D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[The Crimson Binome]

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.

For what it's worth, I believe that both of those spells existed in 2E. As of 3.0, you might be able to pull them off with Prestidigitation, but they didn't feel the need to explicitly codify them.

 

[pemerton]

The storygame side, players can narrate the actions of characters other than their own, and the mechanics are usually about either (a) who gets to talk when, or (b) how does the scene resolve.

I don't really know what a "storygame" is - it's a label I typically see applied to explain why what someone else is doing is not RPGing.

But let's take Burning Wheel. Players can make checks to establish that the NPCs their PCs want to meet are there to be met (the Circles mechanic). Players, as part of PC generation, can purchase relationships which, in the default approach to BW gameplay, the GM is obliged to integrate into the framing of situations?

BW also has various forms of "action point", earned via various sorts of RP decisions made by the players, that can be spent to boost checks or, in some situations, to renarrate failures.

Does this make BW a storygame? Because to me it is just another RPG.

I guess my quibble here is the characterisation that any game which has mechanics that allow the player to have some authorial control are automatically story games. Action points do not make D&D a Story Game. It's still a trad game that has now borrowed a smidgeon of stuff from the other side of the fence.

OGL Conan has a fate point mechanic that allows minor narrations. It's actually more liberal in this respect than BW, because in BW to meet a friendly NPC requires making a successful check, and if the check fails then the authority shifts to the GM to introduce some sort of complication arising out of the failed attempt to hook up with an NPC.

So to me, BW's Circles mechanic is not very different from a Streetwise or Gather Information mechanic. Whereas OGL Conan's fate points are more overtly about player fiat.

I've never seen OGL Conan described as a storygame, though.

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.

I'm not sure this is right. In classic D&D, for instance, the players make decisions in part on the basis of knowledge about the level of threat - for instance, decisions about dungeon levels, decisions about whether or not to tackle the wilderness, etc, and these are not really based just on "playing a role". They're also based on understandings about the way in which the rules establish a gameworld default that is suitable for a certain sort of adventurous game play.

Once you get to non-classic modules, which is nearly everything published in the last 30 or so years, I think the influence of these considerations only grows. For instance, the AD&D Oriental Adventure modules (just to pick some examples that I know reasonably well) take for granted that the players will engage the situations in a spirit of protagonism. They are not simply exercises in world and character exploration.

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.

In my experience a bad player can make any RPG hell - especially, but not only, if that bad player is GMing.

 

[pemerton]

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.

These paragraphs are slighty odd, because they attribute a causal power to a non-existent being, namely, an imaginary person in an imaginary world.

The spell lists exist in the real world. They were written in the real world, originally (in Chainmai) by Gary Gygax, a real person. Decisions were made about how to rank the spells in order of level. And those decisions were made in order to facilitate a certain sort of gameplay.

In Book 1 (Men & Magic), Gygax and Arneson write (p 19) "The number above each column [in the character class charts] is the spell level (complexity, a somewhat subjective determination on the part of your authors)." The word "complexity" is borrowed from the earlier Chainmail, in which Gygax writes (p 33) "Each listed spell has a complexity value, and this value indicates how difficult it is to use such a spell. . . . The table below gives the scores necessary [on 2d6] for immediate, deferred (1 turn) and negated [ie non-effective] spell effects by the various levels of magic-users".

These are the sum-total of the original discussions of spell level and its significance. It is not until the DMG that you get any sort of detailed discussion of ingame considerations around spell casting and spell complexity. That inworld stuff, about "varying amounts of skill and power", is all written up after those decisions had been made. The decisions in Chainmail weren't made with the aspiration of modelling some already-given fiction: they were made for the purposes of building a playable wargame, and the fiction was simply read of the wargame design.

In other words, we have no way of knowing the it is harder for a magic-user to cause a creature to fly than it is to create a permanent ball of light except by reading the spell lists and seeing that one is listed at 3rd level and the other at 2nd. And that listing was driven by gameplay considerations. That's what [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] means when he says that the whole thing is a metagamed contrivance.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

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.

There are things I'd allow and things I wouldn't. I can never really know unless I'm in the middle of a game with a group of players that I have a good feeling for exactly what I'd allow. Sometimes a challenge sounds better in my head and the game has been going really slow and the challenge now seems boring and a waste of time. In which case, I say yes to virtually any solution someone comes up with.

