Improvisation vs "code-breaking" in D&D

[Maxperson]

Okay. I'm not trying to paint with a broad brush. So I don't know who is caught in the confusion. I know there are games where a lot of what designs are in place, like in 3e-5e, allow for a great deal of game play ...until the rules run out. There is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a DM and why 3 people are a required minimum. And why GM game maps have to be made before hand. Or why players use mapping as a strategy. Or why everything Ability Scores aren't attributes, but a ranked game ability. Or...

No game maps ever have to be made.........ever. They are useful, but not in any way required. I usually only make maps for dungeons, and I've had campaigns with no dungeons in them.

 

[Maxperson]

Here's a statement to mull over. A GM can be a referee, a game designer, and a player. He cannot be any more than one at a given time. Also try replacing cannot with should not.

He is always more than one. He is a player/whatever at all times. The rules declare him to be a player, so he is.

 

[N'raac]

This is still a "difficult situation" (even the chess king is in a difficult situation) and
tactical advantage is about survival and survival is deeply emotional.

I don't see too many chess players getting emotional about "Check". I suppose if there were a 7 figure price at stake, though.

This why tactical games can be fun: the stakes are you die and stop playing.

In most RPG's, your character dies and you make a new one.

I'm real. You're real. All our characters are equally fake. The really angsty character is no more "real" than the smart, tactical one.

Many, perhaps most, smart tactical characters who are played as pawns acquire characteristics, ideas, tics, over time and become more fully-rounded characters as they go on.

In a "pure game" model, there is no reason for those pawns to become characters (rounded or not, well or otherwise) and plenty of reasons not to. Anything constraining the ability to choose the most taxctically effective approach is to be avoided.

"Real" is not the word you want here. "Complex" might be. But, hell, not even everyone real is complex.

"Real" is the word I want. As in "behaves like a real person, not a pawn on a game board or a cypher".

Your daughter sounds amazing. This is the point though, What rules is your daughter following for any of her pretending? What win/loss conditions is she acting under? What predefined game objectives does she seek? How does she score points? I'm sorry, but your daughter is simply using "game" to mean something that has nothing to do with playing games. But hey, a word is a label. She can use it for whatever she wants and that's fine. But let's not obfuscate it in order to conform gaming into storytelling. You've just wrote at considerable length about only the latter.

Funny - a lot of people would say she is playing a game, but few or none would suggest she is telling a story, at least in my experience.

At its most basic, RPG's are simply games (There's that word again!) of "Let's Pretend" with pre-defined rules to avoid the "I shot you" "no, you missed" dilemma that often applied in the first edition of LP.

I've never heard of the friendly greeting gesture bonus, but perhaps it's in Molday. Otherwise if there is no bonus, there isn't a bonus. Bonuses are supposed to come from measures of the game design anyway, not abstract stuff.

I see plenty of games in progress where the GM decides that a specific action or situation provides a bonus or penalty. There's also no shortage of games that explicitly note the GM's responsibility to assess likelihood of success, which subsumes bonuses and penalties, or specifically that bonuses or penalties should be adjudicated by the GM. [I recall a game many years back when the DM's mantra was "DM stands for Die Modifier", actually.]

The interesting part of a game is that it is design which can be gamed. Not that it looks cool. It sounds like Musson is saying he wants what amounts to contemporary fluff, while the goal of good game design is to get rid of fluff and instead enable players to interact with it as part of the game.

Do you have any comprehension of the difference between "opinion" and "fact"? Your way is not The One True Way.

For that matter, even "what is fluff and what is rule" can be debated. A spell that does a bunch of damage (specified rolls) to a group of targets (area defined) seems sufficiently defined for the game. Until we wonder whether the paper on the nearby table catches fire. If the spell is a fireball, probably. If it is Barrage of Arrows, likely not. But prior to the paper on the table being questioned, it did not matter.

 

[pemerton]

What rules is your daughter following for any of her pretending? What win/loss conditions is she acting under? What predefined game objectives does she seek? How does she score points? I'm sorry, but your daughter is simply using "game" to mean something that has nothing to do with playing games.

There are no win/loss conditions. No predefined game objectives. That's my point.

Wargamers don't have a monopoly on the use of the word game. Dictionary.com gives me, as the first entry under "game", an amusement or pastime. My daughter is undoubtedly engaging in an amusement or pastime.

It's not an amusement or pastime I'd particularly recommend to anyone who's not either a child or that child's parent - but that doesn't stop it being a game!

What you claim obviously did not happen. The players played around by avoiding the glaring hole in the game until one was probably put in a position where they had to lose something or bring the issue to the fore.

