Pros and Cons of going mainstream

I'm afraid I didn't have the patience to read the whole paper, so I'll just make a quick comment.

I feel one big difference I've seen with D&D is it has shifted from a game where the DM is required to make huge swathes of the game experience to one where everything is prebuilt. Part of this has been due to demands by time-pressed DMs who do not have the time, patience or desire to design things themselves (I fall into the time-starved block; I've got too many spinning plates in my life to spend hours on adventure design these days).

This thread seems as good a place as any to mention something I noticed last week when reading Chris Perkins's column: one thing that Perkins talks about is a deal done by one of the PCs with Dispater, which ended up being one element of the campaign's dramatic resolution. And in the comments, we get this:


I don't know about others' responses, but I just don't get where EvilDM1395 is coming from! "The rest of the game sounded great", but (by obvious implication) it would have been even better if Perkins had copies some other author's conception of Dispater, rather than following the lead of his player and letting Dispater's personality emerge and unfold as it did in his game.

What's up with that? I mean, it wouldn't have made anyone at the table have any more fun. It wouldn't have made the climax of the campaign more dramatic. How has aping someone else's fiction become, for some players at least, a self-standing measure of the quality of an RPG experience?

That's the true sacrifice of creativity that (in my view) has tended to infect the contemporary RPG scene.

Here is Ron Edwards on Jonathan Tweet's RPG Over the Edge, beginning with a quote from the rulebook:


The issue is the same: what is the source of the pressure to treat the output of others' gaming as the input for one's own.

That's not to say that setting is bad. But setting should be something the participants in the game can build on and use in play; not something to which they are expected to conform in play. This is why I, personally, far prefer 4e's cosmology to Planescape and its 3E variant.

pemerton:
I think this to me is are examples of misaligned expectations. Chris Perkins is not your friendly local GM running his home brew, he’s the senior producer for D&D. What he does can reflect on the company therefore its unsurprising that some people expect him to be consistent to what they consider canon. Me not so much, unless he is running an official game at Gencon or some such.

It also depends on the level of information of each side of the screen. In my experience people do not mind expansion of material as long as it can be reasonably consistent with what they already know. That is what makes works such as RttToH so good. The original premise is there with several added layers. Players do have pre establish expectations and breaking them can be detrimental to the sense of immersion. If your run the temple of elemental evil featuring Vacuum, Ash, Dust and Salt factions that could be cool, however those quasi planes are a divergence from the original.

I wanted to be more generalized discussion of editions from high level view.
However, we can also talk about how the settings are affected. I like FR, read the novels mine through the source books for ideas. That being said I never run campaigns in it. Too many players (as a group) know a lot of details about it. Conversely I run a Grayhawk meets Plancescape because at least among the group I am playing with not many are so intimately familiar with the fine details as to either setting lawyer or have their sense of immersion compromised. I do realize that varies from group to group and maybe for some changing the layout of the second layer of Pandemonium inn may be bad for the game.

Luce said:

I think this to me is are examples of misaligned expectations.

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I think it's more than that. I think "canon" has, for some (many?) become an end in itself.

When Arneson ran Temple of the Frog, and Gygax was running games in Maure Castle, they weren't aping anyone else's game. They weren't recycling anyone else's play experience and passing it off as their own? So why has this now become the measure, for a large group of RPGers, of the quality of an RPG experience?

As I said, I think this is where there has ben a move away from creativity to formulaic, pre-packaged experiences.

Looking at it from an edition point of view, I think that 4e was self-consciously built to provide a setting that was transparent to the players in its rationale and basis for adventure, and that lent itself to GMs doing their own thing with it. There is no metaplot.

Some 4e supplements head in a more 2nd ed-ish direction (aspects of Manual of the Planes, the Plane Below and (to a lesser extent) the Plane Above) but overall I think it has been fairly consistent in its approach to setting and its abjuration of metaplot.

Luce said:

Chris Perkins is not your friendly local GM running his home brew, he’s the senior producer for D&D. What he does can reflect on the company therefore its unsurprising that some people expect him to be consistent to what they consider canon.

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Why? How would this make his game better for his players? How would it make it a more interesting or useful example of GMing?

If anything, his column is better for demonstrating that "canon" should be the output of play, not its input.

howandwhy99 said:

dkyle said:

You really think you can play a full-fledged RPG where absolutely every thing that happens is determined by pre-defined rules?

