all games are pattern designs. This isn't under debate.
Yes it is.
When I ask my 6 year old daughter, "What are you doing" and she replies "Playing a game", what she almost always means by "playing a game" is that she is pretending to be doing something imaginary. For instance, she might be piling wood chips onto a park bench, pretending that she is making cakes for sale in her cake shop; or pretending that she is a pet-store owner and that her older sister is her English-speaking pet cat.
This sort of play, which is I think pretty common for human children - it is part of how they learn to make sense of the world, and is one form of
roleplaying within the literal meaning of that term. And it has basically nothing in common with tic tac toe. It certainly doesn't involve "code-breaking".
to play a pattern as a game is to actually attempt to achieve objectives within it. In the case of D&D this is done by proxy.
What is the proxy? And what is it a proxy for?
improvising a story cannot occur during the playing of a game because improvised storytelling is an act of invention, while game playing is the act of discovery through interaction.
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"Shared fiction" never occurs in any game.
Improvising a story can happen during the playing of some games. For instance, when my daughter is playing at making cakes and offering them for sale in her cake shop she might improvise a story - for instance, by asking me what sort of cake I would like to buy, then going through the process of "making" it (ie gathering up wood chips) and then delivering the "cake" to me (ie by bringing me a handful of wood chips roughly shaped into a circular pile and then requiring me to "eat" the cake, which involves holding the woodchips near to my mouth, saying "yum yum yum" and then dropping the wood chips back onto the ground).
That's a story only in a pretty degenerate sense - there is no real rising action, and the conclusion is foregone - but it is a structured sequence of events which are improvised during the playing of the game. And it involves a
shared fiction - my daughter and I jointly imagine that she is a baker, that she is bringing me a cake, and that I eat it. Those events are not real - hence
fictional. And the imagining of them is joint - hence
shared.
That you wanted to tell a story and yet play a game, that you continue to confuse the two acts does not couevidence of your position. On the contrary, it is evidence of your confusion.
I would retort that it is evidence of your desire to use the word "game" with a narrowness that is not borne out by its actual meaning.
My daughter, who describes her improvisational role playing and storytelling as a game, isn't abusing the English language.
But in fact I didn't want to
tell a story. I wanted to
create a story by way of RPGing. In the context of RPGing, those are importantly different things. The difference can be illustrated by pointing to the well-known pitfall in children's games - there is no device for adjudicating between competing desires as to "what happens next". That is because children's games lack any way of differentiating
creating from
telling. Whereas in the sort of RPG that I enjoy this is achieved by allocating different functions to different participants - GMs who frame scenes, players who introduce character motivations, desires and attempted actions; by using mechanical systems (mostly dice) to select between competing desires as to "what happens next"; and by using a combination of rules and conventions to maintain the integrity of the resulting shared fiction which then constrains both downstream scene-framing and downstream action declarations.
You may not enjoy that sort of RPGing, but it is not confused. And it is very obviously intimately related to the sort of RPGing that Gygax invented. It uses many of the same devices that D&D pioneered - a differentiation between player and referee roles; dice for action resolution; continuity of the shared fiction - while adding in some innovations of its own.
all games must have an actual existing pattern in place prior to play. This is the game people will be playing. This need becomes obvious when we remember a game cannot be played without rules in use throughout, the mental pattern accompanying that of the field of play.
This is not actually true except as some sort of ideal.
Do you play Monopoly? Because I have a 9 year old as well as a 6 year old daughter, I do. Modern Monopoly sets ship with a "speed die" which is rolled together with the traditional two dice. The "speed die" can mandate that an additional move be taken at the end of the turn, but the rules for using the speed die don't explain how this is to be reconciled with the rule that rolling doubles grants another turn. I hadn't noticed this until it actually came up in play, so we (or I, as the adult participant who noticed the issue) improvised a house rule - the special "speed die" move is implemented at the end of rolling again for the doubles.
Nor do the speed die rules say what happens to the special moves if you go to jail on your turn. Again, I improvised a house rule: because going to jail negates other downstream elements of a turn, I decided that it negates the downstream requirements of the speed die result. (This means that it can often be a good thing to go to jail, because paying $50 to get out of jail is a better result than having to resolve the special "speed die" move.)
I am not a wargamer, but many of those I have RPGed with have been pretty serious wargamers. For several years back in the early-to-mid-90s they use to play Empires and Arms every week. In one of their Empires and Arms games a question arose around how to adjudicate some particular element of Poland's neutral status - the rules weren't clear. They decided on an ad hoc solution for the moment and to otherwise put the issue to one side. The Empire and Arms group then broke up a few months later when the development of the game had led one of the players (maybe playing Austria? memory fades) to make a move that exploited this "gentlemen's agreement" around Poland, leading to acrimony and recriminations and fallings out.
