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

[Micah Sweet]

In Dresden Files, if you cannot absorb Stress from a Social source, you are Taken Out, just like any other stress. And, whoever took you out gets to narrate what that means.

In general, it should narratively mean that you lose all social standing - it can be no friends, no money, no support structure. The local cops want to arrest you, and everyone else thinks you are such a scumbag that they won't intervene on your behalf. Getting Taken Out by Social stress can mean you die alone and ignored on a cold winter's night in a back alley somewhere, or the like.

That seems like an enormous thing to be decided by running out of social hit points to me, but I've never been a fan of FATE-based systems.

 

[Lanefan]

They might. Which I would think, partisanship aside, most folks would say makes far more sense as a term.

To a point, yes it would.

That point arrives if-when one moves away from seeing the game as a series of more-or-less-set piece events or highlights and toward seeing it as a continuous [can't think of the term for it - in a movie when there's one long unbroken shoot from the same camera]. Put another way, recognizing both the existence and importance of all the bits that don't get roleplayed in detail, and allowing for more detail if-when it might affect player decisions.

A hypothetical example: the players declare their intent is to explore the Westogre Caves because rumour has it that a family heirloom of Jocasta (a PC) has somehow ended up in there.

From the way I read it, a scene-frame-style game would allow the players to prep their PCs in town and then frame them at the entrance to the Caves; that being the next scene.

A more continuous-style game would allow the players to prep their PCs in town and then determine how they get to the Caves: what means of travel they use, which route they intend to take, how cautious (or not) they plan to be, and so on; then after determining whether anything goes adrift on their journey, e.g. frm weather or wildlife, on their arrival at the Caves allows the players to decide how they approach getting in e.g. do they storm in the main entrance, do they look for a back way in, do they spend several days hiding outside watching comings and goings, do they scout the surrounding forest for tracks, etc. etc.

I simply cannot fathom why any player would prefer the first option here rather than the second. I can, however, see why GMs would like it, as there's far less GM-side work involved.

 

[Faolyn]

It's not irrelevant to me, though. That there are things out in the world, hinted at in some way, does not turn those things into an encounter.

No, the hints are not the encounter. Following the hints leads to the encounter. Deliberately avoiding those hints is bypassing the encounter—or potential encounter, if you prefer.

I never said that GM prep MUST ALWAYS mean less player agency". I said there's a conflict there between the idea of needing prep and players being able to do whatever they like. There are ways it can be addressed, certainly. I don't know how open many folks are to those ideas... but they exist.



Read the bits I quoted from the 5e DMG from 2014. Those to me define Encounter in the way I think is relevant to the discussion, and they also very much support the idea of GM as storyteller.

Would you disagree with that assessment of the bits from the DMG I quoted?

I agree that’s how the DMG puts it. I agree that’s how a lot of GMs, regardless of system, do it (even if, famously, nobody reads the DMG). What I disagree with is the idea that prep necessarily causes this conflict, or that’s the only way to define what an encounter.

 

[Enrahim]

Yes... again, I'm not saying that ALL PREP IS BAD or anything so extreme. I'm saying that prep and player agency are, by their very nature, somewhat at odds, and so they can conflict with one another. I would say that GMs should be aware of this and consider it when they design their games or settings... not just deny it as a possible pitfall.

Great! Because "prep and player agency is in conflict" reads to many that highly value player agency as "ALL PREP IS BAD". And I think that is why people have been reacting to that statement. I would be surprised if anyone find this statement you came with here now problematic So I hope this clears this controversy.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Aren't divided as such, not are. Mistyped.

Sure, sure!

Bardic Inspiration, Rage, Reckless Attack, Channel Divinity, Wild Shape, Second Wind, Action Surge, Martial Arts, Deflect Missiles, Lay on Hands, Natural Explorer, Sneak Attack, Cunning Action, Font of Magic, Eldritch Invocations, and Arcane Recovery all agree with you, I'm sure!

Please clarify whatever kind of so clever point you're trying to make here, and please support it.

That my experience living on other planets appears to match your experience playing non-trad games!

 

[Faolyn]

That seems like an enormous thing to be decided by running out of social hit points to me, but I've never been a fan of FATE-based systems

Taken Out in Fate means you’re not in the scene anymore; it doesn’t necessarily mean dead

Getting taken out is bad. Whoever took you out decides what happens. Given dangerous situations and powerful enemies, this could mean you’re dead, but that’s not the only possibility. The outcome must be in keeping with the scope and scale of the conflict at hand—you won’t die of shame if you lose an argument—but changes to your character sheet (and more) are possible. The outcome should also fit within the boundaries your group has established—if your group feels that characters should never get killed without the player’s consent, that’s perfectly valid.

