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

[pemerton]

Some participants my be interested to learn about Suspension of Disbelief.

I don't think anyone in this thread is confused about pretending, or about suspending disbelief.

But as I posted, parents who fool their children about the existence of Santa aren't suspending disbelief. In fact, quite the opposite. And the entry that you link similarly treats suspension of disbelief as an audience phenomenon, and not an authorial one.

In RPGing, the players are invited to suspend disbelief. But a GM who is busy rolling on a table to work out what happens next is presumably not suspending disbelief at that moment. There are moments in RPGing when the GM is audience - many such moments, at least in my RPGing experience - but those moments when the GM is making decisions about what happens next are not manifestations of that state.

 

[pemerton]

So now we've gotten to the point were it's being suggested that GMs somehow belive their campaign world is real?

Have you followed the discussion? I posted this:

Authored works do not have any continuity separate from the decision-making of their authors.

I took it to be obvious. Self-evident, even. Because of this, which I also posted:

My point is quite simple: imaginary things do not have causal impacts.

And @robertsconley, @Lanefan and @Faolyn have all subsequently made posts disagreeing with me.

Some of the disagreements are illusory: @Faolyn and @Lanefan asserted that beliefs about authored works can have causal effects. Which is true - obviously true - and not something I ever denied.

Bur @Lanefan also seems to be arguing that the GM should be pretending the fictional world is real - just like children who believe in Santa Claus - when making decisions about it.

I'm less clear what @robertsconley is arguing, because he has posted things that are similar to what I have posted - for instance, talking about heuristics a GM might adopt in order to help make decisions - but to present them as if they somehow contradict what I have posted.

EDIT:
I have tracked things back to these two posts:

There is no world that exercise causal potency. Where you say the world, you are actually talking about the GM making a decision, using whatever heuristics and processes they think will ensure "consistency".

First, the claim that “there is no world that exercises causal potency.” That’s not a small clarification. That’s a complete rejection of the idea that a fictional world can have internal logic or continuity separate from the referee’s decision-making. That’s also the central difference between how Burning Wheel handles agency and how Living World play does. In my framework, the world is treated as a consistent space. Outcomes are shaped by how player actions interact with that world. In your framing, the world is entirely downstream from GM or system procedure.

So I think my claim is very clear:

*Imaginary things - fantasy worlds among them - do not have real causal power. This means that any talk by a RPGer about what the world did (eg "the world responds to what the players had their PCs do") is really talk about what an author authored the world as doing.

*In a "living world" sandbox, typically that author will be the GM.

*That GM may use various heuristics (eg plausibility, bringing existing trends to fruition, etc) and also techniques (eg rolling on table) in order to decide what to author.​

Not only is this clear, but to me it seems accurate. It describes what I have done for years as a GM. It conforms to what other RPG books that I've read suggest.

I find @robertsconley's claim less clear. He appears to disagree with my assertion that "there is no world that exercises causal potency". The most natural interpretation of that assertion is that the imaginary world does exercise causal potency; but that seems an unlikely belief for someone to hold, and so I presume that something else is intended.

He then refers to the central difference between "living world" and "Burning Wheel" - but in a way that I find obscure. Because both approaches treat the world as a consistent space. In both, outcomes are shaped by how players have their PCs interact with the world (I've given ample BW examples upthread). And in both, what happens next in the world is downstream of the GM and the procedures etc that they use.

It's just that the procedures etc are different. The BW procedures, for instance, include having extensive and nuanced regard to the priorities that a player has established for their PC.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I would have to see their statblocks to judge. If they're in 5.24, I'm likely to not be able to see it. But it's quite likely that the warlord, being a legendary creature, is scary enough to get a pass on being able to cause fear.

And the nice thing about 5.14 is that it's so vague at times that you can reskin things like a battlemaster's Goad into being at least semi-mystical.


I'll also point out that, unless 5.24 changed things quite a bit, the frightened condition doesn't cause someone to lose multiple actions, and only on rare occasions does it cause targets to run away. The frightened creature simply has disad on some rolls and can't go closer to whatever it is that frightened them. And most of the time--maybe even all of the time--the frightened condition only lasts until the end of the next turn or allows for a save at the end of each turn.