I don't understand - what I claim did happen ("the game was able to proceed with a less-than-complete ruleset, patched over by improvisation and ad hoc rulings") and you even restate it back to me ("The players had a broken game system . . . [and] played around by avoiding the glaring hole").

Playing around by avoiding the glaring hole, on the basis of a gentlemen's agreement, is a form of improvisation. It may or may not be the form of improvisation that you are hostile too, but it is undoubtedly a form of improvisation.

Dictionary.com gives me, for "improvisation", the art or act of . . . composing, uttering, executing or arranging anything without previous preparation. In the gameplay that I described an issue about Poland's neutrality arose in the course of play. And, without previous preparation, my friends negotiated an ad hoc way of handling it, which included, as you put it, playing around by avoiding the glaring hole. That is, to say, without previous preparation they made an arrangement. Which is to say, they improvised.

Now, had that happened at the (purely hypothetical) Empires and Arms world championships, it would probably be regarded as a pretty unhappy turn of events. You might expect the organisers of a world championship to plug that sort of gap. (Though sometimes they don't: consider the famous underarm bowling incident by Australia vs NZ in 1981)

You say you can't conceive of a game that covers everything a player could ever possibly attempt

I never said that. There are any number of games that cover everything that a player could ever possibly attempt. My favourite is backgammon. I'm not such a big fan of tic tac toe (noughts and crosses where I come from).

All I've said is that D&D is not one of those games, and cannot be, because of the fact that fictional positioning matters to resolution.

there are already rules for miles miles of binary answers to player attempts.

<snip>

There are no limits potentially. There are limits right now.

<snip>

That's why we have literally a million books with every possible item given statistics for one game or another.

<snip>

a good game, like D&D, has broad systems covering most of the spheres of all human ideas. Think of a dictionary. It's big, but it's not infinite. It's easier to great a huge canvas covering seemingly everything than one might think.

<snip>

I've never heard of the friendly greeting gesture bonus, but perhaps it's in Molday. Otherwise if there is no bonus, there isn't a bonus. Bonuses are supposed to come from measures of the game design anyway, not abstract stuff.

Agreed about Hostile, if you are using the Reaction roll it needs to refer to something in your game. The result of Hostile behavior needs to be designed before it can be interacted with. But rather than building a logic system, generate a game pattern instead. Than look at the behavior of the creation and what patterns it exhibits. Basically everything in the game world is exhibiting a behavior. For monsters, this can be quite a lot as they are usually very complex designs. But once you know all those behaviors plot them on your Alignment chart. How creatures of different alignments act to destroy something in the game could fall under hostile. Balance it, create nuances for each monster design. Playtest. Plus, hostile is a word and Gary doesn't go into his design. So use the term for whatever is in yours.

When do hostile NPCs attack? Well I would think this goes right back to behaviors statted as Alignment again, plus whatever all the variations do for what is exhibiting the behavior - some monster variances, probably a personality system if you use AD&D. All kinds of stuff.

Marriage and dowry both fall under trade.

<snip>

Culture is by monster type, but it's simply mass numbers of creatures behaving as one, something I find best aggregated into a single stat block, IMO

I have played thousands of hours of utterly mainstream FRPGs, mostly Moldvay Basic, AD&D both 1st and 2nd edition, Rolemaster.

None of them had rules that would give the GM more than the most general guidance on how to adjudicate a PC's proposal of marriage to a hobgoblin. Saying that marriage and dowry both fall under trade doesn't take me anywhere. D&D has no trade rules in either AD&D or B/X. Rolemaster does have buying and selling rules, but they don't cover marriage and dowry even for humans, let alone hobgoblins.

What does it mean to say that culture is by monster type . . . something best aggregated into a single stat block? What does a culture stat block even look like? AD&D doesn't provide any examples (unless you are talking about number appearing, % in lair, and some of the demographic information in the Monster Manual - none of which tell me anything about marriage customs).

Even your description of monster hostility simply fails to connect any experience I have ever had or heard of in playing D&D. [O]nce you know all those behaviors plot them on your Alignment chart. What does this mean? How do I, as a GM, come to "know all those behaviours"? In the real world, none of this information exists in the degree of specificity you suggest for really existing human beings, despite all the efforts of anthropologists, sociologists and historians. How is it to be done for hobgoblins? What would the result look like? And how would it tell us when a 3 or 5 on the reaction dice triggers verbal aggression, and when it triggers attack?

This is why I say that you describe some sort of ideal as if it were actual.

Of course, if you radically restrict the scope of possible moves - for instance, hobgoblins just ignore PCs who make offers of marriage, all hostile reactions result in attack, etc - you can start to solve some of these problems. But many players of D&D, and of other RPGs, would see this as eliminating much of what is appealing about the game.

what you relate about non-random adventure placement is going to bring arbitrary results into the pattern the players are playing. That's the referee disabling the players being able to play the game again.