(Emphasis mine)

Edit: It should be noted that it’s not easy to be Taken Out, nor is it easy to heal from it. It’s not like D&D where death is no biggie and spare the dying is a cantrip. If you’re in social combat to the point that you “die” from it, it meant you, as a player, made a serious effort to do that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure, sure!

Bardic Inspiration, Rage, Reckless Attack, Channel Divinity, Wild Shape, Second Wind, Action Surge, Martial Arts, Deflect Missiles, Lay on Hands, Natural Explorer, Sneak Attack, Cunning Action, Font of Magic, Eldritch Invocations, and Arcane Recovery all agree with you, I'm sure!



That my experience living on other planets appears to match your experience playing non-trad games!

Are those things encounters? And I know it's subjective, but I find the Playback moves going out if their way to have clever names more personally irritating.

And I've played Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, FATE, and Marvel Heroic, and read several other strongly Narrativist or non-traditional games. Couldn't get behind the mechanics of any of them.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

Depends on the system. Take a look at City of Mist to see what I consider to be an extreme modification to the PbtA “system.” I’m sure someone else can point to a game with even bigger differences.

But it really depends on what you’re trying to do with the game. Reflavor it? Add a subsystem? Change it to a different setting? I recall reading that the best thing to do with a PbtA game (or maybe just with MotW, since that’s what I was researching at the time) is to make sure that playbooks have something unique to them—which means the game needs to be flexible to accommodate that. I’ve seen people create both medieval and sci-fi versions of the game, although I admit I haven’t looked at them. MotW uses a harm track. If I wanted to bring in hit points like in Dungeon World or conditions like in Masks (and others), I could. The biggest issue would simply be rewriting all the playbooks to reflect it. The PbtA game I’m reading now, Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, even has an entire chapter called Hacking the Game.

So I don’t really think that Narrativist games are as rigid as you think.

 

[AlViking]

Well, what if you needed far more specific maps? What if you or your players were not satisfied seeing the same maps again and again? How do you come up with a very specific map if the need for it came from the players going off in a direction you didn't expect and so haven't prepared for?

What if the moon really was made of cheese? It was never an issue for me any more than most of the time when I'm using a whiteboard it's some quick lines with some generic terrain I throw on the board. No different from fairly generic online maps. On the other hand, it is a major reason I don't like running games online and don't do it now.

What the map shows is just for positioning and knowing where you might find cover. The only description that matters is what I tell the group. Just like I use generic orc minis and tell people that they're thugs dressed in black or clowns with scary face paint, I don't have to use different minis for that.

That's the conflict right there.

That you settle for generic maps, or someone else may just run the game in theater of the mind is a way of addressing the conflict.

If there's a way to address the conflict and I have then I don't see it as an issue. It's not like I have dwarven forge set pieces that I put down when I run games in person.

Just highlighting this as well because this speaks to the conflict between prep and agency.



Pretty quantum-castle to me. I know a lot of folks who would flip out about this.

Nah. The interactions would be completely different, the goals and motivations of the people they meet would be completely different, the setup of how encounters (fight or not) would be different. But this is D&D combat so I need to know a few basic stats of the enemies and I can tweak the rest to match. As long as I have a ballpark for AC, HP, Attack bonus and damage I can come up with significantly different monsters and fights. They would not be exactly the same fights, there would not be the same challenges.

A real world example was a game where the characters were just travelling through a town and the rogue, who had a talent for getting into trouble, somehow managed to start a running fight through the streets with the local thieves' guild. I don't remember exactly how he did it but soon the party was fighting for their lives, they ended up in a warehouse that started on fire ... all sorts of stuff I just winged. I did use some gnoll stats for the thieves guild baddies and another for desert bandits while swapping out a couple of abilities and we were off to the races with nary a similarity in game play.

Your examples pointed out several areas of potential conflict.

Then it's a you problem, not a problem with prep for anyone else.

 

[Faolyn]

What if the moon really was made of cheese? It was never an issue for me any more than most of the time when I'm using a whiteboard it's some quick lines with some generic terrain I throw on the board. No different from fairly generic online maps. On the other hand, it is a major reason I don't like running games online and don't do it now.

There are some whiteboard apps out there that allow you to have multiple people view and modify it in real time. My group doesn’t use them because it’s a pain for some of us to keep switching between tabs. We generally stick to theater of the mind via discord and occasionally throw some maps up so we get a better visual.