De canistro textrinum

[Fuchs]

I'd bet that the general understanding in many if not most groups - unspoken, but understood - is that you don't lose characters in trivial encounters.

That's a pretty depressing and cynical statement.
Why the fuck wouldn't you just be honest about it and say that one of your caveats for playing in a game is that PC death is turned off except by unanimous vote?

I don't play or run lomg-term games where permanent character death is on the table unless the player wants his or her character to die, so yes, I am honest about it.

Though I do understand that others have fun playing with character death by random die roll I know I don't - I played enough such games in the 90s, and they were not as much fun as other games where I didn't have to worry about my character's survival. The game feels completely different to me.

It's also a simple question of efficiency: I do not like to spend hours and hours on designing a character, making a character sketch, writing up a backgrund, just to lose it all on a die roll.

I do assume though that, given how many ways to resurrect a player character are there in D&D, the general assumption is that "death is not the end, just an inconvenience". I also assume that given how stupid it is to take a player ou of the game for an undefined period of time until the character can be revived, people wouldn't mind skipping that step and simply go from "defeated" to "recovering" without the "dead" and "waiting for resurection" part.

That sort of pointless time wasting is what maybe teenagers can do, but once you've got to balance work, family and other hobbies, wasting time on reviving characters - or creating new characters - just so some grognard can feel big in his pants for "surviving real battles" becomes increasingly stupid.

[Lago PARANOIA]

ITT: People post about how someone else's social contract is invalid and wrong while failing to realize that their own social contract is held together by the very same nonsense and baling wire.

I don't have a problem with changes to the rules or social contract as long as they're brought up before they happen. I won't necessarily walk from a game where a group says that a PC won't die except by a supermajority vote even though the base rules say otherwise for example. I have played on D&D MU*s where this was a stated policy.

I will very probably walk from a group that pretends to play by one social contract but are actually operating under another unless there's a damn good reason for that. I will definitely walk if the reason why they didn't mention the hidden social contract was that they could pretend to be using the de jure one.

It's also a simple question of efficiency: I do not like to spend hours and hours on designing a character, making a character sketch, writing up a backgrund, just to lose it all on a die roll.

Then friggin' say so before the situation comes up. Just say that you've put so much time and emotional investment into the character that a key condition on you playing is that you don't give up control of the character until you want to. Just. Say It.

If the group agrees to that stipulation by majority vote before the situation comes up, then... while I don't agree with that mentality, that is a different strokes for different folks situation. But it's upholding a social contract.

[fectin]

No, Lago has always argued that you need a real risk of dying to actually enjoy success, even in encounters with Random Orc #237. (I think he's incorrect, if nothing else because encountering Random Orc #2372 rarely adds anything to the game to start with). Right or wrong though, he makes a cogent argument, where GC just makes noise.

@Frank:
That part of the argument is distinctly not in the bag, because "that part of the argument" does not exist. You could say that MTP is bad from a design perspective because it's cheating your customers, or because it makes moving between groups hard, or because it's usually impossible to balance, etc. You could argue that MTP is bad at your table because it frequently wrecks verisimilitude, or because its a betrayal of the pseudo-contract with your players described by the rules, or that it discourages less assertive players, or that it's hard to be equitable off the cuff, etc.
But all of those are drawbacks that you can work around, not reasons to say "No MTP, ever!"

I had a SpellJammer game where everyone wanted to capture a pyramid and fly it into space. That had been thier goal since they saw that pyramid, and they speculated about it all the time. At the end of one session, they captured a major helm. Then real world stuff came up suddenly, so the game had to end. I ran one more session so they could clear and claim that pyramid (which was a moderately rough fight) and ended with them blasting off in it. That was pure MTP, as condemned by Mistborn: the pyramid was outside the weight limits of even a major helm. What greater good would have been served by not letting that happen though?

[Mistborn]

ITT: People post about how someone else's social contract is invalid and wrong while failing to realize that their own social contract is held together by the very same nonsense and baling wire.