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And yes, I have both played and run games where everything is covered by either pre-defined mechanics (like a dictionary pre-defines the words we are using) or the incorporation of new elements that fall within the operation of pre-defined play.

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I'm kinda curious what you mean by this. Because, if everything was decided by a rule of some kind, I'm really interested in that, as someone who prefers to run sandbox games.

For example, say the PCs are talking to a noble about something. I understand that it is common for there to be rules covering social situations; however, how does one determine that the PCs are talking to a noble initially, or even where they are? Traditionally, this is covered by GM fiat, not rules. Was there some way with rules to determine that they were talking to a noble in his mansion, or did the GM determine this?

And, of course, this extends to all situations from here on out. When the PCs decide to go somewhere, there can be rules covering that journey; I get that. However, if they wait (if they're healing, crafting, working, training, or just generally time skipping), what rules did you determine what happened everywhere else during that time? If, later, they meet someone, how do you know who or what that someone is? Was literally everything a type of random encounter chart, but on a bell curve so as to provide more reasonable results?

I'm just curious, because such a system is begging for me to steal things from it. As always, play what you like

pemerton said:

luce said:

Chris Perkins is not your friendly local GM running his home brew, he’s the senior producer for D&D. What he does can reflect on the company therefore its unsurprising that some people expect him to be consistent to what they consider canon.

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Why? How would this make his game better for his players? How would it make it a more interesting or useful example of GMing?

If anything, his column is better for demonstrating that "canon" should be the output of play, not its input.

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I can only really answer this for my players and my group, but to my players, exploring the setting is very important, and reliable descriptions help them immerse (one of our main goals). If they know Dispater is a very paranoid devil lord, but I play him as reckless, it'll hurt their immersion. It's just not what they're expecting; if they asked for a deal that he'd likely say no to, then I'll have him say no, and they'll say "that makes sense."

Just as, if I'm running a new homebrew setting with my own game system, and I say "dragon and their riders terrorize and dominate the countryside, and dragons have been known to devastate small armies," but then they're successfully able to kill several at low level with minimal trouble in a small group, they're going to get pulled out of immersion, since they were expecting something else (that dragons are able to dominate them, not that they're easily killed by low level PCs).

Basically, this type of consistency helps my group because it gives them reliable outlines of an in-game world to explore. This, basically, can give my players that "Sense of Wonder" that has been mentioned. I'm not saying it's universal, as it's certainly not, but this is why "canon should be the output of play, not its input" doesn't completely work for me. "Canon" in my game is set by the initial setting, and how the PCs (and NPCs) affect things in the course of play. I won't change the setting in a drastic, meaningful way because the players wish it was different. That does both of us a disservice. It doesn't work that way for your group, I don't think, and that's cool. But that's how, and why, it works for mine. As always, play what you like

JamesonCourage said:

to my players, exploring the setting is very important, and reliable descriptions help them immerse

<snip>

this type of consistency helps my group because it gives them reliable outlines of an in-game world to explore.

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I think what you talk about here is separate from my point.

Consistency of setting is fairly important to any game in which backstory and revelations matter. But that's not what I was talking about. A completley consistent world can emerge through play, without predefinition (if you're playing no-myth style) and without adherence to "canon" (whether or not you're playing no myth style).

What I was talking about was someone who was not a participant in the game criticising the game's failure to adhere to canon. There was no suggestion that, for the participants in the game, the gameworld was not consistent - indeed, as per Chris Perkin's reply to the poster (which I did not quote in full above), the deal with Dispater wa worked out through extensive roleplay and active resolution. The player does not seem to have been in any doubt or confusion about Dispater's nature.

My puzzlement concerns why anyone would think it important that the setting adhere to some externally-defined canon. Why is it deemed so important to adhere, in play, to someone else's fiction?

pemerton said:

I think what you talk about here is separate from my point.

Consistency of setting is fairly important to any game in which backstory and revelations matter. But that's not what I was talking about. A completley consistent world can emerge through play, without predefinition (if you're playing no-myth style) and without adherence to "canon" (whether or not you're playing no myth style).

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That's true. I think the poster you were replying to, though, was saying that people that use the "canon" setting expect things to function in certain ways, as defined by the people who write the fictional setting. So, when someone who can write the fiction (like Chris Perkins) plays Dispater against how he's been portrayed fictionally, it might make people object to it, as it's breaking that consistency.

