I'm trying to figure out if there's a better way to manage spells in D&D 5E than manually typing out pages and pages of stuff. Do WoTC publish spell text (electronically) anywhere?

@Wibbs I...I think I love you.

@JustinT To expand on what others said, RAI is not a particularly useful term unless you have a developer on hand, or at least a record of what that developer said on the subject. Even then that doesn't always help. The correct course of action for a developer who realizes their RAW is ambiguous is to fix the RAW. Some developers don't, because they're lazy, or sloppy, or their publisher won't run another print. But it's still the correct solution.

As customers, without a citation or a dev on hand, or else access to errata, we can only fall back on the RAW and interpret it as best we can.

Too often in discussion RAI gets thrown around as a way to condemn the other viewpoint, which is not a practice I find particularly acceptable.

@Lord_Gareth -- yes!

either fix the RAW to not be ambiguous, or make it so "this is something the DM has to tailor to their world" is not just a vague implication

@Shalvenay I try ^_^ Mind you, this comes with the unspoken-until-I-just-said-it statement that it is of course your game and that almost no table runs a game without house rules. The ability to alter the rules is a built-in expectation of RPGs; what annoys me is not when they exist, but when folks don't understand why we reference back to RAW to begin with.

Referencing to the text gives us common ground to start from; "This is what the book says. I find that this doesn't work well. I have changed it to read thusly."

Difficulties start when people presume their houserules are universal, but what holds at your table may be utterly unthought-of at mine.

And that's the point when I start frothing at the mouth and sacrificing orphans on ancient stone altars so that I might have my revenge.

There was a great comment here a while ago, which was along the lines of — if you view D&D as a framework for creating an RPG experience with your specific players, you'll do a lot better when discussing it with others/moving between groups.

*instead of viewing it as a game with unambiguous rules for everyone, that is.

Something like that.

@detly Yep, been my experience. Also asking about houserules up front, since often they've been in place long enough that folks will, in perfect innocence, forget to mention them.

Indeed

@detly -- yes

that's something I'm going through with 3.5 -- getting my fellow DMs to clarify what's a houserule and what's actually some dark, dank corner of the RAW that's not in the SRD or PHBI/DMGI

@Shalvenay I'm gonna let you know that even after 10 years of playing in it, 3.5 still does this to me. It is a festering pit of woe and sorrow, and it delights in hurting you.

@Lord_Gareth -- no kidding!

if I do a full campaign, it'd be 5e and not 3.5, partly for that very reason

@Shalvenay Why must you heap further pain upon me with these words.

Maybe it's just me, but I found 5E's PHB/DMG wording somehow, paradoxically, more decisive about being vague.

@detly That's because WotC spends a lot of time telling you that they couldn't be arsed to finish their own game and that you should do it for them.

When asked via customer service channels, that's also the answer that gets given.

"This is an area the DM must rule on."

Not that I'm bitter

[Seethes]

As a dev myself I spend a lot of time trying to make my RAW as clear and comprehensible as possible, chasing down loopholes and bad grammar and interacting with playtesters to make sure my work is as good as it can be.

Watching WotC get praise heaped on them for telling folks they couldn't be bothered to have standards bothers me deeply.

Yeah, there are a lot of places where you think "you really should have thought that through"

Sometimes, the deliberate vagueness is good and fine

I mean, at some point you've got to stop otherwise you're just writing out the laws of physics for your new universe. And you'll make one little mistake, and not notice it unitl some idiots build a supercollider just to exploit it.

@Shalvenay for that very reason you shouldn't be playing either

3.5e was heavy amounts of legalistic RAW that relied on a lot of house ruling. 5e is more about actively encouraging loads of houseruling, by not having as much legalistic-ness or as much RAW.

Sometimes, though, you look at the gaps in the rules, and you notice a pattern. eg. 4E's biggest gaps were in the "in between adventures" things, and I thought, do they really not expect their players' interest to last more than one adventure?

if 3.5e gave you a problem because it was a rules system that needed lots of house ruling, you're saying you're moving to a system where that was a big design intent

specifically: 5e hollers back to AD&D where the intention was to give people lots of rules then make them house rule stuff as well.

