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

[Maxperson]

I haven't read the full 7000+ posts, so sorry if this is repeating something already discussed to death. But on the topic of "Realism", "In game logic" and "Plausability" I think I have a valuable perspective that I haven't seen here: These are all about player expectations.

In order to competently play the RPG, players need to have some basis to judge likely outcomes of their actions. If their actions consistently has completely different outcomes than the players envisioned, there are no sense of agency.

40+ years of playing RPGs, dozens of DMs played with, and I have never seen a game like that. I don't think that happens often enough to worry about.

 

[robertsconley]

This differs from @robertsconley , who seems to weight verisimilitude on par with player (character) agency, and gives no concern to genre conventions whatsoever.

A point of clarification: a setting can embody a genre, or more accurately, evoke a specific feel. Take Middle-earth, for example. When I run a campaign using Adventures in Middle-earth, my goal is to create an experience where the players feel like they’ve visited Middle-earth as their characters. That’s a different aim from running a campaign that feels like they’re in a Tolkien novel about Middle-earth, which also is a perfectly good approach, but not mine.

As a result, my AiME campaigns had a distinct feel from the ones I run using 5E and the Majestic Wilderlands. The genre feel emerges from the setting’s internal logic and tone, not from trying to reinforce tropes directly.

Good post overall.

 

[JConstantine]

Oh, for sure. That's exactly what I want with Star Wars, for example: "setting tourism" as some put it, but I'm not interested in emulating the films' arcs.

 

[Faolyn]

So, why are you arguing with me? You agree with me. The setting has no "internal logic" separated from the creator. We agree.

...

I wasn't arguing. You didn't understand what I was saying.

I mean, you could just say "whoops, I didn't realize the context, my bad."

 

[Thomas Shey]

To be clear, I wasn't trying to assert that you're a member of any particular group, simply that anyone drawing on EnWorld (or any other similar online source, there's nothing unique about this site in that respect) conversations as a source of data is necessarily drawing a reasonable amount of it from people with strong, but not necessarily representative, opinions.

Sure.

But at the end of the day, there's a flip side of that as I've gotten to see on occasion; I've seen GMs who were sure what they were doing was okay with their players and had the players say "Not so much" but they just weren't willing to get in a tussle about it.

In the end, the people who keep their opinions to themselves are going to inevitably leave people to guess to some degree; there's no help for it.

 

[Faolyn]

Ok, here's the thing.

Two groups start in the exact same space in the setting. Both groups play identical characters. Both groups make identical choices.

According to you, if the setting has internal logic, then both campaigns should end up in exactly the same place because the results of those choices are from the "internal logic" of the setting and not sourced from the DM.

I reject that. The two groups would result in completely diverging campaigns virturally from the first choice because the DM would choose different results based on their personal preferences which have very little to do with the "internal logic" of the setting. @robertsconley admits as much by saying he ran the same campaign (more or less) with different groups. Within very short order, those groups would radically diverge. Even if both groups had made the same decisions initially, the campaigns would still diverge. Because you cannot separate setting from DM. It simply cannot be done.

Two groups go to see the same Lord of the Castle. Both groups use exactly the same approach. One group talks to the Lord of the Castle and forges an alliance. The other group is turned away. Why? Because the DM has decided what is "plausible" in the setting. It is virtually impossible to have groups, even groups that do the exact same thing, to get the same results because you simply cannot remove the DM from the equation.

That's not what Lanefan said at all.

What Lanefan is saying that if two groups start in the same setting, the setting itself will still be recognizable barring a major physical change. For instance, you said you play(ed) in the Realms, simply without a Shadowfell, the Tarrasque is dead, and Zargon has returned. But I bet you still have a most of the same locations (Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Silverymoon), many of the same people (Elminster, Drizzt), many of the same hundred types of elves and dwarfs, many of the same gods, and so on--enough so that someone could look at your game and realize it's the Realms.

There are differences between your Realms and other peoples' Realms, but you and the players haven't made so many changes as to make it unrecognizable.

 

[SableWyvern]

Sure.

