Improvisation vs "code-breaking" in D&D

Umbran said:

This is the same logical failure that GNS makes, considering player agendas.

Real people have several balls in the air at once, several things they are doing, several things they want, several things they need to do, and they don't often fall out into very clear priorities. We need to deal with that reality.

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Those statements were put out not as conclusions, but as something to consider and discuss.

Here's my take: We very much do need to deal with that as a reality. Cognitive biases, emotional responses, and conflicting priorities are very much a real thing. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to tame that jumbled mess. Principled play is important precisely because of this reality. We're never really going to eliminate cognitive biases, and I'm not entirely sure we should. Still there definitely is value in mitigating them sometimes.

I feel like when you let one part of running the game have too dramatic an impact on the others it starts to mask deficiencies. The pain I feel when I frame a boring scene or design a lopsided combat encounter is important, and lessening that impact in adjudication hinders my ability to see that. Likewise if I mask a poor ruling by changing up content midstream it's hard for me to see that impact in a meaningful way that will improve my rulings in the future. Pain is part of the process. I might slightly improve play in the moment, but it hurts my ability to improve the way I run the game in the long term. It's all about being as honest as I can with myself, honing my skills, and improving the bell curve of play.

Celebrim said:

What's this! The players are in danger of not reaching your newly created interesting sublevel of some dungeon somewhere that you labored over? The players' plans for the evening might be frustrated? Just fudge the dice says the writer! Suspend the rules. Don't just allow the players to fail because the dice say so; act partially toward the players and don't even mention that nasty that would have depleted their resources.

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Maxperson said:

Gary's advice in the 1e DMG was also for the DM to just change rules and rolls that he didn't like or didn't make things more exciting for the players.

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Although Gygax didn't use contemporary terminology, I think it's tolerably clear that when he talks about suspending the rules he is talking about content introduction rather than action resolution. For instance, in the passage about wandering monsters that Celebrim quoted, he says it would be contrary to the precepts of the game to have the monster turn up but then fudge the combat.

In a later passage on managing play, he does canvass alternatives to PC death on zero hp, but stresses that they must still give effect to the monster's victory in combat. So the options would be unconsciousness or maiming in lieu of death. This is an early version of the 4e/5e rule that zero hp can be unconsciousness rather than death. (And the benefit is meant to be confined to players who played well but got unlucky - so there's a GM gatekeeper role that's absent in 4e/5e, and which also sits oddly with [MENTION=3192]howandwhy99[/MENTION]'s conception of the GM's function.)

Somewhat similarly, when Gygax emphasises the priority of the GM's judgment in the game, I think he is mostly emphasising the role of the GM in adjudicating fictional positioning. I don't think he is saying that the GM is entitled to engage in some sort of dice-roll-ignoring free-for-all.

howandwhy99 said:

People cannot play D&D without a design to be deciphered in place prior to play.

<snip>

Maybe you never really thought about why there are so many random tables in D&D or never really knew.

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With respect, this is a non-sequitur.

No one is disputing that D&D depends upon the GM to manage backstory - drawing maps, generating content etc. But in Gygaxian "skilled play" the goal of play isn't to work out what method the GM used to create all this stuff. The goal, rather, is to work out the details of this stuff. From the players' point of view it is irrelevant whether the GM chose to put a troll in room 3 of level 4, or whether that was the result of a random roll.

The function of the random tables is to help the GM generate content. But - to repeat - having played this game for over 30 years, and having read a lot of material for it (including material going back to the 1970s before I started playing) I have never heard it suggested that the goal of play is for the players to work out what random tables the GM is using to generate content.

pemerton said:

Although Gygax didn't use contemporary terminology, I think it's tolerably clear that when he talks about suspending the rules he is talking about content introduction rather than action resolution. For instance, in the passage about wandering monsters that Celebrim quoted, he says it would be contrary to the precepts of the game to have the monster turn up but then fudge the combat.

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I agree. And as a general rule, I'd not assert a book says something unless I had a specific passage in mind.

