D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[clearstream]

Which is exactly what I said: it's not the quality that is the primary thing driving its popularity. It's market insertion (you can find them everywhere) and ease (they're relatively cheap, but no, they're not even good quality for the price, you CAN find better if you know where to look...people just don't usually care to look.)


Okay. How about DC movies? How about some of the later films? Infinity War and Endgame were supposed to be grand, epic things. They've got...some serious writing flaws. (Consider the death of Pietro and how horrifically ham-fisted it was.)

They really do have some quality issues.


....if you're going to expand the definition of "quality" to include literally anything that might be valuable about a product, then sure, "quality" predicts success. Because you've watered down "quality" until it means literally anything positive.

Your previous posts made it pretty clear you were talking about something much more robust than that.


Again, only if you water down "quality" to the point that it just means "having benefits." Yes, things that have benefits of some kind will be popular, because that's a truism.

What do you make of apples with apples comparisons, 5e v. 4e, 3e, 2e?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Then you have made it circular. It's popular because it's good; it's good because it's popular. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Any non-circular, non-trivial definition of "quality" is going to tell you nothing, because popularity is at least as much a function of externalities (like, as stated, market insertion, nostalgia, previous investment, etc., etc.) as it is of skillful execution.

And that's we compare like with like, so that we can mostly eliminate those other factors and rate 'fun.' Like both DC and Marvel films are big money superhero blockbusters based on well known characters. So it is pretty easy and fair to compare them. Similarly 4e and 5e are both published by the same company, and having the market leader position and D&D brand recognition to help them. (Though of course 5e actually had to fight that market leader position back from Pathfinder, which is another fair comparison.)

 

[clearstream]

Mostly this is one of the biggest issues. 5e doesn't have a non-combat resolution system, at all, in effect. It has a 'color generation' system. That is, first the GM sets the DC of every task, and only with reference to the specific fiction engaged by that action, and then there's no 'valance' to whatever results from the check. So non-combat resolution in 5e is utterly toothless. It actually means nothing to pass a check in 5e (unless it is an attack roll or a saving throw in combat). 5e doesn't even really tell the GM what the meaning of passing/failing a check should mean in any terms which matter WRT the character's goals at all. So the means doesn't even technically exist for a player to engage some sort of concern they have at a mechanical system level. Is it possible for the GM to draw out a (mental perhaps) map of what successes mean in a specific context, communicate that to the player (so they can assess the stakes and thus truly engage the character's need/consideration) and then honor that. The result would look HELLA lot like a 4e SC! That is in fact exactly what the SC mechanism of 4e does for the game's participants. It says "Oh, you, player, you need to get N successes here before 3 failures to achieve your goal, and the checks will come out of skills X, Y, and Z, and they will be level Q, and R of them will be hard checks." It also says that there is a contract here that requires the GM to honor success with the same faithfulness they would for a combat situation.

I have to ask re: this. How much do you play 5e, and how well versed are you in the core game text?

Yes, you can certainly have Story Now happen without a formal way to do all the above, but everyone had better know how to make that work. Basically Story Now 5e requires rewriting a bunch of the game in a fairly thorough way, even if only informally.

OTOH this is true. Well, not rewriting but grasping and upholding according to specific principles.

 

[Campbell]

What do you make of apples with apples comparisons, 5e v. 4e, 3e, 2e?

I do not really view it as apples to apples. At least not with 4e which pretty much has a phenomenally different set of play agenda than the rest. I do think 5e is significantly higher quality design than 2e or 3e by a country mile. It has a much more coherent design, is much quicker to get to the table, has math that while not as tight as I would like is much tighter than 2e or 3e and plays a hell of a lot smoother than 2e or 3e (esecially 3e which was a damn mess).

I do not think it can be overstated how terrible D&D 3e was from a functional design standpoint. From table handling time to building encounters to uneven class design to putting way too much emphasis on build and spell preparation over actual gameplay the game was a hot mess. Not to mention how absolutely painful prep was.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This reminds me why I have come to dislike overarching 'threat to the world' storylines. They wrap everything around themselves. Hard to have fun player initiated heists, hard to even worry about your insignificant personal woes; the world is at stake, man, whatcha gonna do?

