D&D General In defence of Grognardism

[Sacrosanct]

None of the bolded are the sole domain of grognardism/old skool play/whatever you want to call it. They are just positive elements you want to lay claim to.

Power gaming rewards skill and out of the box thinking to come up with unexpected combinations. Narrative play certainly promotes player skill and rulings over rules. Grognards just act as if their playstyle is the only one that does because it comes from a nostalgic view of their treasured memories. Its like when people say movies used to be better in "insert era". They remember the cream of the crop, not the vast amounts of unmemorable dreck.

Speed of play? There was a reason so many ignored so much of the written rules and ran by the seat of their pants. I personally find 5E runs faster than 1e.

When I talk about out of the box thinking, I'm talking about player skill in the way we often think about it as. I.e., compared to character skill. When editions started having skills and powers for everything, players started looking at character sheets to see if they could do something before attempting it. Compared to older editions, where players narrated what they wanted to do because there were no mechanics that covered that. Maybe the DM asked for an ability check, but for the most part you just role-played it out. That's what player skill means.

I don't think there's any denying that. It's human nature. And we see it in conversations all the time; players saying they won't attempt to disarm the trap or bribe the guard because they don't have the highest modifier in picking locks or persuasion skills.

When I see people playing OD&D/B/X or 1e, I see a lot more of creative thinking in regards to using the environment to gain an advantage, and in modern games, I see a lot more reliance on defined powers and abilities on the character sheet. Also, back then, there was no assumption that encounters needed to be balanced. You had no idea if that next encounter was going to be a TPK so you acted more cautiously and took time to think of different solutions. Contrast that to modern design, and there seems to be an assumption that every encounter should be beatable, which leads to players just going right into battle straight away.

This has nothing to do with nostalgia or treasured memories, and quite frankly is just a lazy way to dismiss arguments you don't want to agree with. Look at how each is played right now. I play with kids frequently, and you can see the differences in new players. Give them a very rules lite system and they imagine and narrate what they want to do. Give them a skills system and they start looking at skills before they decide what they are going to do. This isn't rocket science, this is basic human behavior. When playing games, we tend to follow the rules as we are learning them, regardless of the game. the way the game is designed lends to certain playstyles, regardless if it was by Joe Schmo in 1980 or in 2020. Nothing to do with nostalgia.

Note: I'm not saying one preference or style is better than the other, only pointing out the differences

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

(from around 1980 as a politics student, I was pretty critical of Cruise missiles,

HOW DARE YOU, SIR?

HOW DARE YOU.

Remember boys, no points for second place.

 

[Nefermandias]

I don't get the defensiveness around this. I am sure plenty of other styles have similar things they prioritize or do. But when OSR and Old school people talk about skilled play, they do so because it is one of the crucial things to understand going in if you want to enjoy the style (but I think talking about it as a part of this type of play doesn't imply it soley belongs to the style). I will say, I did a fair amount of power gaming, and ran a number of power gaming campaigns. That is a different kind of skilled play in my opinion (the focus is much more on optimizing your mechanical choices, your character creation choices, and getting more out of the system than it seems was intended). That definitely takes skill and is harder than skilled play in the OSR sense, but it is a different kind of skill.

Yup. Powergaming isn't the same as Skilled Play in the Gygaxian sense.
We had a huge thread on this topic a while ago.

 

[Fanaelialae]

When I talk about out of the box thinking, I'm talking about player skill in the way we often think about it as. I.e., compared to character skill. When editions started having skills and powers for everything, players started looking at character sheets to see if they could do something before attempting it. Compared to older editions, where players narrated what they wanted to do because there were no mechanics that covered that. Maybe the DM asked for an ability check, but for the most part you just role-played it out. That's what player skill means.

I don't think there's any denying that. It's human nature. And we see it in conversations all the time; players saying they won't attempt to disarm the trap or bribe the guard because they don't have the highest modifier in picking locks or persuasion skills.

When I see people playing OD&D/B/X or 1e, I see a lot more of creative thinking in regards to using the environment to gain an advantage, and in modern games, I see a lot more reliance on defined powers and abilities on the character sheet. Also, back then, there was no assumption that encounters needed to be balanced. You had no idea if that next encounter was going to be a TPK so you acted more cautiously and took time to think of different solutions. Contrast that to modern design, and there seems to be an assumption that every encounter should be beatable, which leads to players just going right into battle straight away.

This has nothing to do with nostalgia or treasured memories, and quite frankly is just a lazy way to dismiss arguments you don't want to agree with. Look at how each is played right now. I play with kids frequently, and you can see the differences in new players. Give them a very rules lite system and they imagine and narrate what they want to do. Give them a skills system and they start looking at skills before they decide what they are going to do. This isn't rocket science, this is basic human behavior. When playing games, we tend to follow the rules as we are learning them, regardless of the game. the way the game is designed lends to certain playstyles, regardless if it was by Joe Schmo in 1980 or in 2020. Nothing to do with nostalgia.

Note: I'm not saying one preference or style is better than the other, only pointing out the differences

I think a major issue with "skilled play" isn't the concept itself, but rather the terminology. "Skilled play" has an implication, intended or no, that other kinds of play are not skilled. Which is clearly nonsense.