From Gygax's perspective, the DM is free to introduce or not introduce anything he wants. But he wants the DMs he's coaching to follow the rules once something is in play. Notably, at one point he mentions that the players will expect him to do so. I think the idea here is that not having a combat so that you can do something more exciting is a good thing. But wasting time on a combat that doesn't have a doubtable outcome is a bad thing on several levels. For Gygax, as much as anything, rewarding players for winning such a combat would be wrong, as it removing value from any of the player's other victories by causing them to doubt whether they'd earned them.

Of course, by removing a meaningless low reward random encounter from the dungeon simply to speed the players into the depths for the purposes of a particular expedition, he's still in some since making the whole foray easier. The wandering encounter might be replaced in play time by an even more challenging prepared encounter, but the prepared encounter would still have been there. They way to the treasure has has been made easier and purposely so.

In that sense, Gygax really is fudging the system for the purposes of promoting what he sees as D&D's core story - overcoming challenges and earning the treasure through wits and skillful play. Notice the marker he considers to be the important sign that wandering monsters should be suspended - the players have well and skillfully prepared for the expedition. They got all their stuff together. They made appropriate plans. It would it appear be bad DMing to overthrow such well laid plans by mere random chance.

No one is disputing that D&D depends upon the GM to manage backstory - drawing maps, generating content etc. But in Gygaxian "skilled play" the goal of play isn't to work out what method the GM used to create all this stuff. The goal, rather, is to work out the details of this stuff. From the players' point of view it is irrelevant whether the GM chose to put a troll in room 3 of level 4, or whether that was the result of a random roll.

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Well said. Equally, Gygax seems unconcerned with when the content is prepared, except that he believes (correctly I'd assert) that creating high quality content is difficult and as such, as much as possible it should be prepared before hand rather than in play. In the particular passage I quoted, Gygax doesn't say you shouldn't improvise. He just suggests that until you are experienced, you should not wing it unless you absolutely have to.

Fundamentally, I agree that it is difficult or impossible to avoid bias when a DM improvises. I'm not a proponent of relying on improvisation. But preparing things between sessions is not total defense against bias, or against poor quality material, or against DM's trying to manipulate player choices unduly. From the player's point of view, it's irrelevant whether a room was populated in the DM's head 30 seconds ago, or whether the DM populated it 3 hours ago. In many cases, it's the exact same mental procedure, and the main thing that has changed is the time pressure that the DM is under.

No process of play or preparation can protect completely against bad DMing.

pemerton said:

Although Gygax didn't use contemporary terminology, I think it's tolerably clear that when he talks about suspending the rules he is talking about content introduction rather than action resolution. For instance, in the passage about wandering monsters that Celebrim quoted, he says it would be contrary to the precepts of the game to have the monster turn up but then fudge the combat.

In a later passage on managing play, he does canvass alternatives to PC death on zero hp, but stresses that they must still give effect to the monster's victory in combat. So the options would be unconsciousness or maiming in lieu of death. This is an early version of the 4e/5e rule that zero hp can be unconsciousness rather than death. (And the benefit is meant to be confined to players who played well but got unlucky - so there's a GM gatekeeper role that's absent in 4e/5e, and which also sits oddly with [MENTION=3192]howandwhy99[/MENTION]'s conception of the GM's function.)

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Knocking a PC unconscious instead of killing the PC is fudging combat. Gygax was consistent. The game has rules, but don't let the rules rule you, you rule the rules. Change them if they interfere with you. That's improvisation, and it's also against what Howandwhy has been saying a game is. The players can't know or track back things in a game where the rules can change on the fly, and in D&D the DM has always been able to change the rules on the fly.

Somewhat similarly, when Gygax emphasises the priority of the GM's judgment in the game, I think he is mostly emphasising the role of the GM in adjudicating fictional positioning. I don't think he is saying that the GM is entitled to engage in some sort of dice-roll-ignoring free-for-all.

With respect, this is a non-sequitur.

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It's also a Strawman. Nobody has said D&D is supposed to be a dice-roll-ignoring free-for-all, but the DM can ignore the dice when they get in the way of the game's excitement. Story is part of the game's excitement.

No one is disputing that D&D depends upon the GM to manage backstory - drawing maps, generating content etc. But in Gygaxian "skilled play" the goal of play isn't to work out what method the GM used to create all this stuff. The goal, rather, is to work out the details of this stuff. From the players' point of view it is irrelevant whether the GM chose to put a troll in room 3 of level 4, or whether that was the result of a random roll.

