might not do this but I don't and so I do.


So I write a clock to plan out what happens:

The Doctor stops treatment until his demands are met

Cancer refuses to submit

The fighting population gets reduced by the disease

Super Maximus attacks and takes the holding



HOW THE SESSION PLAYS OUT

I'll talk a bit about how my decision making process works.


Inter scene (IS) discussion between scenes. I want the players to know about the doctor problem and so I ask them who was the first to hear about it. October is the most social character so she says it's her. I ask what she's going to do and she's going to find Midnight. That's a scene I want to see so I ask Midnight where she's found and then we start the scene:

Scene: Midnight and October talk and Midnight persuades October she should talk with the Doctor and persuade him to carry on treating the sick.

IS: I might go and check on Nils and what they're up to but maybe not, here I go straight to the Doctor and Midnight.

Scene: Midnight threatens to flay the Doctors hand if he doesn't carry on treating the sick. We roll some dice. She ends up flaying his hand but he still refuses to treat them. She says she'll blow his head off if he doesn't treat them. We roll some dice. She blows his head off.

The Doctor is a zealot and I've decided he's almost certainly not going to treat anyone but you never know. As it turns out Midnight wasn't particularly convincing and went straight to threats.

IS: So I think about the ramifications of this. Without the Doctor the plague will spread and reduce the number of fighting people in the gang. Same as the clock says will happen if the Doctor refuses to treat them. I don't know how long it's going to take for that to happen and I remind myself to make it a dramatic amount of time dependant upon player actions (thinking about drama rather than 'what would happen.' Now I want to see October and Nils reaction so I just frame them together in a scene, I ask where they are when Midnight finds them.

Scene: Midnight tells the others the Doctor won't help them. Nils tells Midnight she's a psycho and one day he's going to have to kill her. Nils wants to find out what he can do about the Plague given he's a genius scientist.

Scene: Nils investigates and thinks. This is where drama rather than plausibility kicks in. I have no idea what it will take to stop the plague but in the rules it does say that the Scientist can do medical stuff if he has a medical station. He doesn't have one and so I have to think about where one might be. I decide it's in the heart of the ruined city, ruled over by the mutants. Also Nils has to make a roll, he fails and so in the course of investigating he gets the plague himself.

IS: The gang decide to go on a mission to get the kit needed. I also think about the time needed for the Plague to reduce the gang size of the cancer pit. Again I go for drama. If they manage to get the med stuff from the ruined city they'll have time. If not then almost certainly not.

Scene(s): The gang go into the ruined city and fail to get the med-kit. They get out with their lives but they're in a bad position.

IS: Nils is dying of the plague and so the players ask what can be done? I'm thinking of plausibility here. Given what I know of Super Maximum, he would almost certainly have doctors capable of curing it. I tell the players that and this changes things for them. They both value Nils life over Cancers rule of the holding so they decide Cancer has to go. October is going to talk with him.

Scene: October sleeps with and then talks with Cancer. This is a pure IC conversation and at the end of it Cancer decides to step down and give control of the holding over to Maximus.

Scene: Maximus gang rolls into the Cancer Pit.


THOUGHTS

You can see how there are a load of other ways this could of gone depending on the player decisions and dice rolls. What if October had gone to see the Doctor? What if Nils hadn't got the Plague? What if the Mission to get the med-kit had been successful? And loads more.

So although there are broad similarities there are loads of differences in process. You'll note that the RESOLUTION of stuff isn't based on what's dramatic but when I need to know more stuff, like the med-kit, then I create dramatic stuff that can go either way depending on the players.

 

[hawkeyefan]

See my comment about constantly being lumped in with the more narrative group just because I share a couple positions with them. The last four games I've run have been 13th Age, BASH Ultimate Edition, Fragged Empire and Mythras; the next one will be Eclipse Phase 2e. If you ignored the combat elements of the game (which are a big part of it) you could perhaps call the remainder of 13th Age "narrative focused" but even that I think would be a stretch in some ways, and I can't see how it describes any of the other four.

The desire of people to draw lines in the sand and firmly put people on one or the other side is tiresome.

I mean… the fact that I actively run and play more trad oriented games as well as narrativist ones tends to be ignored because how could I possibly have the opinions I do if I still enjoy trad games.

A lot of it comes down to peoples’ ideas about their identity and so a criticism of a game or a style is perceived as personal in a way that it should not be.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm honestly still pretty fuzzy as to what benefit is received from adding additional constraints to the GM. Why would you want restrictions on what you can do running the game?

Oh, well, it's a good question!