Lord Mistborn you are playing Magical Tea Party from the moment you sit down at the table and agree to play a game of Let's Pretend We're Murder Hobos. Nockermensch you are playing a game of hierarchically structured rules with strict expectations of power level from the moment you sit down with a second person to play this game.

You are both following the same set of rules, the fact that you get different results is the rules operate on different people in different ways. And I don't mean the D&D rules in case you're such a nitwit as to delude yourself into thinking those are at all relevant to the actual conversation.

False equivalence is the lowest from of argument please stop being frozen fast and try again. Overall grade: F, hope to see you in the fall semester Almaz.

[Kaelik]

That sort of pointless time wasting is what maybe teenagers can do, but once you've got to balance work, family and other hobbies, wasting time on reviving characters - or creating new characters - just so some grognard can feel big in his pants for "surviving real battles" becomes increasingly stupid.

I agree, anyone who plays D&D differently from me is also a completely worthless human being with no redeeming qualities who deserves scorn for enjoying different things.

What a strange coincidence that is.

Or you know, people who enjoy playing D&D for fun, but who also have other things to do in their life still play with the possibility of character death for some other reason besides being time wasting losers.

Nah, it's got to be the one where everyone different from you is a loser.

[Kaelik]

No, Lago has always argued that you need a real risk of dying to actually enjoy success, even in encounters with Random Orc #237. (I think he's incorrect, if nothing else because encountering Random Orc #2372 rarely adds anything to the game to start with).

The part where you are completely wrong is where you think that random Orc #237 exists. Lago and no one else is demanding that random meaningless enemies exist and/or have a threat of killing PCs.

If your PCs are fighting something level appropriate (and level appropriate means like nearly 0% chance of actually killing you if you even try a little bit) then there should be a reason for it, and that reason should be that the thing they are fighting is important for some reason.

The BBEG dispatching orcs to fight a level 10 party is not something that should actually happen at all.

[Lago PARANOIA]

No, Lago has always argued that you need a real risk of dying to actually enjoy success, even in encounters with Random Orc #237. (I think he's incorrect, if nothing else because encountering Random Orc #2372 rarely adds anything to the game to start with).

Filler encounters where nothing happens except for short-term tactical dickering can be a problem. I personally hated the random non-story encounters in Final Fantasy Tactics. If you wanted nothing important or story-changing (like a PC dying) to happen in them, I suggest either flat-out not adding them to the game or switching up the rules so that they can be resolved a lot faster. For example, you roll on a few DM-seeded charts to get the idea of what's happening round-to-round and people pass the story stick around and engage in witty banter.

If you're going to insist on doing the minutiae of filler encounters anyway then I insist that you stick to the current rules or state upfront that you're doing a houserule where players can selectively waive PC death for filler encounters. If you say going to treat a filler encounter like a story-critical encounter gameplay-wise but then don't at the moment of truth because that gives you a sad then that's a 'walk from the table' moment.

Lago and no one else is demanding that random meaningless enemies exist and/or have a threat of killing PCs.

Kaelik, why are you personally against the idea of random meaningless enemies existing and/or having a threat of killing PCs in a TTRPG? I can think of a lot of gameplay reasons why this is a bad idea in abstract, but I can think of a lot of story-based reasons why that they can sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) be good.

[Fuchs]

It's also a simple question of efficiency: I do not like to spend hours and hours on designing a character, making a character sketch, writing up a backgrund, just to lose it all on a die roll.

Then friggin' say so before the situation comes up. Just say that you've put so much time and emotional investment into the character that a key condition on you playing is that you don't give up control of the character until you want to. Just. Say It.

If the group agrees to that stipulation by majority vote before the situation comes up, then... while I don't agree with that mentality, that is a different strokes for different folks situation. But it's upholding a social contract.

I do that, I said I am honest about it. I don't know where you get the idea that people sneak such stuff up on you. I do argue though that the base assumption of the game is that characters get revived by cleric npcs, or cleric PCs after a certain level, and continue getting played. Ways to survive death are in the rules.

Expecting to lose a character for good is going against the basic rules, so the only point people need to argue about is how much of a time penalty death should entail. A few weeks/adventures until the party has gathered the cash to pay for the spell? A session until the party is back at a temple? Or, no time at all, so people can keep playing their favorite character right away?