None of which addresses the core point.

The claim was that a game which forces a character into a particular emotional state (fear was the topic at hand, but the claim was made in a way that was more general) specifically because they failed a roll, is a game that cannot feature agency, because it is a rule dictating what a character feels. This is of course immediately undercut by a massive glaring exception--magic--but I am well aware that that ship has sailed, and am willing to accept the modified claim that a mundane situation would be unacceptable intrusion into player agency as had been defined, e.g., the player has absolute control over the thoughts, feelings, and actions of their character outside of non-mundane causes, or more succinctly, "The rules cannot tell me what my character thinks."

I then cited several examples where D&D does in fact do that exact thing: a purely mundane source, written as purely mundane, which can in fact force a specific mental state (fear), specifically by having the player fail a roll.

You are now, as I said and which you have ignored, creating one ad hoc exemption after another, up to and including the DM blatantly ignoring the explicit descriptions in order to make mundane things non-mundane, in order to shield the original claim from criticism. This is well past any form of reasonable defense--you are inventing new justifications as each example comes up, hence, making the original strong claim riddled with holes.

D&D absolutely does (a) have purely mundane creatures/persons, who (b) can induce a specific mental state in a character against the will of that character's player, as a result of (c) the character failing a roll to avoid that mental state.

The original claim was that doing such a thing is a gross violation of the kind of agency D&D allegedly promotes, and which BW and other games allegedly strip away. I have since shown that such a gross violation is in fact something D&D has done since at least 3rd edition, with a dragon's explicitly non-magical frightful presence, and which the current edition has continued.

You have tried to assert that the original claim is perfectly fine because:
(a) Large predators should be able to force characters to feel fear against their players' wills
(b) Mundane beings who happen to be classified within the rules as "Legendary" can be parsed as supernatural
(c) The DM is at liberty to rewrite things so that, even though the character in question is explicitly not supernatural, the DM may present them as such (in other words, straight-up Stormwind Fallacy, "X cannot be a problem with Y because the DM can change X to not be a problem")
(d) The "Frightened" condition doesn't necessarily take away a character's actions, and thus somehow does not count as an induced mental state

These exceptions poke massive holes in the original claim. In order to integrate them, the claim has to be rewritten as, "The player has absolute control over the mental state of their character, outside of explicitly supernatural causes, unless they're faced with a massive predator, or a creature which is not supernatural but the DM has rewritten to be supernatural, and even if such an effect occurs from a mundane source, the mechanical effect of certain mental states is so small it should be discounted as not really a mental state at all." Surely you can see how excusing these exceptions has radically weakened the original claim, to the point that it hardly seems to have any weight left at all.

 

[Faolyn]

Beliefs aren't imaginary. They are actual mental states in the actual heads of actual people. Of course they have real effects. I'm posting this now, because I believe that there are people who might read it on these message boards.

My point was, and remains, that imaginary things don't have actual causal effects.

This is still incorrect because of the placebo/nocebo effect and somatic symptom disorders. And, well, is still as unnecessarily pedantic as if you got annoyed at someone who said "they hit me!"" when talking about a two-car accident because in reality, one car hit another car rather than one person slugged another person.

So when it comes to playing RPGs, the world does not do anything. Rather, game participants do things. For instance, the GM makes a decision based on their ideas about the world they are imagining. Which is what @hawkeyefan, @AdbulAlhazred and I have been posting for quite a while now; but some other posters seem to deny it - or, at least, their posts imply that the fiction has its own consequences on play without anyone in the actual world having to actually do anything.

But those worlds are imaginary, not real. Which means, as I said, that they have no actual causal influence.

Again, unnecessarily pedantic. I very much doubt that the people you are referring to truly believe that the world exists or will change without the actual input of the players. What they are almost certainly saying is that, due to the player's actions and the GM's decisions, the world will change because the players and GMs make it change.

People use shorthand when they talk because they assume--maybe wrongly in some cases--that their listeners understand them.

