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

[Micah Sweet]

I don't know this thread has moved very fast, as have most other threads on these topics, so I think if I am saying things like that, it is in expediency responding to posts. I have observed you mention you play trad. But the points were are arguing about are what is going on in trad play and what principles of play can produce agency. Those are the things being disputed

He certainly doesn't seem to have much good to say about trad play.

 

[robertsconley]

This thread is over 800 pages long. Do not expect everyone to have seen your magic hat example.

I apologize for the confusion, I muddled the explanation in my earlier reply and made it seem like the magic hat example had been introduced previously. It hadn’t, so sorry for the confusion.

2) While maybe you make all random tables visible to players, that is not general GM behavior, sandbox or otherwise.
Generally, we should not expect the PCs to know the odds behind the "logic of the setting" mechanics.

Yes, players don’t usually see my tables or notes normally. But the goal isn’t to disclose exact odds. Rather, I design my NPCs and how the world works to align with recognizable human behavior and genre tropes. That way, players can bring their personal judgment to bear, much like we all do in real life.

One reason I emphasize first-person roleplaying and draw on my LARP experience is to give players more intuitive tools for weighing their options. I roleplay NPCs as people who behave believably. At a higher level, my settings lean on familiar fantasy tropes (fighters, barbarians, magic-users, etc.) but create depth by making sure that individual characters have distinct personalities, motives, and contexts. Three paladins will all feel different, even if they share the same class. And I found that you can do tersely without sacrificing depth.

We navigate life just fine without knowing exact odds, and I want my players to be able to do the same in the game world. That’s one reason I use the World in Motion approach: to bring the setting to life in a way that players can engage with through observation, inference, and lived experience as their characters.

3) None of that changes the fact that someone chose to have poo as a possible result on Valentine's Day, and whoever made that choice is sleeping on the couch.

Sure, and if I’ve told my players up front that “a bag of poo” (whatever it actually is) is a possible result in this campaign and they still choose to play, is that still an issue in your view?

 

[robertsconley]

where bags of poo are being distributed on valentines day,

I took it as a metaphor for whatever "not fun" thing could happen in a campaign. For example, Total Party Kills.

 

[Thomas Shey]

What you wrote ...

"Ones that require less judgment calls, which is primarily what I've been talking about from the start. Alternatively, one where the players inputs are taken when the call is made, and actually paid attention to (as in "if four of my six players think it should instead be done X way instead of Y way, then we do it X way") and not blown off on the grounds of speed. "

doesn't provide any concrete examples of rules that could be applied to a more traditional game.

Because its going to vary from game to game, and some of it is just being more specific. Without knowing what games a given reader and I have in common, anything I posted would be useless. How many people in this thread (as a proportion) are going to understand what I'm talking about if I talk about 13th Age Backgrounds? How many about some of the vagueries of Fragged Empire skill applications?

Talking about games that have overly general and subjective target numbers at least likely creates a context for people.

A specific example would be something like jumping a gap. In D&D we know how far someone can jump based on their strength and whether or not they have a running start. We don't know how far you can jump if you're jumping from a higher roof to a lower roof when the gap exceeds your strength score and it's a DM's call.

How would that scenario be handled in a game with more specific rules? Other than to say that if your strength is 15 you can jump 15 feet no matter what the circumstances are or it's just an abstract challenge? How could that logic and rules be applied to D&D since you think most DMs could benefit from systems with those rules? Saying that a GM should listen to players and work with them is just solid general advice and has little to do with the rules of the game.

The problem is, again, you think I'm talking about specific rules. I'm not. I'm talking about writing rules in general, even if they take up more space, to define a wider range of usage without as much in the way of judgment calls.

And I'm also talking about GMing culture; I think too many GMs either have an overly top down approach or are too fixated on speed to actually consult with players about things enough.

These two things aren't entirely independent either, even if the first is rules-based and the second is GM-culture based; they feed into the same problems of unpredictability in situations where I don't see any virtue in that.

I'm manifestly uninterested in getting into the weeds of specific rules, especially since doing so in this thread would require me to talk about a game I don't own and don't play.

 

[zakael19]

Personally, I try to approach a given game in the spirit it was intended, even if it's not quite my thing. Not everyone does, and that certainly results in a messy game, but certain Blades fans holding John Harper up as the RPG messiah and refusing to accept that their game isn't universally appealing is tiresome.

See, I was drawn to BitD because of the setting and premise - I loved the Dishonoured and Thief games. I disliked pretty much every mechanical element of Deep Cuts, and the Strangers/Catalyst lore point.

Oh I have no interest in the alt-universe stuff there (I forget which media he said he’d been watching that sparked that desire), but the DC mechanics fixes all the stuff of core FITD I didn’t care for and was already largely depreciating anyway. If nothing else, it’s a good example of “hey you really can tweak the heck out of this system if you want!”

TBH the “there’s no sun part” of Doskvol is the thing I hate the most, lol. As a huge China Mieville fan I love a lot of the weird Victorian / industrial city stuff and wish he’d gone further into that.