The point is that the game was able to proceed with a less-than-complete ruleset, patched over by improvisation and ad hoc rulings. The fact that the game broke down over this some months later doesn't mean that a game wasn't being successfully played in the intervening period.
A referee in D&D moves, measures and relates portions of the current state of the hidden game to those players who are playing it. They are not players themselves as they do not have any playing pieces on the board. Like any referee they are not there to create anything, only to generate out via calculation results. Specific to D&D, these results include, but are not limited to, To Hit dice roll results, Saving Throw dice rolls, Ability Score dice rolls, and yes, map creation dice rolls.
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not only does no GM ever need to improvise during a campaign, they are interfering with the game if they do
To me, this is asserting some sort of ideal as if it were actual.
For instance, in AD&D, what damage does a PC take from falling 100' into water? What difference does it make if the PC deliberately dives, or rather is pushed over a cliff by an enemy? Does the DEX of the PC make a difference (eg does it permit a more elegant dive)? Gygax's published books don't answer this question, but I can guarantee it has come up at literally thousands of tables playing D&D.
Another example: in any version of classic D&D, how long does it take to hack through a standard dungeon door using a battle axe? And what difference does this activity make to the chances of wandering monsters during that time? No answer to these questions is found in any of the books either, but once again literally thousands, perhaps 10s or even 100s of thousands of GMs, have had to answer these questions over the lifetime of D&D play.
I can tell you how they have, in fact, come up with answers. They have made decisions that extrapolate, as best they are able, from some combination of the existing rules (for falling; for damaging objects with siege weapons; etc) and their own understanding of the causal processes involved (the furthest I personally have ever jumped into a pool of water is about 50' or 60'; I've never cut down a door with an axe, but have split wood for a fireplace; so those are the experiences I would draw upon).
I don't know what label you use to describe that process of rules invention. Most posters on these boards call it improvisation. Various D&D texts have talked about adjudicating things or actions that the rules don't cover.
At no point are referees to interfere with the game, as you say "improvise" by moving stuff around, removing or adding pieces as not directed to under the rules.
But this is not the sort of improvisation that [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], or I, or Roger Musson, is talking about. (Except for the bit about adding rewards - which, as I noted and as [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] has further discussed, he regards as problematic or at least irregular in some fashion.)
Celebrim has been emphasising the need to make up rules, similar to my previous paragraph. Roger Musson is interested in giving practical advice to GMs for when the players get to the edge of the map or get to parts of the map for which the referee has not yet written up any descriptions. That is what his Emergency Room Register is for.
Musson clearly regards the ideal as one in which the GM has fully prepared the map and key. But he recognises that human time, energy and ingenuity is finite, and is offering advice for what to do when those limitations mean that not everything has been written up.
NPCs and their behaviors as contained within their statistical design just like every other game component. They can be gamed through code breaking --the act of mastering a game-- and manipulating the game design. These statistics are largely in AD&D books, but mechanics like reaction rolls, alignment charts, racial relations, morale, loyalty, and plenty of other bits and pieces throughout the early published games do exist. But they are limited as to what the cover, I agree. You desire more depth of pattern complexity within the game subsystem these rules cover. That's admirable, so do I. But this does not mean NPCs aren't pieces of games. It simply means not much in the way of mechanical suggestions were published.
<snip>
So, all your examples about NPCs refer to game components not improvisation. Or with S2 to the generated game board. All these things must be on the GMs map behind the screen and tracked by them just like any referee running any other game.
Again, you state an ideal as if it were actual.
In the real world, GMs don't think of everything. How many 10s of thousands of tables have played through White Plume Mountain? How many solutions have been invented to deal with the ziggurat room, with the frictionless corridor, with the platforms hanging over hot mud?
It is literally impossible for a GM to anticipate and preplan for all those solutions, which know no limits except those of human ingenuity.
Likewise for NPCs. I stated an example of NPC reactions from Moldvay Basic. What
is the bonus for a friendly greeting in a hobgoblin's language? What does "hostile" mean? When do hostile NPCs attack? These things are not detailed for most NPCs in the game. In Moldvay's example, the GM could have decided that the "hostile" hobgoblins surround the PCs and call upon them to surrender while sending for reinforcements. Nothing in the game mechanics indicates that that would have been the wrong decision; hence nothing indicates that the actual course of events was the right decision.
What happens if Silverleaf, to try and pacify the hobgoblins, offers to marry the hobgoblin leader's oldest daughter? Does that increase or decrease the likelihood of attack? How important is marriage to hobgoblins? What are their dowry practices? None of that is answered by the game rules. A GM would have to make it up, doing his/her best to extrapolate from what is written (eg in AD&D hobgoblins are said to hate elves, but I don't recall anything similar in Moldvay Basic).
