D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[The Crimson Binome]

Except, played straight and unbiased, you won't 'succeed at being a hero' with one character out of thousand. Most will just never have an opportunity to be heroic, few of those with the opportunity will survive acting heroic.

Let's say there are a billion people in the world, and a million of them might go on to become heroes. That we choose to focus the camera on those particular individuals does not impose anything on their actions. They would act the same way, whether we watch them or not.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I disagree: RPG campaigns were nothing happens have definitely existed.

Call me a skeptic Even if such a thing exists, its NOT D&D, or if someone played it using D&D then they basically didn't use much of the system. Its certainly not what RPGs are envisaged to be for, remember the Pens & Paperclips joke?

I think Saelorn really needs to play in a campaign that's /exactly/ what he says he wants. Once he's played through the lives of a few completely-random, non-biased, not-destined-to-be-heroes people who live out long, unremarkable, lives (or die in infancy), I think he might start to get it.

Well, I get that feeling too, but I know he's sincere and he's far from alone. I don't have anything against Saelorn getting what he wants, or what he really wants, or what's 'best' for him, or whatever. I think if he got a chance to play with someone like Chris Perkins, or PirateCat, or maybe Pemerton, he'd get an eye-opening experience, but he should definitely play how he likes. My criteria really is that people do what they like but do it with open eyes, knowing its the choice they wanted, not doing it believing they're doing one thing when they're doing a different thing, or without knowing what else is out there. Not that its my business to 'educate' people or decide who does or doesn't know what, but of course we're all busibodies sometimes.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Let's say there are a billion people in the world, and a million of them might go on to become heroes. That we choose to focus the camera on those particular individuals does not impose anything on their actions. They would act the same way, whether we watch them or not.

Unless they know they're being watched, of course.

And, even out of those million, how many get one opportunity to do something heroic? Two or 3 such opportunities?

6-8 per day?

PCs in RPGs, like protagonists in stories, get thrown into events that are extremely improbable. They have to happen to someone. Without the game and the DM pulling fate's strings and making them happen, you don't have a game.

In the end, there's no difference between creating a character that the game & DM treat 'like a destined hero' and theoretically 'choosing to watch' the 1 out of a million ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances and ends up a hero. Either way, you have a shot at playing a hero.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Perfect objectivity might be impossible, but that's no reason to abandon the goal entirely. Close is usually good enough. Not actively diving into the deep end of narrative causality is the absolute minimum I expect from any game, if it is to be salvageable.

Maybe I'm wrong, I have no way to verify my hunch, but I think you're overselling it. As we've amply demonstrated games fundamentally work for gamist reasons. I'm not really even sure what 'narrative causality' would be or how you would 'avoid' it. Why is there a dungeon? Because its fun for the PCs to go in and loot it! That's pretty gamist to me, and it seems to exist only so that there can be some sort of narrative. The dungeon is the antagonist. I get that you can all pretend that there's some other reason 'evil wizards did it.' Its still there so the PCs have a place to adventure. Dragons exist to be slain, etc.

Beyond that, IMHO you're just taking the idea that only your brand of process-sim can give you the type of game you're talking about. Its not like in my games the IN-GAME answer to why there's an encounter going on is "just because it would be boring otherwise" that's not it at all. The players are going around making decisions about what to do, the DM (me) is presenting conflicts and adjudicating them. Those conflicts arise fundamentally because the characters have unmet needs, even if its just a need for entertainment or gold. While I might throw something at the party if they just go camp out in the woods for days on end, they're basically the driving force. Even if its like my war campaign where the action came to them they were still deciding where to be and what to do. Nothing is illogical, plot has to hang together and make sense after all.

I'd also just like to point out that the same 'anthropic principle' that you invoke for 'why are the characters present in this time and place' works for me too! The characters are at the point in time and space where the fulcrum of destiny lies, they will have to confront hard choices and terrible enemies, or else they will fail and go down to the land of the dead unremembered. All the unimportant boring people that might exist? We don't make up legends about them!

Game mechanics can help here. Instead of providing tool to promote and direct the drama, rules can be made to mitigate sources of bias. Random tables are an example of a tool to improve objectivity.

Meh, I think random tables can be OK, but there's no real difference between a random table and a list you just follow from 1 to 10. I long ago realized that was true for 'random encounters', there's no reason at all not to just make up the next 10 'random' encounters that will happen and put them in a list and cross each one off when you get to it. There's no reason not to just put them on the map too! Sure, maybe they're 'wandering' monsters that aren't 'in-lair', but I don't need a table for all this. There's no drama in random die rolls, and if I'm making up the random encounter table anyway, then what's the difference, I've already dictated what is going to likely show up.