So, look at the constraints that Dungeon World establishes. I don't have the text in front of me, but the first thing it does is clearly establish what we are playing, and why. This is key, and is the first 'layer' of defining the roles and structure. Now we know what the game is about, so we have at least one way to evaluate play, does it match with this definition. And let me be clear, while the definition is high level it is concrete and actionable.

Secondly DW clearly defined the core process of play, a conversation. It then defines the core rule structure and responsibilities of play, authority, etc. This is all done in the first few sections of the rules. We learn about moves, the dice, and who makes what decisions.

Later, in the GM part of the rules, this stuff is fleshed out and elaborated. The GM's agenda, principles, and techniques are listed and explained. The GM is expected to take these seriously and use them. They're not exclusive however, and don't dictate how to act in every situation. But you can always use one of the techniques, and should not violate the principles.

Finally DW provides very concrete GM tools, moves that embody the techniques, maps, fronts, steadings, monsters, and a bunch of other stuff. All very clearly and succinctly described, and all highly suited to playing as intended.

Of course you can do what you want. People hack D&D in all sorts of ways, but DW works extremely well as presented. IME when you violate the constraints, play suffers.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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?

Ones that require less judgment calls, which is primarily what I've been talking about from the start. Alternatively, one where the players inputs are taken when the call is made, and actually paid attention to (as in "if four of my six players think it should instead be done X way instead of Y way, then we do it X way") and not blown off on the grounds of speed. I think those work better in combination (the latter still can leave a player expecting one thing and getting another), but either helps.

Basically, my view is that a lot of games require more ad-hoc decision making than is necessary, and having it set up so that's less common is a virtue.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You know, it's funny because I think I usually get the opposite branding, despite being about as allergic to "rulings" conceptually as you can be. I was reading a blog a while back that made a compelling argument that my particular class of player is pretty much gone in the TTRPG space, as board games have exploded and gotten to be bigger experiences. I think I buy there's not a lot of space left over once you're rounding up from Gloomhaven, and I'm in a narrow, narrow slice.

Well, I lean into the game end a fair bit too, its just a bit more admixed in my case than I get the impression is the case with you. I suspect our other common ground is that we don't think the game element is there to just not be an impediment.

 

[AlViking]

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.

The distance you can jump without fail is clearly spelled out in 5e.

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.

What you see as a weakness I see as a strength. I like that I can have a pit that's 20 feet across and let the character know that even if they don't have a 20 strength they can still jump across. It may be risky but I'll let them know in general how likely success is.

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.

We obviously have different preferences, I don't see both players and GM's restricted to concrete rules as a good thing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

There are people who would argue just what you say about at least the latter end, and there would have been people who'd have argued both before they were common. As long as you don't think there's any virtue to it and find it icky, you're going to keep reacting to me this way on this, and I don't see any likely way to change your mind.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Yeah, but this problem predates Edwards; all that's changed is how people categorized each other. It just used to be the Wargamers versus the Theater Kids.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oh, well, it's a good question!

So, look at the constraints that Dungeon World establishes. I don't have the text in front of me, but the first thing it does is clearly establish what we are playing, and why. This is key, and is the first 'layer' of defining the roles and structure. Now we know what the game is about, so we have at least one way to evaluate play, does it match with this definition. And let me be clear, while the definition is high level it is concrete and actionable.

Secondly DW clearly defined the core process of play, a conversation. It then defines the core rule structure and responsibilities of play, authority, etc. This is all done in the first few sections of the rules. We learn about moves, the dice, and who makes what decisions.

Later, in the GM part of the rules, this stuff is fleshed out and elaborated. The GM's agenda, principles, and techniques are listed and explained. The GM is expected to take these seriously and use them. They're not exclusive however, and don't dictate how to act in every situation. But you can always use one of the techniques, and should not violate the principles.

Finally DW provides very concrete GM tools, moves that embody the techniques, maps, fronts, steadings, monsters, and a bunch of other stuff. All very clearly and succinctly described, and all highly suited to playing as intended.

Of course you can do what you want. People hack D&D in all sorts of ways, but DW works extremely well as presented. IME when you violate the constraints, play suffers.

Thank you. This tells me that the kind of GM restrictions you are advocating work best with very curated systems designed to do one specific kind of gaming. That makes sense, and explains one reason why Narrativist games (and some other non-traditional games) don't appeal to me. I don't want the mechanics to force a style of play. I'd rather have an explanation of play intent, but a loose hand on enforcing it mechanically so the game can be adjusted for the preferences of the GM and players.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There are people who would argue just what you say about at least the latter end, and there would have been people who'd have argued both before they were common. As long as you don't think there's any virtue to it and find it icky, you're going to keep reacting to me this way on this, and I don't see any likely way to change your mind.

You're right. Ultimately I do find these kinds of GM restrictions "icky". They are unpleasant to me.

Happy gaming!