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

[Lanefan]

I don't follow. Ahab was doomed and it's quite clear from the very beginning that he's doomed.

It's ages since I read Moby Dick, I only remember the ending where they die together. It seemed to map fairly closely to a scene someone (you?) was positing as being a bad thing, where a PC kills her foe but then dies due to poison inflicted by said foe.

Further--isn't this the very storytelling you claim to detest so? You're already turning this situation into a narrative arc!

I'm referring only to the scene in which they both die - which maps to a single combat in D&D terms - not the whole story.

 

[Lanefan]

And how can players distinguish that?

They don't. It's that old trust thing again.

No. What I'm saying is, you have not really done anything particularly meaningful or noteworthy by only revealing secrets that are now, functionally, irrelevant. Like finding out after you quit a previous job because you got a better offer, that there were free snacks in the break room that you never knew about, or that all those weird tasks that came down from on high were actually part of a hush-hush government contract all along, and thus there were specific rules for why certain tasks were assigned, or that all the times you got a promotion and someone else didn't (or vice-versa) there were actually well-defined and specific procedures which were sensible, just complicated. Like...you no longer care. It no longer matters why those things were ABC and not XYZ, because...it literally doesn't affect you anymore. Knowing how to advance in a workplace you don't work at (and almost certainly won't work at again) is useless information. It's nice to know that they weren't yanking your chain, but other than letting you know that they weren't doing that, there's nothing really gained from this information.

Again, I'm not saying it's bad, and I definitely didn't say that EVERYTHING FOREVER should be revealed. (It's worth noting, this is an example of inserting an extreme view I never said nor even implied. Folks on the "traditional GM" side of this discussion have been quite prone to call out ascribing extreme views to them. If that's a problem, I'd appreciate that that expectation apply to all.)

What I am saying, is that there's a lot more meaning to communicating the rules, or at least some of the rules, when that information still has a meaningful (NOT guaranteed, just meaningful) chance of mattering. That's a gesture with weight to it, because the rules are public knowledge. A failure to abide by them is visible. As I said (repeatedly), that kind of reveal means you as GM have skin in the game. There's no cost to you, no risk, no weight when you as GM already know that it almost certainly won't ever matter. There is some cost, some risk, some weight if you have good reason to believe it will matter again, even if not right away.

Hence why I said it wasn't bad, but it wasn't particularly good either. It's null information, because the impact of the reveal is largely null.

So if you were DMing that scenario with the floating gem generating flashing lights each colour of which had different effects ranging from useful to deadly, assuming the PCs had no prior experience with or knowledge of such a thing, what if anything would you have revealed about its mechanics, and when, and why?

Separately from the above: Why does there need to be mystery in it? You say this as though it's axiomatic that every rule should be mysterious until it doesn't matter anymore. This is far from established (to say nothing at all about whether it is even true).

When you-as-PC encounter something unusual, one would expect there to be some mystery involved as to what makes it tick.

As it happened, they had a PC in the party who had encountered a similar gem before, though that one only flashed one colour and only had one possible effect, which meant that through that PC they had some clues going in as to what might be involved. Had they not, though, they'd have been flying blind until-unless they did some investigation and-or experimenting.

 

[Lanefan]

No, we can let him die and ressurrect him later. Your words.

Exactly. One (later, two) survivors instead of zero.

Works every time for me.

 

[Faolyn]

Sure.

But the core point remains: even from the very foundation of the hobby, even from the moment that what most folks see as the highest height of ultra-realism, generally-respected folks recognized that overly-laborious focus on realism wasn't actually productive. That there are, in fact, times when it is NOT correct to choose greater realism and damn the consequences. That, even to people who prize realism extremely highly, it is NOT universally better to maximize realism absolutely every single time. It didn't come from some yahoo nobody knows. It didn't come from "storytelling" games. It didn't come from a newfangled thing that can be dismissed because it's just a fad. It can't be written off as merely an isolated separate preference totally unrelated to sandbox-y play or "traditional GM" games, because this was very specifically in a context everyone agrees is unequivocally sandbox-y play by the man who defined what "traditional GM" meant.

There have been many arguments, here and elsewhere, where folks have presented the thesis, often in different words, that if you have a choice where option A is more realistic and option B is less realistic, it is ALWAYS, 100% of the time, regardless of context or cost, absolutely always best to choose A, no matter what A or B might be, because A is more realistic and B is less. It is useful to me, to point to something that has none of the characteristics used to casually dismiss my arguments.

It is a useful way to show people that realism is not a cost-free choice, and that sometimes, the cost can be too high.

This.

