Quote from: Benoist;426851I'm getting the feeling we are "that close" from getting all sorts of rants about how straight dungeon crawling is "boring" and "repetitive" and that "D&D could be so much more interesting if only it had this or that." Yeah. OK. So you want to make D&D into yet another fantasy heartbreaker out there. What a fucking stroke of genius. *shakes head*

I play lots of straight dungeon crawls and I do often find them boring and repetitive. Possibly because of how they are DM'd. I used to DM them lots when I was a kid, say aged 14, to about the same standard.

I play lots of games with broader interactive roleplay, and they are far better. Among the kinds of gamers I play with, I think, on the whole, they are more popular. But that's only the kinds of gamer I play with.

I guess I wasn't really just talking about D&D. I was treating Dancey's arguments as levelled at D&D and broadly similar games meaning fantasy TTRPGs where you have broad explorational freedom.

D&D specifically - well, I think it definitely needs a 5th edition, but probably in about 3 years' time, and what that edition should be, commercially, well, fucked if I know - but I'm fairly sure that "narrativist" is NOT the answer. Happy?

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426858Sorry, I meant "backwards" in the sense that "modern" D&D's focus on the board is (a) crap (IMNSHO), and (b) taking the game in the opposite direction from one of the fundamental innovations of RPGs, namely: they're not board games.

Okay. We're definitely on the same page there.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426858The same goes for the invocation of "say yes or roll the dice". Again, I don't have the DMG in front of me but there's a passage that clearly advises the GM to use dice to resolve uncertain situations, instead of arbitrarily saying "you can't do that".

If you look beyond D&D, these approaches have been even more widespread, going back to the 1970s. However, they shouldn't be confused with the dogmas of "mechanical conflict resolution", "social combat", or "shared narrative authority".

I agree. I think mechanical approaches like these need to be weighed carefully against their cost in terms of how much they disrupt or supplant play itself - i.e. player is presented with a situation/environment -> player decides how to react to that situation.

Quote from: Cole;426860I am interested in interacting with an imaginary environment, not a series of "challenges."

Yes, that's a trivial truth for immersionist TTRPGs (although not necessarily for D&D as conceived since 3rd edition); but in building that imaginary environment, numerical dimensions are rarely the most important descriptive element. OK, sometimes they will be - the length of a ship might be important for instance, if you're going to sail on it. But if you're in the town, popping into the tavern for a drink, would you really expect the GM to tell you the detailed layout of the tavern, with dimensions? I'd rather he focused on stuff like the atmosphere, the architecture, the materials that it's built from, the kind of clientele, the ales on offer etc.

Quote from: Omnifray;426865Yes, that's a trivial truth for immersionist TTRPGs (although not necessarily for D&D as conceived since 3rd edition); but in building that imaginary environment, numerical dimensions are rarely the most important descriptive element. OK, sometimes they will be - the length of a ship might be important for instance, if you're going to sail on it. But if you're in the town, popping into the tavern for a drink, would you really expect the GM to tell you the detailed layout of the tavern, with dimensions? I'd rather he focused on stuff like the atmosphere, the architecture, the materials that it's built from, the kind of clientele, the ales on offer etc.

Generally if my character is an interior space I am going to want to know the physical nature of that space. As I have said before it makes the area more concrete and thus more interactable. If he is in an open field or something like that, it is reasonable that the topology might not be as detailed - that is a practical consideration. If he is in a dungeon, a cave, a temple, it is a high priority for me to understand the space concretely in order to interact with it with a kind of freedom. In cases like this dimension is a huge part of this, as a top level perception.

Quote from: Omnifray;426861I play lots of straight dungeon crawls and I do often find them boring and repetitive. Possibly because of how they are DM'd. I used to DM them lots when I was a kid, say aged 14, to about the same standard.

Not "possibly." It certainly is a failure of DMing, and not a failure of the game.

Straight dungeon crawling offers the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of environments, threats, with a wide variety of different entertaining activities (from resource management to cartography to building your company to treasure hunting to straight fighting to solving widely different types of problems and puzzles to interacting with NPCs and other player characters etc etc). If straight dungeon crawling feels boring, then it is a failure of the DM and/or players. Certainly.

In any case, that's what D&D is about at its core: exploration. The voyage down the rabit hole. Beyond the map. In the depths of the Oerth. That's what it is about.

Quote from: Cole;426868Generally if my character is an interior space I am going to want to know the physical nature of that space. As I have said before it makes the area more concrete and thus more interactable. If he is in an open field or something like that, it is reasonable that the topology might not be as detailed - that is a practical consideration. If he is in a dungeon, a cave, a temple, it is a high priority for me to understand the space concretely in order to interact with it with a kind of freedom. In cases like this dimension is a huge part of this, as a top level perception.

