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

[Micah Sweet]

So “GM comes up with something on the fly, players decide to move around it” isn’t a satisfying answer? What more do you want?

Bespoke terminology and extraordinarily precise verbiage?

 

[Faolyn]

Sure. What I meant was that it was intended to drain resources. Whether it actually does comes down to the players. If they're savvy enough to resolve/bypass it without resources expenditure, more power to them. The flip side is that they sometimes spend resources on thing that weren't explicitly intended to be encounters.

Unfortunately, some games—like D&D—don’t have social-specific resources to be drained, which undoubtedly leads people into thinking that social events aren’t encounters.

Hmm. Considering how easy it is to regain hit points in D&D, maybe social events should cause damage.

 

[Maxperson]

Note that I said satisfying!



Sounds like the response of someone reading to understand for sure!

Wow. It's amazing to me that you don't even understand your own posts. Your "satisfying" comment was in the context of you saying that there is a bit of a conflict. There isn't.

I read to understand, but it seems you didn't write to do so! Amazing!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Unfortunately, some games—like D&D—don’t have social-specific resources to be drained, which undoubtedly leads people into thinking that social events aren’t encounters.

Hmm. Considering how easy it is to regain hit points in D&D, maybe social events should cause damage.

I can see it. So much that causes hit point damage can't possibly be doing any real physical harm in the fiction anyway.

 

[hawkeyefan]

So “GM comes up with something on the fly, players decide to move around it” isn’t a satisfying answer? What more do you want?

Well as I said, for many games, I wouldn’t ever think of those as encounters. It’s not defined in any way other than as a signaled threat.

Bespoke terminology and extraordinarily precise verbiage?

You realize you’re defending jargon here, right?

 

[robertsconley]

Seriously, they're NPCs, all the 100s of ways we use to judge the competency and reliability of people, to know who to trust are not present in RPGs.

On this specific point, this is precisely why, when I referee, when I roleplay the NPCs, I will do so in the first person, so that the players have a better sense of what is going on with an NPC character. It's not a perfect emulation, but it's often good enough that it becomes a non-issue.

When dealing with a mass of NPCs, I rely on my experience with leadership positions and management to convey to the player a good enough impression of what it's like with a particular group.

Finally, because of how fast in-game progress compared to real-life time, I tend to err on the side of more information, not less. I recognize that in real life, one's social sense of a situation is built up over repeated interactions with the folks involved. So if a couple of in-game days passed with a bunch of NPCs that are under your command, your character would get a good sense socially of what's going on with them.

And this is a significant reason why, when you described what happened up thread, I felt it was a bad referee call on the behavior of the NPCs you left behind in charge.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Wow. It's amazing to me that you don't even understand your own posts. Your "satisfying" comment was in the context of you saying that there is a bit of a conflict. There isn't.

I read to understand, but it seems you didn't write to do so! Amazing!

If you don’t understand that there’s a conflict between the need for prep and player agency, I’m not going to try and convince you. The way you’re engaging with the idea… “not now and never has been”… certainly doesn’t indicate an open mind.

 

[Campbell]

I think Narrativist game assumes Narrativist play is not any more One True Way than the described D&D play loop and description of the GM as Master of Worlds, Master of Adventures and Master of Rules. Especially when it goes out of its way to say this is how you play this game, not all roleplaying games. 5e does not even contemplate other ways or arrangements. That's not a knock on it by the way. It has no obligation to describe or enable other ways of playing.

 

[Campbell]

So, a serious question: are exploration games an accurate label?

To me, it feels similar to how dungeons function in Dungeons & Dragons, yes, dungeons are a common type of adventure in campaigns using D&D, but they’re not the only thing going on, nor are they always the primary focus of a D&D campaign.

The same applies to exploration and sandbox campaigns. Sure, in many , including my living world, adventurers make their way across the landscape. But often sandbox campaigns have a different purpose. For example, a recent campaign centered on adventuring in the City State of the Invincible Overlord. When the party finally left the city, it wasn’t to explore in the classic sense, it was to help one of the characters pursue a Viking revenge quest.

Which is why, upthread, I decided to call my take a living world sandbox campaign. But sandbox campaigns in general are often more than exploration of the unknown. Now with D&D, dungeon is in the brand name so they can't escape that. But with the sandbox campaign, it is a different story.

I am speaking to exploration as an activity of play here (akin to the exploration pillar and the described 5e play loop). Exploring your environment in a conflict neutral way in order to find out more about the world and its inhabitants. This free exploration comes from two places - players are not expected to engage in the world in any particular way (no binding premises, no game provided agenda) and predefined elements to explore that allow players to decide what to engage with and what to go do with fairly minimal pressure.

So, in Monsterhearts one of the agendas you are supposed to have is this:

Make each main character’s life not boring.

As a player, part of your job is to advocate for your character. But being their advocate doesn’t mean it’s your job to keep them safe. It’s not. It’s your job to make their life not boring. It’s about figuring out who they are, what they want, and what they’ll do to get it – even if that exposes them to danger. Your character can’t emerge triumphant if you aren’t willing to see them through some naughty word.

Unlike some roleplaying games, Monsterhearts doesn’t have an endgame or an explicit goal to shoot for. You are left to determine what it is that your character wants and pursue that in any way that makes sense to you. Since the default setting is a high school, there are a few goals that nearly everyone is going to have: saving face, gaining friends and social security, figuring out who their enemies are, getting social leverage on others, dumping their pain on other people. If you aren’t sure who your character is, start with those things and build from there. Soon, you’ll likely find yourself embroiled in situations that demand action, and what your character wants will emerge from that.

What this means is that at every moment of play you are expected to aggress (rather than explore) the shared fiction in a way that helps you find out more about your character (and the other player characters as well).

Collectively as a group we are doing one of two things in every moment of play: establishing stakes for future conflicts and playing those conflicts out. Avoiding or averting conflict is playing against the agenda of the game. Not playing to the beliefs we have established for the characters would be playing against the spirit of the game. We have freedom of action, but this is done in the context of framed conflicts that must be dealt with in some way.

This is one of the ways in which Information Gathering / Free Play in a game like Blades is often misplayed. Groups who haven't internalized the game's agenda and best practices often treat it is general exploratory play when it's really meant to be used to establish stakes for the coming score (what are we doing, what could go wrong, what stands in our way).

TLDR You can explore in a game where the fiction is not about exploration of unknown environments and you can have a game where our fiction is about exploring the unknown, but we are really just establishing stakes.

 

[Umbran]

I read to understand, but it seems you didn't write to do so! Amazing!

Mod Note:
How about you stop taking personal jabs at people, like, right now. Please and thanks.