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

They're not mutually exclusive. There are certainly people trying to cash in on the popularity of the system, but there's also those who find it adaptable enough.
The proof is in the pudding. If the system genuinely is adaptable enough, then the games would have survived.

And they didn't.
What is it with people shifting goalposts?
Why so unserious? I mean honestly, you're crying "moving goalposts" because people are connecting, correctly and rationally, the quality of games and their long-term success?

d20 was a flash in the pan because it produced a glut of absolute rubbish, which used the system but in clumsy ways that didn't benefit from it, and thus they didn't survive.
 

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More shifting goalposts. I never said anything about success, just that the core is adaptable.
If you can't see that those two things are interconnect, the failing is on you, and the idea that this is "moving goalposts" rather than legitimate discussion is special pleading of the very worst kind.
D20 Modern (and it's spiritual successor, Everyday Heroes)?
Star Wars d20?
Stargate SG-1/Spycraft?
Given Pathfinder 1e is basically D&D3.75, that and Starfinder?
None of these survived long except PF1, which wasn't a d20 game and didn't use the d20STL, and occurred many years later. It's straightforwardly used the OGL and SRD to clone 3.5E and modify it slightly to steal a march on the divisive 4E D&D.
 



It's fallacious. Quality is not always an indicator of success. If it was, betamax would have won against VHS, Android would be more popular than iOS, and neither Michael Bay or Zack Snyder would have a career.
Oh my god. Really? Come on. Even you don't believe this is a legit response to the mass failure of d20 products and the huge damage it did to the RPG industry.

Also, sorry, no re: Android vs iPhone. The entire reason iPhone got such a massive install base and customer loyalty was that for a very long time it was straightforwardly better than Android, and I say that as someone who prefers Android. Sure, it's difficult to move people off an OS when they're used to it, because it's so important to day-to-day stuff to be able to use it quickly.
 

The proof is in the pudding. If the system genuinely is adaptable enough, then the games would have survived.

And they didn't.

Why so unserious? I mean honestly, you're crying "moving goalposts" because people are connecting, correctly and rationally, the quality of games and their long-term success?

d20 was a flash in the pan because it produced a glut of absolute rubbish, which used the system but in clumsy ways that didn't benefit from it, and thus they didn't survive.
How long do they have to survive to count? I know several d20 games with a lot of supplements.
 

How long do they have to survive to count? I know several d20 games with a lot of supplements.
Personally? I'd say they probably still need to be around, because plenty of RPGs from the 1980s are!

But being generous I'd say sometime north of 2008-2010 they needed to still be legit publishing stuff (not just low-page-count adventures). M&M easily makes that bar, no worries. But most of them fail it.
 

What would happen if the PCs decided to go somewhere else and not attempt to enter the tower and confront those rough individuals?

If the game’s over, that’s a railroad. Even if the players agreed to it ahead of time.
This takes us back to an earlier conversation.

I can tell you how all this occurred.

It was early 2022. Me and my friends with whom I play RPGs had met at R's house - this was the first time we'd all met in person for quite a while, given the intensity and duration of pandemic lockdowns in Melbourne. My TB2e books had fairly recently arrived following the Kickstarter, and I had brought them along hoping to play some Torchbearer. So while R cooked food on the barbecue, I talked others through the system, a bit at a time, and thus persuaded everyone to have a try of the game. I talked everyone through PC build, and they built their PCs:
The four PCs were:

Korvin, 21 year old human skald - from Fayan's Way, a prosperous wayhouse on the Urnst side of the river between that land and the Bandit Kingdoms. A skirmish-wise, pragmatic loner, he's a bit of an all-rounder: talking, fighting (with a sword), scholarship, criminal, riding and hunting. His raiment is a night-black cloak. His enemy is a bandit lord. He never tells the truth, and believes in following the clues to hunt down the wicked.

Telemere, 71 year old Elven ranger - from Elfhome in the Fellreev Forest. A stars-wise, calm loner, his enemy is his brother Kalamere who stole his place in a boat to the west. He believes that one should see things through to the end; and when he enters somewhere new, he checks to see if he is being watched. A pathfinder, cartographer, scout, survivalist, healer and archer, his raiment is the traditional Elven greycloak.

Fea-bella, 69 year old Elven dreamwalker - from the tower of the wizard Jobe on the edge of the Bluff Hills, not far from Elfhome. A hills-wise and herbs-wise scholar, healer and Elven enchanter, she believes that one should delve deeply, for knowledge holds the power to change the world. Her instinct is to read every word. Her mother Fella is a scholar, she was mentored by Vaccin (a 7th level Dreamwalker) before Vaccin was betrayed by her enemy Megloss, the elder apprentice of Jobe who set fire to the tower. Her friend is an adventuring Elven ranger whom she last saw riding his steed in the Fellreev. Her raiment is a forest-green cloak.

