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

[DinoInDisguise]

I guess what I am saying is plausibility is going to factor in what players expect to be plausible. If an NPC holds a ring over a pit of lava and releases it, they expect it to fall (and likely fall into the lava). But expectations can get different as you get into more things. Like if you shoot a gas tank on a car should the car potentially explode? If you are in the right action movie franchise, that is a plausible outcome of that action. If you are in the real world, I'm actually not sure, but I suspect it wouldn't blow up, or at least would be a lot less likely to combust the way it does on film. I call this knowing what franchise you are in. But just because you are in a franchise, that doesn't mean plausibility doesn't matter. Your players are using plausibility as part of their way of understanding how the world behaves.

Am I misreading this, or you are agreeing with me? Because I wasn’t emotionally prepared for agreement on the internet.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Am I misreading this, and you are agreeing with me? Because I wasn’t emotionally prepared for agreement on the internet.

I was somewhat agreeing with you. I am not saying they are the same thing, but I am saying they are connected and when you apply plausibility to a setting, you are also considering how the players will react to your reasoning. I was also saying I think player input can be helpful. Like when I am about to make a ruling, I often ask my players if they think that is a reasonable way to handle something that comes up in play (and I think that ties to plausibility rulings too)

 

[Thomas Shey]

But isn't getting people on the same page mainly a means to set and manage expectations? If the car explodes in a big fireball after being shot and a player complain "that is not plausable", they would probably come around to accept it as plausible if you just clarify that this is a game based on over the top action logic. And the thing that has changes is the player's expectation regarding the causal relationship between shooting something and how dramatic the effect will be.

Though I'll just note that can be an endless cycle if what seems "plausible" even in genre-convention sort of ways isn't consistent across observers. Its one of the reason I'm not a fan of systems that lean into GM judgment calls heavily; it can make it very difficult for players to properly assess cause-and-effect.

 

[Campbell]

All roleplaying games are going to deal with some sort of conflict that play will focus on. I don't think world building and situation framing that focus on conflicts that are external to the player characters are inherently more organic than those that are more personal in nature. I don't think Dogwood is less organic than Law and Order. I certainly do not think that Vampire - The Masquerade's focus on these century long conspiracies and drawing players into these elaborate mysteries is more organic than Requiem's focus on the night to night of being a vampire, your relationship your sire and your touchstones - the people who keep you connected to your humanity. The sorts of fiction about personal stakes feel far more organic than adventuring (and all the setting level contrivances needed to make that work) to me.

I also really do not like the contention that a focus on the people, places and things that matter to characters going about their lives is equivalent to drama.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I have as much drama and emotion as I want in my game without implementing rules to force it. Glad it works for you, I don't find it necessary.

And incidentally, there are plenty of people who enjoy Dungeon a Week or some such, and I wouldn't consider any of them as folks are yet to "outgrow" it, nor do I think there's some sort of evolutionary chain leading to those games @pemerton and his fellow Narrativists prefer.

 

[Micah Sweet]

is the implication of this supposed to be that play in your game is more vibrant and immersive than play of (say) BitD?

To me, that's not a plausible claim.

I mean, I read your post about bandits and lovers and the PCs waking up to a scream and so on; and watched bits of the video you linked to. And in this thread I've posted some accounts of my own Prince Valiant RPGing involving bandits and villagers and the PCs travelling through an imaginary mediaeval Britain. And I know what those sessions were like, as I was there.

And I don't see how, in any sense of the phrase, your session is more like "visiting" a place than mine.

I'm happy to talk about differences of technique involved - for example, I didn't track movement of NPCs across a map; I just made decisions about which NPC was where that fitted with what had been presented so far to the players, and that also fitted with what was set out in the scenarios I was drawing upon. But I simply don't accept your experiential way of trying to characterise the difference.

You know telling someone what their point is and then refuting that point is the definition of a straw man?

 

[pemerton]

And incidentally, there are plenty of people who enjoy Dungeon a Week or some such, and I wouldn't consider any of them as folks are yet to "outgrow" it, nor do I think there's some sort of evolutionary chain leading to those games @pemerton and his fellow Narrativists prefer.

I don't think there is an "evolutionary chain". But I think that if one poster refers to their play in terms of "outgrowing" a particular approach to play, it's presumably OK for others to respond with their comparable experiences.

 

[pemerton]

You know telling someone what their point is and then refuting that point is the definition of a straw man?

Not if the account of the point is accurate!

If a poster says that their game does this thing <a visit> that is different from other games' things <a portrayal>, I'm allowed to respond to that. Aren't I?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Isn't plausibility the same as player expectations in the context of a fantasy TTRPG? Isn't that the whole point of Enrahim's post?

Plausibility seems to melt away as a factor, if clear expectations about the way a world works are defined. We do it for magic all the time. It's just that expectation is inherent in many systems, so it's not discussed. But if something falls within player expectations for a world, it also falls within their expectations of what is plausible in that world.

When we label "plausibility" as a separate idea from player expectations things get weird. All of a sudden worlds with slightly different rules become almost problematic because they break this nebulous idea of plausibility even if they fall within player expectations.

So I would guess that plausibility is really just player expectations by a different name. As I can, theoretically, get player's to expect implausible events and not run into issues because I am still meeting player expectations even if violating plausibility in a general sense.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like “plausibility” is not an absolute concept in RPGs; and therefore is just a subset of player expectations.

Yet another argument that a factor considered a cornerstone of a particular playstyle isn't a real thing.

Great.

 

[Faolyn]

To your bolded: can't speak for you but I'm still quite unclear on the "duration". If there's a clear end point to what was agreed then that would seem to nicely define the duration (e.g. in the fix-armour example, she has to fix his armour now but isn't bound to keep on fixing it for the rest of her life, once it's fixed this time she can go about her life as she otherwise would). No problem.

When there's not a defined end point to what was agreed is where I get confused. If the agreement reached is that I will defend you, there's no end point to that agreement; unless something otherwise changes (e.g. you attack me, or we get separated for any length of time, or if you outright release me from that agreement) it seems I'm stuck defending you for life.

I think it's supposed to last for as long as it makes sense to, depending on the phrasing of the actual results and any compromises that have to get put in. There's this whole bit in the rules about how, if you lose enough dice from your pool during the duel, you have to make compromises, so PC 1 would start with "you have to defend me" and PC 2 would start with "nuh-uh!" and PC 1 may have to negotiate down to "you have to defend me for as long as I don't betray you." So there's your endpoint.

(I don't think I'd want to rely on PC 2 there, even if I never intended to betray them. If I have to convince them to defend me, they're probably not the right person for the job.)

It's rather unclear about how this is supposed to work when the duel of wits is, according to the book, be about debate and argument against a neutral third party rather than negotiations like most of the examples indicate. I admit I wasn't on a debate team in school and I don't watch a lot of debates in general, but those I've seen don't really have much compromise in them. This ruleset should have been divided into separate "debate" and "negotiation" sections.

Not so much madness or mental stress rules; but when someone is frightened by something, flees, and later returns I have sometimes put a penalty on their save against immediately being frightened again by the same thing.

Sure--but that's the homebrew rules I was talking about. You can't do that by RAW or RAI in 5e, for instance, because most of the time you can only be affected by a particular fear affect once every 24 hours. Unless that's changed in 5.24, of course.

Edit for extremely stupid spelling mistake.