Here is my rough guess for the number of players whose play of the game consisted in extrapolating from what is encountered in the dungeon backwards to the GM's technique for randomly stocking the dungeon: zero.

I'm happy to accept that this is only a rough guess, and may be subject to modest variation upwards. (Obviously not downwards.) But I think it's pretty close to accurate.

Hence, the number of players whose play of the game was spoiled by a referee deliberately placing an interesting room, like the Fraz Urb'luu room or the imprisoned gods room, I think was also pretty close to zero. By all accounts Rob Kuntz was one of the great dungeoneers of all time, and he seems to have enjoyed rather than suffered from Gygax's inclusion of those rooms in Castle Greyhawk.

It sounds like Musson is saying he wants what amounts to contemporary fluff, while the goal of good game design is to get rid of fluff and instead enable players to interact with it as part of the game.

Backgammon has no "fluff". Chess, despite the evocative names given to the playing pieces, has no "fluff". Most players of D&D think that it is a strength of the game that it has what you are calling "fluff", and that that "fluff" matters to the play of the game.

This is why, in Moldvay's example of play, the GM grants Silverleaf's player a bonus to the reaction roll for the friendly greeting. Because the hobgoblins aren't simply tokens on a board, like backgammon pieces or chess pawns. Part of the conceit of the game is that they are people, who care about things like friendly greetings. I personally don't call that "fluff". I call it an element of the shared fiction, which contributes to the fictional positioning of the PCs, and hence to the resolution of the players' declared actions.

 

[pemerton]

Here's a way to think about scene framing. Each scene is dungeon, but instead of a dungeon it is an emotionally compelling situation to play through. Instead of players trying to get treasure guarded by monsters, they are trying to get the things their characters want from people and things that stand in their way. In this situation the DM is both a game designer and a referee. However, they are not game designer when they are being a referee. They are not a referee while they are being a game designer. Framing a scene is game design in motion - you are describing and creating a mental model of what's happening in the moment for players to interact with, but you are not adjudicating stuff. Once a scene is framed things have been established (both externally and internally) and we play to find out if players get what they want - we use the rules to do this stuff. When the player's do something the DM who is now a referee responds based on what's been established. Introducing new content at this point is rigging the game and bad refereeing. Once the scene is resolved our DM is now once again a game designer. Think of it is not one single module being played, but many modules being created and then played over the course of a single session.

This stuff is hard stuff, and requires a phenomenal amount of discipline. I personally find it much harder than running a game of Basic D&D.

<snip>

Generally when I run a scene framed game I am mentally exhausted, but deeply satisfied.

This triggered a few thoughts in me.

I talk about playing a scene-framed game, but mostly that is to try and convey the gist of how I run my game, and to establish the contrast with either the dungeon approach (which seems to be something of a ENworld norm) or the adventure path approach (which is, I think, the other ENworld norm and also the trigger for this thread).

Compared to serious scene-framing GMs, though, my scene-framing is pretty flabby, and I rely pretty heavily on fairly standard tropes to carry quite a bit of the weight in the scenes I frame. So I wouldn't say that I feel mentally exhausted at the end of the game, but that might be because I'm lazy in my GMing.

Another way in which I'm a lazy scene-framing GM is that often I leave the consequences of failure at least somewhat implicit in the framing of the action declaration, rather than always spelling it out. For instance, in a recent Burning Wheel session the PCs had just arrived at the ruined tower in the Abbor-Alz where the mage PC had spent time in his younger (pre-play) days. That PC was hoping to find the Falcon's Claw in the ruins of the tower - as the note on his character sheet read, "The Falcon’s Claw is a mundane, run of the mill mace Jobe had made 12 years ago and abandoned in the tower. Probably looted by the orcs years ago, it is made of nickel silver and has a frieze pattern of falcons’ beaks around the head and also a falcon’s claw at the base (i.e. a spike). Probably never to be seen again, let alone to be enchanted to become the Sceptre of The Blue."

A scavenging check was made, and failed. So instead of finding the Falcon's Claw, the PCs found some cursed arrows (especially good for shooting elves) that matched the broken arrow one of the elven PCs wears on a cord around his neck - the arrow that slew that character's former master. These arrows were found in the ruins of what had been the mage PC's older brother's private workroom. It was already established - as a central element of the PC's backstory - that his brother was demon-possessed and on the side of darkness rather than light; and that the demon possession had occurred during the events that led to the ruin of the tower. This was the first indication in play, though, that the brother's connection to the dark side might precede those events.

This possibility was always implicit in the fiction, and close to the surface, given the various PC backstories and the way these had started to flesh out in prior sessions. But it wasn't made express until I had to narrate failure.

