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

[Umbran]

A bunch of other games have similar. Fate has mental stress, which you can take from social encounters, and in Fate Accelerated and Fate Condensed you just take regular stress.

The Dresden Files RPG is Fate-based, and it has Physical, Mental, and Social stress tracks.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, I think that is a perfectly cromulent answer. I'm personally more happy with just playing games that run on high transparency. And interestingly the same GM in my example also introduced me to Dungeon World. Honestly I find it odd that this forum seems so divisive.

There are a lot of people I think with little or no direct experience with the kinds of non-traditional games you prefer and, I suspect, not much interest in acquiring said experience once the explanations start flying.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Disagree. Types of encounters are divided into lists of cutely-named moves, for instance.

What?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think D&D is quite a bit more flexible in type of campaign than a lot of games. I'm not on a team doing a heist in a specific world, I'm not attempting to hold off the inevitable insanity that I know will eventually consume me, I'm not fighting against my bestial nature and so on. For the most part it's a D&D fantasy world but when you can go from Ravenloft to Darksun to Eberron to several other options the tone of the game can be quite different. There are some groups that go from one fight to the next with barely a breather, others that do RP for sessions on end, some that never require a roll for non-combat interactions some that require it for just about everything. That's what I mean by flexibility. It's flexibility of play experience using the same base core rules.

It's more general than some games, less than others.

Yeah, I have a very hard time believing any claim that D&D is less flexible than any given Narrativist game in terms of what you can do with the ruleset.

 

[Lanefan]

But when I run certain other games, the idea of Encounters as like discrete situations in play, with certain specific elements (locations, NPCs, environmental factors, etc.) just doesn’t occur to me. It seems significantly different in how situations are crafted in play that it makes more sense to think of them differently.

The sense I get is that some other games might call them "scenes" instead of encounters. Same thing, though, in the end.

 

[Lanefan]

I think D&D is quite a bit more flexible in type of campaign than a lot of games. I'm not on a team doing a heist in a specific world, I'm not attempting to hold off the inevitable insanity that I know will eventually consume me, I'm not fighting against my bestial nature and so on.

And yet without any real effort at all you can use D&D (at least, TSR-era D&D) for all of these things. That's what makes it so flexible.

For the most part it's a D&D fantasy world but when you can go from Ravenloft to Darksun to Eberron to several other options the tone of the game can be quite different. There are some groups that go from one fight to the next with barely a breather, others that do RP for sessions on end, some that never require a roll for non-combat interactions some that require it for just about everything. That's what I mean by flexibility. It's flexibility of play experience using the same base core rules.

Never mind that in the earlier editions the rules themselves were relatively easy to tweak to make the game more bespoke to what you wanted.

And it's light-years easier to learn a few tweaks to an already-known rules system than to learn a whole new system from scratch.

 

[Micah Sweet]

A bunch of other games have similar. Fate has mental stress, which you can take from social encounters, and in Fate Accelerated and Fate Condensed you just take regular stress. I believe you take stress from social encounters in Daggerheart as well, but I’ve only read through the book once. Lots of PbtA games do conditions instead of damage tracks, and many times those conditions are social in nature.

The question always comes to (for me): what happens when you run out of social hit points?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Yeah, I have a very hard time believing any claim that D&D is less flexible than any given Narrativist game in terms of what you can do with the ruleset.

Well yes... I have a hard time believing that living on any other planet would be better than Earth.

The sense I get is that some other games might call them "scenes" instead of encounters. Same thing, though, in the end.

They might. Which I would think, partisanship aside, most folks would say makes far more sense as a term. But they may call them something else. A superhero RPG may call game sessions "issues" and reference "pages" as smaller units. Or a game may not have any term for them.

But this is kind of the point... everyone insisting that Encounter is this intuitive and immediately understandable thing ACROSS ALL OF RPGs that will never ever cause confusion or clash in any way with a different approach... that's the issue.

 

[Lanefan]

The question always comes to (for me): what happens when you run out of social hit points?

They throw you out of the pub on your ear.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Lots of making prep seem bad around here, and I think that is a bit odd. Something to note when we are discussing the use of prep. A growing body of research shows that working memory, the memory used in improvisation, has limits. This is often referred to "working memory capacity" or WMC. This was given as the "magical number seven" in the 1950s.

There is the old myth that phone numbers are seven digits long, in the US, because of this limit. That isn't true, but most research puts this limit around seven numbers for an average person's working memory capacity. Onaverage a person can repeat back roughly 7 numbers they were given moments prior in an experiement. After that you see errors, with increasing frequency. With extensive training, you can short cut this, but there is always a limit.

So why does this matter? Well it means that there is a limit to your improv skill. Reseach shows us that as you approach this limit, under high cognitive load, your creativity declines. This is because the additional mental effort required for a task can overwhelm working memory, making it harder to generate or process novel ideas. Often, for us DMs, this is when a chest has nothing of note in it, or when we resort to a cliche or other predictable outcome. You might also forget names, voices, or other details. Watching for these in a DM can be amusing.

It might be better to engage in some prep instead of forgoing it completely out of fear of a negative outcome. Because by relying on only working memory through improv, you are essentially bottlenecking your creativity from the start. Not engaging in prep is simply a handicap. It would be better to prep in a way that avoids any agency issues, so as to still reap the benefits of using more of your brain.


Sources:

Working memory benefits creative insight, musical improvisation, and original ideation through maintained task-focused attention - PubMed

Anecdotes from creative eminences suggest that executive control plays an important role in creativity, but scientific evidence is sparse. Invoking the Dual Pathway to Creativity Model, the authors hypothesize that working memory capacity (WMC) relates to creative performance because it enables...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Working memory capacity predicts conflict-task performance - PubMed

The relationship between the ability to maintain task goals and working memory capacity (WMC) is firmly established, but evidence for WMC-related differences in conflict processing is mixed. We investigated whether WMC (measured using two complex-span tasks) mediates differences in adjustments...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Classics in the History of Psychology -- Miller (1956)