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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Renamed Thread: "The Illusion of Agency"
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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 9545287" data-attributes="member: 58197"><p>That last item is the key. Combat presents meaningful decisions. Each round, you make choices about where to move, which resources and abilities to use, which opponents to target, which allies to buff or heal, etc.</p><p></p><p>Many of the die rolls in combat could be eliminated and it would still work. For instance, many DMs don't bother rolling damage for monsters and just use the listed average. (The large number of die rolls in combat does serve a statistical function, smoothing out the impact of chance so that small modifiers can have a cumulative impact. But you could achieve the same goal by using bigger modifiers and fewer rolls.)</p><p></p><p>Just adding more dice rolls accomplishes nothing but slowing down the game. And this is a major problem with noncombat scenarios in D&D: Often, the game mechanics present no meaningful choices, so we use "Uh, make a skill check" as a cheap, easy substitute. It makes players feel they have agency without actually giving them any.</p><p></p><p>What OP is saying is to remove that option, forcing yourself to construct a scenario with meaningful decisions -- or else accept that no meaningful decision exists, decide the outcome, and skip the illusion of agency.</p><p></p><p>I'm not a hundred percent sold yet, but it's certainly worth thinking about.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 9545287, member: 58197"] That last item is the key. Combat presents meaningful decisions. Each round, you make choices about where to move, which resources and abilities to use, which opponents to target, which allies to buff or heal, etc. Many of the die rolls in combat could be eliminated and it would still work. For instance, many DMs don't bother rolling damage for monsters and just use the listed average. (The large number of die rolls in combat does serve a statistical function, smoothing out the impact of chance so that small modifiers can have a cumulative impact. But you could achieve the same goal by using bigger modifiers and fewer rolls.) Just adding more dice rolls accomplishes nothing but slowing down the game. And this is a major problem with noncombat scenarios in D&D: Often, the game mechanics present no meaningful choices, so we use "Uh, make a skill check" as a cheap, easy substitute. It makes players feel they have agency without actually giving them any. What OP is saying is to remove that option, forcing yourself to construct a scenario with meaningful decisions -- or else accept that no meaningful decision exists, decide the outcome, and skip the illusion of agency. I'm not a hundred percent sold yet, but it's certainly worth thinking about. [/QUOTE]
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Renamed Thread: "The Illusion of Agency"
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