Why exacrtly are you so hell-bent on making people either give up a character, or take a time out until the character can return? What do you get out of sending your friend to play smash bros until his character gets resurected?

[Fuchs]

That sort of pointless time wasting is what maybe teenagers can do, but once you've got to balance work, family and other hobbies, wasting time on reviving characters - or creating new characters - just so some grognard can feel big in his pants for "surviving real battles" becomes increasingly stupid.

I agree, anyone who plays D&D differently from me is also a completely worthless human being with no redeeming qualities who deserves scorn for enjoying different things.

What a strange coincidence that is.

Or you know, people who enjoy playing D&D for fun, but who also have other things to do in their life still play with the possibility of character death for some other reason besides being time wasting losers.

Nah, it's got to be the one where everyone different from you is a loser.

Yeah, you're right, I went over the line there and got too agressive. As long as everyone has fun people are doing it right.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Expecting to lose a character for good is going against the basic rules, so the only point people need to argue about is how much of a time penalty death should entail.

Not necessarily. For example it's much easier to lose a character for good -- or at least lose a character for so long that it may as well be permanent -- at 1st-level D&D than at 11th level. If you die as a 1st level character due to ghoul attack it may as well be 'for good'. And you either live with it, petition the game designers to change it, or change the social contract.

Why exacrtly are you so hell-bent on making people either give up a character, or take a time out until the character can return?

First of all, my vehemence towards out-of-rules resurrection isn't the resurrection so much as the out-of-rules part. If D&D made low-level resurrection a real and reachable possibility within the rules (like in 4E D&D) then people taking advantage of it doesn't bug me. Similarly, if I was using the resurrection spell under the right conditions but then the DM/group cockblocked me from doing so because they felt like it would undo the drama of the player's death -- and didn't say that they were doing so before the situation comes up -- that would also be a 'walk from the group moment'.

It's not the resurrection of the lack of resurrection that gets my goat, it's the violation of the social contract. And just because I agree to one stipulation (cheap and easy resurrection at level 13) doesn't mean that the group should have free reign to arbitrarily change it in the future. Not even if the arbitrary change is superficially similar to the original agreement.

What do you get out of sending your friend to play smash bros until his character gets resurected?

I think this question is a bit loaded. It implies that I'm enjoying myself at someone else's expense and this is bad. Aside from what I feel is the faulty premise that it's necessarily bad to enjoy yourself at someone else's expense (otherwise the vast majority of human social activity becomes meaningless), I feel that the flip side of offering punishments and rewards for activities is that you have to enforce the punishments. Even if it's just relative punishments like 'you only get 1 piece of candy instead of 10'.

Games and groups holding players to agreed-on punishments satisfies me on a meta-level because it's a smoking gun that the rules and agreements are being upheld. Maybe I shouldn't be happy that such a primitive thing is actually happening, but experience has shown me that you can't actually take it for granted.

[Mistborn]

Expecting to lose a character for good is going against the basic rules, so the only point people need to argue about is how much of a time penalty death should entail. A few weeks/adventures until the party has gathered the cash to pay for the spell? A session until the party is back at a temple? Or, no time at all, so people can keep playing their favorite character right away?

Why exacrtly are you so hell-bent on making people either give up a character, or take a time out until the character can return? What do you get out of sending your friend to play smash bros until his character gets resurected?

because the game can not be all fun all the time for all people. If you lose a character it's not the end of the world and if you can't ever lose a character why are you bothering with D&D in the first place. This is D&D people die when they are killed.

[Fuchs]

Expecting to lose a character for good is going against the basic rules, so the only point people need to argue about is how much of a time penalty death should entail. A few weeks/adventures until the party has gathered the cash to pay for the spell? A session until the party is back at a temple? Or, no time at all, so people can keep playing their favorite character right away?

Why exacrtly are you so hell-bent on making people either give up a character, or take a time out until the character can return? What do you get out of sending your friend to play smash bros until his character gets resurected?

because the game can not be all fun all the time for all people. If you lose a character it's not the end of the world and if you can't ever lose a character why are you bothering with D&D in the first place. This is D&D people die when they are killed.

