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

[Ovinomancer]

I'm actually going off the information given by the side in this thread that were FOR story now games. The way they described it here sounded very unpleasant.

In what way? Like, what sounds unpleasant about it?

 

[niklinna]

I'm actually going off the information given by the side in this thread that were FOR story now games. The way they described it here sounded very unpleasant.

I love me a story now game. Things happen fast, surprise is frequent, and combat isn't an hours-long slog of individual blows, boring whiffed rolls, and whittling away at hit points.

 

[RhaezDaevan]

In what way? Like, what sounds unpleasant about it?

I don't have the time to re-read the whole thread again, but from memory:

• The references to no myth, and no GM secrets. Everything is out in the open. Surprises only coming from the players feels wrong. That reference to the player rolling during an unmasking to decide if their guess at who it is is correct gave me the willies.
• The mention of a (mostly) empty world that the players need to fill up during play. Gives the feeling of actors being filmed for a movie or on stage for a play. Takes me out of "being there" as a player or GM.
• The "yes, and..." feel that's more like an improv group. Players can have bad ideas and the gm should be allowed to say no to them when it makes sense to.
• The "cut to the action" sounds OK in theory, but it would get exhausting if there's no downtime in between ever. The intense parts should be earned by building up to them.

I may remember more later, but those are what I can recall. These are all just preferences of course. I'm strictly speaking for myself.

 

[RhaezDaevan]

I love me a story now game. Things happen fast, surprise is frequent, and combat isn't an hours-long slog of individual blows, boring whiffed rolls, and whittling away at hit points.

I like surprises too, but I need there to be some logic to them.

I need breathing room between action pieces. A climax we've built up to can be intense, but not every part of every session.

Are combats based on a single roll then, or do the players just get to decide if they win or lose? I've not actually looked at combat in SN games at all.

 

[niklinna]

I like surprises too, but I need there to be some logic to them.

I need breathing room between action pieces. A climax we've built up to can be intense, but not every part of every session.

Are combats based on a single roll then, or do the players just get to decide if they win or lose? I've not actually looked at combat in SN games at all.

A group that wants logic will have logic. I haven't had a problem with that. It's true, though, you get one crazy nutter in the mix and things get wacky.

Pacing is also up to the group. Blades in the Dark has alternating action and free role-play. My group when it was active spent a whole session on each.

Combats are as many rolls as feels right. Dealing with a mook might be a single roll. Fighting a gang could be a single roll, a roll per gang member (or a couple), or several rolls. Fighting a capable threat could involve any number of individual checks. It's all based on the fictional positioning, managed through stress, harm, and clocks, and the consequences the player wants to take for each action. You could even negotiate in a single test whether it's going to be an incremental gain/loss or a major push toward victory/defeat. (If you're not familiar with that game & those terms, I can explain.)

 

[Ovinomancer]

I don't have the time to re-read the whole thread again, but from memory:

• The references to no myth, and no GM secrets. Everything is out in the open. Surprises only coming from the players feels wrong. That reference to the player rolling during an unmasking to decide if their guess at who it is is correct gave me the willies.
• The mention of a (mostly) empty world that the players need to fill up during play. Gives the feeling of actors being filmed for a movie or on stage for a play. Takes me out of "being there" as a player or GM.
• The "yes, and..." feel that's more like an improv group. Players can have bad ideas and the gm should be allowed to say no to them when it makes sense to.
• The "cut to the action" sounds OK in theory, but it would get exhausting if there's no downtime in between ever. The intense parts should be earned by building up to them.

I may remember more later, but those are what I can recall. These are all just preferences of course. I'm strictly speaking for myself.

This is a much better post than just saying "your play sounds unpleasant." You should take some care, though, in making some of the assumptions you do here based on a quick gloss. If I were to do the same to Trad play, I could come up with the following bullets:

• Having to constantly ask the GM for details about everything, and the right questions to get the right answers, really seems like I'm just here for the GM to impress me with their fiction writing abilities.
• The required effort to learn all of the GM's setting details just so I can do things is a real chore. Gives me the feeling that I have to do lots of homework or will be not effective because I run into blocking setting cannon. Or, heck, the secret setting canon that I can't even learn until it blocks me!
• The GM having to approve all of my actions really makes it feel like a game of "Mother, May I."
• There are things I find exciting, but I have to wade through the stuff the GM throws up that just feels like filler. Like, a whole session of haggling with shopkeepers and meeting random people just to get to the part that matters? That's so boring.

See, quick glosses can make anything sound terrible. I'm quite certain you'd want to argue quite a few of these, if not all of them, as not representative of your play. Maybe think about that a bit.

By the by, I run and play 5e, and I've played and run D&D since the mid-80's. I don't dislike the game at all.

 

[RhaezDaevan]

A group that wants logic will have logic. I haven't had a problem with that. It's true, though, you get one crazy nutter in the mix and things get wacky.

Pacing is also up to the group. Blades in the Dark has alternating action and free role-play. My group when it was active spent a whole session on each.

Combats are as many rolls as feels right. Dealing with a mook might be a single roll. Fighting a gang could be a single roll, a roll per gang member (or a couple), or several rolls. Fighting a capable threat could involve any number of individual checks. It's all based on the fictional positioning, managed through stress, harm, and clocks, and the consequences the player wants to take for each action. You could even negotiate in a single test whether it's going to be an incremental gain/loss or a major push toward victory/defeat. (If you're not familiar with that game & those terms, I can explain.)

Yeah, I'd be frustrated by that type of combat, personally. No thanks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't have the time to re-read the whole thread again, but from memory:

• The references to no myth, and no GM secrets. Everything is out in the open. Surprises only coming from the players feels wrong. That reference to the player rolling during an unmasking to decide if their guess at who it is is correct gave me the willies.