(Oh well, working on a Swords and Sorcery city hack to make the game I apparently actually want to play, lol).

 

[Bedrockgames]

I took it as a metaphor for whatever "not fun" thing could happen in a campaign. For example, Total Party Kills.

I get you. I like having TPKs on the table. But I think I approach play, as a player, as a bit of a gambling man

 

[AlViking]

Because its going to vary from game to game, and some of it is just being more specific. Without knowing what games a given reader and I have in common, anything I posted would be useless. How many people in this thread (as a proportion) are going to understand what I'm talking about if I talk about 13th Age Backgrounds? How many about some of the vagueries of Fragged Empire skill applications?

Talking about games that have overly general and subjective target numbers at least likely creates a context for people.



The problem is, again, you think I'm talking about specific rules. I'm not. I'm talking about writing rules in general, even if they take up more space, to define a wider range of usage without as much in the way of judgment calls.

So pick a game you think would be better for a new GM than D&D. Any game at all. Give examples of what you're talking about. Or not. I'm tired of the generalities and "more specific rules better" and "be a fan of your players" and "it's better for new GMs" when there's never anything to back it up than to repeat the platitudes. Some other games work completely differently of course but in those cases I don't see how anything would transfer over. Presumably you do.

And I'm also talking about GMing culture; I think too many GMs either have an overly top down approach or are too fixated on speed to actually consult with players about things enough.

That's a preference. I don't really see as big an issue as you do and they talk about it quite a bit in the 2024 DMG. But again ... in other games how does that work? If there's a disagreement on rules how is it decided?

These two things aren't entirely independent either, even if the first is rules-based and the second is GM-culture based; they feed into the same problems of unpredictability in situations where I don't see any virtue in that.


I'm manifestly uninterested in getting into the weeds of specific rules, especially since doing so in this thread would require me to talk about a game I don't own and don't play.

 

[robertsconley]

So pick a game you think would be better for a new GM than D&D.

This is a bit of an aside, but I think one major reason D&D has remained dominant is that every edition has featured the dungeon adventure. While D&D can support many types of campaigns, the dungeon crawl has always been central, and for a new referee, that’s almost ideal.

Why? Because the dungeon offers a clear, manageable format that demonstrates what tabletop roleplaying is about without overwhelming a novice. It’s structured enough to provide guidance but open-ended enough to allow for creativity and player choice.

Take a sheet of graph paper.

• Draw a maze with rooms.
• Fill some with monsters, some with treasure, some with traps, some with oddities, and leave a few empty.
• Need more content? Just add more levels and connect them.
• Need support? Use monster-by-level tables and treasure generators.

If you follow the examples and fill a single sheet with rooms and passages, you’ve got an adventure that offers exploration and decision-making but is easy to prep and run. A new referee can understand the setup and get going within hours of opening the box.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Thank you. This tells me that the kind of GM restrictions you are advocating work best with very curated systems designed to do one specific kind of gaming. That makes sense, and explains one reason why Narrativist games (and some other non-traditional games) don't appeal to me. I don't want the mechanics to force a style of play. I'd rather have an explanation of play intent, but a loose hand on enforcing it mechanically so the game can be adjusted for the preferences of the GM and players.

I think it is at least true that many such systems are fairly focused. I'm not sure DW is a great example of that. It covers the general range of stuff that D&D does, which I think is the design goal. Obviously it is not aimed at the sort of living world fiction first play some of you favor, but it at least overlaps with a lot of D&D, and does many types of stories quite well.

Other similar games seem pretty broad to me as well, Burning Wheel is another fantasy system that is designed for a wide range of situations and setting on par with other major RPGs.

However, clarity, simple universal resolution mechanics, and a play process that is generally applicable means it is easy enough to simply adapt something like AW to many situations instead of trying to run it as is. There are now 1000s of PbtA games that are largely just AW with new playbooks, some tweaked moves, and often a subsystem or two. They're no more different from each other than flavors of GURPS or BRP.

 

[AlViking]

This is a bit of an aside, but I think one major reason D&D has remained dominant is that every edition has featured the dungeon adventure. While D&D can support many types of campaigns, the dungeon crawl has always been central, and for a new referee, that’s almost ideal.

Why? Because the dungeon offers a clear, manageable format that demonstrates what tabletop roleplaying is about without overwhelming a novice. It’s structured enough to provide guidance but open-ended enough to allow for creativity and player choice.

Take a sheet of graph paper.

• Draw a maze with rooms.
• Fill some with monsters, some with treasure, some with traps, some with oddities, and leave a few empty.
• Need more content? Just add more levels and connect them.
• Need support? Use monster-by-level tables and treasure generators.

If you follow the examples and fill a single sheet with rooms and passages, you’ve got an adventure that offers exploration and decision-making but is easy to prep and run. A new referee can understand the setup and get going within hours of opening the box.

While I never do true dungeon crawls any more, it is a very simple template to start from. I also think some of the mods, especially the intro mods Lost Mines of Phandalver are good for a new GM as well.