D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[KarinsDad]

I said this way back on page 4 or something and I'll say it again: Saying "Yes" to players leads to happier players and better narratives. If they want to stack up boxes to reach a window instead of buying a damn grappling hook, why should you stand in the way of that? Instead of a DC 15 climb check make it a DC 15 strength check. Same edge of your seat rolling if that's what you want.

Apples.

My least favorite game session I ever had the DM described a room full of barrels and boxes and an oncoming orc horde that was sure to doom us all. I started to barricade the door with barrels and boxes and the orcs rolled right of them and the rest of the party like wet tissue paper. We all died and for what, because the DM had an unwavering narrative in his head that the boxes couldn't be stacked fast enough. Not only did he not tell me that, he actively punished me for outside the box (the box being hack and slash) thinking by wasting my turn moving boxes. If instead he had run with the idea of the barricade, let us short rest like we needed, and then fight the orcs outside likely no one would have died and the session would have been much more fun.

Oranges.


In the first case, the boxes do not exist unless the DM plays a certain style of RPG, with multiple different styles being totally viable.

In the second case, the boxes did exist, but the DM was heavy handed.


Playing your style is great for you and some DMs, but subpar for some other DMs (myself included). Both have merit.

 

[aramis erak]

Holy balls, 16 pages later and we are still on "Players should have no authoritative control over the universe"? Really?

I said this way back on page 4 or something and I'll say it again: Saying "Yes" to players leads to happier players and better narratives. If they want to stack up boxes to reach a window instead of buying a damn grappling hook, why should you stand in the way of that? Instead of a DC 15 climb check make it a DC 15 strength check. Same edge of your seat rolling if that's what you want.

Not always.

A bit of background: I love certain storygames. Blood and Honor especially. But with a bad player, it can become offensive right quick. One bad player can make it hell for EVRYONE else at the table.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I don't give they players any control over how the world is laid out to them, but I love it when they use that info to come up with something that I didn't anticipate to accomplish their goal.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Forty years for me and it's what I have seen most. In roleplaying games, I mainly see people play the game and play their role, sometimes with group or personal goals, but not with the idea of making sure that the story that can be told after all is said and done is the prime goal. In storytelling games, I mainly see people looking for ways to ensure good story arcs and reach a finale in a way that makes narrative sense, actively using their characters to advance the story toward a narrative goal. They are very different games, really, though I have seen some who do blend one type of game into the other.

I think your points on this topic all have merit, but I think you are greatly exagerating a separation that is appproximately never clean.

Even games that are more roleplaying games than narrative games, as per your defintions, usually include either explicit narrative conventions or implicit ideas such as "you are a hero" and "you are the protagonist". Those narrative conventions that are influencing the decision space of the players, even if the effect may or may not be subtle. Players will very often react to narrative conventions with conventional narrative behavior. The fact that the players are not directly architects of the narrative does not change the fact they have their hands in the guts of a narrative process.

While it is possible to play a game like D&D with a pure roleplaying approach, in fact, I believe it is very rarely done that way.

Yes, it is quite possible that you play that way. But starting from the assumption that D&D is nearly pure roleplaying is, I think, a misleading place to advise from.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Is it just because "it's magic"? Is that all it takes? The party has a wizard in it, faced by the second story window, the wizard drops a Rope Trick spell and poof, they climb up. There wasn't a rope there before and now, you don't even need any skill checks to climb up. All it took was a player spending a bit of character resources and the in game reality is changed. The higher the level of the caster, the greater the changes the player can effect. Sure, you can justify it as, "Well, it's magic", but, you can easily justify the boxes too. "You look around and see a bunch of crates that you hadn't noticed before". Poof, done.

Or is it that trad games have always allowed certain classes to manipulate the in-game reality, so, it just doesn't get questioned out of habit?

It's not that it's magic. Magic is just one of those in-game defined things, like swords or orcs or nanotechnology. The wizard isn't re-writing reality by conjuring up some rope, any more than a fighter is manipulating reality by chopping down a door. It's just characters doing things that they know how to do.

You can't justify those crates in-game, because players (in a traditional RPG) don't have those kinds of authorial powers. The boxes either exist, or don't, independently of the player's desire for them to be there. You could play a more story-telling type of game where the players do have limited forms of non-character authorial powers, but D&D isn't really one of those.

 

[Mark CMG]

I think your points on this topic all have merit, but I think you are greatly exagerating a separation that is appproximately never clean.

Even games that are more roleplaying games than narrative games, as per your defintions, usually include either explicit narrative conventions or implicit ideas such as "you are a hero" and "you are the protagonist". Those narrative conventions that are influencing the decision space of the players, even if the effect may or may not be subtle. Players will very often react to narrative conventions with conventional narrative behavior. The fact that the players are not directly architects of the narrative does not change the fact they have their hands in the guts of a narrative process.

While it is possible to play a game like D&D with a pure roleplaying approach, in fact, I believe it is very rarely done that way.

Yes, it is quite possible that you play that way. But starting from the assumption that D&D is nearly pure roleplaying is, I think, a misleading place to advise from.