Other times, the PCs have been rampaging across the land, becoming extremely cocky over how awesome they are and how they succeed all the time with no real challenge. In which case, I like to say no for a while to prevent them from thinking the entire world revolves around them and everything always goes their way.

Other times, the idea is just really bad. It sounds better in the player's head than it actually is. Unfortunately, players are sometimes very bad at recognizing their plans are bad. Each player feels like their plan was genius and should solve the day. IMHO, that's where most of these conflicts come in.

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.

Maybe. It sounds like it would have been more fun for YOU at least. I don't know if the other players would have had more fun one way or the other, I wasn't there. In this case, it's fairly obvious that the DM wanted you to fight the monsters and didn't really like the idea that you could rest with an Orc horde chasing you. I can certainly imagine DMing that situation and saying "Really? You expect a barrel to stop the door from opening? You realize that Orcs are pretty strong and there are quite a few of them. With them working together it shouldn't take more than a round or two of them bashing the door to open it. They are only a round behind you so you can only put one barrel at most in front of the door. Seems like a pretty bad plan to me. You might be able to stall them a round or two, but taking an entire short rest seems impossible. If the players attempt an obviously bad plan with no real chance of success, they should pay for it."

That's definitely what I'd be thinking in a situation like this. Obviously, I don't know the full details in question. If the Orcs were minutes behind you and therefore you might have had time to actually stack an effective wall of barrels...whether the barrels actually contained something heavy enough to stop the door from opening, etc. Still, there are very few things that a large number of strong people working together can't push over.

The basic flow of the plot is establish goal, set up obstacles, allow PCs to overcome obstacles, achieve goal. Everyone wins when these things go smoothly. Obstacles and challenges should be difficult but any action a PC takes to overcome the obstacle should have some reasonable chance at success. After all, all you really want is for them to come up with a solution on their own and work it through. It might fail, and advance the plot through that failure, but it should probably succeed. Letting the PCs toil away for no result is how you get to "Look, what do I have to roll to get passed this".

I think that allowing PCs to get past obstacles using whatever plans they come up with make for a REALLY dumb game. My players come up with the dumbest plans known to man, sometimes. Saying yes to them...or even making them remotely possible would turn my game into a circus show where they'd compete to see who could come up with the dumbest plans just to see what I'd do with it. I had a player in a Star Wars game play a female character who installed a hydraulic window into the chest of his armor so that he could hit a button and flash his(her) breasts to people to use them as a bonus to Diplomacy checks. At first I said yes but it got more and more out of hand.

The last thing I want to deal with is a game where you say "There's a 40 foot tall wall of 3 foot thick stone blocking your path" and I'm forced to give "I run 20 feet towards it and knock it down" a chance of success. Instead I will continue to say "Sorry, that doesn't work...the wall is way too thick and strong for that solution. Come up with a new one. I'm sure there's a spell to get past it or open a hole it in or you can climb over it or walk around it, or any number of other solutions I haven't come up with...but THAT solution is wrong."

 

[pemerton]

The adventure in question is designed to run in "phases". Most of the phases take place on different days as the events in them need to be spaced out to make the story make any sense.

<snip>

I was using a pace of about 1 phase on each day. The player in question noticed that.

<snip>

I encouraged him to spend the rest of the time during the day roleplaying the personal motivations of his character and giving more flavor to his character's personality.

<snip>

I normally run MUCH more railroady adventures for the same group and they love them. This one had a lot of freedom built in except for the phases(which were still somewhat controllable if the PCs put a lot of effort into changing them), they were able to go anywhere in the city and do anything they want. Compared to most dungeon crawls where their choices consisted of "do I head down the corridor or go home?", this was dramatically more open. Yet this was the first adventure to ever get called out for how railroady it was.

Could the PCs have stopped the riots by intervening in the situation to head off the unrest (eg get the laws changed; persuade the people of Baldur's Gate to adopt non-violent resistance tehcniques; etc)? If they could have, and the player knew of that possibility, and ignored it, then I'm ready to criticise the player for not fully engaging the adventure.