Why do you think a game cannot be house ruled to the point where obvious hindrances to having more fun are removed? We're not talking about all people, all the time, but a small group of people playing a specific campaign. After all you can remove wish loops even in your opinion.

[Fuchs]

What do you get out of sending your friend to play smash bros until his character gets resurected?

I think this question is a bit loaded. It implies that I'm enjoying myself at someone else's expense and this is bad. Aside from what I feel is the faulty premise that it's necessarily bad to enjoy yourself at someone else's expense (otherwise the vast majority of human social activity becomes meaningless), I feel that the flip side of offering punishments and rewards for activities is that you have to enforce the punishments. Even if it's just relative punishments like 'you only get 1 piece of candy instead of 10'.

Games and groups holding players to agreed-on punishments satisfies me on a meta-level because it's a smoking gun that the rules and agreements are being upheld. Maybe I shouldn't be happy that such a primitive thing is actually happening, but experience has shown me that you can't actually take it for granted.

I would say that there's no need to agree on punishments at all for a leisrue activity meant to be fun.

But that aside - the rules state that you can buy a raise dead spell casting for gold. So, even a low level character can be raised in time - by the rules you want to adhere to, and would get mad if someone tried to hinder you from getting it done.

It does boil down to "how much of a time out for the player should we put up as a punishment for character death?". And it leads to the obvious question of "Why does there has to be a punishment like that at all?".

If people discuss rules (or, rewards and punishments) beforehand, would you argue for or against character death being punished by keeping a player out of the game (until raise dead is applied or a new character created and introduced, both of which can take up to several sessions in some worst cases), and why?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Why do you think a game cannot be house ruled to the point where obvious hindrances to having more fun are removed?

That's not the problem. The problem is that the house rules should be stated before the applicable situation comes up. There will of course be some emergent situations in which this is impossible due to limited player foresight. But the potentially house-ruled response to 'should people die when they're killed?' results in such far-reaching yet obvious consequences in an action-adventure game that there's no absolutely reason not to bring it up before the game even starts.

Emergency changes to the social contract that are made at the convenience of one of the parties is some serious shifting of the goalposts. And I question the intelligence of people saying that this is how games should typically be run.

If people discuss rules (or, rewards and punishments) beforehand, would you argue for or against character death being punished by keeping a player out of the game (until raise dead is applied or a new character created and introduced, both of which can take up to several sessions in some worst cases), and why?

Depends on the game. If I was playing Toon or Mouseguard, then no. If I was playing an extremely specialized and customized version of D&D -- for example, an extremely idealistic and sentimental romantic fantasy campaign -- then I could see myself arguing that perma-death should not be on the table.

But D&D as she is played? That is, a collection of superpowered assholes trying to carve a place and name for themselves in a broken land by picking through the breadcrumb trails and corpses of previous badasses? I'd be typically saying 'yes'. If the group overruled me and said that their potboiler D&D campaign was going to be playing without perma-death that would be a strike against it but it's not a dealbreaker.

I would say that there's no need to agree on punishments at all for a leisrue activity meant to be fun.

If you honestly believe this then not only should you not be playing D&D, you shouldn't be doing any kind of activity with other people that produces outcomes of different utility. Full stop.

[Fuchs]

Emergency changes to the social contract that are made at the convenience of one of the parties is some serious shifting of the goalposts. And I question the intelligence of people saying that this is how games should typically be run.

It is not how games should be run, ideally. But things do pop up in the middle of the game that require emergency changes/rulings. There's nothing wrong with shifting goalposts in mid game per se, but there can be something wrong in how it's done.

Sometimes people do change. What was fun for them when the game started is not fun anymore. Or they discover something they like much more than they thought. If someone comes and says "Hey, the thought of losing my character would ruin the game for me, it's not fun anymore if we go on like this, can we change that", should the answer really be "you agreed to that, now stick to it!"?