"Make a plot for the players to follow" when refereeing a cooperative strategy game. That's a horrible idea.
I don't know what exactly you have in mind by
making a plot for the players to follow, but given that neither I nor Roger Musson advocate anything that would fall under that description, I'm not too worried about it.
Musson does advocate putting interesting and interrelated things into the dungeon. And connected to this, he encourages having a dungeon backstory which the PCs (and hence the players) might discover, and hence take advantage of. For instance, if the players learn that the dungeon was designed by a college of magic whose leading figures subsequently had a falling out, they might try to find an NPC belonging to one of the factions who will then help them deal with the NPCs of the opposing faction.
I personally find RPGing more fun when the imagined situations into which I frame the PCs (and thereby the players) relates to the dramatic needs that they have established for their PCs. For instance,
when I started my Burning Wheel game, one of the PCs had as a Belief
that he needed to find magical antecedents that he could use to help enchant artefacts to tame his demon-possessed brother. Thus, the opening scene that I described had the PC in a bazaar in Hardby, where a peddler was claiming to have various magical and esoteric trinkets for sale, including an angel feather from the Bright Desert.
None of these techniques is about "making a plot for the players to follow".
Since its publication many people have not played D&D as a game
<snip>
As to Mr. Musson's bad advice, see my response to 1. Evidence of someone not running D&D as a game is not evidence D&D isn't one. And I'd assume Mr. Musson would be happy with not randomly rolling monsters to populate his dungeon and wandering monster tables too thereby removing the game of players seeking out monsters, avoiding them, etc. as well as playing the dungeon as a maze.
<snip>
I see Mr. Musson is clearly misguided about D&D.
I assume you have a copy of the (original) Fiend Folio. Have a look in the index - you'll see Roger Musson's name next to quite a few of those monsters.
The idea that he was misguided about D&D is absurd. He was clearly a major figure in the early years of British D&D play, up there with others like Donald Turnbull and Lewis Pulsipher.
In your somewhat snide remarks about what you would assume, you run together two things that Musson, quite reasonably, distinguishes: procedures for content generation, and procedures of play.
Musson, in the series of articles that I referenced, has a very interesting discussion of how to populate a dungeon, and the balance between random generation and GM choice. He talks about his own experience using a variety of methods (including an early computer program for content generation that he wrote himself and that was in use by other British D&D players also). He recommends a mixture of random and non-random generation of content, in many ways similar to Tom Moldvay in the Basic Rules (the GM places denizens who are integral to the dungeon backstory, and then randomly generates the rest). One important idea suggested by Musson and not found in Moldvay is to randomly generate a list of monsters, and a list of treasures, and then to deliberately place them so that the GM can achieve a deliberate rather than randomly determined balance between risk and reward.
On the issue of "dungeon as maze", Musson has a very sophisticated discussion of dungeon design techniques - both dungeon geometry and various tricks - that can increase the likelihood of PCs (and thereby players) getting lost. It is far superior to anything on the topic found in any book I have read published by TSR or WotC.
These techniques of dungeon geography and content generation are mostly quite separate from the question of basic play procedure. Musson regards dungeon exploration as the core of D&D play, and has a brief discussion of the technique of scouting expedition (in which the PCs prepare mostly defensive and informational spells) followed by an assault/looting expedition - but this does not add anything of significance to Gygax's discussion in the closing pages of his PHB.
Nothing about this sort of play procedure requires that the GM randomly generate the dungeon contents. It's clear, for instance, that Gygax didn't randomly generate all his dungeon contents. The famous Fraz Urb'luu room and imprisoned gods room in Castle Greyhawk are enough to make that clear - those rooms weren't the results of rolling randomly on tables. He came up with them because he thought they would be fun for the players.
This is why Musson doesn't favour strictly random content generation - he thinks that it reduces the likelihood of the dungeon being interesting to explore, and hence undermines the pleasure in playing the game.
That
many people have not played D&D as a game may be true, for some very restricted meaning of
game. But Roger Musson is manifestly not one of those people.
story and game cultures are two separate sets of ideas affixed to actualities by people currently understanding them as such. In neither case are these objects (game boards, pieces, mental processes, etc.) actually "truly" a game or story.
<snip>
let's drop The Forge "narrative theory is dogma" schtick.
<snip>
There is no such thing as actual fiction or nonfiction except as one culture's ideas of how they understand their world. In stark contrast, games require actual designs which must exist throughout the playing of a game.
<snip>
gaming and roleplaying are practically the opposite act of storytelling. Just read any history book (that hasn't been whitewashed by critical theorists practicing a highly suppressive variety of narrative absolutism).
I don't understand any of these statements, but as far as I can tell they don't bear upon anything that I am saying.
