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

[pawsplay]

Note: I DO NOT MEAN POLITICAL CONSERVATISM. This is not a thread about politics.

I mean "conservatism" as in resistance to change. You see it all the time -- people complaining about the new art or aesthetics, literally saying things like "if they used the old art I would be in." It is so mind boggling to me.

D&D is a living game. OF COURSE the new books etc are going to adapt to the new market. If you literally won't play a newer version because tieflings or whatever, then it isn't for you. Don't demand it regress to the era you discovered D&D because that is what makes you feel good; play the version you discovered.

I don't liek every artistic or design choice either, but it isn't up to me to demand D&D coddle my unchanging preferences. If I want to re-experience BECMI (the edition I grew up with) I can just play that. And so can you.

/rant

D&D is about the aesthetics. There are plenty of other games out there worth playing. If it's D&D, I expect it to stick pretty closely to existing aesthetics and lore, or make a conscious break for specific reasons. "It's a new edition, who cares?" has always frustrated me.

 

[Maxperson]

Let me give a concrete example of what I mean. Let's say the PCs were framed for a crime (or possibly committed one, whichever you prefer). The plausible, but extremely boring, option A would be for them to wait for days or weeks in a jail they don't have the ability to break out of, until a judge finally arrives to hear their case. The slightly less plausible, but still fairly plausible, option B would be for the PCs' allies (who also oppose the tyrannical/oppressive laws of the land) to stage a prison breakout before that happens, both to help the PCs escape, and to have a little leverage over them ("we did break you out of jail...you could at least scratch our backs in return" kind of thing). A prison break specifically to help the PCs is simply, flatly, less plausible than the prison working as it has always worked. But it's also a hell of a lot more fun--and, importantly, still quite plausible, even if it is ever-so-slightly less plausible than the alternative.

If there is a GM here who would choose to make the players play through hours of "you can't escape from the jail cell, it was literally made to hold people like you, you just have to wait until the trial begins", rather than having a plausible-but-not-AS-plausible exciting prison-break sequence, I will gladly retract the criticism. But I'm fairly confident there isn't anyone here who would choose the maximally-plausible but terribly-boring option when a highly, but not maximally, plausible option exists that would be way more fun to play.

I think you are correct that no one here is going to make them play through hours of "you can't escape the jail cell." More likely, if the more plausible scenario of, "You can't escape, it will be weeks until trial" happens, the DM is going to quickly narrate the passage of time. It's just as realistic as playing it out for hours, but with 100% less boring.

How I would run such a scenario is this. If there is a slightly less, but still very plausible chance of allies staging a jail break, I will determine how likely that is. Since you've stated it's only slightly less than the very plausible, "you can't escape," I'd assign something like an 80% chance of them trying to stage the jailbreak.

I'd also ask the PCs what they are doing. Usually they will investigate the cell, the guards' habits and schedules, etc. and they might try to break out themselves, in which case there would be time involved in planning, roleplay, etc. and that might indeed take hours, but it's not going to be hours of sitting there staring at walls because they can't escape.

If I roll an 80 or less on the percentile dice, I will figure out how long until they show up to break the PCs out. If they show up before the PCs attempt to escape or the players have told me that they aren't attempting to escape, I'd call for a perception check to see if the group wakes up when the allies first show up and try to signal them, or if they are sleeping deeply and it takes more time and effort to wake the group up, which comes with added risk of detection. Then we'd roleplay the attempted jailbreak and it would work or it wouldn't depending on how it all played out.

If they attempt to escape before the allies show up, all of that fun would happen and they would escape or not, and maybe get moved to a different cell, or who knows what else. If they don't escape, it could foil the jailbreak by accident.

If I roll an 81-00, the allies think it too risky to attempt a jailbreak. Now, there might be other factors that are in play as well. Perhaps the group is friends with the Sheriff and he comes to them one night and says something like, "I spoke with the Mayor and he has agreed to let you go, but you will have to leave town immediately and not return. I'm sorry my friends, it was all I could do." or something similar.

If nothing else is going to happen, though, and the players have decided to have the trial, I'm going to fast forward to the trial date and we will roleplay from there.

 

[Reynard]

D&D is about the aesthetics.

No.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Odin really needs to change it up a bit.

Yeah, I just went with something where there were obvious hints of there being more to the person.

The framing means the GM has thrust an encounter upon the party. They have some choice in how they resolve it, but the hard framing precludes bypassing being a possibility.

So no difference between a social encounter and a combat encounter, then?

What's "interesting" it that people feign shock and amazement and pretend not do understand plain English because we aren't using forge terminology.

Instead of assuming people are posting in bad faith, perhaps you should consider that sometimes wording or phrasing that makes sense to one person may not make sense to another?

Part of it, though, is the idea that once you have bypassed it, that encounter is no longer available. If it’s creatures, they’ve moved. If it’s a hazard of some sort, there’s generally no reason to risk it again. So there’s no more potential there.

Well, would that always be the case? If we use invisibility to sneak past the guards on the way in, that doean’t mean we can do so on the way out. They’d still be there and still be an obstacle… no?

Except there are. @pemerton even mentioned one in either BW or TB: the players seeing signs of orcs in a particular direction. I don’t think he had planned out orcs beforehand. Instead, he improvised it, as per the rules of that game. It’s what I referred to when I talked about the PbtA GM moves called Reveal Future Badness. If the GM for that game decides to drop hints about something bad ahead, and the players decide to not go that way but to go around in order to avoid that Future Badness, they’ve bypassed it.