I see what you're saying but consider that the conventions you are suggesting permeate the decision space do so prior to in-game play, as do things in D&D like "class" and "race." I would also agree that such things are conventions of the space between in-game decision space, between sessions during leveling up and the like. Once the roleplaying happens, it's a different story, so to speak. The narrative is what unfolds during gameplay in both story games and roleplaying games but in the later, the players must affect that narrative through their character while in story games players can affect the narrative directly. And, please remember, I am speaking of these differences between roleplaying games and story games as "by design" not in regard to how any given single game group might necessarily approach playing. My expression of my own experience was merely in direct response to someone else's assertion of their experience, and some ongoing back and forth that followed. The rest of what I am posting is in regard to the underlying design of these types of games and how they may relate to "character play vs player play" per the OP's questioning. As I have also mentioned in previous posts, people add rules to the mix at tables all the time and more power to them.

 

[Lanefan]

Late to the party again, as usual, but a few thoughts:

1. In the example where someone comes up specifically to the PCs in a tavern with an adventure to be done: easy workaround if it's not a stealth mission is to have the guy instead stand at the bar and announce his request to the whole place. (for added fun, have other guys doing the same in other bars all over town) Then, it becomes an in-character choice whether to get involved or not; and as DM you've given yourself the pleasant side effect of loads of design space to add in competing parties and so forth if you want...or not, if you don't want.

2. Sometimes - if I've thought of it - I'll have predetermined minor details e.g. does the wizard have a beard, or are there boxes in the alley. If so, then that's the way it is no matter what. But if I haven't - and this happens all the time! - then I'll either roll myself (for the beard) or give the players a roll (for the boxes) and see where it goes. For the boxes example, if there's no boxes in sight and the PCs decide to go looking for some there will be two rolls involved - one by the party for success in box-finding, and one by me to see if anybody notices and-or cares about this activity.

3. My problems arise when there's an element written into an adventure and the party take so long to get to that element it makes no sense for it to still be there. I have to modify the adventure on the fly, while also figuring out what has become of said element (usually a creature). An example from a module I'm running right now: the day before the PCs got to the dungeon three down-on-their-luck fighters wandered in to it, found some wine, got too drunk to move, and stayed put (this is scripted). The PCs found their tracks (this was not scripted) and followed them in, but then for some reason then left those tracks and went another way. It's now been several days; the PCs have gone almost everywhere except where these guys are or could have got to, there's no way those fighters could have reasonably survived unless they stayed right where they were (with limited food and no water, not happening), which means I-as-DM either have to do some serious fudging to let them survive or abandon what would potentially be an entertaining and amusing encounter. It's possible the PCs will never get to the part of the dungeon these guys are in (their exploration has been somewhat haphazard), but in-game consistency tells me the best they can do is either find three corpses or find nothing except the aftermath of a major drink-up as the hungover-but-very-lucky fighters have managed to stumble outdoors and away.

From what I've read here, different DMs would handle this a bunch of different ways.

Lan-"no DM plan ever survives first contact with the players"-efan

 

[Hussar]

That does seem to be the tipping point; like not being able to be a little bit pregnant.





Two things: you can think of magic as the currency of wizards (much like a fighter could have bought and brought a rope) and the action of casting the spell is happening in-game rather than being meta-gamed by the player, trying to affect the setting from outside of the setting with a quasi-power not possessed by the character.

At the end of the day though, it's still a player spending a character resource to affect the in-game reality. The only reason that the wizard has that spell is because he knows he will possibly want to circumvent a particular challenge. The reason that spell exists in that class' spell list is for exactly that.

For example, explain to me why clerics get Water Breathing. Why is Continual Light, a spell that has setting shattering implications, a second level spell? Why have spells like Mending, and Make Whole? There's a host of spells on the list, practically the entire utility list of spells, that only exist for meta-game reasons. They are the level they are because that's the level you will likely need them at. Continual Light/Flame is second level because at 3rd level, the party is undergoing extended foray's into the dungeon and they need a way to see without hauling around barrels of oil. So, second level spell it is.

It's entirely meta-gaming contrivance from front to back.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Why is Continual Light, a spell that has setting shattering implications, a second level spell? Why have spells like Mending, and Make Whole?

There's nothing even remotely meta-gaming about it. Spells exist because someone within the game has decided to create them, using ye olde spelle creation rules, in order to meet some need. Someone broke a cup, and a wizard figured that magick-ing it whole again would be a good use of time and energy, so she set about developing a Mending spell.

Spells exist at the levels they do because they require varying amounts of skill and power in order to accomplish, and bigger spells require someone with more skill to expend more power.

Unless your question is why the game takes place in a universe where sufficiently power spellcasters can create spells to do almost anything, in which case that's just the anthropic principle in action - that's our premise, and if you didn't want to buy into the premise, then you wouldn't be playing the game in the first place.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It's entirely meta-gaming contrivance from front to back.

It is...and I'm much less strict on the "absolutely NO meta game mechanics in my D&D" than Mark CMG. However, I like to limit it as much as possible.

To me, the game is a mix of meta-game contrivances that are required to even have a game(Spells are the order they are in because players will need them in that order, classes have abilities restricted to higher levels to avoid spoiling low level games, stats are bought using point buy, players are always the people the adventure happens to, and about a million other contrivances) and the actual in-game part that needs to stay almost entirely free of metagame contrivances in order to be consistent and believable.

This means that you may get Continual Light at 2nd level, which is a pretty powerful spell because the game tells you that you do, but you can still only cast it the number of times per day it says in the book. It still only has precisely the effect written in the book, no more, no less. Once a particular meta-game contrivance is defined as part of the game world it doesn't break believability.

There are certain other mechanics that aren't defined within the game world at all. These are the ones that seem confusing to me. Like no one has the magical ability to wave their hand and make the wizard grow a beard. Or make the door change colour or anything else like that. The DM comes up with those things and the players react.