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The goal was to have fun playing a character with a personality, goals, desires and more, who explores and overcomes challenges, and as a result wins treasure and the princess.

The function of the random tables is to help the GM generate content. But - to repeat - having played this game for over 30 years, and having read a lot of material for it (including material going back to the 1970s before I started playing) I have never heard it suggested that the goal of play is for the players to work out what random tables the GM is using to generate content.

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I agree.

Umbran said:

You know that sounds like conspiracy theory, right?



With respect, in my experience those who want a "pure game" experience like you describe simply slip on over into things that aren't called role-playing games - board games, wargames, and some computer games typically give them what they are looking for. All the tactical decision making, none of the mucking about with story.

The "Role playing" portion of things really does imply some level of story to most folks, and that's something you'll probably just have to learn to live with.

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Absolutely seconded. In fact I'm going to go one step further. There is nothing wrong with the principles [MENTION=3192]howandwhy99[/MENTION] is claiming for some games. But D&D was founded on the absolute rejection of those principles. It was founded on Arneson playing Braunstein rejecting his role as students' revolutionary leader and instead playing "con artist pretending to be from the CIA". In other words fundamentally rejecting his soical role and pushing at the boundaries to see what could be done.

And Braunstein itself was a freeform LARP. A game with adjudication and without rules. And D&D came out of the GM losing control of his game.

It was further cemented through the Castles and Crusades society and Arneson's group rejecting their massed battles and instead going for stealing magic swords off each other and counting coup in a way not covered by the rules to the point Gygax visited to ask them wtf they were doing. Because they were fundamentally rejecting the social roles built into the game in favour of what they found more interesting.

Board games and computer games are frequently as Howandwhy99 describes (indeed Papers Please might be the platonic ideal of such a game). Team Sports, especially American Football, also work that way a lot. D&D on the other hand was founded on rejecting that paradigm.

Celebrim said:

From Gygax's perspective, the DM is free to introduce or not introduce anything he wants. But he wants the DMs he's coaching to follow the rules once something is in play. Notably, at one point he mentions that the players will expect him to do so. I think the idea here is that not having a combat so that you can do something more exciting is a good thing. But wasting time on a combat that doesn't have a doubtable outcome is a bad thing on several levels. For Gygax, as much as anything, rewarding players for winning such a combat would be wrong, as it removing value from any of the player's other victories by causing them to doubt whether they'd earned them.

Of course, by removing a meaningless low reward random encounter from the dungeon simply to speed the players into the depths for the purposes of a particular expedition, he's still in some since making the whole foray easier. The wandering encounter might be replaced in play time by an even more challenging prepared encounter, but the prepared encounter would still have been there. They way to the treasure has has been made easier and purposely so.

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I don't think that's what he meant by that passage. What I think he was talking about was fun. If the DM has prepared an exiting castle of dread that the players are going to love, don't ruin the game by hitting the players with combats that are going to bore them or slow them down from reaching the excitement. They're looking forward to reaching the castle, so random encounters, whether easy or hard, are going to take away from that.

Fundamentally, I agree that it is difficult or impossible to avoid bias when a DM improvises. I'm not a proponent of relying on improvisation. But preparing things between sessions is not total defense against bias, or against poor quality material, or against DM's trying to manipulate player choices unduly. From the player's point of view, it's irrelevant whether a room was populated in the DM's head 30 seconds ago, or whether the DM populated it 3 hours ago. In many cases, it's the exact same mental procedure, and the main thing that has changed is the time pressure that the DM is under.

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What sort of bias do you think a DM has when improvising?