Though I have a funny story regarding an unusual course such a scenario took from years ago. Perhaps it was accidentally very Story Now in a sense? It was an Exalted campaign I was running and a Deathlord was trying to blow up the world. The motive of the Deathlords is basically to end suffering by euthanising the entire world. The PCs somewhat unsurprisingly were not going to let this happen. So one of the player characters had dragged her wife (who was originally just a random NPC but the player decided their character madly falls in love with her) into the 'final battle' with the Deathlord. In the ensuing battle the wife gets killed (I don't remember how, probably due random. The wife was a competent warrior, but not nearly as tough as the PCs.) So at the crucial moment where the characters are just about to stop the bad guy from activating his doomsday thing, he makes some sort of classic villain speech, addressing the character whose wife was killed. "Now you know my pain, join me and we can end all the suffering forever!" (Or to that effect.) So the character, who is utterly heartbroken, actually agrees, joins the bad guy, the world gets blown up, the end. On the one hand it was pretty cool, but the other players weren't terribly pleased.

Definitely amusing, and kind of cool. I think its a good example of the player engaging with the world through the perspective of the character, so nice RP.

(I have a bad habit of accidentally making weirdly convincing bad guys. This is not the only time when the PCs have gone during a villain monologue: "You know what, he actually has a point!" )

In any case, what we were talking about? I think I lost the plot... But yes, the GM introduces the situations for the PCs to react. Then again, in Story Now GM frames the scenes too (though there tends to be some more limitations about how they should do it there.) And the framing of course always contextualises and informs the direction the play will take. It also matters how much the play revolves around the PCs reacting to things the GM frames and how much around the things PCs just initiate. Like can the PCs just randomly decide to rob a Baron's treasure vault or buy a ship and become pirates (Why both my examples are about crime?) Sure, in D&D these both still would be contingent on the GM having put rich barons and ships in the world, but at this point we can hardly call things "GM directed." And I don't think it is unusual for game to contain both more plothooky and more self-initiated situations.

I mean, I can't really say what a given GM in, say, Dungeon World, is going to frame into a scene. It is ENTIRELY going to reflect whatever the players have 'asked for'. So they will have answered certain questions, which may have established barons and treasure vaults, and pirates. Even if not, the GM in DW is certainly not powerless, and is not told that they cannot add elements for whatever reason. However, those elements will only be added which are relevant, they must be part of framing a scene or some move within a scene. Like, the GM might introduce pirates by framing a scene "you spot a black sail rising above the horizon to the north, looks like pirates!" Or maybe its a response to a Spout Lore move by a player and the GM responds with "You know that the Melmurian Sea is the abode of the infamous Crimson Captain, a pirate of great ill repute." I'd assume all of these put some sort of pressure on the PCs, they will either have to face the pirates, or some other negative consequence will arise, like they won't reach Star Island by Midsummer Day. Additionally GMs create fronts, so they COULD build in pirates that way too, though IMHO creating a front totally whole cloth that hasn't any basis in either current play or some premise that the participants have discussed in some fashion doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess a portent related to that front could act as a trial balloon, maybe if the players totally ignore it, then the pirates remain over the horizon and fade from view.

Players themselves have a lot of ways to bring stuff in though, and they really don't have any formal constraints. They can answer questions in ways that introduce new stuff, they can create a new bond which references something out of thin air, or they can simply role play it, though at that point the GM will have to oblige them.

Sure. I just feel that 5e play doesn't need to be, and often isn't, nearly as constrained than implied.

No, but there's this weird idea that "5e does it OK" which is only true IMHO for a very narrow slice of possible RPG play styles. In fact IMHO it is a pretty narrow game. It may fight some use cases less strongly than some games, but what it does well is pretty narrow.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Mostly this is one of the biggest issues. 5e doesn't have a non-combat resolution system, at all, in effect. It has a 'color generation' system. That is, first the GM sets the DC of every task, and only with reference to the specific fiction engaged by that action, and then there's no 'valance' to whatever results from the check. So non-combat resolution in 5e is utterly toothless. It actually means nothing to pass a check in 5e (unless it is an attack roll or a saving throw in combat). 5e doesn't even really tell the GM what the meaning of passing/failing a check should mean in any terms which matter WRT the character's goals at all. So the means doesn't even technically exist for a player to engage some sort of concern they have at a mechanical system level. Is it possible for the GM to draw out a (mental perhaps) map of what successes mean in a specific context, communicate that to the player (so they can assess the stakes and thus truly engage the character's need/consideration) and then honor that. The result would look HELLA lot like a 4e SC! That is in fact exactly what the SC mechanism of 4e does for the game's participants. It says "Oh, you, player, you need to get N successes here before 3 failures to achieve your goal, and the checks will come out of skills X, Y, and Z, and they will be level Q, and R of them will be hard checks." It also says that there is a contract here that requires the GM to honor success with the same faithfulness they would for a combat situation.