Beyond that I don't see tables as more than idea generators. DMs rarely just use what is on them without any filtering anyway. If you're really stuck then I guess rolling a random something is OK, but I don't get stuck like that, there's always something happening. The world isn't just reactive, its ongoing and its aimed squarely at trying to stop the PCs from getting what they want because again that anthropic principle you talked about, which I just call protagonism.

Truthfully though, if I want to just wander in random generator land why not play a computer game? That's how I feel about it. In our 5e game my character has great ambitions. He's 4th level, but by gosh he's going to build himself a kingdom! Everything that stands in the way is his antagonist. He's got so much stuff he needs to do he'll be at it for 15 levels, which is of course exactly how I hope it goes. I have no doubt, and every expectation that the DM will throw neighboring kingdoms, greedy interlopers, foul monsters, and bands of bandits, and stuff I can't even think of, in my way. I'd be very disappointed if it wasn't that way. I don't want to roll dice and just succeed because hey the random dice said it was easy, I want to earn it.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

PCs in RPGs, like protagonists in stories, get thrown into events that are extremely improbable. They have to happen to someone. Without the game and the DM pulling fate's strings and making them happen, you don't have a game.

Maybe you run your games that way, but it's not necessarily true. PCs don't find themselves in such improbable circumstances unless the DM inflicts such a thing on them.

It's entirely possibly to have a game without the rules and DM conspiring to create improbable situations. Look at Shadowrun, for an example of a codified game world where PCs and NPCs do exciting things, on a regular basis, of their own volition. D&D can also be like that.

 

[JamesonCourage]

There's no drama in random die rolls

I somehow feel like this quote might embody the deep divide in the ongoing conversation. I might be wrong, but I know that my mind rejected that assertion hard when I read it just now.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Maybe you run your games that way, but it's not necessarily true. PCs don't find themselves in such improbable circumstances unless the DM inflicts such a thing on them.

Every game you have ever played in that you didn't walk out of in boredom was run that way.

Being an adventurer, alone, is an improbable circumstance.

It's entirely possibly to have a game without the rules and DM conspiring to create improbable situations. Look at Shadowrun, for an example of a codified game world where PCs and NPCs do exciting things, on a regular basis, of their own volition. D&D can also be like that.

Shadowrun assumes you've entered a small, short-life-expectancy, profession. The kinds of things shadowrunners do are not the kinds of things a society could accomodate a whole lot of without collapsing into anarchy - so, yeah, the game essentially forces an improbable narrative (you are a Shadowrunner, not dead, and get all the work you want and then some) in order to make the game work. Just like an author would place his protagonist in an interesting situation, and shape the narrative in interesting ways that are just barely plausible, however improbable they might be were the setting and situations real.

Meh, I think random tables can be OK, but there's no real difference between a random table and a list you just follow from 1 to 10. I long ago realized that was true for 'random encounters', there's no reason at all not to just make up the next 10 'random' encounters that will happen and put them in a list and cross each one off when you get to it. There's no reason not to just put them on the map too! Sure, maybe they're 'wandering' monsters that aren't 'in-lair', but I don't need a table for all this. There's no drama in random die rolls, and if I'm making up the random encounter table anyway, then what's the difference, I've already dictated what is going to likely show up.

I somehow feel like this quote might embody the deep divide in the ongoing conversation. I might be wrong, but I know that my mind rejected that assertion hard when I read it just now.

There's plenty of drama in a random die roll a player makes to see if he succeeds or fails (perhaps, 'forward') at something important. The drama inherent in encountering an orc patrol in a corridor, followed by a troll in a cavern, is no different for the patrol being random and the troll pre-placed, or the reverse, or both being pre-place or both being random. It's the exact same pair of encounter.

One reason I think 'players always roll' variants are kinda nice, if you can get a system robust enough to handle the implied lack of DM 'fudging.'

 

[Balesir]

Let's say there are a billion people in the world, and a million of them might go on to become heroes. That we choose to focus the camera on those particular individuals does not impose anything on their actions. They would act the same way, whether we watch them or not.

Maybe you run your games that way, but it's not necessarily true. PCs don't find themselves in such improbable circumstances unless the DM inflicts such a thing on them.