Yes, yes!  This is where I'm coming from as well.

Quote from: Cole;426868Generally if my character is an interior space I am going to want to know the physical nature of that space. As I have said before it makes the area more concrete and thus more interactable. If he is in an open field or something like that, it is reasonable that the topology might not be as detailed - that is a practical consideration. If he is in a dungeon, a cave, a temple, it is a high priority for me to understand the space concretely in order to interact with it with a kind of freedom. In cases like this dimension is a huge part of this, as a top level perception.

Just trying to understand here...from a designers take...

At what point do you like to get that type of info (first impression,situation dependent etc.)?

How do you feel about games that intimate the player roll for other sensory perceptions but not spatial ones?

Interactable how...with movement rates,weapon reach,feat use ie. the "rules" or something else...character feelings/expressions or...?

Does "top level perception" actualy tell us exact dimensions or just a general feel for the space and what may be likely?

:hmm:

Quote from: Cole;426860I am interested in interacting with an imaginary environment, not a series of "challenges."

I think this summarizes in one single sentence all that is wrong with the current iterations of the game.

Quote from: Benoist;426881I think this summarizes in one single sentence all that is wrong with the current iterations of the game.

from my limited 4ed. experience I would concur...

Quote from: skofflox;426886from my limited 4ed. experience I would concur...

Note that I wrote iterationS with an "s." Just to make clear this wasn't 4e-specific.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426858The same goes for the invocation of "say yes or roll the dice". Again, I don't have the DMG in front of me but there's a passage that clearly advises the GM to use dice to resolve uncertain situations, instead of arbitrarily saying "you can't do that".

If a player wanted to see if a magic crossbow was for sale in a tiny village, I'll happily toss him a D20 and say give me a 20.

So we got a 95% chance that there are no magic crossbows for sale, but I get to be surprised 5% of the time.

It's fun to get surprised by dice.

Quote from: Spinachcat;426888If a player wanted to see if a magic crossbow was for sale in a tiny village, I'll happily toss him a D20 and say give me a 20.

So we got a 95% chance that there are no magic crossbows for sale, but I get to be surprised 5% of the time.

It's fun to get surprised by dice.

Would rolling a 00 on d% be more appropriate for something like this?

Quote from: RSDancey;426758Players get automatic information about the world they inhabit, provided it would be reasonable to assume they're alert to that knowledge.

Generally your point is accurate but the examples are horrendous. Any referee who omitted the obvious overhead webs and the pile of refuse in the center is doing a poor job. The DMG guide example (either one) is a poor example in this regard. The 3.X example can be excused because it is a direct homage of the original example.

On the other hand there are several modules I know of for AD&D 1st that have overly long room descriptions. Really really long. I agree that concise, terse, description that only contain what the players absolutely need is a virtue.

Your first part is that the players get automatic information about the world they inhabit. HOW do they get this information? They can't mind read the referee so the only alternative is for the referee to describe it. Otherwise it effectively doesn't exist.

If you relying on the players to ask about it then you just turned encounters into a game of 20 questions which is what will happened after the first few times with this system.

Which leads to the problem of assumptions. Different people assume different things. If you don't include any spatial description then how they will know it is a large, small or medium size room?

The solution is to teach referees how to make good descriptions.

As for me I am of the school that a picture is worth a thousand words. I use a dry erase battlemat and have a small box of furniture/prop by me. I developed a patter that has me drawing and describing at the same time. For certain common situation I have a tube of mats that i just throw out. Like a forest, road, etc.

I refined this to the point where the players don't have to play twenty questions with me about the encounter and it gets laid out in a minute or two.  Things like Dwarven forge and many of Wizard's Dungeon Tiles are not used unless I have something already done before the session and laid aside.

The point of this is to illustrate there other methods of shrinking the description phase of an encounter.

I would be interested to know if you have any actual play account of doing this while refereeing a dungeon crawl.

Quote from: ggroy;426890Would rolling a 00 on d% be more appropriate for something like this?

I'm sure if the player keeps asking in every village, the GM is going to start asking for %ile dice or even d1000. Same if it's not a +1 crossbow but a +5 crossbow, +10 against lycanthropes.

Actually, in those situations, I'd probably ask the player to rephrase the question in more general terms (or rephrase it silently on the fly) so that there might be a crossbow, or a sword, or whatever. Or, in D&D terms, you could just have a Treasure Table letter associated with a given size settlement.

But those are just ways of regularizing something if it turns into more than a one-off. If the question doesn't arise very often, then the exact percentages don't have to be very precise.

Quote from: estar;426901The solution is to teach referees how to make good descriptions.

Bingo. Again.