@doppelgreener Today in Things Gareth is Bitter About....

that said there's games that make that not a problem because they design with the intention that you're gonna make a bunch of stuff up, and leave room for that. in D&D, coming up with house rules is asking to screw up majorly because you broke a class or made something too powerful or otherwise destroyed the delicate balance that theoretically exists. in Fate or Roll for Shoes, figuring out how to do things on the spot is just fun and risk-free.

@doppelgreener A better way to say this is your rule may have disturbed the delicate paradigm. D&D in general has a large, intricate system that runs on many small and vital parts. Changing any of those parts affects all of the others.

Even without taking balance into account, you alter how the math that drives the game works.

@Lord_Gareth that is a better way to put it.

@Tritium21 Mm?

I just noticed the 'answers' are 2 different colors... I dont know why

The bottom question is in your favourite tags.

The dice background is semitransparent so it changes colour with the background.

The text itself is assuredly the same colour.

I had to change monitors to see the background for tag favorites...heh

@Tritium21 one of your monitors is probably very badly calibrated then. I suggest you run it through these test images.

Controls on the monitor are broken

Ouch

@Lord_Gareth And yes. To this: I wonder if this correlates to the engine vs framework thing. D&D is an engine, it has moving parts that instruct you in running the game. When combat starts, D&D takes over and tells you how things are going to go down: you're going to roll for initiative, now it's his turn, he gets these choices. It's boardgame-ish, you have to do what the game says.

@doppelgreener That would fit with the paradigm in which the rules are written. In D&D you don't have an ability until the rules (including houserules) say you do.

Fate is a framework. It dumps a box of lego in front of you and says to knock yourself out. When you're in combat, it's deliberate that you can totally change things up, they just give you some suggestions. There's some basic mechanics to follow, but those are the lego. Up to you how you apply and interact with them.

There is nothing going chug-chug-chug keeping your game moving except you, which really tripped me up when I moved from D&D to Fate. I suddenly was no longer having something telling me what to do.

(Took me a while to realise that's what it was.)

My mind comes back to this because there's those games that have the big system of intricate moving parts where you're going to mess things up if you start changing the rules or house rule in certain ways. Then there's the games where there is virtually no such thing, and it is difficult to mess things up by making something up.

The games I'm aware of that fit the former (mainly D&D editions) are engines, the games that fit the latter (cthulhu dark, fate, roll for shoes) are either a framework or just so rules-light there's no rules to mess with.

It might be correlation more than causation though.

Might be, but it's worth looking into.

The...connectedness, of D&D's math, is part of the reason I get bothered when folks go, "You're the DM, just do whatever."

Yes

Now I'm thinking about Cthulhu Grey.

Like, dude, I am aware that I'm the DM. I'm also aware of the cascading consequences of what I touch.

As someone reasonably aware of the breadth of the system, just doing whatever will - yes. Could have cascading bad consequences.

@BESW Cthulhu Grey?

@doppelgreener What's really fun is when the developers propose alternate systems with no knowledge of or respect for the consequences. A supplement in D&D 3.5 proposed converting armor to a form of damage reduction, for instance. Care to guess how much more lethal the game gets when AC bonuses from armor and shields stop existing?

@doppelgreener Cthulhu Grey. It's a Cthulhu Dark hack for more fiddly bits: most obviously, a combat mechanic with something like hit points.

But most importantly, it totally revises the Insanity mechanic so that experiences have fixed, immutable Insanity values and your chance of gaining Insanity is proportionate to the Thing you see, rather than your current Insanity score.

@BESW Huh. What's the goal of hardening up the ruleset?

This is "realistic" and "intuitive," which I find arguable, but more importantly to me it throws out the pacing mechanism at the heart of the system.

@Lord_Gareth I think very? A high AC stopping an attack completely is probably better than a few DR vs a giant explosive attack.

though as far as I recall the dangerous stuff just targets your resistances

@doppelgreener Yes and no. The deadliest attacks either target saves, don't have saves, or are touch attacks, which would have ignored those classes of armor to begin with.

