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

[hawkeyefan]

What you seem to see as constraints I see as freeing me when I'm a player to focus on my character. It's not a constraint to have a different role. It's a differentiation of responsibility that makes the game more enjoyable.

I might as well ask you why you feel like interacting with the world through my character is a constraint? Are we as mere humans constrained?

Yes, of course we are.

Constraints are just limitations. A player’s authority in an RPG is limited. How it is limited may vary from game to game, and you may be perfectly happy with how your preferred game handles this, but that doesn’t mean that you as a player are not constrained.

Those constraints are there to make the game function. The constraints is where skill comes into play. For instance, as a player in a very standard game of D&D, if my character is in trouble in some way, I can’t just narrate that an army marches over the hill and rescues me. No… I’m limited by my character’s abilities and my ability as a player to put those to use. I’m constrained by them.

 

[Campbell]

I'll have more in the morning, but I do not endorse the idea that lore/setting is story or that all GMs are storytellers.

 

[Faolyn]

Right. Let me give an example: I had a 5e character, way back when 5e was brand new. The game was set in my sister's pre-existing game world, which has a ton of lore and lots of games played in it. So, I pick Dwarf, Wizard, Transmuter, and Folk Hero. So I'm not trying to be especially profound in my characterization, I just figure he's tired of all the BS associated with being a little guy and he wants to play in the big leagues.

So, we go out on the frontier, turns out we're doing some loose version of Phandelver, which is itself reasonably location-based kind of AP-esque 'there are a few routes but they all basically lead to the same place'. But along the way Azardel kicks the ass of the Boss Hobgoblin in personal combat (good trick for a wizard, but as a Mountain Dwarf he's actually got a battleaxe and chain armor he can wear).

He decides he's going to take over the castle, and rebuild it, call all his dwarf buddies that he's a folk hero to down to live in it, and develop a trade route. Yeah, I guess that either A) doesn't mesh with whatever the DM wanted to do, and/or B) doesn't seem 'plausible'. Well, I did it, and got some reasonable problems and whatnot to solve, for a time. Had to kiss the arses of the neighbors, kill of a few monsters, build a bunch of stuff, and somehow come up with enough cash and retainers to make it work.

So, once I was dragged off on an adventure related to the other characters, that was that, it was decreed that my henchmen, acting with monumental foolishness, released a terrible monster which immediately took over all my stuff and undid all of that work.

Now, that MIGHT happen in a kind of narrativist fashion, but all of the above just illustrates many of the flaws with plausible and logical, and the many foibles of trad play in general. Also, I want to be clear, it wasn't BAD play in its own right, it was just a certain kind of play that is very distinct from what is found in games like BitD.

I’m not really certain that “henchmen released a monster” counts as plausible or logical, unless that was a previously established possibility. It sounds more like an excuse to have travelogue adventures rather than single location-based adventures.

 

[Faolyn]

Ok. Let's walk through this.

Who created the caravan route?

Who creates the caravans that ply this route?

Who created the bandits on this route?

Who decided that the bandits are attacking caravans on this route?

EVERY single element is created by the DM. Plot, setting and character. Every single element. Now, where this is a sandbox is that the players have the choice to interact with this particular story or not. They could choose to walk away. What makes it non-linear (which is different from sandbox) is that the players can choose how they interact with the bandits. They could choose to oppose them, join them, or perhaps something else entirely.

But, again, at no point in this is the DM not the story teller here. When the players inform the DM how they choose to interact, the DM then authors the next chapter - how do the bandits react to whatever it is the players chose to do? That's 100% defined by the DM. And that choice will always be colored by the fact that we're playing a game and the DM will want to make the game interesting. It would be an extremely rare DM who would decide that the bandits just leave quietly because the PC's show up and ask them to after all. So, the DM brings the challenge based on whatever the players decide that their goals are. That's what DM's are supposed to do. Players then react to that challenge and the DM creates the next challenge. So on and so forth.

Your insistence on a "random encounter" is a red herring. It doesn't matter how the story is brought to the table.

So what do you propose the best thing to do is? The players create all encounters?

 

[Micah Sweet]

It is not just that.

I'm sure you've heard the phrase "limitation breeds creativity". I don't personally think the pithy version is actually correct--it needs one extra word. "Good limitations breed creativity." There are good limitations and bad ones. As an example, forcing a DM to run the game with total sound-cancelling earphones on is a limitation, but not one that leads to creativity.

On the other hand, things which specify pathways of response can be exactly that. Like how, for a famous example, the original Silent Hill video game got its absolutely iconic "thick fog" horror feel. Originally, in development, there was no fog--but that meant you could see the incredibly short rendering distance of the original PlayStation. They added the fog because it both solved that problem, and heightened the horror of the experience, leaving you always second-guessing whether you were truly safe. A similar thing happened on another PS1 classic, Medal of Honor, which exploited sound rather than visuals to imply a richer world than the game could actually display. Woven into the sound are dog barks, gunshots, and soldier voices in medium distance. You can never tell for 100% certain whether those are actual dogs or guns or soldiers, or just diegetic sound to make you think there's more going on. This allows them to get away with a non-overwhelming number of enemies, keeping the pacing up and the proper feel of the combat flow, without letting the player totally relax in the confidence that they know exactly where every enemy is.

