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

[Micah Sweet]

Are you asserting there aren't dramatically more players than DMs--such that there isn't a shortage?

Are you asserting that nearly all players always have a long, established history with their players before a campaign begins? (If so, how can that established history have occurred when they're starting their first campaign???)

Are you asserting that trust never needs to be built nor maintained? Because that's what people have been telling me they haven't been asserting for a while now, and it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for an assertion that was apparently 100% one direction for the thread up to this point to suddenly reverse.

Your conclusions are where I have a problem. Are you denying mine regarding the world you are presenting?

 

[Thomas Shey]

These guardrails feel to me very much like trying to protect the players from the GM. I really object to it as a general principle, because it assumes either incompetence or malice.

They're certainly there to minimize the impact of inconsistent rulings or bad judgment calls. I certainly don't think that's malice, and "incompetence" seems a stretch since I've seen it from otherwise excellent GMs.

Basically, seat belts aren't just there for bad drivers.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And yet you keep saying you want the setting "independent". That you want a "physics" engine or the like. That you want an "objective" world. Etc., etc., etc.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, here.

I want a human making decisions when there's doubt, and I want that human (in my game) to use personal and group standards of plausibility and verisimilitude as major factors in their decision-making, with fun for the players and/or focused randomizers a tie-breaker when multiple choices are possible (which is just about always), and "what would make a good story" as an independent goal not to be a factor.

 

[Umbran]

People in general massively over rate systems and how impactful they are.

I will come back to this in a moment....

In order of importance it's something like:

The people you're playing with on a general human level

How well they can do functional roleplay

How creative they are

How well they can do functional roleplay with this system

It isn't entirely clear to me what you mean by "functional roleplay", but I'll try to work with this, regardless....

I watched John run Blades with Geoff and Ezekial3, well I watched the first few sessions. They were great and he was awful and the system was actively detrimental to play.

This seems highly inconsistent. A moment ago, you said that folks over-rate how impactful systems are, and you don't put the system within the top 4 things that impact results, but now you are saying the system was detrimental to play.

Why do you blame the system, and not instead say the player's ability to do functional roleplay within the system wasn't up to snuff? By your own presented logic, shouldn't that be the more likely candidate? Shouldn't you be blaming the player's inability to adapt to the system, rather than the system itself?

People in general massively over rate systems and how impactful they are.

Coming back to this...

I am in the midst of experiencing the impact of system.

I was running a D&D campaign that recently concluded - low combat, but pretty traditional stuff - The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, which I consider a sort of "piecewise-sandboxy" published adventure. This group mostly goes for fairly traditional, somewhat linear play. They like it when there's a pretty obvious goal for them to shoot for, and a general path to reach that goal that isn't too hard to find. They typically want to concentrate on how they handle the details.

While I prep up the next campaign (which won't be D&D, but Savage Worlds, but still pretty traditional stuff), one of the players is stepping up to run a short-ish campaign in a completely different system as filler. In terms of campaign structure, this game is basically a tree of decision points, not a free sandbox.

But the system is quite different from D&D. D&D is very focused on small tasks - picking a single lock, casting a single spell, making a single attack, what you can do in a mere few seconds of time in a round.

This system isn't focused on minute task resolution, or full conflict/scene resolution, but something in-between. I might call it "sequence resolution", where I mean "sequence" as in a movie or TV show action sequence - the set of things that might happen in a period of time a character has focus on screen.

So, "I rappel down from the ceiling, use mirrors to bypass the laser alarm, cut into the display case, remove the Golden Idol of McGuffin without triggering its mechanical pressure switch by leaving my calling card with a weight, seal the case so my entry was invisible, and go back up the rope," which in traditional task resolution might be five or six individual tasks, is all one roll here.

The things that have the impact, and that takes time for the players to get used to, seem to be that the "task" is much longer, that anything that would fit into an action movie or Mission: Impossible episode action sequence is an acceptable proposition, and if it fits in the genre, and is consistent with what has already been stated, you don't generally have to check with the GM to get details.

Like, the door is locked, but how - maybe it is a fingerprint scan, or a retinal scan, or accessed by RFID chip - doesn't matter. If the player can narrate any of those, and how they deal with it, they're good to just pick the details and go! The difficulty is set on the overall "get into the vault" not on each step of trying to do so, so the steps can be handled as narrative.

And, once they are used to it, the result is palpable - plans become much more dramatic. and grandiose. If, in a more traditional system, I'd presented these players with a caper in which they needed to sneak into a place, get past guards, break into a vault, and get out with the McGuffin, this group would worry and fret and try to plan every single action. Here, we just hop in full-bore without much plan beyond "Jack and Steve are on distraction duty, Sarah and Jim are breaking into the vault. Go!"