Golin, 43 year old Dwarven outcast - from a forgotten temple complex just inside The Pale. He is cynical and explosives-wise, and believes that explosive solutions are good solutions; he always looks for weak points in structures and mechanisms. As well as fighting, orating and Dwarf-y stuff, he is the group's cook. He carries a huge maul. His friend Vaxen (who may be the same personage as Vaccin?) is an alchemist from Jobe's tower; his mentor Grantham is a 7th level outcast; and his enemy is also called Golin, and cheated on the exams to get the best apprentice position. He is an orphan (or, at least, has repudiated his parents) and in memory of them wears an armoured glove worth 1D. He also wears galoshes as his raiment.
As you can infer from that account of the PCs, when the players chose their PC's home towns, we talked about where these were located on the NE part of the Greyhawk map that I had pulled out - for instance, the Wizard's Tower was in the Bluff Hills, and the Forgotten Temple Complex adjacent to the Troll Fens and the Griff Mountains.

Having done all that - established PCs, backstory, some basic geography - I then described the situation, as per my post to which you replied:
I had already decided on my way to the session to use the Tower of Stars as my scenario, but also - inspired by my Darkwood Forest experience - to open with a bandit encounter if any of the players built a talk-y PC. So when one built a skald, that settled that!

In the introductions phase we established that the PCs had met on the road, although Fea-bella and Telemere had once met in the Elfhome, while she and Golin had met at Jobe's tower. I read out the scenario backstory, and the players chose goals (Korvin: discover the truth about the Beholder of Fates; Telemere: discover if my brother came through here; Fea-bella: raid the tower for the secrets of the stars; Golin: raid the tower for its laboratory ingredients). Then I described the approach to the tower, where the PCs could see four rough-looking individuals sitting at the base of the basalt-scree slope up to the tower, one of them bandaging the feet of another.
You can see how the goals chosen by the players for their PCs connect to the scenario backstory that I read out, and also in some cases to PC backstories - eg Telemere is looking for clues about his brother; Golin is looking for ingredients for explosives.

With all that established, if at the point of narrating the approach to the tower, and the rough-looking individuals, the players had indicated that they weren't interested in the game, or weren't interested in the setting, or weren't interested in the scenario I'd presented, (1) that would have been pretty weird, given the time and effort spent so far (over an hour, from memory), and (2) that would have required a conversation about what to do instead.

To make it more concrete: what sort of anti-social weirdo lets the GM read out the scenario backstory, and then chooses a goal for their PC related to that backstory, and then - once the GM frames the first scene - says "Oh, actually I want a different scenario?" As I posted upthread, that would be weirdly dysfunctional.
 

There are a number of trad sandboxers in this thread who have stated they see a lot of similarities between what they do and the principles outlined in Blades in the Dark. This has gained a reasonable amount of pushback from the strongly narrativist clique.

Specifically, I stated that I found Play to Find Out, as described in Blades, to be philosophically very similar to the general concept of emergent story and general concepts I've adhered to for quite some time. This resulted in numerous people strongly and moderately aligned with narrativism to rush to tell me these things are completely different. Someone, possibly @Hussar, went so far as to tell me emergent story isn't even possible in the games I run.

A short while ago, I commented that the way @pemerton describes scene framing sounds very similar to the way I view setting development. Pemerton promptly replied to assure me that these two things are completely different and I'm wrong to see them as at all similar.
So here's what I actually posted:
For what it's worth, I think setting creation and scene framing are pretty different things.

For instance, setting creation is normally regarded as a type of prep. Whereas framing a scene is a component of actual play at the table.
Do you disagree with that?
 

Personally? I'd say they probably still need to be around, because plenty of RPGs from the 1980s are!

But being generous I'd say sometime north of 2008-2010 they needed to still be legit publishing stuff (not just low-page-count adventures). M&M easily makes that bar, no worries. But most of them fail it.
Does a game still count as "surviving" if the setting remains the same but the system changes? Take L5R. It had a bespoke d10-based system for its first two editions, then switched to d20 for a while when WotC bought the IP (including a long stint where both systems were active) before AEG bought it back, switching back to the d10 system (with updates of course) for its third and fourth editions. Now the most recent edition uses a completely different mechanical system (and a somewhat changed setting) along with the new IP owner. And there's a D&D 5e version as well. So does L5R "survive"?
 

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