However, you're absolutely right: the DR does not reduce damage enough to compensate for the greatly boosted accuracy

It is in fact like everyone is making touch attacks, all the time.

greatly boosted i.e. you'll pretty much always hit

@Lord_Gareth Oh! So you still have an armor class to overcome, it's just puny?

@doppelgreener Yeah. It ends up being 10 + nat armor + dex

I would've thought they'd just convert the whole shebang into DR, and pretend that stuff that doesn't bypass it misses or something.

And then magical bonuses

Which means, incidentally, that casters are just as hard to hit as usual

So only non-casters get screwed.

@Lord_Gareth harder to hit than the dude in full plate

@doppelgreener Yep.

More importantly, just as hard to meaningfully affect.

So, yeah. When that came out there was a flurry of support for it, followed by sorrow, then anger.

Which is pretty much the story of 90% of WotC's design outside of 4e

Excitement, betrayal, rage

that sounds similar to the experience I had of watching 5e get developed

"Excitement, betrayal, rage, apathy" is my reaction to most of the things WotC does nowadays.

cautious hopefulness and interest at the new stuff they were talking about that was radically different to anything previously (and probably impossible), they release a game that sounds just like the previous ones and features a whole lot of copying and pasting directly from them, strong signs they are actually never going to do the stuff they were talking to (while never visibly acknowledging that they'd totally dropped their starting plans), giving up on them completely and sighing.

@doppelgreener Mmhm. Except 5e has the Pathfinder Effect going where it's acquired loyal fans that defend it to the death against any accusation leveled against it.

Not that I'm bitter, he said bitterly, with a bitter expression, while drinking black coffee.

yes, and that lead to ugly business here in the beginning of 5e.

@doppelgreener I was here for it. I remember.

still, thankfully, I'm not looking to pick fights with loyal fans and don't care if they love 5e as long as I can play my stuff with my friends.

@doppelgreener I get involved in debates not because I hate System X or Y, but because I am passionate about good design standards.

Sadly a lot of folks take me condemning design decisions as condemning their decision to play in a system.

Your hyperbole makes it an easy confusion to have.

@BESW Hyperbole is a requirement of holding the dark throne.

And the greatest threat to retaining it.

"Excitement leads to betrayal; betrayal leads to rage; rage leads to forums; forums lead to the Dark Side."

@BESW This is so true it hurts.

Feed the trolls, you mustn't

@Lord_Gareth I'm curious about the "outside of 4E" qualifier

Was it sorrow and anger that were missing, or excitement? :P

@detly 4e is some of the tightest, cleanest design exhibited by WotC. It was, and is, the height of their mechanics work, the most honest edition of D&D ever published, and probably their best time in terms of listening to customer feedback and responding appropriately.

@detly 4e basically delivered on what it promised. People who were angry about 4e were generally angry because it didn't promise what they wanted.

@BESW Also this.

4e does have some mistakes (VAMPIRE, MY GOD), but for the most part these mistakes are not the result of the developer misunderstanding their own math.

In fact, I'd kinda go so far as to say that 4e was the first and only time anyone on the writing team had a damn clue what they were doing.

In terms of design principles, 5e is a huge and deeply saddening step backwards, into darker times and places.

Interesting

How does that mesh with the popularity (due to necessity) of posts like "The Rules of Hidden Club" (and others)? Do you think they show it was a good design because you could write a thing like that unambiguously and be consistent with RAW? Or was it a weakness in WoTC's publications that fans had to take it upon themselves to write massive clarifications for rules that affected one of the core classes (rogues)?

(I'm not trying to be pejorative here, I mean I never liked 4E a lot, and quite like 5E, but they both have merits and flaws)

Yes.

Both could be true TBH

4e was massively complicated, but its complexity almost never self-contradicted.

@BESW beat me to it

mmm

When I was DMing 4E, I hated rogues

Their turn just... 50% of the combat sessions seemed to be untangling the string of exceptions that rogues relied upon

My group during our 4e years were people who really enjoyed mastering complex rule systems. The mental gymnastics of reconciling strict mechanical interpretations with game-world reality were part of the charm of the system.

But then, in 5E, my issue is the opposite. Flanking is replaced by "ally within 10ft," hiding is basically down to DM call, etc.

"Circles are squares, squares are circles, and don't think about Triangles."

