D&D 5E A case where the 'can try everything' dogma could be a problem

[Agamon]

The degree to which I detest meta-gaming and narrative mechanics cannot possibly be overstated within the context of this forum. The inclusion of such things within a game, unless they can be removed entirely, will make a game entirely unplayable to me. They are anathema. They are the enemy, which destroys and corrupts an otherwise-enjoyable game into worthless junk. The decision on the part of the designer to include such a thing is a decision to overtly abandon and disregard a significant portion of the RPG fanbase.

Over 4 different groups and few dozen I game with, none of them are anywhere near this vehemently opposed to this style of game. I don't disagree that this is your opinion, you are welcome to it, but it's not that of a "significant portion" of the RPG fanbase.

You could call that anecdotal, perhaps, but FATE won a gold Ennie last year, and Night's Black Agents and Marvel Heroic got silver the years prior. These games don't just "include such things," they pretty much are such things.

It's okay to not like a thing, just don't state that the majority agree with you please.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

You could call that anecdotal, perhaps, but FATE won a gold Ennie last year, and Night's Black Agents and Marvel Heroic got silver the years prior. These games don't just "include such things," they pretty much are such things.

They're intentionally different from traditional/simulation/immersion/roleplaying games. They're not trying to compete in that category. They're riding on their indy mechanics, and hoping that the judges were generous enough to let them compete anyway.

It's okay to not like a thing, just don't state that the majority agree with you please.

Consider your sampling bias. I certainly have. Not many are willing to stick around here and debate in such a toxic environment.

Words have meaning. It's not a role-playing game if you're not playing a role, any more than you can have a video game with no visual output. A billion voices to the contrary cannot make a falsehood true. I don't care if I'm the last sane person on the internet; there are four lights, not five.

 

[pemerton]

the instructional text on how to apply the rules is every bit as much of a real rule as the number of HP you gain with each level. Thus, I would put the modern role-playing era at about the point when the rules actually told us to start role-playing rather than treating it as a board game.

Gyagx's D&D is not a board game. In a board game there is no fictional positioning. Gygax's D&D is utterly rife with fictional positioning - arguably, that's the bulk of the game, especially in its pre-AD&D versions.

Original D&D was intended as just a game, and the use of "role" in the name is more like the 4E usage as the role you play in the party, rather than the way an actor would use the term. (And we've all heard what Gygax had to say about wannabe play-actors.)

For that reason, I don't consider early D&D to qualify as a real RPG, in the "role-playing" sense of the term. You could certainly role-play within it, if you were so inclined, but that wasn't the point and the rules were not designed to facilitate it. Or at least, there was no indication if that was supposed to be the point, and a very loud voice telling us that it wasn't.

It's not a role-playing game if you're not playing a role

I feel that you are begging the question here - that is to say, you are assuming that the phrase "role playing" has a certain meaning - your preferred one - and then judging all games that call themselves RPGs by reference to that meaning.

I already mentioned, upthread, the example of roleplaying for skills development that law students (and other sorts of students) undertake. That has nothing to do with acting, but is nevertheless truly described as roleplaying. By adopting the role (of an appeals court barrister, or a mediator, or a client, or whatever) the student imposes (i) a limit on permissible "moves" (eg an advocate can't address arguments to his/her opponent, but rather must address them to the court, and that in terms requires adopting appropriate court manners), and (ii) a standard for successful achievement.

Gygax clearly saw RPGing in the same way. By choosing to play a fighter, I (i) limit my permissible moves in the game (eg no spell casting, no use of magical staves), and (ii) set a standard for success (per Gygax's DMG, successfully playing a fighter means displaying leadership and physical courage). The fact that that's not acting doesn't mean it's not roleplaying.

That's not to say that one can't bleed into or engender movement towards the other. For instance, some of the constraints on permissible moves that arise by choosing a particular class role are the result of fictional positioning (eg NPCs look to the fighter for leadership because of the way the fighter has ended up being framed within the fiction, and the player of the fighter who wants to keep the NPCs on board therefore finds him-/herself obliged to have his/her PC take the lead). And that naturally pushes players to engage with that fiction, to wonder about why it is that this particular person ended up becoming a bold warrior rather than (say) a cowardly thief, etc.

But there is no necessity or inevitability about immersion-style RPGing of the sort you favour. It's quite possible to engage with the fiction of, and surrounding, a character without feeling compelled to make choices in the game only from the ingame causal perspective of that PC. The word causal is especially important here. A player in (say) Burning Wheel who chooses to use metagame points to pump a skill check may well be making choices only from the ingame perspective of his/her PC - s/he is deciding, from that persepctive, to try harder. It's just that s/he is manifesting that, within the mechanics, via a device that does not itself model an ingame causal process.

