D&D 5E Roleplaying in D&D 5E: It’s How You Play the Game

[Maxperson]

in your mind is there never a time when there is nothing at stake AND something can be uncertain? or is it that you have a way OTHER THEN THE ROLL to solve for uncertainty in cases with minor or no stakes?

5e itself tells the DM not to call for rolls unless there is a meaningful consequence for failure. Uncertainty is not the only criteria. I mean, if it literally doesn't matter if they succeed or not, why not let them succeed and move on to something that has meaning?

I have a friend who is a trained magician (not just slide of hand but that's part of it) and he was doing card tricks when me and his older brother were in HS. I have another friend that fancies himself a poker expert (he does win some good money at the casino, but not enough to do much). Me and most of my buddies know how to play poker... those two though only want to play for money...ever.

on more then one occasion as a 'game night' we have tried poker (normally it's board games) but only if those two are not there... because game night to us is things of no consequences so no real stakes. We split some chips up among us, if someone runs out we just redistribute the chips (sometimes we remember to not use all of them) we don't keep track we just play and joke...

I relate the above because sometimes you use skill and luck for things that are uncertain in real life with little to no stakes.

See, I wouldn't want to play in a game like that. Not because I have to play for money. I don't. But I at least want there to be some consequence for good and bad play. If I run out of chips, I want to be out of the game. If I win, I want to get the chips and see them accumulate so I can lord it over everyone! Muauahahahahaha! Okay, maybe not that last part, but I want winning to mean something, even if no money is involved.

From a (long ago) game We had a player who wanted to try to sneak past a bunch of people... he knew that 2 off duity guards were among them, and so there WAS a chance he would be spotted... there was no NEED to sneak, we could just decide yes/no or we can roll... I wonder though, in your mind if this was 5e how would you handle an uncertain moment with no stakes?

I would have let you attempt to sneak by and the guards would have had a chance to see you. Probably opposed rolls due to uncertainty. Since being sneaky like that is a strong indicator that you were up to no good, had you been spotted and the following RP didn't get you out of it, you might have ended up arrested until things could be sorted out. That's enough of a meaningful consequence for me.

 

[Lanefan]

Each of these represents a failure to play 5e*.

Start with meaningful consequences in mind. If you haven't any, don't roll.

The meaningful consequence occurs if you succeed: you get to the top and can proceed from there.

Otherwise, what would you do? Grant auto-success on a climb where any shred of realism would say success is far from a sure thing? Or grant auto-failure and deny the PCs/players the possibility of getting to the top?

 

[Lanefan]

So if I could but I also could not (in quastion) but i have no stakes you take it I always do make it.... intresting.

in the case of the example I gave he flubbed the role the guard noticed and waved hi (we knew him) and nothing else mattered... he just knew that meant that his stealth wasn't as good as he thought... no stakes no consequences just wondering "Can I"
TBH I felt then and feel now it was a waste of time and energy to roll.

I wouldn't see this as a waste of time and energy at all.

Sometimes things in-game can be - and are - done purely for gits and shiggles. Nothing wrong with this, nor with resolving them just the same as if they're serious.

 

[Lanefan]

Honestly, I've done that too, particularly with climb checks (ironically enough.) Our intuition is often to feel that if there is a chance of failure, we ought to roll. Even if the result doesn't feed back into our fiction in a meaningful, consequential way. It's easy to forget we can just say yes and move on.

Except "just say yes" invalidates the chance of failure, whether consequential or not, that you've already admitted exists; which for me blows up believability.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@AbdulAlhazred I've been thinking about some problems and possible benefits of a mode of play that looks similar to 4e. It may be relevant to your interests.

Moves from F to G in many modes might be called "appeal to", like this
DM says F
P says F
DM says F=G so roll
P rolls
DM says >F >G
In a sense, P's fiction appealed to the DM

Moves in the mode I am thinking of might be called "invokes", like this
DM says F
P says F and =G so roll
P rolls
DM says >F >G
So player simply invoked the move

There could be concerns about agreement. We would have trust player, rather than trust DM, but a crucial fact about DM is they have nothing at stake. P might have everything at stake! (If you think about that, it's similar to the Czege Principle.)

