I don’t agree with the overall view there.
The example the blog gives is: “I flash the barkeep my best smile, order a cup of ale and pay with a handsome tip and try to get him talking about the local rumours in a chatty friendly manner.” The mistake in the reasoning is assuming the GM must call for a roll.
From my point of view, players don’t call for rolls, the GM does. Players just say what they are trying to do. While the GM can call for a roll in a situation, they don’t have to. Something might just succeed or not. What if the barkeep likes gossiping with anyone who walks in the door, no matter how persuasive the other person is?
It’s also odd that they state in the d20 version of the example “the roleplaying doesn’t actually affect the outcome” right after suggesting the GM give a +2 modifier to the roll for the roleplaying.
How the fuck are my players doing all of this roleplaying then ??? Sorcery I tell you !
Proper shit assumptions here, the writer is doing the exact opposite of the D&D nerds who pick up pbta and say “well how am I supposed to do anything?”
Probably most egregious though is how they’re arguing against them self: they claim that the mechanic driven exchange isn’t influenced by the roleplay, but had the DM give an explicit bonus for their roleplay. Likewise, they think the means to roll mean you have to roll, and presumably hasn’t understood commoner’s get Use Rope as a class skill, which is what the “who should be able to complete a task” is based on.
I don’t even play D&D (and haven’t since before AD&D had a second edition) and I’m still baffled by what PbtA brings to the table.
PbtA is artschool D&D. Its a very different approach to the same concept that brings different aspects of the idea to the forefront. Its really good for groups that are good at acting and improvisation, but want a random element to help drive the more personal and less combat oriented stories they’re telling.
Personally it’s not my cup of tea, as I am absolutely into the fantasy and tactical combat side of D&D (well, Pathfinder), but it definitely has its place for groups that are just an excuse to hang out.
I understand the intent. (I’ve been playing “story games” since the 1980s…) For me the problem is that I just don’t understand the mechanisms. When I try to read PbtA-based games I get Nigel Tufnel in my head saying “these go to eleven” only instead he’s saying “these dice rolls go backward”.
And all the explanations people point me at presume I’m a D&D player (I’m not) who’s never seen a story game before (when, as I’ve said, I’ve been playing them since the '80s). I’m just at the point now where I presume I will never grok a PbtA game and pass them over automatically now.
Feels like a post written by someone who’s only really played D&D and close relatives.
It is helpful to have a shared understanding of the world and how difficult things are. In real life I can look at a fence and judge if I think I can scale it. In some RPGs, I can’t. Typically bad things happen when the DM’s imagination diverges from the players’. Having consistent rules can help keep things unified.
Also, as others have said, don’t roll for things that aren’t interesting.
D&D and most of its relatives are lacking fail-forward and good succeed-at-cost mechanics.
Also 1d20+stuff means every result is equally likely. You’re just as likely to roll a 1 as a 10 as a 20. I think that kind of sucks, and that’s a bigger gripe I have with the popularity of 1d20 mechanics.
There was a tragic time in the mid-to-late '80s when the FLGS would put some books on the shelf where the author breathlessly claimed a “revolution” or “rennaissance” in gaming; claiming in effect, to have “solved the problems of role-playing games”.
And the “solutions” were invariably some combination of these:
- adding many, many, many, many, many more classes
- dropping class/race restrictions
- dropping weapons/armour/whatever restrictions based on classes
- support for genres other than D&D-style fantasy
- …
And so on ad nauseum. Because when they said “problems of role-playing games” they meant, really, problems of the only RPG they’d ever played: AD&D.
Even by the mid-80s we had games that were far more radical in solving the problems of D&D. Chaosium had published several games in a bewildering variety of genres that didn’t even have classes, so there were no need for more classes, for removing class restrictions, etc. Traveller existed as well. Games like Rolemaster had classes, but no hard limits based on them: classes expressed preferences and adjusted costs for skills (with the exception of magic; that was still somewhat class-constrained, though literally every class could learn some magic at least). Even TSR had published games that weren’t D&D-like in most respects: Boot Hill, Gangbusters, Dawn Patrol, etc. (And do I even need to delve into the wild, wacky, weird world of FGU? Bunnies & Burrows, Chivalry & Sorcery, Space Opera, Villains & Vigilantes, …)
So it was always tragicomic to see people with such limited experience express such hubris in “solving” problems that had long since been solved in a head-spinning number of different ways and approaches that were far more radical, far broader, and far more intriguing a way than just adding classes and removing some class restrictions.
That’s the vibe I get from this article.
This guy seems to have experience with the Moldvay/Mentzner line of the old school games, with perhaps a bit of a smattering of AD&D before encountering D&D3 and its offshoots. I see no evidence in his rant that he’s ever experienced a game system that was actually revolutionary in its movement away from the D&D roots. I suspect if I sat him down at a FATE game (or even an middle-aged-school game like Castle Falkenstein) he’d die of anaphylaxis.
Yep. Agreed. Sometimes the phenomenon you’re describing was called a “fantasy heartbreaker”. Clearly they were passionate but didn’t have the breadth of experience to really go somewhere new and exciting.
The interesting thing is that this was posted 14 hours now and the user haven’t posted any comments but Ukraine and Russia war ones 2 days ago.