 

[pemerton]

Hps are necessarily meta-game information

I don't think everyone agrees with this.

Ron Edwards on a similar issue:

I suggest that Trouble in Orkworld, Hero Points in Hero Wars, and Spiritual Attributes in The Riddle of Steel are Resource-based metagame mechanics, whereas Power in RuneQuest, Sanity in Call of Cthulhu, and these mechanics' many derivatives in other games, are straightforward, non-metagame Resources. Similarly, I suggest that the role-playing bonuses based on out-of-game neatness in Sorcerer are metagame, whereas the Stunt rules based on difficulty or unlikelihood in Feng Shui are not.​

Gygax is himself ambiguous about this in his DMG. He makes it clear that hit points are not, primarily, a measure of physical injury (let alone of the ablation of physical wellbeing, as if humans are defeated in combat in the same way that one wears down a rough board with sand paper). But he does say, for example, that "the accumulation of hit points and the ever-greater abilities and better saving throws of characters represents the aid supplied by supernatural forces" (pp 111-12). That leaves open a straightforward, non-metagame interpretation of hit points - though it doesn't answer the further question of how a particular character might know how much supernatural aid s/he still has left in the bank (so there would still be a player/PC knowledge gap).

On the other hand, the passage on p 81 does suggest that hp are metagame and not representational of anything in the fiction: Gygax there says

[R]ecall the justification for character hit points. That is, damage is not actually sustained -at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch, and thus the saving throw. If that mere scratch managed to be venomous, then DEATH. If no such wound was delivered, then NO DAMAGE FROM THE POISON.​

This makes both hit points and saving throws seem like metagame devices for rationing the narration of character death. In 4e I think this non-sim approach to hit points reaches its full realisation. My sense is that 5e is trying to go back to some sort of ambiguity.

(Like pre-4e D&D, 5e also has the oddity that higher level PCs are harder to heal to full strength - that does suggest a non-metagame reading of hit points, either as "meat" - compare "light" to "critical" wounds - or as "mojo", with only powerful clerics able to restore the mojo of powerful characters.)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I feel that you are begging the question here - that is to say, you are assuming that the phrase "role playing" has a certain meaning - your preferred one - and then judging all games that call themselves RPGs by reference to that meaning.

I acknowledge that the word "role" has two definitions, and I purport that one of them is relevant to the topic at hand. My fundamental premise is that, when you play a role-playing game, you are taking on the role of a fictional character and acting from that perspective. You are taking on a role in the same way that an actor would.

This is the heart of role-playing. The player adopts the role of a character and then guides that character through an adventure. The player makes decisions, interacts with other characters and players, and, essentially, "pretends" to be his character during the course of the game. That doesn't mean that the player must jump up and down, dash around, and act like his character. It means that whenever the character is called on to do something or make a decision, the player pretends that he is in that situation and chooses an appropriate course of action.

This is the definition I'm using. I strongly believe that, whether anyone has ever read the passage directly, or even whether they consciously acknowledge it, this is what most players understand role-playing to be about.

I already mentioned, upthread, the example of roleplaying for skills development that law students (and other sorts of students) undertake. That has nothing to do with acting, but is nevertheless truly described as roleplaying.
[...]
Gygax clearly saw RPGing in the same way. By choosing to play a fighter, I (i) limit my permissible moves in the game (eg no spell casting, no use of magical staves), and (ii) set a standard for success (per Gygax's DMG, successfully playing a fighter means displaying leadership and physical courage). The fact that that's not acting doesn't mean it's not roleplaying.

As I said, this is role-playing in the 4E sense - the word "role" is being used as a synonym for "job" (not that you can't use 4E to role-play in the traditional sense, of course, but 4E actually codified the alternate meaning). You're taking up a specific set of abilities, which help you to accomplish a specific set of goals, but you aren't taking on a role in the acting sense of the term. The court barrister doesn't have a name or mannerisms apart from those which belong to the law student. The fighter is, essentially, a package of rule mechanics which aid toward a vaguely-defined victory condition.

And I strongly believe that your usage of the term is misleading, in much the same way that a pretentious citizen of the United States might travel through Europe or South America and claim misunderstanding over usage of the word "football". Your usage might be technically correct within certain contexts, but it's obviously not the prevailing usage of anyone else around you, and your insistence on retaining the terminology is creating a barrier to effective communication.

 

[pemerton]

I acknowledge that the word "role" has two definitions, and I purport that one of them is relevant to the topic at hand. My fundamental premise is that, when you play a role-playing game, you are taking on the role of a fictional character and acting from that perspective. You are taking on a role in the same way that an actor would.

<snip AD&D 2nd ed extract>

This is the definition I'm using. I strongly believe that, whether anyone has ever read the passage directly, or even whether they consciously acknowledge it, this is what most players understand role-playing to be about.