Well, surprises still happen all the time. The GM can, say in Dungeon World, spring something on players, and in fact that is normally how things work. It is more a question of the type of things that will come up. A DW GM is unlikely to simply bring in something completely from left field that doesn't address something that follows from the current play, etc. Now, it may be that this would be GM-generated content, like a Danger of a Front, but the Front in the first place would be developed according to the principles of DW, and chances are some sort of foreshadowing would have occurred. It is untrue that the GM cannot introduce stuff, it just has to be relevant, not just "I want to tell this story, so here it is."

• The mention of a (mostly) empty world that the players need to fill up during play. Gives the feeling of actors being filmed for a movie or on stage for a play. Takes me out of "being there" as a player or GM.

Skilled GMing and thus good scene framing should present a 'world' that is just as authentic feeling as any other technique does. Some things are nearly impossible in classic play that can be done in Story Now. Certainly people have tastes though, nobody can claim you shouldn't have your own. I would say you might want to try playing in an SN type of game of some sort and see what you REALLY think.

• The "yes, and..." feel that's more like an improv group. Players can have bad ideas and the gm should be allowed to say no to them when it makes sense to.

Well, 'yes, and...' is not necessarily employed by all such games. Beyond that I would say that there are ALWAYS sources of constraints on what people can do. Also the focus may not always be on problem solving, it could be on conflict resolution, for example. So, the problem I see with this objection is simply that it assumes a classic GM/Player relationship understanding of RPGs and then projects that onto a different type of game.

• The "cut to the action" sounds OK in theory, but it would get exhausting if there's no downtime in between ever. The intense parts should be earned by building up to them.

Not all 'action' needs to be razor edge do or die. Some could well be, and normally is, some sort of social interaction for example. Something is usually at stake, but there is still pacing.

I may remember more later, but those are what I can recall. These are all just preferences of course. I'm strictly speaking for myself.

I mean, none of the above is intended to call people out for their tastes, maybe you wouldn't like something like Dungeon World, but you would probably be best advised to try it with an open mind under a GM experienced in that type of gaming, and THEN decide if it is fun or not. Its like people who have never tried snowboarding who insist that it is 'bad' and only skis should be allowed on the mountain. Give it a go first, then decide!

 

[RhaezDaevan]

This is a much better post than just saying "your play sounds unpleasant." You should take some care, though, in making some of the assumptions you do here based on a quick gloss. If I were to do the same to Trad play, I could come up with the following bullets:

• Having to constantly ask the GM for details about everything, and the right questions to get the right answers, really seems like I'm just here for the GM to impress me with their fiction writing abilities.
• The required effort to learn all of the GM's setting details just so I can do things is a real chore. Gives me the feeling that I have to do lots of homework or will be not effective because I run into blocking setting cannon. Or, heck, the secret setting canon that I can't even learn until it blocks me!
• The GM having to approve all of my actions really makes it feel like a game of "Mother, May I."
• There are things I find exciting, but I have to wade through the stuff the GM throws up that just feels like filler. Like, a whole session of haggling with shopkeepers and meeting random people just to get to the part that matters? That's so boring.

See, quick glosses can make anything sound terrible. I'm quite certain you'd want to argue quite a few of these, if not all of them, as not representative of your play. Maybe think about that a bit.

By the by, I run and play 5e, and I've played and run D&D since the mid-80's. I don't dislike the game at all.

My assumptions are solely based on how you and others in this thread have described SN games. So that must mean you didn't describe it accurately enough, I suppose.

I made no comments about 5e either way, so I'm a bit confused why you brought it up.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I like surprises too, but I need there to be some logic to them.

I need breathing room between action pieces. A climax we've built up to can be intense, but not every part of every session.

Are combats based on a single roll then, or do the players just get to decide if they win or lose? I've not actually looked at combat in SN games at all.

Obviously there are many different SN games, but I haven't really seen one where players would "just decide if they win or lose." Now, lets say we are playing Dungeon World, the GM is likely to provide some clues that 'stuff is going to happen' and maybe the sort of stuff, generally. Like the players know they're exploring what is ostensibly an orc lair, well orcs probably jump out of the shadows! That may well be several moves downstream from the opening scene, so we could play for quite a while with just the sense of increasingly risky player moves (IE tracking orcs to their lair, entering, etc.). DW doesn't actually have a COMBAT system, but it has a system for determining if you take an action whether or not you pulled it off or not, and if there were any complications. The players are certainly not deciding what happens. If the dwarf leaps into the way of the onrushing orc and the player rolls a 5 (a bad roll), guess what? The GM is going to figure out what the 'bad thing' is which happened, based on what move the player made, and the situation, maybe the dwarf stumbles and the orc shoves him away and hacks into the halfling thief! No player decided that, but the combat is certainly not over, DW would have that continue until things are resolved, either the orc is dead or maybe it runs off, or I suppose it might TPK the party! Honestly, while combat is a bit less structured than in, say Basic D&D, its not THAT different. The players make decisions based on the situation, dice are rolled, stuff happens, characters/monsters die, flee, etc.

And, as noted, there's plenty of logic in "surprise an orc charges the party!" when the action is IN AN ORC LAIR, which is typically the sort of thing that happens in DW (since it is basically a D&D-like setting and genre).

Once the orc is dispatched, the PCs will probably move around some more in the dark, expending torches, worrying about if the halfling's wounds should be fully healed before pressing on or not. Rhythmic chanting is heard up ahead, should they investigate or avoid danger? Its really pretty stock stuff in many respects.