Besides laziness, I see this sort of management of the balance between explicit and implicit consequences of failure as a way of managing the balance between player agency and suspense. If I was GMing for strangers, I would probably have to be more explicit more of the time.

The other thing I do, which is probably easier with friends than it would be with strangers, is poke and prod the players with out-of-game comments as they debate about action declaration options. For me, this is as important as a way of trying to make the stakes clear and weighty as is the more formal description of the fictional situation. This is also part of why I find GMing Basic D&D, or "skilled play" more generally, so hard. It depends upon the GM exercising a type of neutrality towards the players that I'm not really capable of.

 

[howandwhy99]

Funny - a lot of people would say she is playing a game, but few or none would suggest she is telling a story, at least in my experience.

At its most basic, RPG's are simply games (There's that word again!) of "Let's Pretend" with pre-defined rules to avoid the "I shot you" "no, you missed" dilemma that often applied in the first edition of LP.

Pretending is not a game like running is not a game. Yet running in races at the Olympic Games is gaming. Why? Because they preset the pattern on the field, start the timer, and enable the runners to run in a game. In fact, most competitive games are race games of one type or another.

Similarly, pretending in D&D is a game for the players because they competing and/or cooperating with other players and themselves to accomplish ends within a predefined game - the pattern preset behind the screen. Player can test and better their fantasizing because it is done within a game.

For that matter, even "what is fluff and what is rule" can be debated. A spell that does a bunch of damage (specified rolls) to a group of targets (area defined) seems sufficiently defined for the game. Until we wonder whether the paper on the nearby table catches fire. If the spell is a fireball, probably. If it is Barrage of Arrows, likely not. But prior to the paper on the table being questioned, it did not matter.

Sufficiently defined means that spell's design has taken into account all elements within the design of the game. If there were a table and paper in the game, then they had to have been designed prior to placement. They shouldn't simply have Saving Throws either, but AC, HP, STR, CON, DEX, Alignment, and the rest.

There are no win/loss conditions. No predefined game objectives. That's my point.

Wargamers don't have a monopoly on the use of the word game. Dictionary.com gives me, as the first entry under "game", an amusement or pastime. My daughter is undoubtedly engaging in an amusement or pastime.

It's not an amusement or pastime I'd particularly recommend to anyone who's not either a child or that child's parent - but that doesn't stop it being a game!

Yeah, dictionaries can be poor at learning how people are using terms. Or in how they present those definitions. Your definition hardly helps anyone when attempting to understand what a game is. Something that amuses can hardly be considered complete.

I don't understand - what I claim did happen ("the game was able to proceed with a less-than-complete ruleset, patched over by improvisation and ad hoc rulings") and you even restate it back to me ("The players had a broken game system . . . [and] played around by avoiding the glaring hole").

Playing around by avoiding the glaring hole, on the basis of a gentlemen's agreement, is a form of improvisation. It may or may not be the form of improvisation that you are hostile too, but it is undoubtedly a form of improvisation.

Dictionary.com gives me, for "improvisation", the art or act of . . . composing, uttering, executing or arranging anything without previous preparation. In the gameplay that I described an issue about Poland's neutrality arose in the course of play. And, without previous preparation, my friends negotiated an ad hoc way of handling it, which included, as you put it, playing around by avoiding the glaring hole. That is, to say, without previous preparation they made an arrangement. Which is to say, they improvised.

Now, had that happened at the (purely hypothetical) Empires and Arms world championships, it would probably be regarded as a pretty unhappy turn of events. You might expect the organisers of a world championship to plug that sort of gap. (Though sometimes they don't: consider the famous underarm bowling incident by Australia vs NZ in 1981)

The players were playing a broken game, but chose to play it broken. That's hardly fun. You claimed it was a functional game just after demonstrating it was not. That they had to stop the game, improvise a solution, one that did not fix the game back into a system, and apparently led to the whole going done in flames, does not prove your point that improvisation is part of games.

And check out the article on the 81 underarm bowling incident. The action was covered by the rules and perfectly legitimate. It's simply no one had figured it out before.

I never said that. There are any number of games that cover everything that a player could ever possibly attempt. My favourite is backgammon. I'm not such a big fan of tic tac toe (noughts and crosses where I come from).

All I've said is that D&D is not one of those games, and cannot be, because of the fact that fictional positioning matters to resolution.

And I said fictional positioning doesn't occur in D&D because of the map as gameboard the DM uses behind the screen. In fact, it never occurs in any game. So I have clearly shown D&D is, or at least was by the rules, one of "those" games meaning an actual game.