From my (outsider's) point of view, having only your posts to go on, it sounds like the PCs couldn't have stopped the riots. And it sounds like your player noticed this, and also noticed that roleplaying the personal motivations of his PC and giving more flavour to his PC's personality would have had no practical effect on the unfolding of the adventure. For instance, whether he spent his spare time helping old ladies across the road, or spent it drowning puppies, the riots would have come on just the same.

Letting the PCs toil away for no result is how you get to "Look, what do I have to roll to get passed this".

I'm inclined to agree.

The rules are a guideline. Not ever kobold has the same Int stat. It's possible this one was dumber than the rest. It's also possible it was more a language barrier.

The event was over 20 years ago - so I can't remember if the kobold spoke Common, or we had a dwarf or gnome who spoke kobold (probably the latter - my brother was a player, and at least back then he had a thing for gnome illusionists).

It seems certain that this kobold was dumber than the rest, given that this one was dumb whereas the rest had come up with some moderately clever plan to infitrate the city. But why was this one dumber than the rest? Because the GM decided that it would be, so that we couldn't interrogate it. That is, the GM decided to roadblock us.

I played a game earlier today where the DM flat out said "The monster has 2 hitpoints left, but I'm going to say that kills him because I think it'll be more fun not to drag this combat out longer than it needs to." I've had DMs say "This battle is starting to drag on, and I'd like to get to the more interesting parts of this adventure. I'm going to say you win. Let's say everyone takes...1d6 more points of damage and the battle is over." I've had DMs say that based on specific circumstances that certain abilities won't work...like casting a fire spell while underwater without a clear rule for what happens. I've definitely had DMs give random +2 bonuses to people based on circumstances narrated that had no basis in the rules at all.

None of this is roadblocking except for the fireball, and in that case the relevant fictional consideration - namely, that the PC is underwater - had already been established.

Contrast this example, which I don't think I'm making up (as in, I have some vague memory of having lived through this in some episode of play decades ago): the PCs have to deal with a wooden building, the player of the 5th level MU decides to fireball it, and the GM, rather than rolling on the item saving throw tabe, retroactively decides that the timber on the building is too damp to catch fire. That is a roadblock. (In G1, Gygax anticpates this possibility and builds the dampness of the timber into the initial description of the situation.)

The DM doesn't have to roll morale if he doesn't want to or doesn't feel it is appropriate for his game or the current situation. The DM gets to decide these things in order to make the game more fun. Often the DM knows way more details about what is going on than the players do and sometimes they understand that for the health of the game certain options need to be "restricted" in order to make the story turn out better in the long term.

Let's put to one side the fact that not rolling for morale, or for reaction, is just burning the player who chose to play a high-CHA PC. Let's focus on "fun" and "better story". I think the GM I am talking about failed on both counts. His game was so un-fun that his players walked en masse and started a new game with a new GM (me) and a new system (Rolemaster). His story was so much worse than what we wanted - namely, a story in which interrogation of the prisoner enabled some sort of intelligence to be gained, and hence some sort of pro-activity on our part - that we dropped it rather than find out what he had in mind.

The idea that the GM has sole authority over what makes for a better story is not something that I accpeted than, or accept now.

Framing situations the players are interested in is sometimes a really bad idea. Players rarely know what they ACTUALLY want. I've had players who REALLY wanted to be king and to rule over a country. If you give it to them, suddenly the game is boring because they now have to deal with the things kings need to actually deal with.

I'm not quite sure how making a PC be king is framing a scene. But anyway, I've never found that framing situations the players are interested in to be a bad idea. Nor allowing them to realise goals like becoming important social and political actors. (Though, within D&D, PC-build mechanics and genre tropes interact - eg a ruler is typically a name/paragon level character, not a 1st level one.)

Conan was a king and yet REH found plenty of interesting things for him to do. One of the PCs in my 4e game is a Marshall of Letherna, so hence one of the most important agents of the Raven Queen, and a peer of any mortal ruler, but he has plenty of interesting things to do too!

