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

[SableWyvern]

((Note, I left off the accountable to players bit since that's not relevant to my point))

He very much has repeatedly claimed that he is not responsible. How could he be responsible for things that are just "logical results of the setting"? That's like claiming that you're responsible for 2 plus 2 equalling 4. If we accept that the setting itself is an "independent machine" (his words mind you), then he cannot possible take responsibility for results.

How can someone be responsible for results they are claiming they have no direct control over?

So you think he might agree he's accountable even though not responsible? What does it mean to you if the the GM is accountable but not responsible?

I can't see how accountability can be considered irrelevant to a discussion of responsibility unless you're using some extremely strange definitions. It might be possible to be responsible without being accountable (for example, if there is no oversight) but someone should only ever be held accountable for things for which they bear responsibility.

 

[robertsconley]

But, for some reason, this keeps getting ignored.

I have addressed this several times in several ways.

 

[robertsconley]

@robertsconley
I think I’ve had a flash of insight that might help me understand you a bit better.

When you say the world feels ‘lived in and plausible’ is that because the players know about and trust in the process you’re using?

Indirectly, yes. The feeling of trust makes players comfortable enough to take risks and be proactive. Because they are proactive, they interact more with NPCs, and that interaction is one of the core ways I make the world feel alive.

But to be clear, making the world feel alive is just one technique within a larger framework designed to make the players feel like they have visited the setting as their characters.

You’ll surely agree that there are people that can convey the appearance of a lived-in world much better than you without doing the hard work behind the scenes. An illusion of a lived-in world, as it were.

I agree there are other ways of accomplishing that feeling. But I would disagree that it takes less work. All creative endeavors require effort, and doing them well, regardless of technique, takes dedication and hard work.

What varies is talent. A technique that works easily for someone like Matt Mercer or Vincent Baker may be harder for me to pull off, and vice versa.

I think that’s why your reference to the feel of things can throw people off. The ability to invoke feeling (even about plausibility) is merely a function of one’s literary ability and has nothing to do with one’s intelligence or knowledge. This is because when we parse fiction we’re filling the lacunas of causality with our own plausible extrapolations.

Plausibility can be investigated by the players and weighed by examining the events and their outcomes outside the session, alongside how I arrived at those outcomes using the established facts of the setting. An illusion quickly falls apart under scrutiny if the referee cannot justify their reasoning based on what is already true in the world.

In contrast, my approach encourages continuity, so the players can return to past events, locations, or NPCs and see how their choices shaped the world over time, this reinforces a sense of persistence rather than performance.

Now, is illusionism a problem? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the circumstances and the talents of the referee. It can work well, or it can blow up in the referee’s face. What it is not is a magic wand for managing a campaign. But neither is my framework.

 

[robertsconley]

((

He very much has repeatedly claimed that he is not responsible.

I would appreciate you citing quotes before saying I said something

 

[Enrahim]

((Note, I left off the accountable to players bit since that's not relevant to my point))

He very much has repeatedly claimed that he is not responsible. How could he be responsible for things that are just "logical results of the setting"? That's like claiming that you're responsible for 2 plus 2 equalling 4. If we accept that the setting itself is an "independent machine" (his words mind you), then he cannot possible take responsibility for results.

How can someone be responsible for results they are claiming they have no direct control over?

Inperfect analogy time!

I am a software engineer. I feel strongly responsible if somehow my software claims 2 plus 2 is anything but 4. I claim no direct control over the calculation, I let the computer do it's thing.

I hope taking this analogy one step further might help developing some further understanding:
When I develop software I am rarely the one deciding what the software should do. Rather someone else ask if something can be done, and I use my knowledge of the system to assess the situation.

More often than you might think I can come back to the one giving the request with the feedback that the software already can do what they request, and describe what steps is needed (often involving some configuration)

Another common outcome is that I see that this exact request is a bit outside what the software currently handle, but that it is pretty obvious how the software should be extended to accommodate it. There might be a little room for creativity on my part with exactly how I phrase or structure the code to do it, but finding the overall solution is basically a straight forward logic puzzle.

Sometimes someone request something far outside the scope of the current software. This are the times where I really need to get creative myself. Maybe I need to make a completely new extension module, or even rearchitect parts of the existing system. However as the system in question get more mature, these situations get progressively more rare.

From how I read Rob it sound like his game runs like a solid well designed software system honed over decades of improvements and architectural refinements. For such a system the majority of time is spendt just informing the user what the system is capable of, and see it work it's magic. This is something very different from a oneshot or standard 10 session campaign that essentially work as startups.

 

[Hussar]

I absolutely do know what it means and you are absolutely wrong when you say that logic can't exist when I create the setting in the first place.

I don't need to use logic to create all of the initial setting material. I can decide that I want 3 oceans and 46 lakes without having a logical reason for them. Once I have those placed, though, I can figure out what would logically arise from the existence of those water features and the terrain that surrounds them. I can further logically figure out what happens when the party interacts with those features.

Little Timmy wasn't thinking logically when he decided to shoplift from the grocery store, but getting in trouble when he was caught was a logical consequence of an illogical action.

Again, you're conflating different things. You cannot have logical outputs from completely illogical inputs. Sure, you plonk down 46 lakes and 3 oceans without any understanding of how lakes and oceans are formed will result in something that won't stand up any actual examination.

 

[SableWyvern]

Again, you're conflating different things. You cannot have logical outputs from completely illogical inputs. Sure, you plonk down 46 lakes and 3 oceans without any understanding of how lakes and oceans are formed will result in something that won't stand up any actual examination.