...But you know what, of course the game is limited. It occurs to me you think anything and everything anyone actually does can be part of playing D&D. They are limited to attempted actions of a playing piece. And Players can only ever move pieces on the game board via the referee. By rule they can't get up, move around the screen, and slide a token or whatever else is tracking location around the maze. That's clearly not allowed by the rules, so, like any game, actions taken outside of a game aren't part of it.

I have played thousands of hours of utterly mainstream FRPGs, mostly Moldvay Basic, AD&D both 1st and 2nd edition, Rolemaster.

None of them had rules that would give the GM more than the most general guidance on how to adjudicate a PC's proposal of marriage to a hobgoblin. Saying that marriage and dowry both fall under trade doesn't take me anywhere. D&D has no trade rules in either AD&D or B/X. Rolemaster does have buying and selling rules, but they don't cover marriage and dowry even for humans, let alone hobgoblins.

What does it mean to say that culture is by monster type . . . something best aggregated into a single stat block? What does a culture stat block even look like? AD&D doesn't provide any examples (unless you are talking about number appearing, % in lair, and some of the demographic information in the Monster Manual - none of which tell me anything about marriage customs).

Even your description of monster hostility simply fails to connect any experience I have ever had or heard of in playing D&D. [O]nce you know all those behaviors plot them on your Alignment chart. What does this mean? How do I, as a GM, come to "know all those behaviours"? In the real world, none of this information exists in the degree of specificity you suggest for really existing human beings, despite all the efforts of anthropologists, sociologists and historians. How is it to be done for hobgoblins? What would the result look like? And how would it tell us when a 3 or 5 on the reaction dice triggers verbal aggression, and when it triggers attack?

This is why I say that you describe some sort of ideal as if it were actual.

Of course, if you radically restrict the scope of possible moves - for instance, hobgoblins just ignore PCs who make offers of marriage, all hostile reactions result in attack, etc - you can start to solve some of these problems. But many players of D&D, and of other RPGs, would see this as eliminating much of what is appealing about the game.

So I'm trying to help you out. You said you don't have anything for these elements in your games and the players wanted them. My suggestions are all possible for game systems to include in your game.

To your specific questions,
Culture is behavior, so technically all the rules governing pieces and the board are being referred to. For hobgoblins specifically their behavior can be treated as a whole with a single statblock, just like any unit's. It is an aggregate, but then you can talk about how "all hobgoblins" behave.

Marriage is a contract by my understanding, something well established in the history of game design already, but regardless define what marriage is in game terms and assign it to hobgoblins. Put it on an appropriate table for random rolling too. If creatures don't have marriage rites, they don't have them.

Game pieces are in large part defined by their behaviors. Plot all of those on the Alignment Chart according to design per alignment type. Is it lawful, neutral, or chaotic? This has nothing to do with "really existing human beings". This is a game. You only ever need to cover its design. Once you know all the behaviors in the game assign them to pieces with an alignment score. For all non-PC pieces this will cover their behavior. It can be further refined by other stats like intelligence, wisdom, charisma, strength, constitution, dexterity, % in lair, morale, loyalty, and so on. All of these define, limit, what these elements can do.

Here is my rough guess for the number of players whose play of the game consisted in extrapolating from what is encountered in the dungeon backwards to the GM's technique for randomly stocking the dungeon: zero.

You're joking. Stocking a dungeon according to a game design pattern is a time honored tradition of D&D. What are you talking about?

Backgammon has no "fluff". Chess, despite the evocative names given to the playing pieces, has no "fluff". Most players of D&D think that it is a strength of the game that it has what you are calling "fluff", and that that "fluff" matters to the play of the game.

This is why, in Moldvay's example of play, the GM grants Silverleaf's player a bonus to the reaction roll for the friendly greeting. Because the hobgoblins aren't simply tokens on a board, like backgammon pieces or chess pawns. Part of the conceit of the game is that they are people, who care about things like friendly greetings. I personally don't call that "fluff". I call it an element of the shared fiction, which contributes to the fictional positioning of the PCs, and hence to the resolution of the players' declared actions.

Let's not talk in conceits. What you are saying is you are creating an imagined narrative with other people. Which is why you don't want or have any use for the vast body of design suggestion in our hobby which amount to rules for a boardgame behind a screen. You want rules for who gets to resolve a conflict between two conflicting storytellers' narratives. Those are story "games", not roleplaying games and nothing remotely enabling players to play a game - to decipher the pattern, to actually achieve game states in such, and score points. To win or to lose.

 

[Campbell]

Here's my take: Games and play are different things. When I'm shooting some hoops with friends we're playing, but we are not like playing a game. Once I'm challenging a friend to take the same shots I'm making we're playing a game. Now the activity has purpose and structure. Now we're doing things we wouldn't normally do if we weren't playing a game. That's the fundamental difference in my mind. Game design is a form of mind control. It subverts what we would normally do if left to our own devices. When we play games we collectively let the object of the game become our priority.