That's just a convoluted way of saying that my children have a false belief about what actually happened.

Well. They were actively lied to about what happens, actually. By what really amounts to a practically world-wide conspiracy to which nearly every adult and older child belongs.

<hums X-Files theme>

 

[Faolyn]

It's not expressly mentioned. As I've posted multiple times, in reply to you and others, it is found in the lists of obstacles, and in various die traits that modify a character's hesitation.

If you want to fit it into the general categories, it is a manifestation of the fear of violence.

Yes, I saw that. I take that to mean "witness a murder/stumble upon a murder victim", not "commit a murder."

Because murdering someone isn't frightening (killing someone in self-defense could be, but that wouldn't be murder). Coming across a bloody corpse with a knife sticking out of it would be.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, I saw that. I take that to mean "witness a murder/stumble upon a murder victim", not "commit a murder."

Because murdering someone isn't frightening (killing someone in self-defense could be, but that wouldn't be murder). Coming across a bloody corpse with a knife sticking out of it would be.

I wouldn't be so sure. I mean, I haven't actually tried it. Still it would seem pretty frightening. If I put myself in the place of a hypothetical version of me that is actually about to kill someone, yeah that feels fairly scary, at a kind of somewhat removed level. Hard to say what I'd be thinking in the real situation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is still incorrect because of the placebo/nocebo effect and somatic symptom disorders. And, well, is still as unnecessarily pedantic as if you got annoyed at someone who said "they hit me!"" when talking about a two-car accident because in reality, one car hit another car rather than one person slugged another person.


Again, unnecessarily pedantic. I very much doubt that the people you are referring to truly believe that the world exists or will change without the actual input of the players. What they are almost certainly saying is that, due to the player's actions and the GM's decisions, the world will change because the players and GMs make it change.

People use shorthand when they talk because they assume--maybe wrongly in some cases--that their listeners understand them.


Well. They were actively lied to about what happens, actually. By what really amounts to a practically world-wide conspiracy to which nearly every adult and older child belongs.

<hums X-Files theme>

I want to believe

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I wouldn't be so sure. I mean, I haven't actually tried it. Still it would seem pretty frightening. If I put myself in the place of a hypothetical version of me that is actually about to kill someone, yeah that feels fairly scary, at a kind of somewhat removed level. Hard to say what I'd be thinking in the real situation.

My limited experience (read: I've read Crime & Punishment) suggests that the act of murder is more enjoyable in the contemplation than the committing.

 

[pemerton]

This is still incorrect because of the placebo/nocebo effect and somatic symptom disorders.

These aren't cases of imaginary things having real effects. These are actual things - mental and/or bodily states - having real effects.

As I said, Galadriel, the Millennium Falcon, Conan, dragons, unicorns, superheroes, etc - these things do not have real effects. They can't - because they don't exist!

I very much doubt that the people you are referring to truly believe that the world exists or will change without the actual input of the players. What they are almost certainly saying is that, due to the player's actions and the GM's decisions, the world will change because the players and GMs make it change.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to repeat my point back to me.

But multiple posters in this thread, when it is suggested to them that the world did it really means the GM made a decision about what happened in the fiction, reject that suggestion.

Presumably, as you say, they don't think that the imaginary thing has real causal power. But there is an extreme reluctance to actually speak about the GM making a decision.

 

[Lanefan]

If you are pretending to yourself that the stuff you are marking up is not made up, then that seems like an obstacle to taking care in what it is that you make up,

How so?

If I imagine it as if it's real, wouldn;'t that tend to push me toward taking more care over what I'm doing rather than less?

and how it will support the RPGing that it is being made up for.

Your mileage will vary on this, but IMO if I'm doing the setting-building etc. in isolation of any specifics other than genre then I'm doing it right.

Put another way, lots of different plays can be performed on the same stage, in the same vein that lots of different RPGs* can be played using the same setting.

* - but not all; there's a few games that specialize to their specific setting e.g. BitD specializing itself to Duskvol and vice-versa, but IMO that type of design condemns both the game and the setting to niche status at best.