I would respond that in fact I think the first process is more in line with the Czege Principle, though neither of them is exactly violating it. Still, there's a sense in which, if the person who is taking the risk is also setting the parameters for how it will be adjudicated, that might not be cool (your comment about 'trusting the player' IMHO is rooted in exactly this). I'm not categorically opposed to any possible system where the player picks the mechanics to use. I have, however, found that the GM might be in a stronger position to do so in many cases. Anyway, HoML at least has way for the player to effectively say "no no, I think I'd prefer things like THIS!" which is to invoke the use of a practice. Also you can invoke Fate. Neither of these is guaranteed to be appropriate to every possible situation though. You might not have available positive fate, or you might not be able to come up with a character attribute to invoke it on. You may well not have a practice that you can fictionally justify using in the situation, etc. Barring those possibilities, the character must go with his original approach.

There could be a significant worry that players will elide fiction. It seems all too possible players over time will change "P says F=G so roll" to, "P says G so roll". The fiction might start to feel like cut-scenes in video games: fun at first but dispensed of the nth time P just wants to do the G. In other modes, DM is upholder of fiction - appeal to me, without naming your move - so so that we maintain a fiction that we know to contain potential that game alone cannot.

Right, that was my other concern, its only a tiny step to eliding the fiction entirely when stating it and linking it to mechanics are effectively all one thing. Handing the mapping off to the GM is mainly meant to make it harder for this to happen (though it isn't by itself a very strong guarantee as we've seen).

On the benefits side, it provides a route to player-empowerment that could pay off in agreement to constraints on other dimensions. It should appeal strongly to mechanically-minded players. On balance though, I have a not yet worked through theory that "player-invokes" puts fiction in jeopardy.

Well, I guess you could look at it like player empowerment, but I think it is a weak sort compared with things like having the players decide many of the key points about how the fiction is set up to start with. I mean, if the player wanted zombies, and they got zombies, they probably don't need to also decide which knack was in the scope of the "burn zombies with fire" fictional move. I mean, its probably already pretty obvious. If not I think maybe someone dropped the ball on developing this story! (it happens).

 

[clearstream]

@Ovinomancer I realise I am in the wrong on something. You expressed that I moved the goalposts. Or put arguments that are incoherent.

I think I do. It takes me time to get what I want to say down the way I really wanted to say it. I struggle to avoid bringing in fragments that are part of my thinking... but gods know how others might follow them. Sometimes you say something and that makes me realise something else!

I know that those factors are frustrating to debate against, and test one's patience. I appreciate you bearing with it and challenging me to bring my argument into coherence.

 

[clearstream]

Except "just say yes" invalidates the chance of failure, whether consequential or not, that you've already admitted exists; which for me blows up believability.

I can empathise with that. It's a common concern. The idea isn't to change what's possible, but to ask the question - if there are genuinely no meaningful consequences, what are we rolling for?

As the debate with @Ovinomancer might have emphasised, that cliff is the same cliff in all scenarios. That overhang is dangerous in every case.

What @Ovinomancer's examples cleverly did is overlaid multiple consequences, and then cried "Gotcha!" when I didn't spell out what I thought was happening.

Failing the first roll and being stuck at the bottom meant the ritual completed. Making it would have reached the overhang. The timings a little wonky there: for the sake of brevity I glossed details that would have mattered at my table. No one seemed to pick up on it, but climb in 5e is usually half-speed. If the ritual really did finish in one check, then we must have been working in a timescale above one round. Let's say 1 minute. That's enough to reach the top quickly enough... but it seems rather brief for a ritual that summoned a greater demon!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Each of these represents a failure to play 5e*.

Start with meaningful consequences in mind. If you haven't any, don't roll.

Meaningful in what sense? If the meaning is all in the mechanics, (IE falling will cause damage, which may have some further impact on the character's ability to act) that isn't meaningful narrative, IMHO. Frankly I would say that it isn't meaningful in a way that really matters to me unless there's some DRAMATIC impact, but dramatic impact does not require us to posit any causal linkage within the fiction, that is WHAT the drama is isn't implied by either the mechanics OR the fiction, except that the game requires in a failure case it go against the intent of the PC.

 

[clearstream]

The meaningful consequence occurs if you succeed: you get to the top and can proceed from there.

Otherwise, what would you do? Grant auto-success on a climb where any shred of realism would say success is far from a sure thing? Or grant auto-failure and deny the PCs/players the possibility of getting to the top?