I can't say I understand this criticism of the tasks resolution system at all.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And that's we compare like with like, so that we can mostly eliminate those other factors and rate 'fun.' Like both DC and Marvel films are both big money superhero blockbusters based on well known characters. So it is pretty easy and fair to compare them. Similarly 4e and 5e are both published by the same company, and having the market leader position and D&D brand recognition to help them (Though of course 5e actually had to fight that market leader position back from Pathfinder, which is another fair comparison.)

Nah, I'd rather not draw the modhammer. You and I will never see eye-to-eye on this question, I guarantee you that.

In fact, let's turn that around. 3rd edition and its descendants (like PF1e) were wildly popular. One of the most popular editions ever, in fact. Popular enough to become part of the cultural zeitgeist well beyond just D&D, e.g. the use of "Took a Level in Badass," a trope name that drew on the 3rd edition concept of à la carte multiclassing.

It's also a completely broken, deeply, deeply flawed system. One that two different companies had to straight-up admit to their players that it was too broken to keep iterating on, the second of which had literally made their fortune by trying to keep iterating on it.

How does your theory explain that?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, but there's this weird idea that "5e does it OK" which is only true IMHO for a very narrow slice of possible RPG play styles. In fact IMHO it is a pretty narrow game. It may fight some use cases less strongly than some games, but what it does well is pretty narrow.

Yeah, I definitely am not one of those "but D&D can do everything" people. It cannot. It is an action adventure game with some weirdly specific conventions. But I do think it can easily do very character driven play, as that mostly is not about the rules. Not Story Now of course, but still. Basically what you need for character driven is characters who have motivation to do stuff, and a GM that is willing to let them do stuff. Like sounds silly simple, but that's basically it. If you want more drama, then build characters with hooks for drama.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Nah, I'd rather not draw the modhammer. You and I will never see eye-to-eye on this question, I guarantee you that.

Then why do you continue?

In fact, let's turn that around. 3rd edition and its descendants (like PF1e) were wildly popular. One of the most popular editions ever, in fact. Popular enough to become part of the cultural zeitgeist well beyond just D&D, e.g. the use of "Took a Level in Badass," a trope name that drew on the 3rd edition concept of à la carte multiclassing.

It's also a completely broken, deeply, deeply flawed system. One that two different companies had to straight-up admit to their players that it was too broken to keep iterating on, the second of which had literally made their fortune by trying to keep iterating on it.

How does your theory explain that?

So I really don't like 3e. At all. But the truth is that a lot of that brokenness was theoretical. Yes, you could break the game if you did certain things. But most people simply didn't, and the game worked fine enough for them. And yeah, if it actually would have broken down during casual play so that people literally couldn't paly, it wouldn't have been popular. But that's not what happened. (I can attest to this. Played for years, didn't particularly like the game, but I cannot remember a single instance of 'the game braking.' Orks were killed for XP just fine, no issue there.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Then why do you continue?

Believe me, what I had written the first time was very, very different.

So I really don't like 3e. At all. But the truth is that a lot of that brokenness was theoretical. Yes, you could break the game if you did certain things. But most people simply didn't, and the game worked fine enough for them. And yeah, if it actually would have broken down during casual play so that people literally couldn't paly, it wouldn't have been popular. But that's not what happened. (I can attest to this. Played for years, didn't particularly like the game, but I cannot remember a single instance of 'the game braking.' Orks were killed for XP just fine, no issue there.)

....if your standard of "it isn't broken" is "you can do the basic stuff at early levels and nothing noticeable pops out," then again, I assert you have a trivialized definition of "quality." But since we have gone around this circle three times now and gotten nowhere, I won't be responding to you further on this subject. There is nothing further to be gained by doing so.