Back in 1e, there was an optional rule in the DMG that, after every in-game month, the players needed to make percentile checks to see if they caught a disease, such as "cardiovascular-renal" afflictions (possibly fatal in d12 days), leprosy, or a UTI, or a parasite.

Was this realistic? Yes. PCs are always crawling through filthy places with open wounds (and many of those wounds were caused by filthy claws or blades), and they eat crappy dried rations and badly roasted monster meat--real wild meat has to be prepared carefully because of the parasites; imagine what an owlbear is infested with. And who knows what those potions are made with! There's no list of side effects or adverse events, let alone potential allergens!

Was this actually fun? Well, I don't think that these two pages full of tables and calculations ever showed up again in an official book, and I don't think I ever saw it addressed in Dragon Magazine (I might have missed those articles or letters) so that should tell people that the writers figured that this level of attention to realism wasn't necessarily wanted.

(Watch: someone will reply saying they use this rule religiously.)

 

[Lanefan]

Retreating from combat: still engaging with the game and the story.

Avoiding any activity that has a 1 in 20 chance of instant death: Smart and cautious...but not engaging with the game and story.

100% still engaging with the game and story, only in a way you personally don't approve of.

 

[hawkeyefan]

You're confused. Correlation does not equal causation. The cook being there)or not) isn't connected to picking a lock

The comment I responded to wasn't about causation. It was about the lockpicking attempt having "nothing to do with the cook". Here is the comment:

It's not just that the stakes have been set, but more so that the lockpicking attempt has nothing to do with the cook. Being discretely different events means that there should be different rolls to determine each.

I don't see how when picking a lock, being discovered by someone who may be on the other side has "nothing to do" with picking the lock. Of course it does!

And you say here that there should be distinct rolls for the two things. So I offered a way that there does not need to be two rolls.

I didn't say that you cannot split it up into two rolls. I didn't say there "should" only be one roll. I just offered an alternative.

Not as remarkable as the amount of arrogance it takes to assume that people who have a preference other than yours don't have enough imagination to make your way work, or are actively making it not work.

We just like something different.

I don't know who you mean by "we"... because there have been several people who continue to misunderstand fail forward, or see it as only applicable to narrativist games. That people have different preferences is obvious and really doesn't need to be said anymore.

In this case, you've described two things as being "unconnected" when clearly they may be connected, so I commented to explain why and also how it could be resolved all with one roll.

 

[Campbell]

I think it's a huge mistake to cast GM Moves as just what GMs do. I know that a lot of us kind of intuitively picked up scene framing and so it seems like that's what GMing just is, but it's just one way to approach roleplaying games. Especially when it comes to moves like separate them that are very explicit hard scene framing sorts of moves.

This is not how I approach with Worlds Without Number or Into The Odd at all. Nor even how I approach Chronicles of Darkness.

 

[zakael19]

No, it's about the conservatism of D&D and how it can change. The very nature of the topic is going to involve challenging how things are done and suggestions on how they can change.

Or even: talking about how D&D has changed for many people inclusive of its guidelines in the newest edition as well as games that take certain aspects of “modern” play culture and attempt to grab the vibe with a system that supports it (thinking Daggerheart here mainly).

 

[hawkeyefan]

Or even: talking about how D&D has changed for many people inclusive of its guidelines in the newest edition as well as games that take certain aspects of “modern” play culture and attempt to grab the vibe with a system that supports it (thinking Daggerheart here mainly).

Absolutely!

I played in a 2d20 game of Star Trek Adventures for a bit. I'm not a big Trek fan, so I wasn't crazy about the game... but I did like the way it handled initiative. Essentially, it grants initiative to the PC side of the conflict, and then they can select who of their characters they'd like to go first. Then it alternates to the NPCs, and then back to the PCs and the player decides who goes next... and so on, until everyone on each side has gone. Then you start a new round.

I adopted this for D&D for a while and it worked quite well. 5e isn't the most tactical game in many ways, so this added a level of tactics... of decisions to be made. Who goes next? Should we push the Wizard's turn to the end of the round and prolong the duration of his Spell effect, or do we have him go now? And so on. It kept the players more engaged as well... they were more likely to be paying attention no matter whose turn it was.

I mean... people have been tweaking D&D since the jump... it's really odd to see folks shooting down ideas out of hand just because they come from certain games, or are suggested by certain posters.

 

[pemerton]

This I think is why some people don't like fail forward. Your expectations of play are different.

I know this seems obvious, but for some reason we all want to re-litigate "my preference is different from your preference" over and over ad infinitum.

Again, if you want other posters to stop asking me questions, please take that up with them.