<snip>

I strongly believe that your usage of the term is misleading

<snip>

it's obviously not the prevailing usage of anyone else around you, and your insistence on retaining the terminology is creating a barrier to effective communication.

Again, I feel that your last sentence begs the question. Not everyone is using the AD&D 2nd ed definition of roleplaying, at least in the sense that you read it. Certainly not the OSRers, for instance. Nor many of the 4e players. Nor all of the 5e players, given the diversity of opinion and approach of 5e GMs posting in this thread.

And there is a reading of the AD&D definition which is different from your preferred reading. The key passage is "whenever the character is called on to do something or make a decision, the player pretends that he is in that situation and chooses an appropriate course of action." That passage doesn't mandate the sort of approach you prefer. For instance, a player who imagines him-/herself in that situation, motivated as the PC would be motivated, and therefore decides to spend a fate point to enhance the prospects of success for a skill check has done exactly what that passage mandates.

Likewise, a player who imagines him-/herself in that situation, and who imagines him-/herself into the mind of a perceptive character, and thereby declares as an action "I look for a chink in the armour", has done what that passage mandates: s/he has pretended that s/he is in that situation and has chosen an appropriate course of action. Nothing in that passage prescribes how the chosen course of action is to be resolved, nor how questions of authorship are to be determined. For instance, it doesn't contradict anything in that passage for the existence of a chink in the armour to be determined in part by the success of a Perception check.

You are asserting an equation between identifying with a character and particular methods of action resolution and authorship which simply doesn't obtain.

 

[Aenghus]

I believe it's more important that a player portrays their character in a way that's at least minimally compatible with the expectations of that particular game table than trying to meet some theoretical standard that can never meet universal agreement.

Some groups are into token roleplay as a veneer over skirmish wargaming. Others are close to method actors in their rejection of the metagame and mechanics in general. IMO the vast majority are much closer to the middle on these issues, and have some tolerance for different emphasises on PC portrayal. The stated and unstated goals of an RPG group, whether the groups or those of individual players, are substantially a matter of taste. How well the group's chosen systems, houserules and social contract match the groups address those goals can (hopefully) be debated usefully as to whether they are fit for purpose, but the choice of goals, as a matter of personal preference, requires much less justification.

Even for those who have roleplaying as metagame avoidance as a goal, there is a huge spectrum of possibilities on valid PC choices, backstories, types of portrayal, acting, IC motivations, PvP, genre fidelity, humour etc etc. A particular PC might be portrayed in a wonderfully entertaining way by his player, but not match other necessary criteria for a PC in that game, such as compatible motivations, skills and backstory. Some groups might be fine with such a PC, others may not.

So, IMO, an exclusionary definition of RPGs that excludes the first mode of RPG playing and many groups that still play RPGs, some for decades, isn't useful or reasonable. Acknowledging that the goals of a group are a matter of taste and establishing a consensus can complicate game startups, but IMO it's a method that produces better, more coherent games.

 

[Tony Vargas]

On the other hand, the passage on p 81 does suggest that hp are metagame and not representational of anything in the fiction: Gygax there says

I don't think 'metagame' implies /no/ representation of anything in the fiction, just enough abstraction to give the player a game (system mastery?) advantage in framing decisions in rules terms rather than IC terms. Hps, being readily quantifiable to the player but not the PC, are certainly an example.

Really, even the oddest mechanics still represent something in the fiction. If you use some sort of narrative control mechanic to retcon a backstory relationship with an NPC, that relationship /is/ something in the fiction. If you want the 'decision' to be something in fiction, it's 'Fate' taking a direct hand, Kismet. If you're playing with the conceit that the rules of the game are the laws of physics of the in-game reality, then the PC is even aware that he has twisted the Mage-the-Ascension-like reality of the world he inhabits. You could go down right fourth-wall-breaking with that, if you really wanted to. It's really a matter of style and aesthetics how you conceptualize the relationship between game mechanics and the imagined narrative. Not worrying about it overmuch, for instance, is a perfectly legitimate style. ;P

I acknowledge that the word "role" has two definitions, and I purport that one of them is relevant to the topic at hand. My fundamental premise is that, when you play a role-playing game, you are taking on the role of a fictional character and acting from that perspective. You are taking on a role in the same way that an actor would.

The same way an actor might in an improv scene, perhaps. Even so, actors are very much aware that they are not their character, and that they are there to tell a story, for an audience. Even 'method acting' isn't about immersing in the role to become the character, but calling upon analogous personal experience and emotion to portray it.

This is the definition I'm using. I strongly believe that, whether anyone has ever read the passage directly, or even whether they consciously acknowledge it, this is what most players understand role-playing to be about.