Sure. I recently wrapped up a game of Stonetop, which is a variant of Dungeon World that casts the PCs as the champions of a quasi-iron age village. If I introduced the presence of dangerous creatures/people in the area, it would likely be as a soft move made on a 7-9 result. Most likely I’d combine it with something else… so there are the tracks, do you want to press on and risk running into whoever left them? Or do you want to avoid the tracks, knowing that will force you to make a wide berth and will add an entire day to the journey. How do you want to proceed?

They could take the long way and avoid the potential danger, or they could press on and try to save time. If they pressed on it could lead to danger of some sort. An encounter you’d call it. I may not.

You may not think of them in those terms, sure. I would, though, if only after the fact. The concepts are the same, however—if you had actually written the adventure out beforehand, you’d probably would have thought of those events as encounters.

Sure, but I think the idea of writing it out ahead of time is a rather important factor in how one seems to think of these things.

 

[pemerton]

I still have no idea what "In order to do something do it" means for example.

In Apocalypse World, ":if you do it, you do it" means that if a player has their PC do <this specified sort of thing> in the fiction then, at the table, <this move that is triggered by that sort of thing> *must * be rolled and resolved.

Another way to put it: when that sort of action is declared, the dice must be rolled. There is no negotiated/consensual resolution of those sorts of action declarations.

One thing that is pretty fundamental to the design of AW, or a similar game, is specify the sorts of things that trigger these moves. Because that will be one of the biggest shapers of how the game plays, where the key sites of conflict are, what capacity players have to achieve finality in resolution, etc.

 

[pemerton]

Asking people to explain is not refusing to accept.

It's interesting how such a simple question has evoked such a strong response.

I 1000% agree with this!

 

[AlViking]

In Apocalypse World, ":if you do it, you do it" means that if a player has their PC do <this specified sort of thing> in the fiction then, at the table, <this move that is triggered by that sort of thing> *must * be rolled and resolved.

Another way to put it: when that sort of action is declared, the dice must be rolled. There is no negotiated/consensual resolution of those sorts of action declarations.

One thing that is pretty fundamental to the design of AW, or a similar game, is specify the sorts of things that trigger these moves. Because that will be one of the biggest shapers of how the game plays, where the key sites of conflict are, what capacity players have to achieve finality in resolution, etc.

I appreciate the explanation. Still just a weird way to say "When actions are declared, always roll the dice" or whatever would make sense for the rules.

It's kind of lime saying "Wherever you go there you are." Also tru but doesn't really mean much.

 

[Faolyn]

Well, would that always be the case? If we use invisibility to sneak past the guards on the way in, that doean’t mean we can do so on the way out. They’d still be there and still be an obstacle… no?

Maybe, maybe not. The party might exit the area through a different way. The party might cause a ruckus which causes all the guards to be summoned to a particular area, leaving none at the original spot. If the guards are on patrol instead of protecting a specific location, they might not even be there the next time the party is there.

Sure, but I think the idea of writing it out ahead of time is a rather important factor in how one seems to think of these things.

Ok, so I have bunches of free time and I use some of it to write reviews of the zillions of games I have for my friends to read. I have nearly three hundred pages of them so far. I’m not going to say I’m a great reviewer or anything, but I will say that I’ve read a fair number of different RPGs at this point.

That being said, there are games I’ve read, or at least skimmed, that don’t have encounters, and they are nearly all very tightly focused in scope. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people would consider them to be RP exercises rather than games. You play as faeries or ghosts and humans have moved into the house you’ve claimed as your own; now deal with them. You play as heroes who are bragging about their exploits over drinks; what are those exploits? You play as dogs trying to bring comfort to your people who are sad; as dogs, you have no idea there’s an apocalypse occurring. (These are all games I actually own.) in short: with these games, you’re not encountering much of anything new because the game’s purpose is quite limited.

The games we’re talking about in this thread are not that kind of game. They’re games that can be described as adventure games. Your characters move around and doing things that are not dictated by the game’s concept, and that means encountering obstacles and threats which are nearly always placed there by the GM (or by a roll on a table, which may or may not have been created by the GM) either at that moment in time or before the game started, during a prep phase.

So basically, even if you don’t really think of them as encounters… they’re encounters.

 

[pemerton]

What's "interesting" it that people feign shock and amazement and pretend not do understand plain English because we aren't using forge terminology.

Here is what I posted:

The concept of bypassing an encounter is an interesting one.

Where does the encounter "exist", such that the players are able to have their PCs "bypass" it?

In most of the RPGing that I do, there are just events that occur in play. So we at the table experience those events, and in the fiction the PCs do whatever it is that they do. But there are no "proto-events" to be bypassed.

That's not "pretending not to understand plain English". It's initiating a conversation about a particular sort of approach to play.

 

[pemerton]

I appreciate the explanation. Still just a weird way to say "When actions are declared, always roll the dice" or whatever would make sense for the rules.

A significant audience for Apocalypse World, when it was written, were fans of Vincent Baker's earlier RPGs. The best-known of those was Dogs in the Vineyard, which uses the rule "say 'yes' or roll the dice".

So "If you do it, you do it" is explaining that AW uses a very different rule for when dice are rolled to that which is used in DitV.