I think here you are saying that no-progress will prevent retries. Either that or time is at issue. Forcing the party to go the long way around can be a meaningful consequence.

But if the can retry freely. If time isn't at issue, it's just colour. If your group are deeply into such details, then that itself can be a meaningful consequence. I sometimes find something like that as a world immersionist: I want those cliffs to feel daunting, the lay of the land to be felt.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No. I am using narrate to mean introduce, by way of stating it, some fiction.

The narration that Baker characterises as functionally optional is not meaningless. Eg “Amek tears out after him,
shouting for his men" (IAWA, p 15) is not meaningless. But it doesn't generate rightward arrows. Even if Amek's player says nothing at all, "the game just chugs along" because the players can compare the dice rolls, pass the advantage die as appropriate, roll the next round, and (once the third round is resolved, or an absolute victory is achieved earlier) apply the appropriate consequences.

The same can be true of D&D's hit-point based combat resolution. This is why conditions pay such a vital role in 4e D&D, because they generate leftward arrows with concrete changes to the fiction (a character is prone, or is burning, or is poisoned, or is pushed or teleported or frozen in terror). The rightward arrows remain fewer than in, say, Dungeon World or Burning Wheel (as @AbdulAlhzared posted about upthread) but the connection to the fiction is more intricate than in purely hp-oriented D&D combat.

But the player could decide to retreat based purely on the hp numbers.

I played the little wargame with my daughter again on Wednesday afternoon. I used an ability to retreat one of my forces, because I could see that the formation it was part of was going to lose to my daughter's formation. But there was no fiction involved.

I don't see what this has to do with Baker's analysis. It seems to talk about something quite different. Baker is not talking about refusing to narrate vs narrating. He's contrasting being compelled to narrate with merely being permitted or being enjoined to narrate. The latter is what he describes as a system that "lacks teeth" and hence makes the arrows between cues and fiction that it urges functionally optional.

The distinction that Baker draws is not a novel one in general - the difference, in process design, between one which can't be gone through without doing all the desirable things associated with the process, and one that depends on urging and goodwill for all those things to be done, I think is fairly well known. Baker's insight consists in seeing how this distinction manifests itself in RPG design and hence RPG play.

Well, he clearly thinks he's achieved it, with DitV. I think he's also achieved it with Apocalypse World. I can see the difference he refers to when I compare how 4e plays with how MHRP/Cortex+ plays (a rather comparable degree of boxes to boxes with sometimes merely optional leftward arrows) to how Burning Wheel or Classic Traveller players (lots of rightward arrows at nearly every point of resolution, with Duel of Wits being a bit of an exception in the case of BW).

It's not that hard to design a resolution system that makes fictional position a necessary input. It can be harder to have the system also be a satisfying one (Classic Traveller has a few rough edges, compared to AW), but the basic design is not unachievable.

Here's two rule compared, that illustrate the difference:

From 4e D&D, the 16th level Sorcerer utility Dominant Winds: As a move action, enable yourself or one ally in a close burst 5 to fly a number of squares equal to your Dexterity modifier as a free action.​

​

From Classic Traveller: When you activate your ships jump drive, make a dice throw to avoid mis-jump, applying <specified modifiers> and requiring <specified target number> for success.​

Neither rule is especially fancy; both pertain to movement. The Classic Traveller one is, at its core, structurally the same as an AW or DW player-side move - an action performed by a character in the fiction requires a check. And the consequences of the check feed back into the fiction: if it succeeds, the ship enters jump space and travels to its intended destination; if it fails, then the ship ends up jumping to some random destination determined by the referee (canonically via a random dice roll, though I can report from experience that it doesn't hurt the game to do it a bit differently - I rolled the specified number of dice to determine the mis-jump distance, but placed a world at that point, drawn from my handy file of pre-generated worlds, rather than having the PCs just die in empty space unable to refuel their vessel).

The 4e D&D rule is specified almost entirely in "cube" terms: the trigger and the flight time are both specified in terms of an action economy, the targetting is specified by reference to squares on a map (ie cues), the distance flown is specified by reference to a cue (ie a Dexterity bonus), and the movement type itself (flight) involves a whole lot of cue-ish things.