You seem to persist in this conviction that you speak for a majority. Clearly, it must be a 'silent majority,' since you always find yourself going back and forth, on your own, with several folks when this particular pet peeve of yours comes up.

 

[pemerton]

I believe it's more important that a player portrays their character in a way that's at least minimally compatible with the expectations of that particular game table than trying to meet some theoretical standard that can never meet universal agreement.

I definitely agree with this. I'd go so far as to say that, for a good RPGing experience it's incontrovertible!

an exclusionary definition of RPGs that excludes the first mode of RPG playing and many groups that still play RPGs, some for decades, isn't useful or reasonable.

Ditto.

Some groups are into token roleplay as a veneer over skirmish wargaming. Others are close to method actors in their rejection of the metagame and mechanics in general. IMO the vast majority are much closer to the middle on these issues

<snip>

Even for those who have roleplaying as metagame avoidance as a goal, there is a huge spectrum of possibilities on valid PC choices, backstories, types of portrayal, acting, IC motivations, PvP, genre fidelity, humour etc etc. A particular PC might be portrayed in a wonderfully entertaining way by his player, but not match other necessary criteria for a PC in that game, such as compatible motivations, skills and backstory. Some groups might be fine with such a PC, others may not.

this is role-playing in the 4E sense - the word "role" is being used as a synonym for "job" (not that you can't use 4E to role-play in the traditional sense, of course, but 4E actually codified the alternate meaning). You're taking up a specific set of abilities, which help you to accomplish a specific set of goals, but you aren't taking on a role in the acting sense of the term. The court barrister doesn't have a name or mannerisms apart from those which belong to the law student. The fighter is, essentially, a package of rule mechanics which aid toward a vaguely-defined victory condition.

I've grouped these two quotes together because they both raise the issue - What does it mean to play "in character"?

I don't think I agree that it is a spectrum between "method acting" and mere tokenism. And I know that I reject the idea that playing a character in an RPG is primarily about voice or mannerisms.

I think voice or mannerisms - what can more generally be called colour - becomes a focus when the players lack the capacity (due to overt rules, default play procedures, or whatever) to make any more significant impact on the fiction. But where players are able to actually impact the fiction, then in my experience the fictional events that result from those play choices are far more significant than whether or not the PC has distinctive mannerisms.

My view is expressed well in this quote from Christopher Kubasik:

Characters drive the narrative of all stories. However, many people mistake character for characterization.

Characterization is the look of a character, the description of his voice, the quirks of habit. Characterization creates the concrete detail of a character through the use of sensory detail and exposition. By "seeing" how a character looks, how he picks up his wine glass, by knowing he has a love of fine tobacco, the character becomes concrete to our imagination, even while remaining nothing more than black ink upon a white page.

But a person thus described is not a character. A character must do.

Character is action. That's a rule of thumb for plays and movies, and is valid as well for roleplaying games . . . . This means that the best way to reveal your character is not through on an esoteric monologue about pipe and tobacco delivered by your character, but through your character's actions.​

Here is a bit from pages 2 and 4 of Fate Core:

If you've never played a roleplaying game before, here's the basic idea: you and a bunch of friends get together to tell an interactive story about a group of character you make up. . . . If you're a player, your primary job is to take responsibility for portraying one of the protagonists of the game, which we call a player character . . . You make decisions for your character and describe to everyone else what your character says and does.​

I think the emphasis on decisions is important. Action over mannerisms. (There is also no very significant contrast between this and the AD&D 2nd ed text, unless you give the words "pretend" and "appropriate" in that text some very specific meanings.)

 

[Ristamar]

Interesting discussion. A few sincere questions for those that are vehemently opposed to metagaming:

Is it preferable to have players that have little or no experience with the game system you're running to avoid conditioned or metagame behavior? If one of the highest priorities is restraint or circumvention of metagame behavior, I would assume running new campaigns with a veteran group could be difficult. The more familiarity a player has with a system, the more mental gymnastics (s)he has to perform in an effort to disassociate personal knowledge and experience relative to a new character's lack of knowledge and experience.

Do you modify or expand upon existing systems to allow for more exploratory actions and mechanics to assist in determining and expanding the relative boundaries of a character's abilities? For example, how do spellcasters come to fully understand their spells' power variance? How do healers determine the level of spell they need to cure an ally's wounds? Are there utility spells or skill mechanics that would help probe innate defenses or test the efficacy of various actions or effects?

At what point is the effort to disassociate dropped in favor of accepted rationalization? How does a player know when his character has the proverbial light bulb turn on when exploring new skills and abilities or absorbing new information? Is the player or the DM the ultimate arbiter of what rationalization is acceptable and what crosses the line into metagaming?