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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9335327" data-attributes="member: 7006">I've talked about this before, so I always assume people have heard my ramblings about it before already (and then just casually walk on past and pretend they didn't hear it, LOL.)But in case not and you honestly don't know, there's a simple reason-- in freeform roleplay (aka performative improvisation), things succeeding or not succeeding is up to the people involved in the scene to decide.  If I'm freeform roleplaying and I get into a swordfight with my scene partner, at barest minimum one of us has to decide to make the choice to lose-- to take the sword hit and then fall to the ground.  Which is fine... that is completely a doable thing if we really wanted to decide who wins like that.  And players making choices on their own like that happens all the time in standard RPGs without using any game mechanics-- the DM chooses to give out information they think the players already know, or players choose to follow one path through the forest rather than another (rather than deciding randomly.)But to keep things surprising for all of us at the table, sometimes rather than making our own choices as to what we do or how we do it or what happens as a result... we let the game mechanics decide for us what happens.  The mechanics tell us when we hit with our sword swing, when we weren't able to make that leap to the ledge, when we get stabbed in the chest and fall down unconscious.  These are 100% all things that we could each decide for ourselves via improv if we so chose during "freeform roleplay" (and anyone who has ever played Fiasco can remember the time when yeah, based on how this heist has gone tits up... their character probably needs to get shot in the face, and they voluntarily let it happen.)  But by letting mechanics and dice decide things for us, it surprises us at the table and gives us new and unexpected perspectives and events to then roleplay around.  Scenarios we did not plan for, which make for more interesting and creative experiences coming out of it.So that's why we use the game... to randomize our results.  But we don't actually care about the mechanics that we use because we're not playing the mechanics for the sake of playing the mechanics.  If we really cared about playing a competitive and tactical game using dice?  We'd play sometime like King of Tokyo because that game is well designed and balanced and built from the ground up just for that experience (so it works really, really well).   But for D&D... we care about what we come up with for ideas after the DM asks us "What do you do?"  And then after we freeform improv our ideas, we will roll some dice to see what the results of the ideas were, and then freeform some more ideas out of them.  But how the dice rolling itself actually works?  That's the least important part of the D&D and for which we care the least.</blockquote>

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