It was nice when you could fluff text a really cool series of manoeuvres.

@Lord_Gareth Oh, man. Vampire was so much gleefully fun flavour that I forgave it for being functionally useless.

We rotated DM, and a really, really cool thing that another player-as-DM did was to introduce occasions for us to re-tell epic battles in our own words (eg. to travelling merchants who we were escorting). Think C3P0's little storytelling scene with the ewoks in RoTJ.

And now I'm wondering which system would be best for a short game about sparkling vampires, glittering werewolves, and effervescent zombies.

@BESW A friend of mine noted the irony that there are four or more ways to play an interesting, dynamic vampire in 4e. None of those ways involve any of the options with 'vampire' in the name.

4E had a slayer class, and IIRC it would have made a decent vampire character (somewhat ironically)

[shudder] I remember the Slayer class. It went from "best class for new players" to "that unholy abomination" just by virtue of one player's using it.

The bugbear was bright pink.

@BESW ....Vhat?

@Lord_Gareth He had a rather traumatic experience with the Tear of Ioun--a chunk of solid Knowledge which was then immersed in Far Realm Crazy for several hundred years.

Each successful Will check let him discover the True Answer to any single question. Failed saves imposed brain-boiling sanity loss and physical deformation.

We managed to stuff the tentacle-stalk eyeballs back into his head, but the fur stayed stubbornly pink for the rest of his (rather short) life.

Ouch.

However, he managed to hang on a LOT longer than anyone expected before he finally gave in to the terrified and vomit-punctuated pleas of his party to stop mining the forsaken god-gem for plot spoilers.

'scuse me while I star that and die laughing.

@BESW @Lord_Gareth Tell me about this Vampire thing?

@doppelgreener The very last Essentials expansion book had several classes that were kinda obviously "just-for-fun."

The Vampire was the best combination of "That sounds awesome!" and "That sounds useless!"

To the point that anything you'd ever actually want from the Vampire class would be BETTER if you just took a Vampire multiclass feat.

Oh, dang.

@doppelgreener I don't know much of the details. I don't understand enough of 4e's math myself to explain what's wrong with Vamp or the vamp-replacement combinations and options.

@doppelgreener -- you misunderstood me actually, the problem I had with 3.5e wasn't the need for houseruling -- it was that it wasn't clear what was a houserule because of all the crazy niche stuff roaming around that system that is RAW

@doppelgreener -- 5e has more houseruling yes, but it also has a much more compact ruleset

so it's a lot easier to go "oh, that's not in the PHB or DMG, so I can be pretty sure that that's a house rule"

@Shalvenay oh, you mean if you read a thing on the internet it wouldn't be clear whether this crazy thing was (a) actually how things worked, (b) someone totally misunderstanding the rules, or (c) something someone totally just made up and may or may not believe is (a)?

@Lord_Gareth It's the same problem 3.5 vamp PCs had, actually: vampires had their HP hacked down to nearly nothing, their healing was made difficult, and in exchange they were given high damage-reducing features.

@doppelgreener, or hear a ruling in a game I'm playing, even!

@BESW Oh god what. Why would they make that mistake two editions in a row.

@BESW -- makes me wonder if 2e vamp PCs were/would have been some sort of ungodly overpoweredness

Because vampires are really really REALLY hard to mechanise in a D&D system while retaining their classic status and features.

Vampires in pop culture are glass cannons.

They're nearly impossible to kill... until you know how, and then they go "poof!"

This... doesn't work well for D&D PCs.

agreed

[pulls up stats]

Prince Rupert's Drop

The Buffy vamps avoided this somewhat. Non-slayers had a hard time aiming for the heart, or getting a stake through flesh

Sometimes

when the plot demanded it

Okay: a 4e vampire PC has resist 5 necrotic and vulnerable 5 radiant. Direct sunlight deals 5 radiant each round, amped up to 10 because of the vulnerability.

Vampires start with 2 healing surges per day. (Compare the puny wizard, which gets 6 + Con mod.)

While bloodied (below half hp) you have regen based on your Charisma modifier--it stopped when you hit half hp again.

During short rests one ally can give you one of their healing surges to heal with.