Games are not always about pattern recognition. Here's a game: I tell you a joke. You build on my joke and improve it. I then do the same. You get the drift. We can even assign points and declare a winner and loser after 3 rounds, but we don't have to in order for it to be a game. That totally depends on what we are trying to do.

That being said there's a significant value in unstructured play that's different from what we get out of games. I don't really think it's our place to say people should only play games, and not just play. If I sit down with a group of friends we can role play without playing a role playing game. That's a totally cool thing to do. It's more common than playing role playing games actually. Kids do it all the time. It's done on tons of venues across the internet by people totally uninterested in role playing games. Some groups will drift back and forth between just role playing and playing a role playing game, and that's also a totally cool thing to do. When we stop dungeon exploration in a game of Basic D&D dungeon crawling to have a chat with a stable hand that has nothing to do with us getting treasure we're taking a break from playing a role playing game. We're totally still role playing, but in a totally unstructured way. That's a totally cool thing to do if your group is into it. I'm not particularly into it.

To put it another way : sometimes playing poker is about playing poker. Other times playing poker is really about chilling. I still feel there's value in talking about poker as a game.

 

[Maxperson]

Pretending is not a game like running is not a game. Yet running in races at the Olympic Games is gaming. Why? Because they preset the pattern on the field, start the timer, and enable the runners to run in a game. In fact, most competitive games are race games of one type or another.

Similarly, pretending in D&D is a game for the players because they competing and/or cooperating with other players and themselves to accomplish ends within a predefined game - the pattern preset behind the screen. Player can test and better their fantasizing because it is done within a game.

You seem to be ignoring all of the definitions of game. That's bad as it implies quite a bit of narrow mindedness. One of the definitions of game is an activity engaged in for diversion or amusement. So yes, pretending is a game like cops and robbers as children, as are games with strict rules like chess or tic tac toe, and games that include both like RPGs.

Yeah, dictionaries can be poor at learning how people are using terms. Or in how they present those definitions. Your definition hardly helps anyone when attempting to understand what a game is. Something that amuses can hardly be considered complete.

No. They're pretty good at including the varied definitions of a word like game. You're just really bad at admitting that there is a definition of game that has been used by billions of people over the centuries, is still used by billions of people, and is different from what you want game to mean.

And I said fictional positioning doesn't occur in D&D because of the map as gameboard the DM uses behind the screen. In fact, it never occurs in any game. So I have clearly shown D&D is, or at least was by the rules, one of "those" games meaning an actual game.

Theater of the mind was used for decades. 3e kind of ruined that, but I played in 3e games where theater of the mind was still used. Game boards are not required in any edition of the game.

...But you know what, of course the game is limited. It occurs to me you think anything and everything anyone actually does can be part of playing D&D. They are limited to attempted actions of a playing piece. And Players can only ever move pieces on the game board via the referee. By rule they can't get up, move around the screen, and slide a token or whatever else is tracking location around the maze. That's clearly not allowed by the rules, so, like any game, actions taken outside of a game aren't part of it.

Not one action taken as part of the rules of a game take place outside of it. They are all part of the game. When a referee at a football game makes a call, he does so via game rules and the both the call and the ruling are part of the game. You know what actions happen during a game session, but are outside of playing the game of D&D? Ordering pizza or Chinese food.

To your specific questions,
Culture is behavior, so technically all the rules governing pieces and the board are being referred to. For hobgoblins specifically their behavior can be treated as a whole with a single statblock, just like any unit's. It is an aggregate, but then you can talk about how "all hobgoblins" behave.

There is no behavior that "all hobgoblins" exhibit.

Marriage is a contract by my understanding, something well established in the history of game design already, but regardless define what marriage is in game terms and assign it to hobgoblins. Put it on an appropriate table for random rolling too. If creatures don't have marriage rites, they don't have them.

Why would I ever randomly roll marriage when I can just pick it or not?

Game pieces are in large part defined by their behaviors. Plot all of those on the Alignment Chart according to design per alignment type. Is it lawful, neutral, or chaotic?

Alignment can not and does not ever limit actions. A creature, NPC or PC can and does have the ability to act outside of alignment. It's not a straight jacket, but rather vague descriptor of the general feelings of that individual. Plotting by alignment is a waste of time.

This has nothing to do with "really existing human beings". This is a game. You only ever need to cover its design. Once you know all the behaviors in the game assign them to pieces with an alignment score. For all non-PC pieces this will cover their behavior. It can be further refined by other stats like intelligence, wisdom, charisma, strength, constitution, dexterity, % in lair, morale, loyalty, and so on. All of these define, limit, what these elements can do.