That's not how I treat friends. I do not think that just because I agreed once to a certain rule set that I should be held to that agreement for all eternity.

(Both my current table top SR4 and D&D3.X campaigns have been running for over 10 years each. If my campaigns only ran a few sessions each I'd be a bit more likely - though still generally unlikely - to tell someone to stick it out even if he has no fun currently.)

[Fuchs]

I would say that there's no need to agree on punishments at all for a leisrue activity meant to be fun.

If you honestly believe this then not only should you not be playing D&D, you shouldn't be doing any kind of activity with other people that produces outcomes of different utility. Full stop.

Maybe if I wrote "there shouldn't be any negative consequences that actively reduce the fun of the acticity" it would be clearer.

Losing in poker is not a punishment. Losing non-trivial amounts of money would be one. I can play poker without having to lose money.

[nockermensch]

Huh. Interesting. I haven't really approached things like that in the past, but I can see the appeal. Do you ever do games where the PCs are currying favor with various factions in a measurable way, which then leads in to the strength of sides when the armies of tiny men are busted out?

I'm thinking of giving the PCs a chart summarizing the way different factions feel about each other, like so:

	Ferazi	Fey	Dwarves	Ettercaps
Ferazi	-	Neutral	Unfriendly	Enemies
Fey	Neutral	-	Neutral	Neutral
Dwarves	Unfriendly	Neutral	-	Friendly
Ettercaps	Enemies	Unfriendly	Friendly	-

Since each possible recruitable faction has some built-in prejudice for the others I think that the real interesting problem here is how to secure the Ferazi suport if you're already allied with the Ettercaps, or vice-versa.

With a situation like this, the existing NPC reaction tables should be a good start. Depending of the order the PCs go after each faction and their exact plans, apply modifiers for each faction initial disposition to help and use that as a guide (from "We received news that the Ettercaps are helping you, so give us a reason to not treat you as enemies too, and make it quick!" to "The Ettercap elder already sent word of your plight. By the dawn we'll march with you. For now, lets feast!")

The actual appeasing of the hostile factions could be solved by straight diplomacy/bluff/intimidate/whatever rolls, pure MTP or any kind of mix that makes your group more confortable. The way I usually roll is to expect some kind of inconvenience for the PCs whenever they don't succeed by simply rolling dice, ie: ideally failing in a roll should cause inconvenience and force compromisses instead resulting in catastrophic failure. So maybe they have to deliver a beloved NPC as a hostage to a hostile faction to secure their support, or one of their magic items as a gift to the leader, or whatever seems appropriate. The usual CRPG solution of "kill some rats for me to gain my support" seems boring, but sometimes even it makes sense.

[hogarth]

There are at least two kinds of excitement derived from TTRPGs. There's the casino-like excitement on making bets based on hard chances and there's the reading-a-book-like excitement of not knowing exactly what will happen next, even if literaly tropes are obviously steering the story.

But you can't cut off possible gameplay and story directions and while simultaneously claiming that it makes the story more exciting and unpredictable.

Lago, which do you think would be more exciting:
(1) watching an action movie where you're pretty sure that the good guys will win in the end
(2) watching half of the aforementioned action movie and then flipping a coin -- heads = you watch the rest of the movie, tails = you leave and never find out what happens in the end
?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Sometimes people do change. What was fun for them when the game started is not fun anymore. Or they discover something they like much more than they thought. If someone comes and says "Hey, the thought of losing my character would ruin the game for me, it's not fun anymore if we go on like this, can we change that", should the answer really be "you agreed to that, now stick to it!"?

It depends. If when they originally made that agreement they had a good faith in fulfilling it then I would be willing to renegotiate the social contract. If they had pretended to agree to the social contract with the intention of, Darth Vader-style, springing their actually demands at an inconvenient time for better leverage then they can go fuck themselves and I will strongly consider never playing with them again.

By analogy, if I'm playing a poker game for money and Bob gets a call from their SO saying that she got a pink slip and money is going to be tight I'm open to the idea of reducing or even eliminating the monetary stakes altogether. Though Bob also needs to accept that the group may still demand any money he owes and/or they'll kick him out and play the original game without him. Even if the agreement goes through I'll probably play a game in the future that had the original rules set-up if I believe that it was an exceptional circumstance and won't soon happen again -- Bob's SO got another job or he got a bonus or whatever.