As for why the players show up...presumably because they enjoy playing the game, they want to see what happens next in the story, they want to have fun acting and roleplaying their character and their decisions, they enjoy solving puzzles and trying to figure out the answers to the problems the DM throws at them, or they want to use their cool abilities in combat and get a power trip over being better than they are in real life. Plus they still get to make decisions at various points in the game. Just not 100% of all decisions are open to them 100% of the time.

There are at least two ways of "seeing what happens next in the story". One is to have the GM dictate it to you. Another is to participate in creating it. I, and my players, prefer the latter.

Likewise, ther are at least two ways of "figuring out the answers to the problems the GM throws at the PCs". One way is to try and guess the answer the GM has in mind. The other is to inhabit one's PC, imagine what is feasible within the shared fiction, and come up with ideas, with an expectation that the GM will adjudicate them fairly in accordance with the rules of the game. I, and my players, prefer the latter.

My players don't want to simply "use their cool abilities in combat". They want to choose who their enemies are, and who they try and make friends with. They want to form meaningful goals for their PCs - goals that relate to the campaign world, like "undo the sundering of the elves" or "increase the scope of the Raven Queen's divine power" or "kill Orcus and thereby defeat the powers of undeath". And then pursue those goals through play. Fighting will be part of it, but not just for its own sake. The fighting is located within a broader context of goals and values and friends and enemies, that are reflective of, and change with, the players' choices for their PCs.

it never even occurred to me that facts in the game world would suddenly change because a player asked about it until this thread.

You keep talking about "change" but you haven't identified any change. If the GM has not described whether or not the NPC is bearded, or whether or not he wears boots rather than sandals or clogs, or whether or not the alley contains boxes or lumber of hay bales, then when a player asks about those things, for the GM to follow the players' lead is not to change anything. It is to establish some ingame fact that hitherto had been unsettled.

the stuff you made up before the game started with the needs of the story as it has progressed so far.

<snip>

Sometimes that means saying "Sorry, you can't attack the kobolds because you have no idea how powerful they are. They are well organized and deadly and performing a raid on them is going to get the entire party killed. I don't want the party to die because the game will end. So, in an effort to prevent the players from leaping to their deaths, I'm going to use a rather heavy handed method to prevent them from doing it. In the end, the game will be more fun for it."

The GM I am talking about didn't say this. Even if he did, I'm not sure that would have saved him. If he can retroactively decide that a kobold is too stupid to yield useful information under interrogation, why can't he retroactively decide that some of the kobold guards got drunk and fell asleep at their posts?

Where does the story get these "needs" that oblige the GM not to deviate from the script? Whose needs are they? If the players want to infiltrate the kobold camp, haven't those needs changed? The GM broke script to roadblock the players, and that's good GMing - but breaking script to give the players the fun game that they want is bad GMing?

That sounds topsy-turvy to me.

 

[Manbearcat]

These paragraphs are slighty odd, because they attribute a causal power to a non-existent being, namely, an imaginary person in an imaginary world.

The spell lists exist in the real world. They were written in the real world, originally (in Chainmai) by Gary Gygax, a real person. Decisions were made about how to rank the spells in order of level. And those decisions were made in order to facilitate a certain sort of gameplay.

<snip>

The decisions in Chainmail weren't made with the aspiration of modelling some already-given fiction: they were made for the purposes of building a playable wargame, and the fiction was simply read of the wargame design.

In other words, we have no way of knowing the it is harder for a magic-user to cause a creature to fly than it is to create a permanent ball of light except by reading the spell lists and seeing that one is listed at 3rd level and the other at 2nd. And that listing was driven by gameplay considerations. That's what @Hussar means when he says that the whole thing is a metagamed contrivance.

Good post and all undeniably true. Every time these conversations come up and the false inferences that ignore the legacy construct of the system (contrived wargame skeleton and post-hoc fictional elements clumsily hung over it), it strikes me as some odd D&D version of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Just because folks have internalized levels (spells and/or class), experience points, hit points, armor class (on and on), it doesn't suddenly make them "fiction-first" and it certainly doesn't make them coherent. Malleable enough to work as simulation if you squint vigorously? I suppose. But that doesn't allow for the inversion of the design origin of the gaming engine, nor the (rife) clumsy synthesis of system and fiction (as a process simulator), and it certainly doesn't make it intuitive for anyone who hasn't spent a fair bit of time "Clockworking Oranging" themselves (as we all have I guess) into either buying into D&D's idiosyncratic incoherencies or at least averting our eyes (with a tacit admission that Something Is Rotten in Denmark) when it gets too much.