So it isn't just "that it benefits me because it's what I want to do". Rules that bind GM behavior can, in fact, actually be useful to play. They can heighten the experience for the players in various ways, and they can push the GM to be more creative, not less, if they are properly designed.

Because, as I said above, SOME limitations do not actually enhance creativity and I'll be the first to bat for that. (I've said as much in many previous threads.) But well-constructed limitations do in fact foster and encourage creativity. This is one (of several) reasons why Dungeon World and other PbtA games discourage merely exploratory rewriting of their core rules without testing. The rules really have been very, very carefully thought out, designed, and rigorously tested. Changing them is a big deal and is much more liable to cause problems rather than solving them.

(Note that this is not the same as writing new player-facing moves you feel like writing--that's not only fine, the book explicitly talks about ways to do it and gives examples of well-constructed moves, poorly-constructed moves, how to turn the latter into the former, and IIRC some of their own experiences with flawed constructions they replaced with better versions. Further, it's not about writing DM-facing moves for monsters and locations. You're explicitly supposed to do that. This is about fundamentally rewriting important parts of the game itself, like the Agendas, Principles, rolling mechanic, or baseline moves like Defy Danger or Discern Realities.)

That is, to be fair, another reason why these exquisitely designed games generally don't appeal to me. For me, the RPG experience don't feel right without some potential for DIY. I don't want to have to follow some specific rules to get a precise experience. I want to be able to tailor my game to suit my needs.

 

[AnotherGuy]

What you may not know is that the same problem exists in boffer LARPs like NERO.

Hey I meant to ask you this before - as you've used this term in replies to me.
What is a boffer LARP? I know what a LARP is, I'm just not familiar with the term boffer LARP.

 

[SableWyvern]

Hey I meant to ask you this before - as you've used this term in replies to me.
What is a boffer LARP? I know what a LARP is, I'm just not familiar with the term boffer LARP.

As opposed to hanging out inside, gossiping and plotting.

I believe "boffer" refers specifically to the padded weapons.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And we're lucky you're here to let huge swathes of people in the hobby know they're wrong.

All you're doing is overtly attacking the way other people play because you don't understand it, and then complaining that you don't like the way the people you're attacking defend themselves.

Okay. What is incorrect about the claim?

Because this was a lot of words to say "Nuh-uh" without actually responding in any way.

From where I'm sitting, there's nothing incorrect about Hussar's claim. If one person has full control over 99.9% of everything...where can anything emerge? Sure, to the players things "emerge", but that emergence is them being allowed to see something taken out of the black box. It's not "emerging" from anything but the notes they aren't allowed to see.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That is, to be fair, another reason why these exquisitely designed games generally don't appeal to me. For me, the RPG experience don't feel right without some potential for DIY. I don't want to have to follow some specific rules to get a precise experience. I want to be able to tailor my game to suit my needs.

I literally said there WAS "some potential for DIY".

It's just not "some potential for DIY in the foundational core".

This is like saying that you can't program anything at all, ever, while using a Windows machine, and that the ONLY way to be able to be a TRUE programmer is if you're writing binary directly. Just because you use a graphical OS, doesn't mean you aren't a programmer.

Are you genuinely going to say that the only way you can have any meaningful DIY potential in a game is if you can literally rip out the most fundamental rules and replace them entirely? Because--if I were a betting man, which I am not--I'd (almost) be willing to bet good money you don't actually want to rip out, say, the fundamental idea of using d20s from D&D, and don't consider the ability to do that necessary for being able to have "some potential for DIY" when playing D&D.

 

[pemerton]

I see no need to restrict the actions of the GM in order to play that game. If there are things you could do that aren't in keeping with your chosen playstyle, just...don't do them.

Your answer reads to me as: it benefits me because it's what I want to do. For someone insisting on more and more specific analysis, this seems remarkably circular.

I refer you to my dozens of other posts in this thread, which spell out in great detail the process of play for Burning Wheel, Torchbearer and Prince Valiant, and also say a bit about my preferred approach to Classic Traveller.

Here's just one example: in GMing Torchbearer, I'm more interested in experiencing my friends' presentation of what it means to be Elven and Dwarven, and of how Elves and Dwarves relate to one another, than in presenting them with setting lore about Elves and Dwarves.

Can't you experience a fiction through the actions of the players? I mean, you don't control what they do.

What sort of fiction do you have in mind? If the GM is the author of all the "lore", decides everything that is at stake, etc, what are the players contributing via their action declarations? In my experience, it tends to end up being pretty operational, "problem-solving" stuff.