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Your conclusions are where I have a problem. Are you denying mine regarding the world you are presenting?

I don't assert the things you're claiming I assert, so I ignored the irrelevant sections where you ascribed an extremist viewpoint to me.

Y'know. The thing you and everyone else in this thread constantly accuses me of doing to you?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think Micah has never been on Reddit . I remember a group of new players I took on had only done a little one shot before, the GM for that told them that they lit the field where they were camped on fire because nobody explicitly said they'd put the fire out (even though the party included a Barbarian with Survival proficiency; or that even novice adventurers wouldn't be that dumb).

I've GMed for people who just due to the cultural expectations much less play expected all NPCs to be secretly waiting to betray them.

I've had people turtle up and horde their resources because they expected to be dropped into unwinnable combat at a moment's notice.

I don't care for Reddit and have visited it only very occasionally, and only at heavily-curated subreddits. And I try not to play with people who assume the GM just wants them to suffer for their own amusement.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I want a human making decisions when there's doubt, and I want that human (in my game) to use personal and group standards of plausibility and verisimilitude as major factors in their decision-making, with fun for the players and/or focused randomizers a tie-breaker when multiple choices are possible (which is just about always), and "what would make a good story" as an independent goal not to be a factor.

I don't see how you can get to "that human [using] personal and group standards of plausibility and verisimilitude" without "what would make a good story".

Because, as it turns out, group standards of plausibility and verisimilitude are literally what most stories are built on. People get annoyed, even upset, when they realize that a story they like has failed to uphold group standards of plausibility and verisimilitude at the broadest possible definition of "group", namely, society at large.

And you'll note that the "story" games you pooh-pooh here...literally do explicitly run on group plausibility. Like they explicitly call out "what makes sense" over and over again as the standard for when things happen and why.

 

[JConstantine]

Yeah, sounds like an argument that everyone should be playing Narrativist games, since they supposedly codify GM objectively best practices. The opinion reads as biased to me.

There's that reactionary pushback I was talking about. The irony is that I, the one who made that comment, not only don't think everyone should be playing Narrativist games, I don't even like them myself.

Until this comment, I've deliberate tried to avoid stating my preferences precisely because cliques form and lines in the sand get drawn.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There's that reactionary pushback I was talking about. The irony is that I, the one who made that comment, not only don't think everyone should be playing Narrativist games, I don't even like them myself.

Until this comment, I've deliberate tried to avoid stating my preferences precisely because cliques form and lines in the sand get drawn.

But remember, Mr.(?) Constantine, it's only the narrativists who get prickly, who act like everyone should live by their standards, who see insult where insult isn't present, etc., etc., etc.

And folks wonder why I get so annoyed by the double standards present in such discussions...

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, I would suspect he has at least used it, but I've no idea whether he frequents it or not. Not that that's necessarily got any bearing on the discussion.

But yes, I too have seen such things. The horror stories of strangers are a dime a dozen, of course, but literally every experienced player I have brought into my Dungeon World game has had at least one terribad DM experience they had previously discussed with me. (Obviously, those players who had never played a TTRPG before cannot have such experiences, thank goodness!)


Yes. A great many GMs/DMs/STs/etc. out there don't quite seem to grok that they train their players to produce behavior. They seem to fundamentally fail to understand how their actions directly shape and produce player behavior. A large number of murderhobo groups are murderhobo groups not because players are dicks or inherently in-universe-antisocial or whatever, but because one or more DMs have taught them that mercy is a sucker's game, traitors lie behind every smiling face, and authority figures cannot be trusted and are usually bumbling, incompetent idiots who literally cannot make things better even by accident.

It's a topic I've long thought about making a Snarf-style post-article about, the way DMs create problem players and then get angry about having problem players.


Yep. That's a defensive strategy I've had to adopt with most DMs I've never played with before as well, especially with 5e, where the DM culture-of-play is "pshaw, this game is always 100% easy street for players, gotta make it ULTRAMEGADEATHBRUTALITY just to even remotely challenge them!"....which has directly contributed to multiple TPKs and campaign failures in my experience. (And even if the TPKs are unrepresentative, I know simply from perusing this forum that "gotta make every encounter Deadly++" is VERY much a common sentiment among 5e DMs.)

I'm not sure how much value a rant about how much you dislike traditional play DMs would have, but it's a free forum. Lord knows plenty of folks have wondered why I posted something.