This fails. As I said above, alignment fails to cover anywhere near all behaviors.

You're joking. Stocking a dungeon according to a game design pattern is a time honored tradition of D&D. What are you talking about?

Once I graduated high school and matured a bit, I realized that randomly rolling monsters in a dungeon resulting in a great deal of nonsense matches. You virtually always ended up with creatures that wouldn't be caught dead living together in a confined space and would have killed each other off. I choose every creature when I design a dungeon. I plan out their living arrangements, reasons for interaction, etc. I even pick half of the treasure, including magic items. The only reason I roll for the other half is that it is fun to roll things, not because some chart is necessary.

 

[N'raac]

Pretending is not a game like running is not a game. Yet running in races at the Olympic Games is gaming. Why? Because they preset the pattern on the field, start the timer, and enable the runners to run in a game. In fact, most competitive games are race games of one type or another.

I, and several others, are using the word "game" as it is defined in the English language. It seems you wish to redefine the words, which makes communication quite difficult. Like, in a D&D game, deciding that whether an attack hits or misses will be resolved by opposed percentile rolls, rather than a d20 versus a target number. This can certainly work, but if only the DM is using that definition, the game will fall apart rapidly as the players continue rolling d20s.

Similarly, pretending in D&D is a game for the players because they competing and/or cooperating with other players and themselves to accomplish ends within a predefined game - the pattern preset behind the screen. Player can test and better their fantasizing because it is done within a game.

I could just as easily say that "A game has predefined victory conditions which, once achieved, results in the end of the game." That's not D&D - there are no predefined victory conditions, like "kill the hobgoblin chieftan" (the players might just as easily define a "win" as chasing off the hobgoblins, teaching them and the nearby Elves to live co-operatively for the best interests of both, allying with the hobgoblins to wipe out the elves, or enslaving the hobgoblins (whether for the elves, or enslaving the elves as well) or "whoever reaches 12th level first wins". In fact, some would say the absence of a clearly defined victory condition and/or game ending means RPG's are not games, but pastimes, hobbies or simply play, much like the bakery example.

Sufficiently defined means that spell's design has taken into account all elements within the design of the game. If there were a table and paper in the game, then they had to have been designed prior to placement. They shouldn't simply have Saving Throws either, but AC, HP, STR, CON, DEX, Alignment, and the rest.

The problem with your theory is that the continuous introduction of new elements by players and GM's alike makes it impossible to have all interrelationships predefined. Hence, judgment is used to improvise (or we get the wonderful "you can't attempt that because it is not in the rules/module").

Yeah, dictionaries can be poor at learning how people are using terms. Or in how they present those definitions. Your definition hardly helps anyone when attempting to understand what a game is. Something that amuses can hardly be considered complete.

It is only you that views "complete" as an essential prerequisite. By the definition, I am not sure any RPG can ever be considered "a game".

The players were playing a broken game, but chose to play it broken. That's hardly fun. You claimed it was a functional game just after demonstrating it was not. That they had to stop the game, improvise a solution, one that did not fix the game back into a system, and apparently led to the whole going done in flames, does not prove your point that improvisation is part of games.

Emphasis added. Why did they continue playing for months if it was "not fun"?

And check out the article on the 81 underarm bowling incident. The action was covered by the rules and perfectly legitimate. It's simply no one had figured it out before.

From my quick read, many had figured it out. A deliberate choice was made to bowl in that manner as it prevented the other team getting the points needed to tie or win. Not that far off running out the clock in many timed sports. It seems a lot like an RPG rather than a traditional competitive game/sport, actually, in that it was rules-legal, but simply not done as it was viewed as unsportsmanlike. In fact, one tournament noted on Wiki had banned the practice - akin to a house rule.

And I said fictional positioning doesn't occur in D&D because of the map as gameboard the DM uses behind the screen. In fact, it never occurs in any game. So I have clearly shown D&D is, or at least was by the rules, one of "those" games meaning an actual game.

First, the fact that "you said" anything does not deem it to be correct. You seem to limit the term "fictional positioning" to spatial relationships. Even there, the map does not indicate whether the Hobgoblin has his sword high in the air to bring it crashing down, or low to the ground to slash at his foe's leg. It certainly does not indicate the "fictional positioning" which may influence negotiations with the Hobgoblins. What do the rules say the modifiers are if these Hobgoblins know the PC's previously wiped out a neighbouring tribe? Nothing. They certainly do not rule whether that neighbouring tribe were allies (logically making these Hobs less friendly) or enemies (so perhaps we have ingratiated ourselves), much less whether the Hobgoblins should be better disposed to us because we removed a competitor tribe, or worse disposed because they may well be next. Now, add in the manner in which the PC's approach the hobgoblins (perhaps threatening, or maybe negotiating with what a great thing we did to help them).