But at the end of the day, there's a flip side of that as I've gotten to see on occasion; I've seen GMs who were sure what they were doing was okay with their players and had the players say "Not so much" but they just weren't willing to get in a tussle about it.

In the end, the people who keep their opinions to themselves are going to inevitably leave people to guess to some degree; there's no help for it.

You may well have seen such things; I'm just leery of people who then apply those experiences to specific individuals they don't know in a general conversation or treat their experience as universally applicable.

I've certainly seen people claim that I probably don't or might not really know how my players feel about a range of things: maybe things I do cause my players trauma, maybe my GMing style isn't actually fun for them, maybe my players don't really believe I'm objective enough. People are welcome to believe what they want, but there is no way for me to engage with those opinions in any useful fashion. It's not as if I can (legally) scoop my players' brains out and display them as evidence. I'm quite comfortable that I've got a pretty good idea what works for my group and why my players keep coming back over literal decades; if someone on the internet wants to suspect that they know better and that their experience with completely different people gives them more insight into my players than I have gained by actually interacting with them, there's not really anything I can do about it.

As an aside, there certainly are some things I do as GM that some of my players don't necessarily like. They accept them, because they realise we're a big group and we aren't all going to get exactly what we want all the time, and there is a lot more that they like than there is that bothers them.

Edit to add: Perhaps one big factor that distinguishes groups where the players are secretly unhappy and ones where they are not is the willingness of players to speak up in the first place. If my players aren't happy with something, they will actually tell me and then we can work towards a mutually satisfactory solution. In other words, the fact I can successfully run games where the GM has a lot of power to make judgements isn't the result of being some prodigy capable of doing things most GMs can't, it's simply that I have players who feel comfortable voicing their opinions and we, as a group, are capable of working towards solutions to problems.

 

[Enrahim]

40+ years of playing RPGs, dozens of DMs played with, and I have never seen a game like that. I don't think that happens often enough to worry about.

Of course not. The point of example of the extreme (if no consistency then no agency) is to increase the contrast of a phenomenom so that it is easier to see it also in the non-extreme case.

As a DM I have certanly been on the receiving end of complaints that I have deviated too far from player expectations.

And I have myself felt on the frustration of weak internal consistency and implausible plot twists to have made some reflections around where those steel from for myself at least. The way I have seen other talk passionately about realism, consistency and plausability seem to match what I would expect from someone having similar feelings.

 

[Lanefan]

Ok, here's the thing.

Two groups start in the exact same space in the setting. Both groups play identical characters. Both groups make identical choices.

According to you, if the setting has internal logic, then both campaigns should end up in exactly the same place because the results of those choices are from the "internal logic" of the setting and not sourced from the DM.

Maybe yes, maybe no, as the vagaries of the dice will also have their say. One group might get wiped out by the second patrol of Orcs they face while the other sails through that same combat with nary a scratch.

Other than that, however, ideally they would indeed end up at more or less the same place. If it's the same DM running both groups, I would actually somewhat expect this and if all other things were identical would raise an eyebrow were it not the case.

If it's different DMs, though, then even before setting-based choices there's very likely going to be differences in rulings and rule interpretations which can have a snowball effect over time.

I reject that. The two groups would result in completely diverging campaigns virturally from the first choice because the DM would choose different results based on their personal preferences which have very little to do with the "internal logic" of the setting. @robertsconley admits as much by saying he ran the same campaign (more or less) with different groups. Within very short order, those groups would radically diverge. Even if both groups had made the same decisions initially, the campaigns would still diverge. Because you cannot separate setting from DM. It simply cannot be done.

Two groups go to see the same Lord of the Castle. Both groups use exactly the same approach. One group talks to the Lord of the Castle and forges an alliance. The other group is turned away. Why? Because the DM has decided what is "plausible" in the setting.

For sure? Or is the difference due to one group succeeding on some rolls while the other lot fail dismally?

It is virtually impossible to have groups, even groups that do the exact same thing, to get the same results because you simply cannot remove the DM from the equation.