In order to get functionally non-optional leftward out of the 4e move, the GM has to take deliberate steps in establishing the situation, such as terrain that requires or ate least invites flying to circumvent it; and to get rightward arrows you need stuff like winds that blow flying creatures around, or low ceilings that flying creatures might bang their heads on, and the like. (Again, @AbdulAlhazred has posted about this upthread.)

To somewhat echo @Ovinomancer, none of this is to assert that Classic Traveller is a better RPG than 4e D&D. In fact I think it is easier to create compelling fiction in 4e D&D than it is in Classic Traveller! But there is no doubt that to do that in 4e requires those additional techniques of very deliberate situation design - for instance, the first ever combat I ran in 4e was adapted from the B/X module Night's Dark Terror and involved the PCs on a boat on the river, with a chain across the river to stop their boat, enemies swimming to them and coming to them on a raft, a sandbar to move to from the boats, an enemy slinger on one bank, etc. Beside the colourful nature of it, all that stuff helped to ensure that both leftward and rightward arrows would be generated, and thus that the fiction would seem "real" in Baker's sense - again, that is not real in the sense of "realistic" but real in the sense of a feeling of "heft" and independence of will and artifice.

It's obvious, given the amount of criticism that was directed towards 4e over the 4 or so years of its active lifespan, that many RPGers did not succeed in generating those arrows in their 4e play: for them it was just a miniature skirmish game with boxes to boxes. Whereas while I think it is quite easy for Classic Traveller to generate boring fiction - for instance, you don't have to read very hard between the lines to see that this was a concern informing a lot of the Traveller commentary in early 80s White Dwarf - I don't think many players of it would fail to generate arrows to the left or the right. At least its resolution systems make that easy by default.

I think I'm missing how this is radical. You're saying that the GM should narrate fiction. Didn't the 2nd ed AD&D books say something similar?

Heroes of Myth and Legend outlines rules for 'checks and actions'. The intent is to define an iterative process which moves from fiction to mechanical resolution and back to fiction, and isn't trivially either subverted to produce only meaningless fiction, nor to give the GM unlimited authority to weight the mechanical impact of a PC action on the fiction as she sees fit.

"First the GM will have described the fictional situation the characters are in. At this point players who have access to fate may expend it to alter the fictional situation. This is explained later in this section. The player describes to the GM what action their character is taking, in fictional terms. This includes both the action taken and the intent or desired result. Next, the GM will determine the DV, which is the number required to achieve success on the check governing the action. Usually the DV is determined by the level of the current challenge, but the GM may have resources available to alter this somewhat."

The GM describes a situation, this is classic 'scene framing', it isn't stated here, but said scene necessarily must be 'pregnant', it is part of a challenge, and a challenge can ONLY relate to some kind of overall situation that is dramatically interesting WRT at lest on PC (who are canonically protagonists). So, we have fictional situation, and then player description of intent and action, in purely fictional terms, although I will note that invoking a feat is pretty much not subject to interpretation (IE the GM isn't ever going to say "oh, you didn't actually use Come and Get It, or whatever).

Next, the GM will determine what 'aspect' is in force, that is essentially which knack or knowledge would apply to a check. If a feat is being used, this may be dictated by the feat (IE an attack may say 'Weapon vs FORT' or something like that). Otherwise the GM decides "Oh, you want to harangue the goblins long enough to distract them while the elf escapes, OK that seems like you are Deceiving them, so Bluff!

Now, eliding some chances for the players to make additional choices like invoking a practice or expending power, the mechanical check system gets invoked, and a level of result is determined (failure, success, complete success, enhanced success). That will probably have some mechanical impact, like definitely it will change a tally in the current challenge.

However, fiction HAS to result, because the check is A) part of a challenge and each check canonically advances the plot, and B) there has to be a way to frame the next scene, since action declarations can ONLY arise out of fiction.

As I have said earlier, there is some danger of this all being too weak, but plainly a specific set of assertions is made about what the process is. I don't see how anyone can really talk about this kind of thing WRT 5e, except in as much as some weaker statements about "how most people play it" or "how I play it." I'm not convinced much be appeals to 'informalism' or 'convention' in terms of analyzing a GAME. It is fine to use it to analyze an instance of play, but IMHO if you want to build a strong game you have to think about both how it is designed and ALSO how it will play out in practice.