Celebrim said:

H&W has us believe that the real D&D is obviously one that exists only in his head. How exactly this situation came about, I'm not sure, but I'm willing to guess that it came about through improvisation. I'm willing to bet that H&W began play of D&D sometime between 1975 and 1980, or else was accepted into a table that began in that period and had its roots in war gaming - and that this table had no direct connection to the Wisconsin group. This is roughly the time my cousin began play in central Arkansas, having met an old school punch card computer programmer who had ran into the game some years before while in college. At the time, the rules of D&D were very incomplete, were badly written, badly organized, sometimes contradictory, contained numerous errors, and cross referenced other TSR rule sets that were hard to come by. If you wanted to play at all during this period, you had to improvise heavily to create a functioning set of house rules based on what you assumed that the designers were doing when playing. Remember, how you prepare to play and how you think about playing an RPG is more important than the rules. Apparently at H&W's table, the improvised version of D&D was one of many early forks off D&D that moved the game in a somewhat odd direction (Peterson records several contemporary and predecessors to D&D that were occurring at wargaming conventions, most of which do not in fact meet H&W's definition of game as some had no rules engine at all beyond referee improvisation). In this version of D&D the DM's purpose was merely mechanical. A limited number of game pieces were defined, and they had no fictional positioning as we'd understand the term. The boards of this game were pregenerated and prepopulated, and the game was played as purely an open ended tactical wargame with apparently even less meta-story than Nethack. While the PC's could propose anything they wanted, it was the DM's job to continue to refine the player proposition down until it was a simple defineable tactical move - "go 3" closer to the orc and attack". Any interaction with the setting was meaningless unless predefined, and players acting under these constraints soon adopted very straight forward propositions.

And while I'd argue that even under those constraints, there is a significant amount of improvisation going on and nothing much like "code breaking" (which I agree with pemerton is a term that apparently only means decision making), the goal of this play was clearly to reduce the DM's role as much as possible to neutral arbiter of a wargaming scenario.

Despite the illusionism of pretending that the DM wasn't making arbitrary choices and therefore couldn't possibly be an unbiased rules engine, H&W's group was happy with this and enjoyed it. So you can imagine his dismay no doubt when TSR steadily produced materials that didn't conform to his groups definition of D&D. You can also see why H&W repeatedly refers to the need to convert the official published materials of D&D in order to first play the game. Because the official published materials don't limit themselves to this neat tightly confined little world, and have to first be converted into something more resembling Nethack before they can be played. The 'real D&D' - by which he means merely what he was used to at the time - was being killed by... real D&D.

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That was a nice story.
It could form the basis of an interesting retro-stupid ironic Heartbreaker like Encounter
Critical, only with more charts and much less roleplaying.

howandwhy99 said:

...Mass cultural conformity and suppression of ideas...
...this contemporary cultural genocide against gamers and game culture...

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Now I'm thinking you must be a troll from grognards.txt or somesuch. This is just too
extreme.

howandwhy99 said:

Obviously you're wrong.

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Obviously you're wrong.

howandwhy99 said:

But naysaying isn't helping anyone here.

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That one you got right..

howandwhy99 said:

I agree with everything prior to this, but not this.

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Unsurprising. The umpire/referee does not design a playing field or make tactical decisions for the opponents. Play does not stop while one team or player asks how a rule should be applied. All of these activities are examples of how the DM is more a participant than any umpire/referee.

howandwhy99 said:

when we remove the improv during a game. So the pattern of the field of play and rules can be deciphered through play.

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This is the opposite of what happened with Kreigsspiel. The original designer labelled it “not a game” and provided no improv. The later designers added improv and it was perceived as moving towards, not away from, being a game. The opposite of your premise that improv is not consistent with “a gane”.

You just said in the previous quote, "IOW, it was viewed as the façade of a game, but not actually a game, by its own designers."

howandwhy99 said:

But victory points are there. XP score. Since it's a cooperative game no one's declared "the winner".

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The absence of a winner is a difference between RPG’s and “games” commonly cited by RPG designers and authors. “A winner” is a requirement in some widely held definitions of “game”. They aren’t the only valid definitions, but neither is yours.

howandwhy99 said:

And yet the game system is incomplete. Maybe you mean "unfun"?

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D&D is also incomplete. And I mean “broken”. Some people enjoy figuring out how to break the game, making a broken game more fun to them.

howandwhy99 said:

So Toon is a game that covers every player attempt and the others are broken. Go figure.

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That is the only logical conclusion which can be reached based on your definitions.

howandwhy99 said:

As I said before, the books are suggestions, not an all encompassing design. There are multiple suggestions covering the same areas even. And of course the obligatory - DMs are never allowed to improvise in D&D.