Ha ha ha have fun roleplaying that

You have an encounter power which lets you deal bonus damage on a hit and gain a new healing surge. You get the ability to use it more times per encounter as you level up--but all healing surges above your ma of 2 go away at the end of a short rest.

One of your at-will attacks grants temp hp on a hit.

And now the kicker: as you level up, your powers gain "supercharge" style abilities where you spend healing surges to make them more awesome.

I feel like in 4E, any time WoTC saw a number, they tried to figure out another way to use it as an expendable resource in a class' power. It's a wonder they didn't have a class that let you spend attribute points for striking.

@BESW But that is not an abundant enough resource, it sounds like.

@doppelgreener Right. You start with 2 per day, and you have very limited uses of the "gain another surge" power.

You can always heal to half health, but you're basically forced to leech off others to heal above that.

Which is super flavourful, but not great resource management for the party--especially since you can't do that during combat.

Effectively: a vampire who survives a battle can recover, but a vampire who gets into serious trouble mid-battle is unlikely to last.

But--flavour!

Your three at-wills are: mentally beckoning someone to come closer to you and dealing psychic damage; draining their life force with necrotic damage and gaining some temp hp; and dealing physical damage with a slam attack that pushes them away from you.

(The last one counts as a melee basic attack.)

And your level 1 daily is to conjure a swarm of bats that deal ongoing damage, and then you teleport invisibly amongst them.

As you go up, the various utility options let you choose between more "nobility" or more "feral" flavour.

Level 2 utilities are: charm someone so they don't take immediate actions or opportunity attacks and you have bonuses to Bluff and Diplomacy against them; and scare someone so they grant combat advantage and you have a bonus to Intimidate against them.

It sounds like a very exaggerated striker style — get up close, hit, get out quickly

Yeah, and it might work in another system.

But for 4e, it defies the basic assumption that heroes are tough as nails, hard to put down, designed to triumph over great odds.

While the vampire is a glass cannon and a party resource drain.

At least with some of the rogues powers, the "getting out quickly" was built into the power

Right.

They might benefit a lot from a vampire that is a glass cannon in the more typical sense. Flavour them as being tough enough to overcome sunlight vulnerability, like Alucard. Give them no less than an ordinary amount of healing and health, but give them sufficient resources to play around with both.

go the damphir route- half-damnd

Rather than a specific combat power which supplies healing surges, which one must use in lieu of any other power, give them something like the Warlock's Curse which will result in healing surge supply. Turn them into a frightening defender who can take a hit, or turn them into a controller.

@Tritium21 This is exactly the best option: if you like the vampire class, multiclassing in it gives you EVERYTHING you'd want, often better than the full class's version.

Or, yanno, @trogdor managed to make a seriously scary psychic vampire with a psionic build.

I did do that

I think I even played him a little, but not as much as I would have liked to

I was thinking more along the lines of reducing the benefit and drawback to make something long-term playable, and fitting in the D&D paradigm

not to say that doesn't stand for all the hundreds of 4E characters I made besides a couple

well,.. you can multiclass

as I recall many of the worst (but not all) drawbacks go away

and at least as far as I personally wanted, I got all the benefits I wanted out of multitasking it rather than taking the vampire class

@Tritium21 This is what the multiclass feat does.

though to be fair, I did want to roll him with a psionic class and just make him as vampiric as possible after that

Ahh

@BESW in point of fact, the multiclass feat reduces both of those, that is correct

the main issue is, does it toss out the right stuff for any particular person?

for me it did, but everyone has different tastes

Case in point: -2 healing surges, instead of "2 healing surges."

in fact, for my taste, I found it almost perfect

TBH, any time I had a player express interest in playing a vampire, I reconsidered the system we were using. Cause, ya know, there are like 6 entire game lines by white wolf for that >.>

@Lord_Gareth Don't worry, I get that all the time [flutters eyelashes] ;o)

that is one of the reasons I like Fate, personally. you can pretty much make whatever character you want, within reason at least

@Tritium21 but then everyone has to be a vampire don't they?

