Pros and Cons of going mainstream

[howandwhy99]

It is. But if the player decides on an objective, it is much more satisfying to be able to realize that objective through application of well-defined rules, and say "I do this", than to ask the DM "do you permit me to succeed?", which is what a player must fall back on to in the absence of rules.

But there is no absence of rules, if the DM is following them. I strongly disagree it is less satisfying, and again the evidence in the videogame arena alone is hugely against your point.

It's essentially inevitable that a DM will need to use fiat (that is, decisions made not on the basis of game rules) from time to time, if not frequently).

That's an absolutism and one I disagree with. It's a kind of soft bigotry that prevents any growth in RPG design beyond its current state.

And I don't think obfuscating the rules is a good thing, anyway, as the rules are a players only real means to impact the world they're playing in, without appealing to fiat.

They aren't the rules known to the players, they are the rules of the puzzle design, the game system. It's why nearly 100% of them are called guidelines. You didn't have to use them as the known rules weren't the proverbial cartridge so to speak, but the console.

I don't see a good reason to make them guess about what their options are.

It depends upon your game design goals. When designing a puzzle game guessing can be the point.

I think specifics might be useful: can you recall a specific gameplay experience within recent memory which imparted a "sense of wonder" to you? What gameplay mechanic helped enable that feeling?

I'll do a google search for a post of mine in the last couple months about the everfull beer stein we found. The rules of how it functioned are still unknown to us, but it provided hours of fun just by itself.
EDIT: It's in the spoiler

 

[Quickleaf]

Ironically, D&D was most popular during the 1e era when it was a cartoon and action figure line.

So maybe it would be for the best if Disney bought D&D?

 

[Luce]

I think it was more that during 1e the majority of the follower were hardcore, while as it gained popularity the ratio of casual games increased. I do not use the term in any way derogatory. I just feel that some people come to play at the table and do not spend large amount of time thinking about the game in their daily life. They do not read articles, of hang on forums trying to analyze the game or get the latest build. They are there to have fun. Nothing wrong with this.
Contrast with the early days of the game where the game was much more niche targeting people of college age or older. 1e PHB & DMG can be a spring of inspiration (it breathes character) however I do not see many 8-12 year olds being able to grasp it, while I regularly see people that age to play in and even run Encounters of 4e in the FLGS. Am I saying that 1e is any way not a god game? NO! Just think that it has a different set of goals in mind and is targeted for older people.

Quickleaf: about your XP comment http://wizards.com/dnd/images/rollplaying.jpg

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You know, I don't think I've ever seen an experienced, adult RPG player describe a recent gameplay experience as possessing a "sense of wonder", in any system, including old editions of D&D.

I don't think "sense of wonder" has anything to do with game mechanics or design. It's rose-tinted nostalgia for childhood where mechanics quite literally didn't matter, because kids are perfectly happy with pure make-believe. "Sense of wonder" happens when the world is a mystery because the processes used by the DM to run it are a mystery.

But I think, as RPG players get older and more experienced, that mystery simply doesn't work any more. We see past that. Succeeding or failing at things simply because the DM said so loses any meaning. Lack of coherent rules makes trying to plan frustrating and meaningless.

To be clear, I'm not making any statement on the relative merits of editions of D&D, but rather on the lack of usefulness of "sense of wonder" for evaluating game systems. It's tangential to mechanics, and inextricably tied up in our own very personal experiences and expectations.

While what you say has merit, when a campaign hits the sweet spot where players and the DM have all "bought in" to the campaign, you can still get that sense of wonder.

Not recent, but definitely well into my adult years and a decade+ into the hobby, I ran the best campaign of my life. it was a supers game set in the 1900 as imagined by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and others. I was in the zone, creatively, but so were the players. EVERY PC was fully grounded in the time & place, right down to the strongest man in the world being a bald, handlebar-mustachioed, club-swinging, leopard-skin wearing Brit and an amnesiac Atlantean teen.

Nobody wanted to miss or postpone a session. Nobody was looking at the "meta" aspects of the game. There were "reveals" in the game that made some players' eyes go wide. There were player actions that actually got cheers & high-5s.

I admit I caught lightning in a bottle...and I couldn't have done so without the players. (I know this is at least partially true, because I haven't run a game anywhere near that fun since.)

 

[pemerton]

This is NOT an edition war!

<snip>

Please discuss.

I think it's an interesting essay, although a bit overblown or exaggerated in places. I'm a great admirer of Weber, and I think there is something to be said for applying a Weberian analysis to the aesthetics of D&D.

But I think the author falls into an edition-warring trap. For example, the author clearly doesn't understand how skill challenges are meant to be adjudicated. On page 20, s/he says:

Through a mechanic called “skill challenges,” the game converts a role-playing event such as negotiating with a local duke into a quantitatively governed dice-rolling session, described as “Level: Equal to the level of the party; Complexity 3 (requires 8 successes before 4 failures)” (Wyatt 76). Gone is the uneasy treaty between rationalization and enchantment; here, the system is all-encompassing.​

And on the same page, s/he says of 4e monsters that

the qualitative aspects are like a skin overlaid on this framework.​

In both cases, s/he shows a lack of understanding of how these mechanical systems relate to the "qualitative aspect" of play ie the fiction. In neither case is the system all-encompassing; rather, the system is intended to regulate the process of narration between player and GM, and it is their narration, within the constraints of that regulation, that produces the fiction.