In practice, let's face it: two groups doing the exact same thing for longer than a vanishingly short period would be rarer than hen's teeth. And the different choices the groups make are going to cause massive divergence, sometimes before the DM even gets any input into the matter, after which there's no real way of extracting the differences the DM makes from the differences the groups bring on themselves.

 

[pemerton]

It's telling that everyone on the trad/sim side of the debate have all expressed the same sentiment: a preference for mechanics that model the fictional world and a focus on "realism"/verisimilitude because it facilitates immersion. There is also a tendency towards first-person roleplaying and character/actor stance for the same reason. This is not a coincidence.
Meanwhile, I've noticed elsewhere, that narrativists tend toward director/author stance, and aren't as concerned with immersion - indeed many state that don't experience it (for example, I remember an interview in which BitD author, John Harper, expressed as much). Anecdotally, the (admittedly single digit) narrativist players who have mentioned immersion outside of this board, when elaborating, seem to actually be talking about engagement - the way one might be engrossed in a TV show - rather than immersion the way simulationists mean.

By actor stance, author stance and director stance, do you mean this?

• In Actor stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions using only knowledge and perceptions that the character would have.
• In Author stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities, then retroactively "motivates" the character to perform them. (Without that second, retroactive step, this is fairly called Pawn stance.)
• In Director stance, a person determines aspects of the environment relative to the character in some fashion, entirely separately from the character's knowledge or ability to influence events. Therefore the player has not only determined the character's actions, but the context, timing, and spatial circumstances of those actions, or even features of the world separate from the characters.

If you do, then I don't agree with what you have posted.

When I play Thurgon and Aedhros, I am playing in actor stance - I make decisions using knowledge and perceptions that my character would have. The character's hopes and commitments and regrets are particularly important to me also. For instance, Thurgon is committed to the tenets of his order, and his family, and Aramina; and he hopes to revive his order from its current dire state. Aedhros regrets bitterly the death of his spouse, and everything that he does is ultimately grounded in that bitterness.

On the other hand, it seems to me that a good chunk of "sandbox" play of a trad(ish) sort happens in author stance. The players make decisions about forming an adventuring party, and sticking together, and looking for adventures (perhaps following GM hooks/leads), all based on the real players' priorities - namely, to do adventure-oriented FRPGing. Sometimes, retroactive motivations are generated. I get the impression that there is probably also quite a bit of pawn stance (as defined): pawn stance of course does not preclude quite a bit of character colour, but the reasons for the character's actions do not get developed beyond this is what I do because I'm an adventurer.

The only person in this thread who has argued for reasonably strong director stance is @Faolyn, criticising the call for a roll when Tru-leigh looked around for a vessel to catch Joachim's flowing blood.

Note that actor stance and director stance can occur simultaneously, in the following way: Tru-leigh's player, using on knowledge and perception that Tru-leigh has (ie he knows that he has to get Joachim's blood to his dark naga master, and he can see it spilling onto the floor) declares that Tru-leigh looks around. Actor stance. But then that action declaration is resolved in the usual way, and because it succeeds, Tru-leigh can see a vessel. That is director stance, in that Tru-leigh's player, via the successful Perception test, determined an aspect of the environment relative to Tru-leigh (ie a vessel that he could see) separated from Tru-leigh's ability to influence events (ie Tru-leigh didn't cause the vessel to be in the room). But the cleverness of the BW resolution system is that there is no tension or contradiction between actor stance for action declaration, with resolution permitting the "transformation" of that into director stance.

This is quite an important feature of BW. It is part of how the system creates an extremely intimate engagement with the situation by the player.

My friend with whom I mostly play BW (he GM's Thurgon, and plays Alicia in our two-player/two-GM game) I suspect spends more time in author stance than I do (which is basically none, as I've posted). In particular as a player he pays close attention to the tests that he needs for advancement, and then motivates his character to pursue courses of action that will allow him to make those tests. Thus his PCs advance more quickly than mine do!

But anyway, I hope this makes it clear why I don't agree with your generalisations. (And I think it would be interesting to hear accounts of actor-stance play in trad-ish sandboxes. I noticed you referred to Vampire games in your post - I don't know if you or @Campbell have such accounts to give.)