@trogdor to the extent that the story isn't getting thrown at the wall for it

yes

but you can roll like, a vampire

@doppelgreener With at least 2 of those systems, they can be just about anything (the new lines are actually balanced for that)

specifically the fourth one, and smashing through and bruising all the players for it

and YOU get to decide what that means

@doppelgreener You can mix splats, though it's more or less advisable depending on the context and edition.

@BESW oh yeah, i recall this now

both nWoD editions are mixable

@doppelgreener and I was going to say, like, most Fate games aren't gonna let you get away with trying to play like, some kind of god

@trogdor yessss I like that.

the rules between first and second arnt very different, the settings are vastly different

@trogdor right. and if I start playing a legitimate career clown in Amaterasu, I would probably destroy all immersion.

Unless I patched them into the story properly.

though you could be a god who has lost at least most of their godly powers

@doppelgreener yeah, exactly

(and there is also fate which would make mixed parties easy, or....sigh...gurps)

@trogdor Yes! Or an aspect of a god. "So are you, like, a mortal granted powers by them, or are you literally them in a sense?" "Uhhh... it's hard to tell which at times. I think I'm the second one?"

and heck, even playing a god would work if the entire group has decided that was the theme of the game

not to say that means making that game actually work would not be really hard

@doppelgreener Now I'm imagining a Clown Court of Nobles debating whether to license a talented clown despite his being born to one of the Clown Nobles out of wedlock.

Gods with limited power.

or Gods with Godly powers, but the things they have to contend with are hard even for them

that is why it would be hard to make that concept work

@doppelgreener "LIMITED COSMIC POWER! --modest but reasonable living space."

I could imagine Iroas, as a character with Combat: 10, and everything else around 1-3.

you would need to be putting effort just into deciding what can challenge your PC's

yes

that's true

... Can you think of any systems, other than nWoD, that has an official rule book that is essentially "Here's how to house rule without breaking things"? ...excluding fate

i am going to go! farewell!

not that I know of

Fate is the most flexible system I know anything about

not to say I think a different system might not work for that

but I don't know it

Maybe Solar System?

Savage worlds too, i think

I mean, I am not looking for a new system, just curious how many developers provide guidance on tweaking the system in a functional way

Well, that's a different question entirely.

There's a big difference between an official rule book that is essentially "Here's how to house rule without breaking things" and an official rule book that provides solid guidance on how to house rule without breaking things.

So, for example, I think Call of Cthulhu does the latter but not the former. It's got a lot of rules and no need for houseruling to play the game (thus it's not essentially a guide to homebrew), but it does a very good job of supporting the GM who does want to make homebrew and houserules.

nodnod

I have trouble expressing myself sometimes.

@Tritium21 I would agree with that

@BESW No stickied post with cool stuff to kickstart?

Been kinda busy and not a lot to renew to remind me.

'scuse me, I think I just spiked a fever. bbl

feel better

... I send out blank character sheets formatted. They come back with formatting messed up. WAT

huh

I send blank character sheets out as text documents or word documents, with formatting in place to make reading and editing the sheet easy (or even render in the case of the text documents). The players....just stick text anywhere on the sheet. My players, to a man, all have IT degrees

:) sounds about right

lol

o/

@Tritium21 Not a rule book, but one chapter of the Apocalypse World book is about how to hack the system to fit what you are doing.

nodnod

...fever is now below 101.

Here, have a Portal song.

I think I may have just deinstalled my youtube support…

But good to hear you're getting better!

Well, I don't have uncontrollable chills. So yes, better!

Going to the doctor in the morning, though. I suspect sinus infection.

@Tritium21 Mouse Guard does not have it in the rules, but the Guide on Hacking is written by the author: burningwheel.com/forum/showthread.php?11538-On-Hacking-Nature

Strangely, Google image searches for goose and borg don't bring up anything at all relephant.

kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/RoboGoose

But I was hoping for something more like this:

Afternoon all

Avast ye

wave/

yarp?

\wave

@wibbs @IronHeart @Shalvenay 5E is unique in regards to "rules as intended" in that a significant amount of the text is dedicated to exactly that - telling you the intent of the rules without making specific rulings. This is less true of the PHB, but the DMG brings this out in full force.