Fortunately, I'm far more rigorous about lake and ocean placement than my players are about analysing it. As such, even though my placement might not be rigorous enough to satisfy a geologist (or whatever other 'ists study planetary formation, rainfall patterns, processes of erosion, fluid dynamics or what-have-you) who wants the highest possible level of lake-placement-fidelity in their elf-games, it stands up to all the examination it's going to be exposed to.

Yet again, the objective isn't to be perfect, it's to be good enough.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's not utterly ridiculous. You just won't accept any answer that doesn't match what you believe is correct. You said elsewhere that you give detailed answers because otherwise "no discussion would happen." But we can't have a discussion with you because you can't accept any viewpoint but your own is correct.

I gave you my reasoning for the frightened condition vs. the duel of wits and said, repeatedly, that I was talking about what was happening with game mechanics. You kept trying to drag the real world into it, despite that not being what the issue was about. You wanted to know how to deal with a railroading GM. I gave you multiple ideas. The only thing you would accept, as it turns out, is a total apology from them.

Perhaps, if you truly want a discussion, you should learn to accept other people's beliefs and words instead of insisting that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong.

And yet, I have had quite a productive conversation with @dave2008 in both directions, or so I felt. Their questions were perfectly polite, and their answers, while inviting criticism, were a useful starting point.

Perhaps, instead of pointing fingers and accusing others of one-true-wayism, it would be beneficial to question whether your requirements are the ones that are one true way? Because thus far that's a pretty apt description of what I've seen. I'm not allowed to ask for clarification--and when I do, I get immediately and completely shut down, or told that I should just already know, without further clarification. Everyone has to be on board with the "realism" train, and no explanation will be forthcoming? That's not exactly inviting any discussion or allowing anything but one's own viewpoint, and seems to lack any room for further inquiry!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Again, you're conflating different things. You cannot have logical outputs from completely illogical inputs. Sure, you plonk down 46 lakes and 3 oceans without any understanding of how lakes and oceans are formed will result in something that won't stand up any actual examination.

Well, you can by pure accident, but you can't generally get logical outputs from illogical inputs. A method or procedure which relies on sheer dumb luck to turn illogical inputs into logical outputs is not going to be a particularly useful method!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I tried to think about how I could concisely explain myself better and I just don't know that I can. I like the vagueness of things that are "broadly plausible" within the confines of the fantasy setting we are playing in. I don't want or need hard and fast criteria or rules for these things. We don't need a limiter and I would prefer not to have one. My players trust me and I them. If we disagree with something we discuss it and resolve it together.

Well, here, the issue with the vagueness isn't that it can capture a lot of different methods.

It's that almost anything goes.

I have been told, by people in this thread, many many many times over, that "realism" (or "plausibility" or whatever term you like) is not only an essential tool, it is supremely useful as (very specifically) a limiter on what the DM is allowed to do, say, include/exclude, permit/forbid, etc., entirely separately from any talk of "trust" or the like (e.g. more than one poster has suggested moving past "trust" and talking about these things instead).

That's why I'm asking about what it does, in fact, actually limit, or not limit. And thus far, because of its vagueness, the limitation it seems to place is..."anything goes, as long as the DM worked hard enough". Which is precisely why Hussar, myself, and others have noted that this (alleged) limiter, from the player's perspective, cannot even in principle be distinguished from someone just making up whatever they like.

How can a limiter actually limit, if the limit produces results indistinguishable from not being limited at all? That is why the vagueness is such a problem.

I freely recognize that a rule which perfectly specified every individual act or deed or thought that a DM could have would be ridiculous, like it would literally deserve ridicule for its sheer, audacious stupidity. The problem is that the alleged limitation, or guide, or whatever else we're calling it now, has not had anything established as limiting anything. As far as I can tell, every DM action is permitted under a "plausibility" criterion, so long as the DM did some homework beforehand. Sure, some things require more work than others, but--contra what many have said to my face in this thread--based on my actual experience GMing an actual game--I don't see that effort as ever being even remotely prohibitive.

Hence, other than a DM who simply can't be arsed to put in the work, "plausibility" does not seem to be any different from "anything goes" in terms of the results it can produce from a player's perspective. At which point, what is it even limiting?

I do want to say you keep saying: the DM does this and that or the DM decides this or that. That is not my experience. In our group, the DM adjudicates, but if a decision needs to be made it is a whole group effort.

So what is plausible is not one persons perspective, but the whole groups.

This is extremely surprising to hear. I had understood--in fact, I had thought it was explicitly said, multiple times--that involving players in something like this was utterly unacceptable. That it would be inventing the world to match the players, rather than having the world be "independent" etc. This makes it even harder to understand what exactly is happening, because before this, I thought plausibility had to be determined only by the DM--allowing a player to ever have any say in the discussion of plausibility, I had thought, would be a total abrogation of a vital limiter, namely, that the players cannot simply mold the world like clay in their hands (and thus--allegedly--destroying any possibility of stakes, conflict, drama, etc., etc.)

I'm deeply confused about how the DM could be involving the players in this, in the way it has been presented time and time again, namely, black-box DMing. How can the players tell the DM that what is in the hidden DM notes is plausible or not plausible? How can they critique it when the DM tells them they cannot do a thing they think makes sense, because of secret notes the players aren't allowed to see? That was this whole long discussion very specifically about how many essential parts of the story cannot ever be seen by the players until long after the effects thereof have already become established facts.

Or, to ask the question in simple terms: How can the players affect the DM's decision about the plausibility of what the DM already knows, but the players do not and cannot yet know?