If I'm playing a poker game with Bob and tries to change the stakes simply because he doesn't want to lose more than 100 dollars and he's already at -80, then fuck him. If in the future he wants to convince us to play for lower stakes then fine, but until the game is over we're playing under the original agreement. If the group decides to let Bob off of the hook anyway then not only will I probably not play with Bob in the future but I won't play with the people who decided to let him off.


Now, a D&D game isn't played for actual money (though with the amount of time you're expected to put into it, it may as well be) so my response to someone acting like Bob in scenario #2 wouldn't be as extreme as if he owed me actual money. But me mistrusting Bob #2 and his enablers from then on for at the very least doing low-stakes group activities? That's going to happen.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Lago, which do you think would be more exciting:
(1) watching an action movie where you're pretty sure that the good guys will win in the end
(2) watching half of the aforementioned action movie and then flipping a coin -- heads = you watch the rest of the movie, tails = you leave and never find out what happens in the end

Those aren't even comparable activities. The flip of a coin won't change the actual outcome of the ending. If you're saying that with the latter I can at least imagine whatever ending I wanted, well, if I'm willing to live with that level of denialism I could do the same with the former. So the comparison with tabletop gaming, where the story is ideally NOT yet written until you get to that point, makes no sense.

Here's a fix to your analogy:
(1) watching a half-finished action movie in production. The ending hasn't been filmed yet but the director tells you that while s/he hasn't worked out the details like witty banter and stunts it's a certainty that the good guys will win and the bad guy will die. I get to watch the rest of the movie at a future date after it is finished and the rest is submitted to the public.
(2) watching a half-finished action movie in production where the director hasn't committed to an ending. S/he has two scenes filmed; one in which the good guys win and the good guys die. I flip a coin and based on the results of that coin the director creates appends one of the two endings to the movie and then submits it to the public. I don't get to find out which ending the director used until I actually watch the film.

I would say that the latter is by definition is more suspenseful and thus more exciting. Better? More satisfying? Maybe, maybe not. I can think of a lot of stories that had stupid or frustrating plot twists where a more predictable ending would have served the narrative better. But more exciting? Definitely.

[Kaelik]

Kaelik, why are you personally against the idea of random meaningless enemies existing and/or having a threat of killing PCs in a TTRPG? I can think of a lot of gameplay reasons why this is a bad idea in abstract, but I can think of a lot of story-based reasons why that they can sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) be good.

When I said that I meant "(Lago AND everyone) believe X." because I assumed that everyone agreed on this point.

Random meaningless enemies should not exist because nothing you do should ever be meaningless.

IE: Let's look at RHoD. It begins with an ambush by the people who tag you into the story. Great, that fight can either be:

1) So easy you have no chance of dying.
2) Harder enough that you could die.

Now, 2 is fine, because the fight it actually meaningful.

Now, if you go to town, and then start heading out and run into a Hydra, that Hydra matters because it is preventing you from going where you want to go.

Now eventually, there are some Lizardfolk when you are way to high level to matter. They don't matter at all, and further, have no chance of killing you at all.

And that's fine, because they are meaningless.

My point is that when fectin says "Orc #237" he is strawmanning. Because the entire point is that no one ever contends that you should spend time fighting opponents who are literally meaningless.

[Username17]

Nockermensch's stated position (the one that Mistborn stands in opposition to) is that you should roll the dice until you get a result you don't like, and then retcon that result away and then keep rolling dice like you hadn't just invalidated the entire exercise in dice rolling by fudging the results.

I have no fucking clue where you're getting this from nockermensch's posts. Enlighten me.

dude, if you aren't going to hack your way through nockermensch's TL;DR walls of text, which I remind you are 100% of the reason this thread exists at all, why are you posting in this thread?

