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

[Micah Sweet]

Dude.

Did you seriously turn to "hit points" for an example of a simulationist model? Hit points?

Solid joke. 9/10. You almost got me.

If it's not a model, why does damage go up the farther you fall before landing?

 

[Micah Sweet]

It is most striking to me how this little exchange is echoing closely some of the discussions that happened almost 25 years ago at The Forge. Once we get past the whole pretending about what we're pretending and start talking about the actual tools and processes in an objective way then tons of stuff can be done.

Just to be clear, you don't have to end up at something like Narrativist play. Agendas or attitudes/culture of play can get you wherever you want to go, you are just no longer in the dark.

I think there are a few people here who have some exposure to the most current thinking that came out of the Forge era community. I get the impression thought has moved on from agenda to maybe culture, but I am no expert.

Except this kind of "RPG design as scientific method" seems to be far more popular with Narrativist-leaning folks than otherwise.

 

[Faolyn]

What's the statue of limitations on "let it ride"?

And if the third person is a PC?

Bare-bones example: your PC wants us to go to Hightop and my PC wants us to go to Karnos, so we both try to convince pemerton's PC as his is the deciding vote.

The rules don't say. The only given examples are having a debate in front of an audience and two people trying to convince a ruler to take their side. It indicates that the listener(s) think that the winner is correct, and I haven't read the rules enough to know if that applies to PCs as well. If it does, though, that's a bit scary. Not only do the rules force the losing PC to concede (unlike in real life, specifically this thread ), but it would mind-control pemerton's PC into agreeing with the winner.

It's possible there are rules that state "don't use this on PCs" but I haven't seen them.

 

[Maxperson]

Dude.

Did you seriously turn to "hit points" for an example of a simulationist model? Hit points?

Solid joke. 9/10. You almost got me.

It models skill, physicality, luck, death, unconsciousness, etc. A portion of it is abstract in that the DM can pick whether any given sword hit models luck, physicality, skill or a combination, but once selected the simple model is there.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, although I am adding that which is imagined among them. So that the world as it is imagined, and the events that are imagined to be going on within it, can be causal (given the cognitive facts that amount to their imagining.) Else it becomes rather elliptical to explain normal human cognitive activities such as planning (a plan is imagined, and then acted on: the formed plan is a step in a causal chain even if it exists only in imagination.)

I would say it is better to look at plans as tools. They are a natural concomitant to ephemera. Humans have developed both elaborate planning and elaborate tool making. I see them as two sides of one coin. In fact we often refer to ephemera as plans, like documents or spreadsheets, etc.

I agree that a description of the unfolding of events often would need to include the creation of a plan as a part of a process. I'm less impressed with the idea that a plan causes things to happen... This becomes akin to ascribing agency to tools.

 

[Maxperson]

Why can’t you just say “In a living world sandbox, the setting is the priority, and that’s a good thing”?

Because setting, while one of the primary priorities, is secondary to agency.

 

[Maxperson]

Seems like the only goal is to claim a "gotcha".

No. There's also the mocking. Someone says something to mock our side of things and others jump in to laugh at it. It's disappointing to see folks act like that.

 

[Maxperson]

If it's not a model, why does damage go up the farther you fall before landing?

And it caps after a certain distance fallen, modeling terminal velocity. And you fall, modeling gravity.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And it caps after a certain distance fallen, modeling terminal velocity. And you fall, modeling gravity.

Seems like a model to me. Certainly not something worth belittling.

 

[Campbell]

Sure, and in many ways it may inform the overarching design of the game itself then moment to moment play. Like, we have the Stress -> Vice -> Trauma link not because it's pure game based attrition, but to see if you can deal with the costs of the Scoundrel's life or if you flame out. The game definitely expects you to dig into the cost of that life explicitly, and reinforces that with mechanics.

But I think you could take the sandbox side of Blades and run it with a D&D ruleset and get a really solid game out of it (there's been some buzz in the 5e community over the last couple of years about wrapping a bunch of the core tech from Blades etc in to your play, including a book about uhh "Proactive Roleplaying?" - Reddit thread reviewing said book). It just would lack the character thematic portions in mechanics and expectation.

We use a lot of Blades tech in my homegroup's other games. Our Vampire hack, our Cyberpunk Cortex hack and our Final Fantasy 8 Cypher hack all have rules for Blades style flashbacks. The FF8 hack uses missions that pretty much work like scores, but are more fleshed out trad style adventures. It also uses downtime actions for pool and wound recovery between missions instead of tracking time.