If the game must be fully designed to be "a game", show us these rules. Even if you are sufficiently psychic to predict and document predefined rules for all possible actions and interactions, that demonstrates only that this is how you play the game - not that anyone who plays differently is no longer playing D&D (much less no longer playing a game), or that your way is the One True Way and all others are having badwrongfun if they play differently.

...But you know what, of course the game is limited. It occurs to me you think anything and everything anyone actually does can be part of playing D&D. They are limited to attempted actions of a playing piece. And Players can only ever move pieces on the game board via the referee. By rule they can't get up, move around the screen, and slide a token or whatever else is tracking location around the maze. That's clearly not allowed by the rules, so, like any game, actions taken outside of a game aren't part of it.

Show me any edition that says:

- Players cannot move a "playing piece" (many groups use miniatures and players move their own miniatures);
- there must be a screen;
- there must be a maze;
- the maze must be mapped (I recall a great RPG that noted you don't really need a map if nothing interesting happens between key locations - the wandering players simply locate a key location at random, and having located it know how to return to it *).

You have said all of these things are "clearly not allowed by the rules", so please cite the rule book and page number where these clear prohibitions are stated. Any edition of D&D will do.

* That would also be a perfectly valid "game rule" and would effectively preclude activity in the corridors/useless spaces in between. We would have to improvise if we decided we want them to become important (eg. "as we head from the throne room to the sleeping quarters, I will attack the Wizard because I think he is a Doppelganger"). In a traditional game, we would say "you can't attack in the corridors" or even "you can't attack a player's character" because this would be written in the rules. In an open ended RPG, we can and do think outside the box and improvise the results.

To your specific questions,
Culture is behavior, so technically all the rules governing pieces and the board are being referred to. For hobgoblins specifically their behavior can be treated as a whole with a single statblock, just like any unit's. It is an aggregate, but then you can talk about how "all hobgoblins" behave.

Being as it is simple, please provide an example of such a stat block. In a traditional wargame, all hobgoblin units will indeed behave the same way. But under the rules of a traditional wargame, either detailed rules for parlay will exist, or you cannot parlay. And in such a game, you cannot suggest marriage as a negotiating element unless the game provides rules for same. RPG`s are not traditional wargames. The first rule of an RPG is that improvisation is not only possible, but essential.

If we were successful in reducing everything to a random roll by charting everything, we no longer even need a GM. We can just decide what we do, look up the appropriate chart, roll the dice and move on. The lack of ability, or even desire, to reduce everything to a probability table creates the need for improvisation, which creates the need for a GM.

Game pieces are in large part defined by their behaviors. Plot all of those on the Alignment Chart according to design per alignment type. Is it lawful, neutral, or chaotic? This has nothing to do with "really existing human beings". This is a game. You only ever need to cover its design. Once you know all the behaviors in the game assign them to pieces with an alignment score. For all non-PC pieces this will cover their behavior. It can be further refined by other stats like intelligence, wisdom, charisma, strength, constitution, dexterity, % in lair, morale, loyalty, and so on. All of these define, limit, what these elements can do.

And we return to "playing pawns, not playing characters". We have a game, but not a role playing game, as we have removed the roles to play.

You're joking. Stocking a dungeon according to a game design pattern is a time honored tradition of D&D. What are you talking about?

Let's not talk in conceits. What you are saying is you are creating an imagined narrative with other people. Which is why you don't want or have any use for the vast body of design suggestion in our hobby which amount to rules for a boardgame behind a screen. You want rules for who gets to resolve a conflict between two conflicting storytellers' narratives. Those are story "games", not roleplaying games and nothing remotely enabling players to play a game - to decipher the pattern, to actually achieve game states in such, and score points. To win or to lose.

And the wheel comes full circle... What you describe is a game, not a role playing game. I`ve long since lost count of the number of RPG rules I have read that include the statement , for the new RPGer, that you don`t win or lose an RPG, yet your definition requires we win or lose. The fact that storyteller games exists demonstrates that your definition of a "game" is just that - your definition only. Not that of many of us posting, and not that of the English language.

Enjoy your game (whatever it may be). With the limitations you have placed on it, it is not an RPG, such as D&D. But I like playing a board game (hidden board or otherwise) every now and then too.

 

[S'mon]

:howandwhy, do you consider the Prussian Free Kriegsspiel to count as a 'game'? Here you have defined victory conditions, but the 'rules' are essentially 'the judge decides'. Does that count as a game?