Yet another character I played was an extra life of another character. Yet again, that started as a "let the dice fall" kind of game, where the DM ran a hard meatgrinder adventure that kind of obviously ground our party down to one surviving PC. Since we were in a hardcore/oldschool mood back then (in fact, since that was way back to 2e days, I think it was not an "oldschool mood", but plain "authentic oldschool"), we laughed at the gruesome deaths, thought that that was awesome, made more characters and came back for more. The result was that the same character survived again, for pure luck (and/or the help of his Bladesinger kit, but since we were like level 2, in 2e and with the enemies casting evocations, mostly luck).

That was when we decided that the situation was precious enough to merit a story: That character was obviously Marked by Fate for some Great Goal.

Nockermensch's entire point in starting this entire fucking misbegotten piece of shit thread is that once he decided that characters were cool enough he started fudging the dice and the rules in order to keep them going. In short: that at some arbitrary point he made the conscious decision that he was going to retcon bad events generated by the dice, and thinks this is somehow OK.

Or to put it another way: that once he decided that he was going to start fudging, then literally every single battle came with the caveat "but the players can't actually lose". Which means that all the NPC attacks, all the literally hundreds of NPC attacks were completely meaningless exercises in die rolling. Exactly like fectin's mass combat example plus the "and then the dice don't mean anything" modifier.

If the results of the dice are not going to be honored, it is both dishonest and pointless to actually roll them! And nockermensch has explicitly stated that once a campaign gets going and the players are lulled into a false sense of security in not being completely dicked with by the DM to suddenly start dicking with the players by not honoring the die rolls anymore.

TL;DR: nockermensch waits for the players to be content with an actual game with actual rules and actual dice before he starts completely fucking with them by turning into a railroading "story first" DM who shows blatant favoritism and refuses to honor die rolls or acknowledge the rules.

Fuck. That.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

ITT: People post about how someone else's social contract is invalid and wrong while failing to realize that their own social contract is held together by the very same nonsense and baling wire.

I don't have a problem with changes to the rules or social contract as long as they're brought up before they happen. I won't necessarily walk from a game where a group says that a PC won't die except by a supermajority vote even though the base rules say otherwise for example. I have played on D&D MU*s where this was a stated policy.

I will very probably walk from a group that pretends to play by one social contract but are actually operating under another unless there's a damn good reason for that. I will definitely walk if the reason why they didn't mention the hidden social contract was that they could pretend to be using the de jure one.

It's also a simple question of efficiency: I do not like to spend hours and hours on designing a character, making a character sketch, writing up a backgrund, just to lose it all on a die roll.

Then friggin' say so before the situation comes up. Just say that you've put so much time and emotional investment into the character that a key condition on you playing is that you don't give up control of the character until you want to. Just. Say It.

If the group agrees to that stipulation by majority vote before the situation comes up, then... while I don't agree with that mentality, that is a different strokes for different folks situation. But it's upholding a social contract.

And yet, you think the usual parts of the DMG dealing with these very issues are fine as is, right?

And yet (part II), from where in my posts did you take material to steer the discussion to hidden social contracts? I think it should be clear that I'm talking exactly about making them pretty much explicit. That the very fact that different social contracts exist right now, deviating from your cute "the game as she's played" (we never play the game as she is played in my group, Lago, except maybe once by edition, to get a feel for the probabilities. Then we start to tinker with it to suit our tastes.) and that people have fun with them, but then get butthurt when suddenly faced with the different ways different groups play should be a warning sign that this part of the game needs a better writing treatment. Stop channeling GC and pretending that there's a right way to play D&D and realize at once that we need to take these things that "everybody knows" and put them on paper, so that people can actually look for group and see a list like:

• PC death can happen anytime (Raise dead magic common in temples of most towns)
• Game accommodates around PCs storylines. Tell me what do you intend for your character's future and lets work on how to get there.
• more usually unspoken expectations.

I've played campaigns where the DM straight said beforehand: Don't worry much about survival because there won't be meaningless deaths. Which means that people could still be killed and die in boss fights or other situations where that death was dramatic and meant something, but not during random encounters and such. In any situation where PC death isn't on the table, deaths results became some kind of inconvenience (you got a limp for one adventure, one of your magic items was broken now, or something).