I am finding this exasperating to read, let alone anything else. Can you really not see that these are contradictory? You pick some people who, by your own definition, are "one in a million" because of what they end up doing as a life story and yet "PCs don't find themselves in such improbable circumstances unless the DM inflicts such a thing on them" and your GM doesn't do so?? It's a bit like Comical Ali with his "No, there are no tanks here!" when there were tanks on camera crossing a bridge right behind him. In this case it's just "Oh, no! We are not following this bunch of ruthless tomb robbers and anti-Tiamat crusaders in the anticipation of any drama! How could you imagine such a thing?"

There are a few immutable facts about roleplaying games:

1) The game world does not really exist - it is a figment of all the players' imaginations*

2) The player characters do not exist, they are also the figment of the players' imaginations

3) When the player characters are imagined, we do so with the expectation that they will do something interesting and/or exciting. In other words, something dramatic.

There are a myriad ways to play RPGs and a myriad of tastes they can cater to, but these facts are simply not negotiable. They are simply the way things are. There is really precious little that could be said to apply to all TTRPGs, but these 3 points definitely count.

As others have already said: play the game however you like, but please wake up to what is actually going on when you do.


*: For those that think only the GM imagines the world: if the players didn't also imagine the game world they could only imagine their character floating in empty space. They have to imagine the game world in order to play the game. Doing so only to be told you are "imagining it wrong" because "only the GM knows what it's really like#" is not only nonsensical it is ruinous of any ability to play the game with any agenda.

#: This is especially egregious, since it is, as already noted, not "really" anything. It is a figment of our imaginations.

 

[Balesir]

Like I said before, nobody is perfect. As long as the DM is trying, and is aware of probable biases, then the end result will be good enough.

The research and researchers I pointed to are saying precisely that this is hardly ever the case. Vanishingly few people are really aware of when they are using heuristics and "fast thinking" and the biases that are emanating from that. Several of the people who have researched those heuristics and perceptual inconsistencies have said when interviewed that it is impossible to avoid them in the general case. We all have them. We all fall for them regularly. All we can do to counter that is remember routinely to check and test our beliefs if they are important. The beliefs that form our models of imaginary worlds are almost certainly wrong (as they deal with stuff we do not need to consider deeply on a daily basis) and are probably not important enough to really warrant extensive testing and revision on a regular basis.

Short story - this is not about corner cases or the fringes of scientific theory, it's about most of what is relevant to an "adventure" roleplaying session.

You are factually incorrect on this point. It is way easier to convince the DM of something that is actually practical than to convince the DM of something that is completely unrealistic. It's easier to convince the DM that I can run a mile in ten minutes, than that I can jump to the Moon.

You have to consider the messages the target of the social interaction is predisposed to hear, sure. That applies to all sorts of social endeavour, from a sales pitch to a contract negotiation to a confidence trick. In broad terms that probably means something not utterly unrealistic, but roleplaying scenarios frequently deal with actions or situations that are well beyond the everyday experience of the players. Our mental models for these things tend to be even more wildly incorrect than usual.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Maybe I'm wrong, I have no way to verify my hunch, but I think you're overselling it.

I'm probably over-stating my case, yeah. For example, I can see some room for players to contribute in world-building, where it might actually improve the game rather than detract from it.

There's no reason not to just put them on the map too! Sure, maybe they're 'wandering' monsters that aren't 'in-lair', but I don't need a table for all this. There's no drama in random die rolls, and if I'm making up the random encounter table anyway, then what's the difference, I've already dictated what is going to likely show up.

When you place them on the map, you're saying that they'll be there regardless of what the players do. When you roll randomly, you're saying that you don't care whether or not the players encounter these monsters.

Those aren't necessarily in conflict with each other, but they tend to be.

The world isn't just reactive, its ongoing and its aimed squarely at trying to stop the PCs from getting what they want because again that anthropic principle you talked about, which I just call protagonism.

Those things are not equivalent. Just because we're pointing the camera at this particular group of people, who might be in the right position to do something big and important, it doesn't mean the world is out to get them.

At some point, if the PCs actually do accomplish something important, then opposing NPCs might take action to stop them. Not because the PCs tend to find themselves in improbable situations, but due to real choices that the players have made.

I don't want to roll dice and just succeed because hey the random dice said it was easy, I want to earn it.

You didn't earn it, at all, if it was set up for you. The DM has arranged these convenient monsters and bandits and usurpers for you to overcome. That's not to say that it's necessarily easy to overcome them, but that's the reason why they are there.