@Shalvenay re: Simulationism, that's part of my point. D&D shouldn't have to tell you that its not a good idea to divert from economic reality in a way that lets your players generate infinite money. And any answer that suggests you should just go ahead and allow this is crazy.

@JustinT what I don't get is, am I supposed to run a business or something during downtime In 5E?

@JustinT ah, I know our GM-to-be came it and mentioned that there was no point add it works out at a loss

@JustinT to be fair the economic reality of D&D has always been pretty broken

IIRC in 5e if a player character runs a shop, it costs them money rather than making them money

I don't know anything, but I had thought D&D was founded on some economic principles originally, because Gygax was insurance expert and that bled into the game he designed?

Dunno about that; for all the editions I've seen it's founded on the idea that things are worth what they are worth to adventurers, or priced according to what creates challenge for adventurers.

That said, BD&D is not one where I've taken a deep look at the economy.

Whoa.

Went reading through OSR blogs, found this.

tao-dnd.blogspot.com/2015/04/dont-get-them.html

[amused]

Dude writes some insightful stuff and some crazy stuff, but I'm leaning more towards the former than the latter on this one.

@shatterspike1 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Well I guess I can agree they didn't really get us.

Yeah, his takeaway of the site as a whole was incorrect, I think

His takeaway on the question and what the answers meant was also missing the point somewhat.

> Well, I don't have an answer for that. No one does. The faulty premise is right there in the original question: the speaker has already condemned the players as "cretins" right out of the gate. All conversation from there necessarily goes downhill (...)

but that is the premise: the premise is this is considered unwelcome behaviour.

and he talks about punishment as if it's an embodiment of the penal system, but really the answer he was paraphrasing (badly) was saying to just confront them with the consequences of what they're doing.

the dude's okay with his players murdering everybody; that GM isn't.

Why is that unwelcome behavior, if you're free to choose what you want to do in a game?

I think his problem is a presumption of simulation priorities.

@shatterspike1 The question says so: he wants a game that doesn't regularly escalate to serial psychopathic murder.

That is, he's assuming badwrongfun if the GM has meta-game playstyle goals.

@BESW How do you prioritize changing player behavior without hampering agency, though?

Which is confused with prioritising 'realism' in the game world and 'choice' for the players.

@shatterspike1 Whoever said the GM in question was interested in preserving total player agency to be a psychopathic murderhobo without any guilt or remorse for mowing down dozens of innocent civilians for no strong reason?

@shatterspike1 If you can't engage the players as agents of their own change--getting buy-in on the playstyle goal? By manipulating the environment to encourage desired behaviour.

It's like how a street without any trash on it won't pile up trash as fast as a street that's already got litter.

There's not a dichotomy of "let the players do whatever they want" and "punish them for behaving outside your unspoken parameters."

I will bring to the fore the fact that blogger was the one going on at length about preserving player agency, always. Likewise the blogger was the one emphatic that he would not ever try to change anyone.

But, never trying to get anyone to change ever is not a healthy attitude.

This is the core of his problem, though: "Here is the problem with RPGs in the hands of people who are uncomfortable with realities. Too much time is taken in trying to make them work like television." For him, games that aren't "realistic" are wrong.

I get people to change all the time. I moved into a new house recently, my housemates were doing things to frustrate me and each other, I asked them to change, they did. When my players are playing games, if there's stuff we begin to dislike, we ask to do things differently, and we do them differently. We change to accomodate each other, or request change to accomodate ourselves.

He's explicitly saying that trying to simulate settings and attitudes that don't fit with his idea of real-world morality and practicality is badwrongfun.

I asked one of my players, who always played Toon Link ALWAYS in Smash Bros, to try playing other characters as well, so that we would not have such a monotone experience with his character he's mastered and who we understand extremely well. A couple of weeks later he'd had some experience with other characters like Fox and Villager and started playing those with us.

I change to accommodate my fellow RPG players and help them have fun, and I ask the people I play with to do similarly when I need to ask them to do that.

@BESW Well, problematically also, it is realistic that murdering tons of people has major consequences.

Like getting a "Wanted for murder, huge reward" poster put up around the place describing you and your party as outlaws. Because, like, that's what would happen with a roaming gang of murderers!