Dungeon World's Defy Danger, XP for failure, and HP/Armor model vs AD&D's Saving Throw, XP for Gold, and HP/AC model are world's apart from one another in terms of intuitiveness for a newbie TTRPG player. I've introduced 5 new players (including an 8 year old) to DW and its immediately understood. I don't know how many new RPGers I introduced to AD&D (dozens). The ratio of face palms to light bulbs was not good.

What is most interesting is how difficult it seems to be for many long-time D&D players to grok (minimalist) systems (like Dungeon World) that are pretty straight-forward but don't possess the mental gymnastics and cognitive workload requirements of D&D.

 

[mcbobbo]

Good post and all undeniably true. Every time these conversations come up and the false inferences that ignore the legacy construct of the system (contrived wargame skeleton and post-hoc fictional elements clumsily hung over it), it strikes me as some odd D&D version of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

This may be true, but it IS appealing. I mean, I can't live in that world, but if a forum member is genuinely in a place where the whole system 'fits' and there's no whiff of metagame, who am I to mess that up? It's a bit like telling kids there's no such thing as Santa. Why would you do that? What's to be gained?

Dungeon World's Defy Danger, XP for failure, and HP/Armor model vs AD&D's Saving Throw, XP for Gold, and HP/AC model are world's apart from one another in terms of intuitiveness for a newbie TTRPG player.

It's almost as if there have been new editions of D&D since then. /winkwink /nudgenudge

 

[pemerton]

if a forum member is genuinely in a place where the whole system 'fits' and there's no whiff of metagame, who am I to mess that up? It's a bit like telling kids there's no such thing as Santa. Why would you do that? What's to be gained?

Nothing, if it's just gratuitous balloon-popping.

But if the other person is looking for ideas on how to handle GMing, the issue might come up.

 

[Mark CMG]

At the end of the day though, it's still a player spending a character resource to affect the in-game reality.

The difference being the spell is a resource that exists in the mind of the character while an action point exists for the player.

 

[Mark CMG]

I don't really know what a "storygame" is - it's a label I typically see applied to explain why what someone else is doing is not RPGing.

But let's take Burning Wheel. Players can make checks to establish that the NPCs their PCs want to meet are there to be met (the Circles mechanic). Players, as part of PC generation, can purchase relationships which, in the default approach to BW gameplay, the GM is obliged to integrate into the framing of situations?

BW also has various forms of "action point", earned via various sorts of RP decisions made by the players, that can be spent to boost checks or, in some situations, to renarrate failures.

Does this make BW a storygame? Because to me it is just another RPG.

OGL Conan has a fate point mechanic that allows minor narrations. It's actually more liberal in this respect than BW, because in BW to meet a friendly NPC requires making a successful check, and if the check fails then the authority shifts to the GM to introduce some sort of complication arising out of the failed attempt to hook up with an NPC.

So to me, BW's Circles mechanic is not very different from a Streetwise or Gather Information mechanic. Whereas OGL Conan's fate points are more overtly about player fiat.

I've never seen OGL Conan described as a storygame, though.

I'm not sure this is right. In classic D&D, for instance, the players make decisions in part on the basis of knowledge about the level of threat - for instance, decisions about dungeon levels, decisions about whether or not to tackle the wilderness, etc, and these are not really based just on "playing a role". They're also based on understandings about the way in which the rules establish a gameworld default that is suitable for a certain sort of adventurous game play.

Once you get to non-classic modules, which is nearly everything published in the last 30 or so years, I think the influence of these considerations only grows. For instance, the AD&D Oriental Adventure modules (just to pick some examples that I know reasonably well) take for granted that the players will engage the situations in a spirit of protagonism. They are not simply exercises in world and character exploration.

In my experience a bad player can make any RPG hell - especially, but not only, if that bad player is GMing.

In one sense, it is true that players influence the game directly, even in so far as they can lobby a GM to run a particular adventure, for instance. But ultimately, in a roleplaying game, they have to encounter and affect that adventure setting through the character.