(As a joke he said he has three monkeys. The spies ended up being lowly nobodies no one pays attention to, as they were a blind spy, a deaf forger and a mute assassin respectively. )
(There is generally an unstated expectation in HoB, though, that if no PCs are in a scene, it'll get narrated quickly and move on to the next bit with your own characters.)
> Where House of Bards differs from those familiar games is in a focus on drama and conflict rather than procedure and challenge. The focus of the game takes the player characters and puts them up against other characters (including each other), instead of focusing primarily on working together against external forces.
What group cohesion? It's about conflicting with other PCs.
> The traditional structure of RPGs, from its roots in D&D, is that the players usually all work together on the same side, save for the occasional disagreement about how to split the loot or doppelganger infiltration. A game like House of Bards, however, follows a more dramatic structure. Instead of the action being driven by external threats, the player characters are put at various cross-purposes and thrown into conflict with one another, driving the action. When temporarily allying, or even when part of the same organization working cross-purposes, different goals and drivers push tensi…
There's some good advice about how to handle this in Fate, and keeping the IRL group cool while the PCs are at each others' throats.
They might plot against each other, but I want them to primarily plot against non-player opposition.
E.g. They might have different ideas who should become the next Court Chaplain, but all should desire/benefit from the untimely demise of the current one.
Man, when I was 17 I wanted my dice to be ornate, thematically fitting the game, heavy in the hand and compelling to be rolled. These days I just want big, bright numbers.
@besw I'll be honest if we did have someone juding the RAW tag/acting in the other META discussion currently being discussed. I would probably want it ot be you as arbiter as you have always displayed levelheadedness and understanding about both sides of the issue without casting your lot in with a side as it were.
A quick glance at the tags on his blog tells me I probably don't have much overlap with his interests or playstyles.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Thank you, that's flattering. We've got plenty of other folks who are just as capable in that regard, but less vocal, so if it goes through there's no dearth of support.
But now, it sounds like a lot of work for no particularly desirable effect when I can just work with my players to figure out what kind of game we'd all like instead of manipulating them into agreeing with my taste.
Well, some of my sheltered friends think he is a gamemastering god, whose rule is not to be dismissed.
Well,and a half of his books and some of his suggestions make sense.
His attitude doesn't though.
Let me give you an example.
He encourages GMs to let his players add details or even roleplay NPCs ad hoc and then take those suggestions/performances and repeat them.
Can't argue with that! Technique for an instant win.
His presentation of the issue though is somewhere between "let them do work for you" and "these silly players will never notice you are totally unprepared"
I wish Wick's Houses of the Blooded had an editor. Blood and Honor was in some ways a successor to HotB, but I never got around to reading it. I like his game ideas but presentation could be better.
What I came in here for, though, was to ask what's going in meta about moderator distrust. I can't seem to find more details.
Oodles of style, occasional flashes of pure genius, lots of repeating himself smugly, well-meaning but heavy-handed and misguided attempts at social commentary, and a barely-concealed contempt for the amateur fans he used to be one of.
@BESW Okay, back from Confusedville. His articles uner a column "Play Dirty" were gathered into some books under the same name. In Poland it actually spawned a series, which had multiple authors.
The series followed the naming convention of Play Dirty, so there was Play Hard, Play with the Plot and Play with Your Head etc.
"Back from Confusedville" would be a great name for an album by a band that just got back together after a decade-long breakup marked by abjectly failed individual projects.
I honor of @BESW's name-spotting abilities, enjoy some handy statistics. So far RPG.SE chat has generated 23 great names, 149 good names and 1 awful name. I think we're doing well.
Also, there was the one discussion about how to summarize games from player choice perspective in a very short sentence that I would like to continue sometime.
@eimyr I'm not sure that's ever actually going anywhere. It was a fun thought experiment, but I think its failure was more revealing than any success could have been.
@eimyr A day or two ago the chat feed had a blog post about what makes D&D feel like D&D. [rummages around]
> [...E]very single spell is a declaration that in this setting, this thing is possible. It is a thing that happens. That’s bold. And with the sheer volume of information in the spell list, it’s also very broad. (source)
In D&D--yes (for most settings/editions, personal results may vary, consult your GM if symptoms last more than a day or a rash develops). In Dresden Files--probably not. In CthulhuTech--ia ia!
It likely would be true of magic in settings where magic is a manipulation of our current understanding of physical laws, but not in settings where magic is a method of bypassing them--or, like D&D, where physical laws are largely ignored whenever inconvenient, magic or no.
Or when you drop 10,000 gold pieces on someone from a mile up and they hardly notice, because objects weighing less than a pound have no falling mechanic.
Or when you violate the laws of thermodynamics by doing almost anything with magic.
It may help to use terminology like "rules-first" and "fiction-first."
D&D tends to assume that you're using it as a rules-first system, where the rules tell you what the fiction will (and can) be.
Compare an engine like Apocalypse World or Fate or Solar System, where the narrative comes first and rules are triggered by the fiction as appropriate.
D&D says "These are the ways you can use a two-handed weapon." It may include triggers for wielding it one-handed, but unless Strength is explicitly one of those triggers, no amount of narrative haggling will create a gap in the rules to allow it unless the group decides to make one themselves.
I finagled his understanding of wielding weapons by explaining that, while it would be physically possible to hold the weapon in one hand, it is designed to be wielded effectively with only two hands.
Maybe I shouldn't try to fight on his battleground, though.
By creating this set of absolute permissions and triggers which often roughly coincide with "common sense" understandings about what is and isn't possible, D&D rules can create the illusion of emulating physical reality.
In truth, though, D&D rules are the physical laws of the D&D world, rather than being rough emulations of our own physical laws.
A D&D biologist would understand HD and inherited templates, not genetics.
If your friend wants to play in a game where a high Strength score is an open permission for doing things that strong people can do, he'd be happier in a system which is built to support it, or a group which is willing to hack D&D in that direction.
(A lot of groups do hack D&D in that direction, often unconsciously, because they prefer a fiction-first playstyle but are reluctant to change systems for whatever reason.)
> I find it difficult to imagine that in a world where spells effect creatures in recognizable, quantifiable ways that are directly based on HD, and the same world is filled with towers of wizards dedicated to fully understanding the universe in general and magic in particular, that nobody sat down for some empirical testing to figure out what HD are. (source)
I'm personally much happier now that I'm aware of the rules-first bubble and can choose consciously to spend most of my game time outside of it.
(Ditto the GM-as-superior bubble, the props-are-required bubble, and the d20-System-can-do-anything bubble.)
So, to come back to your original question: Arguments from real-world physics are only unassailable in games which explicitly prioritise real-world physics. They're defensible but arguable in games which don't give any indication either way, and in games that actively defy real-world physics, arguments rooted in those laws are about as helpful as oysters to a panda.