Curiously, the same DM that had that romantic ideal about PC death was the same one that crossed out ordinary raising spells from the cleric list as a matter of fact. He didn't like the kind of world that results from "death is cheap" spells and so death, in his campaigns, when actually happened, was pretty much final or at least required "go to the underworld to bring the soul back" kind of quest. (This is the same DM from the campaign where I played an "extra life" character to another PC. That kind of equivalent trade was what we felt was appropriate to bring someone from the dead there).

So it's a bit funny to see when people mention "easy mode". His games never felt like "easy mode" for me. They were different. You kind of knew you were immortal except to the main villains, but death when happened was "for reals" and you were fighting those guys anyway, so...

[nockermensch]

Nockermensch's stated position (the one that Mistborn stands in opposition to) is that you should roll the dice until you get a result you don't like, and then retcon that result away and then keep rolling dice like you hadn't just invalidated the entire exercise in dice rolling by fudging the results.

I have no fucking clue where you're getting this from nockermensch's posts. Enlighten me.

dude, if you aren't going to hack your way through nockermensch's TL;DR walls of text, which I remind you are 100% of the reason this thread exists at all, why are you posting in this thread?

Yet another character I played was an extra life of another character. Yet again, that started as a "let the dice fall" kind of game, where the DM ran a hard meatgrinder adventure that kind of obviously ground our party down to one surviving PC. Since we were in a hardcore/oldschool mood back then (in fact, since that was way back to 2e days, I think it was not an "oldschool mood", but plain "authentic oldschool"), we laughed at the gruesome deaths, thought that that was awesome, made more characters and came back for more. The result was that the same character survived again, for pure luck (and/or the help of his Bladesinger kit, but since we were like level 2, in 2e and with the enemies casting evocations, mostly luck).

That was when we decided that the situation was precious enough to merit a story: That character was obviously Marked by Fate for some Great Goal.

Nockermensch's entire point in starting this entire fucking misbegotten piece of shit thread is that once he decided that characters were cool enough he started fudging the dice and the rules in order to keep them going. In short: that at some arbitrary point he made the conscious decision that he was going to retcon bad events generated by the dice, and thinks this is somehow OK.

Or to put it another way: that once he decided that he was going to start fudging, then literally every single battle came with the caveat "but the players can't actually lose". Which means that all the NPC attacks, all the literally hundreds of NPC attacks were completely meaningless exercises in die rolling. Exactly like fectin's mass combat example plus the "and then the dice don't mean anything" modifier.

Lol, Frank. No.

At that particular campaign, at that particular moment, every one of the hundreds of dice rolls rolled against the guy who couldn't die yet were still meaningful, because someone could very well die thanks to them (my character). As it indeed ended happening.

At other moments, there were other hacks at work, but every one of them was meaningful for the PCs.

If the results of the dice are not going to be honored, it is both dishonest and pointless to actually roll them! And nockermensch has explicitly stated that once a campaign gets going and the players are lulled into a false sense of security in not being completely dicked with by the DM to suddenly start dicking with the players by not honoring the die rolls anymore.

TL;DR: nockermensch waits for the players to be content with an actual game with actual rules and actual dice before he starts completely fucking with them by turning into a railroading "story first" DM who shows blatant favoritism and refuses to honor die rolls or acknowledge the rules.

Fuck. That.

-Username17

Show me on the doll where the basketweavers touched you, Frank. I think it's explicit in my posts the "we decided", "we thought that", "we", "WE" parts. I don't use the royal third person. That "we" means "the DM and the players". There weren't situations of somebody feeling cheated because those were all common decisions.

I believe I have a "Fuck. That." here that belongs to you. Have it back. Stop inventing imaginary victims to games where everybody had fun.

[nockermensch]

False equivalence is the lowest from of argument please stop being frozen fast and try again. Overall grade: F, hope to see you in the fall semester Almaz.

I'm still waiting for your own homework, Mistborn. Lago and Frank presented some points that I have to agree with, because they're actually pertinent. It sucks to feel cheated in a game.