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Your view on the prohibition against improve has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked above, so no point reiterating that here. I will however, note that the only way to turn those suggestions into an all encompassing design is to improvise as gaps arise.

howandwhy99 said:

I take it you didn't miss all the DM screens published for every version of D&D? Do you not know why they were there? Like why all the modules had maps for tracking locations? Is any of the mere existence of this stuff proof for you?

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Screens were a means of hiding information, including module design and even die rolls. Many gamers find secret rolls inappropriate if we are to “let the dice fall where they may”, and roll in the open. Why are they published? Because many GM’s use them as both shields and references (they all have reference tables, not just sight blockers with nice pictures), and therefore they could generate revenue. Maps are also illustrations to provide greater description in less space, and I didn’t tend to draw on mine in 25+ years of GMing.

howandwhy99 said:

Gary left a lot up to individual DMs.

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Indeed he did. As cited repeatedly above, he knew no rule set could cover all possibilities, nor was it even desirable, so he expected DMs to improvise.

howandwhy99 said:

D&D is the first RPG. By my understanding Kriegspiel was a wargame.

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The designer’s title said it was not a game. I credit his interpretation over yours.

howandwhy99 said:

You're ignoring all the dozens and dozens of tables for the DM to roll on in D&D? I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what a DM is for and you choose to forget the DM does have to roll all that stuff up?

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You are ignoring or misinterpreting their purpose. They are there to assist the DM in generating content, often by stimulating ideas. They are not there to replace the DM’s role as content designer. Rolling a Vorpal Sword held by a first level adversary would mean “roll again” rather than “lucky players” in most well run games. The exceptions would soon see the appellation “Monty Haul” added.

howandwhy99 said:

One player can stop playing in another person's game of Mastermind and run another game for someone else.

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Are you now saying Gary’s intro was wrong, or simply less than universal?

Zak S said:

But this is only relevant to our conversation if you assume that the threshold for "realness" of a character (and therefore as a human) is that they panic under pressure.

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That is not the only possible means of effecting a realistic character. Perfection, however, is far from realistic.

Zak S said:

A character represents a WAY to play in the campaign (as Frodo, a hobbit from the shire for example). PC death means you lose that and that is a fate players famously very often seek to avoid. Many people would rather lose a game of chess than a treasured character in D&D, because they are as "real" as characters in angstgames.

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Some players seek to avoid character death. Others are quite prepared to take great risk for potentially great reward. This is covered in detail above.

Zak S said:

It looks like what you're trying to say is:

"I have a preference for games that encourage angsty characters and the way I express this preference is by saying other people's less angsty characters aren't 'real' or that the playstyle of these players is 'insipid' or 'not fun' despite the fact that absolute nothing backs this up at all. It's just my taste ."

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It looks like you are saying one cannot have a personality without being angsty. My taste in RPG’s is definitely for characters with personalities, and not simple pawns on the board. That is my preference for RPG’s. That someone may prefer to reduce the RPG to a boardgame is fine – I also like a lot of boardgames. But a boardgame has different goals than an RPG, which is a common “introduction to new gamers” topic in RPG books. If I want a boardgame, I will play a boardgame. If the goal was to play an RPG, that is what I came to play.

Zak S said:

This is outside the scope of the discussion--we are talking about characters that make mistakes only when the player does, not characters that are infallible. And they're super fun.
Batman, Elektra, James Bond...

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“infallible” typically means “cannot lose”. The potential these characters will lose makes their stories worth reading. They are highly competent. They are not infallible.

Zak S said:

I get that you have had bad experiences at the table with people who are into playing tactically clever PCs and have been unable to also give those characters personalities in a way that interests you, but it's not rational to generalize to everyone's experience from your own.

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I can accept your statement as long as I classify most of the Internet as “not rational”. Your own experiences are generalized into discussions here and in the AP thread, for example.

pemerton said:

Although Gygax didn't use contemporary terminology, I think it's tolerably clear that when he talks about suspending the rules he is talking about content introduction rather than action resolution.

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Yes - Gygax advocates nuance in using procedures for content generation, but is pretty
strongly anti-fudging in action resolution. At most he's ok with the occasional PC left for
dead rather than slain outright, as something the GM can just decide.