The ship has almost certainly sailed, but I think if it had instead been termed something different like "Asymmetrical Challenge Engagement" (ACE) there'd be a lot less pushback whenever someone brought up ACE in a discussion.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think a major issue with "skilled play" isn't the concept itself, but rather the terminology. "Skilled play" has an implication, intended or no, that other kinds of play are not skilled. Which is clearly nonsense.

The ship has almost certainly sailed, but I think if it had instead been termed something different like "Asymmetrical Challenge Engagement" (ACE) there'd be a lot less pushback whenever someone brought up ACE in a discussion.

I think it is a big misreading of what is going on. People adopted it descriptively because they needed a word to describe the approach. There wasn't any intention of saying other styles don't also involve skill, that different types of skilled play can exist, just that this style places special emphasis on something we've decided to call skilled play. Now the term has taken root, and is useful, I think it only muddies the waters when people try to expand the term or have it altered (we could come up with more precise terminology but then you will just have two words floating around to describe the same thing, and skilled play will still likely have its old traction). Also, skilled play is easy to understand what it means. ACE isn't. I didn't have to think twice about what skilled play meant the first time I heard it in context. ACE is something you'd need a glossary for.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Based on my understanding, this is an extremely common misunderstanding (every DM I'd ever met read it this way, until I found ENWorld). Therefore, I wouldn't call it a house rule. Rather, it was an unclear rule that we believed we were using RAW, but were not using RAI.

Half a dozen of one, six of the other. If people are talking about the game as designed, it was a houserule even if it was based on a common misunderstanding. In the OD&D days I hit an awful lot of people who thought you rolled a to-hit roll with Magic Missiles (I was one of them), but that was in practice a house rule too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

When I talk about out of the box thinking, I'm talking about player skill in the way we often think about it as. I.e., compared to character skill. When editions started having skills and powers for everything, players started looking at character sheets to see if they could do something before attempting it. Compared to older editions, where players narrated what they wanted to do because there were no mechanics that covered that. Maybe the DM asked for an ability check, but for the most part you just role-played it out. That's what player skill means.

Or, bluntly, didn't narrate it because they thought it wouldn't get them anywhere. As I've noted before, it wasn't exactly uncommon for GMs to set the difficulty of doing a lot of things such that it didn't pay to try, and that was true even when there was no mechanics for it, as a lot of GMs would just set some number on a D6 with the old sense-secret-doors things as a model.

I'd argue one of the reasons people started looking at their sheets was as much because having the thing in print in front of them gave them some idea in advance if it was liable to be successful within a probability that they wanted to deal with rather than being at the vagaries of how a given DM was going to decide to resolve it.

Or, as I've put it before, "Rulings Not Rules" only looks good to someone who has a fairly high faith in the quality of most GM's off-the-cuff rulings.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think it is a big misreading of what is going on. People adopted it descriptively because they needed a word to describe the approach. There wasn't any intention of saying other styles don't also involve skill, that different types of skilled play can exist, just that this style places special emphasis on something we've decided to call skilled play.

The semantic loading of a term exists whether intended or not. And bluntly, I think its optimistic to think some of the people who started using that term didn't intend it just exactly that way; I've been in a few too many discussions where people clearly think of more modern games as easy mode that requires no thought to accept that no one intended "Skilled Play" not to imply that other styles weren't.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I think it is a big misreading of what is going on. People adopted it descriptively because they needed a word to describe the approach. There wasn't any intention of saying other styles don't also involve skill, that different types of skilled play can exist, just that this style places special emphasis on something we've decided to call skilled play. Now the term has taken root, and is useful, I think it only muddies the waters when people try to expand the term or have it altered (we could come up with more precise terminology but then you will just have two words floating around to describe the same thing, and skilled play will still likely have its old traction). Also, skilled play is easy to understand what it means. ACE isn't. I didn't have to think twice about what skilled play meant the first time I heard it in context. ACE is something you'd need a glossary for.

It's clearly not so easy to understand the intended meaning. Else I wouldn't regularly see these disagreements about how "there are other kinds of skilled play" crop up whenever "skilled play" gets mentioned. You don't see similar objections to "crit" or "fumble", despite these terms being widely understood.

IMO, it's a poorly chosen term. Alas, as I said, that ship has almost certainly sailed.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I think a major issue with "skilled play" isn't the concept itself, but rather the terminology. "Skilled play" has an implication, intended or no, that other kinds of play are not skilled. Which is clearly nonsense.

The ship has almost certainly sailed, but I think if it had instead been termed something different like "Asymmetrical Challenge Engagement" (ACE) there'd be a lot less pushback whenever someone brought up ACE in a discussion.

I call it pandering to the GM, but that doesnt have the air of superiority. It's certainly part of early play's tendency towards metagaming/ DM manipulation, because actually using the rules for task resolution was frequently sort of a death sentence (10% chance to disarm traps anyone?).

When the rules say your character is trash at an activity, players weaseled around the rules to avoid using them. Refer to all those eloquent and brilliant 1st edition characters with bad Int and Cha scores. "Skilled play" at it's finest.