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

[AlViking]

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

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167211435795

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

I agree, and will add that prep can be a great help in my ad-hoc improvisation. If I know certain things about a section of town, it is far easier to add to it than to make it all up on the fly. Is this section of town the slums or an older neighborhood that has fallen into disrepair? It gives me a solid foundation to build on rather than having to build everything from the ground up.

I can also take some NPCs that I thought of and rethink them. Maybe I had Jasper the old guy who lives in the slums but I never introduced him. Now I can use parts of Jasper like his mannerisms, general look (finding a look and "voice" for an NPC is important to me) to build a different NPC with completely different personality. So now I still have that NPC loosely based on Danny Devito but instead of a good hearted soul who's just fallen on hard times they're secretly pretending to be old gentry that just wants the neighborhood to return to it's glory days but are really an evil warlock kidnapping people to sacrifice them. I still use some aspects of the NPC as a starting point, but they are completely different people.

 

[AlViking]

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.

I did like some aspects of VTT like the fog of war effects, but I've never really enjoyed TotM. I think if I were to do it again I'd look into DndBeyond's map tool and just use a grid most of the time.

 

[CreamCloud0]

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.

minor quibble, did you mean to say 'deliberately avoiding what those hints lead to is bypassing the encounter'?

 

[Umbran]

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.

It does?

If you walk into a huge, ancient red dragon's den, and get into a knock-down, drag-out physical fight, and lose, you die.

If you walk into the Faerie Court, and get into a knock-down, drag-out political fight, and lose.... you die. Or wind up in servitude in Underhill for a century, or something equally fae. And again, it doesn't have to be outright death - and as a practical matter usually won't be, because death is mostly boring. There are lots more interesting things you can do with a character who lost a conflict.

Also, I already noted that, at any time short of the final blow (or argument on the floor of the Unseelie Court, or whatever) you may Concede - which means that you don't get what you want, but you leave with your hide intact, largely in a manner of your own choosing.

If you want to meddle in the affairs of your betters, be ready for the consequences. If this is a world in which politics and social standing matters, this is how it goes.

 

[Faolyn]

minor quibble, did you mean to say 'deliberately avoiding what those hints lead to is bypassing the encounter'?

Sure.

 

[Maxperson]

If you don’t understand that there’s a conflict between the need for prep and player agency, I’m not going to try and convince you.

That's good, because there isn't. Despite your insistence that there is not, there are two kinds of agency, and the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. There may be conflict between prep and the agency YOU prefer, but there isn't any conflict with the kind we are using. Like your preferred agency, ours also goes up to 100%.

 

[Bedrockgames]

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?

First those are horrible definitions of the types of adventures they are describing and it is a horrible definition of an encounter. WOTC generally hasn't been good at this sort of thing IMO (it is one of the reasons I was going back to the 1E DMG in the 2000s). But I would add, an encounter is not, in my mind, a scene. An encounter is simply any interaction that occurs during play with an NPC, monster or being. Being that, encounters can have more or less definition. This is why I was asking whether you felt all encounters meant the GM was acting as storyteller or planned encounters. But that said, throwing a group of orcs at a party is not the GM acting as storyteller in my opinion

 

[Bedrockgames]

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.

As long as you are not prepping outcomes or paths, prepping locations and people, doesn't really impact agency (I would say it enhances agency to have an objective world prepared). If we are dealing with prep as planned scenarios that have a flow of events, scenes, or a path the players need to follow (especially if there is an understanding they can't get off of it) then agency is impacted by prep. But improv can also interfere with agency if the GM is trying to force the players in a certain direction.

 

[Maxperson]

You are in a dessert. There are nothing but sand in all directions. What do you do?

I wonder why being trained in athletics makes me really great at swimming when I've never been in enough water to swim in.

 

[Maxperson]

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

Is it good? I've been really curious about that game, being a big fan of the books.