I think it's similar to the 4e Eladrin backlash; people didn't like when they were rewritten as high elves, rather than celestials. Is it wrong to change it? Not in any objective sense, no, but some people didn't like the change. I think Luce was just saying that as someone who has control of D&D's fictional setting, running something established publicly (or writing about it publicly), without qualifiers, might ruffle some feathers, or put people on edge. Which makes sense to me, even if it doesn't bug me, personally.

pemerton said:

What I was talking about was someone who was not a participant in the game criticising the game's failure to adhere to canon. There was no suggestion that, for the participants in the game, the gameworld was not consistent - indeed, as per Chris Perkin's reply to the poster (which I did not quote in full above), the deal with Dispater wa worked out through extensive roleplay and active resolution. The player does not seem to have been in any doubt or confusion about Dispater's nature.

My puzzlement concerns why anyone would think it important that the setting adhere to some externally-defined canon. Why is it deemed so important to adhere, in play, to someone else's fiction?

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This is what I tried to comment on; to groups that like to explore the setting, it's important that they remain grounded in the pre-established "canon". I don't think Luce cares that they're deviating from "canon", but commenting that some people might not like a WotC representative publicly playing something against the fiction they're supposedly adhering to.

As far as EvilDM1395, it seems like part of his social contract is similar to my group's: the setting, once decided, should play out as assumed once the game begins. So, if you're running a game with Dispater in it, and part of that involves him being very paranoid, then it breaks that social contract if he's played as reckless. Unless, of course, it's made clear up front that you're just using the "canon" as a springboard, and that things are different; indeed, that's exactly how I ran my long term 3.5e game. So, when things different from the stat blocks, or adhered to rough flavor but not strictly to details, my players knew that going in.

I can't say for sure, but I imagine most people would be fine with this if it was made clear. From the sounds of it, though, EvilDM1395 was expecting Dispater, if used, to act as Dispater is described, and that his actions not matching up with his assumptions broke his sense of "immersion" in the story. Again, like I said, it's an obvious play style thing, but that's my take on it.

Then again, I feel like I'm totally missing your point. When you say, "Why is it deemed so important to adhere, in play, to someone else's fiction?", all I can do is go over why it's important for my group, again (immersion, exploration of setting, etc.). Sorry if I'm missing the point. As always, play what you like

Pemerton said:

My puzzlement concerns why anyone would think it important that the setting adhere to some externally-defined canon. Why is it deemed so important to adhere, in play, to someone else's fiction?

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Dude, after the years of caterwauling about the canon changes that 4e made to D&D, are you really surprised that people would hold canon uber alles? I mean, many of the changes 4e made weren't judged based on whether or not the changes resulted in an interesting game, but were instead solely judge on whether or not they adhered to material that had been out of print for a DECADE.

I can almost see it when you talk about established settings. Almost. But, when talking about core elements of the game? Blows my mind.

JamesonCourage said:

I feel like I'm totally missing your point. When you say, "Why is it deemed so important to adhere, in play, to someone else's fiction?", all I can do is go over why it's important for my group, again (immersion, exploration of setting, etc.).

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Unless I've misunderstood, you're talking about creating your own fiction, not adhering to someone else's.

Hussar said:

Dude, after the years of caterwauling about the canon changes that 4e made to D&D, are you really surprised that people would hold canon uber alles?

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Blows my mind.

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I guess I'm not shocked, in the sense that I can comprehend that it's out there. But I don't understand the motivation.

I mean, how does anyone get hurt by Chris Perkins presenting Dispater in a different way? In what sense is Perkins making a mistake, or doing something wrong?

JamesonCourage said:

I think the poster you were replying to, though, was saying that people that use the "canon" setting expect things to function in certain ways, as defined by the people who write the fictional setting. So, when someone who can write the fiction (like Chris Perkins) plays Dispater against how he's been portrayed fictionally, it might make people object to it, as it's breaking that consistency.

<snip>

I think Luce was just saying that as someone who has control of D&D's fictional setting, running something established publicly (or writing about it publicly), without qualifiers, might ruffle some feathers, or put people on edge. Which makes sense to me

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It doesn't really make sense to me. Why should someone be put on edge by someone else running the game with different fiction?

A novelist isn't obliged to write with the same characters, or the same themes, every time. A musician can change tune or rhythm. How could it be that Chris Perkins is obliged to be straitjacketed by his (or his employer's) previous fiction?

And relating this back to the essay in [MENTION=29760]Luce[/MENTION]'s OP, why has the nature of play changed, so that the emphasis is not on individual groups creating their own fiction, but rather on individual groups doing their best to reproduce the fiction written by TSR/WotC?