The essay would have been strengthened, I think, by recognising the huge influence of indie- and Forge-style design on 4e: as in my description just above, for example, the conception of the function of the rules that Vincent Baker has pioneered, namely, as primarily intended not to describe the fiction, but to regulate the shared production of the fiction. (And no one in the RPG world has more strongly attacked the idea that if only your rules are mathematically tighter in their simulation, you'll get the enchantment you're after than Ron Edwards. So 4e is influenced by a school of design that agrees with many of the points made in the essay.)

This would then have provided a basis for identifying 4e (and Forge game design more generally) as a modernist attempt to reconcile rationalised production and creativity, rather than a mere McDonald's-isation. Which may or may not be vulnerable to some sort of deconstructive or other critique (depending on the author's inclinations in that regard).

 

[S'mon]

You know, I don't think I've ever seen an experienced, adult RPG player describe a recent gameplay experience as possessing a "sense of wonder", in any system, including old editions of D&D.

I think sense of wonder is something evoked by the GM. I can recall having it playing d20 Midnight, playing a 4e Ravenloft game oneshot (our PCs were children, fighting the Erlking), and to a degree playing a sandbox Labyrinth Lord game. The latter two were within the past year. Perhaps notable that the former two were with female GMs, for some reason I find female GMs are particularly talented at evoking SOW.

 

[S'mon]

In neither case is the system all-encompassing; rather, the system is intended to regulate the process of narration between player and GM, and it is their narration, within the constraints of that regulation, that produces the fiction.

The essay would have been strengthened, I think, by recognising the huge influence of indie- and Forge-style design on 4e: as in my description just above, for example, the conception of the function of the rules that Vincent Baker has pioneered, namely, as primarily intended not to describe the fiction, but to regulate the shared production of the fiction.

But it doesn't say that in the 4e DMG - it doesn't even imply that, AFAICT, except maybe in the example of a roleplay skill challenge? It maybe sort of implies it in the 4e DMG2.

 

[pemerton]

But it doesn't say that in the 4e DMG - it doesn't even imply that, AFAICT, except maybe in the example of a roleplay skill challenge? It maybe sort of implies it in the 4e DMG2.

The DMG2 has whole sections of Robin Laws's HeroQuest revised rulebook cut-and-pasted, so definitely.

But I think it's implicit throughout the whole of the DMG too - from the emphasis on scene framing ("cut to the fun") through to the description of skill challenge mechanics (see the discussion in Imaro's current 4e encounter design thread) to the metagame approach to combat encounter design.

I don't know that one would identify it if one didn't already know that school of design, but that is often the case with influences that aren't overtly acknowledged.

 

[dkyle]

But there is no absence of rules, if the DM is following them. I strongly disagree it is less satisfying, and again the evidence in the videogame arena alone is hugely against your point.

When I say "do you [the DM] permit me" there, I mean to imply that the DM himself is deciding, not based on any rules, but on whatever ethereal, intangible ideas he has about what "should" happen. This is in contrast to the player considering what the rules permit him to do.

That's an absolutism and one I disagree with. It's a kind of soft bigotry that prevents any growth in RPG design beyond its current state.

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

Also, "bigotry"? Really?

I'll do a google search for a post of mine in the last couple months about the everfull beer stein we found. The rules of how it functioned are still unknown to us, but it provided hours of fun just by itself.
EDIT: It's in the spoiler

That example bears out my original point: that "sense of wonder" is independent of system. There aren't any game mechanics at play, other than very basic ones your DM invented for that item, that couldn't just as easily be used in any system.

You DM was instrumental in capturing your imagination. Not the specific edition of D&D he used.

 

[howandwhy99]

When I say "do you [the DM] permit me" there, I mean to imply that the DM himself is deciding, not based on any rules, but on whatever ethereal, intangible ideas he has about what "should" happen. This is in contrast to the player considering what the rules permit him to do.

I gathered that. What I'm saying is that element isn't essential or unavoidable in games with a DM as referee. The player is determining through trial and error what the rules are just like in a videogame or any puzzle game.

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

Also, "bigotry"? Really?

What I mean is absolutist thinking denies certain possibilities as fundamentally impossible and it's easy to be prejudiced against anything that doesn't fit inside our predetermined conceptions of the world. I'm asking that you open yourself to up other possibilities.

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.

That example bears out my original point: that "sense of wonder" is independent of system. There aren't any game mechanics at play, other than very basic ones your DM invented for that item, that couldn't just as easily be used in any system.

While elegant in design I would hardly call it basic. Plus, you're still assuming a game system is not the puzzle. The system is run by the DM not necessarily created by him or her. As I mentioned before, like a cartridge and a console the game rules define the operation of play and the puzzle the operation of the DM.

You DM was instrumental in capturing your imagination. Not the specific edition of D&D he used.

Or maybe the game rules he used behind the screen, but I'm not advocating for any specific edition here.. I'm saying game rules and game design itself can successfully be focused on building in wonderment via suspense, anticipation, and rewarding the use of imagination.

You can certainly continue to deny or try to limit all of that, but between the two of us all we end up with is you unwilling to conceive of or play games you don't believe are possible.

Look, I'm not seeking to change your mind here. If you want to continue to believe with such certainty in whatever set of beliefs you hold, I don't desire to change that. What I'm disagreeing with is that others might not only be holding differing views from your own, but flourishing with them.