Doing it wrong Part 1: Taking the dragon out of the dungeon

[Meatboy]

I hope the sequel will be better.

Very enlightening. Thanks for adding to the conversation actually part two concerns itself with the idea that the search for "balance" in the game, especially between classes, is having a detrimental effect on the hobby.

 

[ImperatorK]

Ah, so that's a no.

 

[TerraDave]

Sure. But sometimes there are no overarching themes or links, no plot, yet the game still includes tons of not-combat stuff.

For example, maybe the party chooses to go to a new area and talk to the locals. Maybe they spend 3 sessions in a high society party that they weasel an invitation to, only to board a ship and sail to a faraway land the next session. Maybe none of this is planned by the dm. No "story" is planned, it emerges from the actions of the pcs. There's no pre-planned plot- the dm didn't have a single bit of this planned or anticipated, he's winging it.

It sounds like some folks here ("remove the story and D&D becomes nothing more than Diablo") would claim that this isn't D&D, but to me, this is exactly what D&D is about. It's not everything D&D is about- there's combat, looting, etc- but the combat and looting are no more essential to D&D than the high society ball. D&D is what you make it; the story of the game, for me, is what you tell after it's all over, not what the dm tells his girlfriend in advance because that's how it's going to go, regardless of player agency. (Not to say that is the position of anyone in particular, but we've all seen or played in those games.)

Sure. The beauty of it is that the DM can take a more planned approach (at least in the sense of deciding to run through certain adventure, focus on a certain area, etc) or let players drive the overall direction of things. (though some DMs are probably better at one then the other).

 

[Sunseeker]

Actually no. I don't have any issues with anything here. I was just trying to pin down a kind of disconnect in game design vs play style that I think has led to a lot of strife in the player base over the years. Early on dnd was pretty much designed for dungeon only experience, even if thats not how people played it. Today the game has never been more capable of supporting different play styles, especially more "character" or "story" oriented games. BUT now there is a group (though I suspect grognards are nothing new ) who feel that dnd is no longer dnd.

As for "dragons" I was actually using them to describe any kind of challange or obstacle that needs to be overcome. By taking them out of the dungeon the game has become far more complex as the amount of variables are far more controlable when you are working inside a finite environment like a dungeon. Having to account for these variables has led to a much more robust rule system.

You know, even though I have an extensive open-world(different from sandbox) campaign in process, we are actually just about to begin a very long and extensive dungeon crawl that I have been working on. One that actually ends with a dragon!

Speaking as someone who plays a lot of MMOs, where their "instances" and "raids" are what have grown out of the classic "dungeon" concept, spending a lot of time in those things can become repetitive. Now there are quite a list of creative and interesting dungeon crawls out there, but at some point someone asked "Why are the evil things always hiding in dungeons?"

I think being outside exploring, adventuring and occasionally fighting evil makes the dungeons themselves seem that much more.

Now, I'm sure there are people who say that X should always be X, that coke should always be coke. But the fact that the system supports adding rum to our coke is I think, much better than a system that only gives us coke. And if you really don't like coke...I suppose you can have your pepsi(4e) too.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Very enlightening. Thanks for adding to the conversation actually part two concerns itself with the idea that the search for "balance" in the game, especially between classes, is having a detrimental effect on the hobby.

Now I'm looking forward to it.

 

[Grazzt]

To many of us, "telling the story" is what you do after the game is over, in describing how the game turned out. The setup, the actual play of the game- those aren't "telling a story" to me. Those are "playing a game."

Yeah. What Jester said.

 

[am181d]

To many of us, "telling the story" is what you do after the game is over, in describing how the game turned out. The setup, the actual play of the game- those aren't "telling a story" to me. Those are "playing a game."

I have a hard time understanding how you could separate the two. Obviously, you can talk about what happened during the game afterward, in the same way you could talk about a game of Monopoly or what you had for breakfast in the morning. But to the extent that a role-playing game involves role-playing, interacting with other fictional characters and accomplishing (or being thwarted in the completion of) a series of goals significant to the individual characters, there's obviously a narrative that forms during play.

Maybe you're making a more narrow point about how much of that narrative is pre-planned or how it's structured?

 

[Obryn]

Uh, no. Not only no, but that is a pretty insulting statement to those of us that have a strong-with-the-roleplay-but-NO-STORY style of game.

Bingo. I'm beginning to think that people here are conflating "story" with "everything but combat".

Nope; when I see someone shouting "NO STORY" all I see is silly and unnecessary D&D tribalism.

-O

 

[Neonchameleon]

Well, Gygax might have felt he did a big disservice to simulationism when he introduced hit points, but that only shows his position on the simulationism scale (between pole arms and hit points). Both of these are astronomically high simulationism values if you compare to the Maid RPG's take on combat. In maid, all combat equipment is strictly Fluff, a giant robot has the same combat value as a broom (that is, none), and the difference between an attack and a feint is what attribute you roll against.

Look at the other roleplaying games from the 70s. Chivalry and Sorcery? More simulationist than D&D. Traveller? More simulationist than D&D. Runequest? More simulationist than D&D. Metamorphosis Alpha? More simulationist than D&D (it even had a version of the Rolemaster weapon vs armour to hit and damage tables). Gamma World First Edition? More simulationist than D&D. (Not by much in these last two cases - they basically were hacked D&D games produced by TSR). I think the only 1970s RPG that was less simulationist than D&D was Tunnels and Trolls.

Yes, D&D is a lot less simulationist than Maid. But I don't think anyone pushed that boundary at all. Besides, in GNS terms Maid is narrativist ("will this make for a more interesting story"), Gygax was gamist ("will this make for a more challenging and satifying game").

 

[pemerton]

For example, maybe the party chooses to go to a new area and talk to the locals. Maybe they spend 3 sessions in a high society party that they weasel an invitation to, only to board a ship and sail to a faraway land the next session. Maybe none of this is planned by the dm. No "story" is planned, it emerges from the actions of the pcs. There's no pre-planned plot- the dm didn't have a single bit of this planned or anticipated, he's winging it.

It sounds like some folks here ("remove the story and D&D becomes nothing more than Diablo") would claim that this isn't D&D, but to me, this is exactly what D&D is about.

<snip>

D&D is what you make it; the story of the game, for me, is what you tell after it's all over, not what the dm tells his girlfriend in advance because that's how it's going to go, regardless of player agency.

I'm not sure whose position you are opposing yourself to, but your account of story in RPGs seems a bit limited to me.

There is a style of RPGing called "story now" or "narrativism" that has nothing to do with a story being planned, or with the GM telling his girlfriend in advance and then thwarting player agency. It has some resemblance to your "going to a new area and talking to the locals" and "spending 3 sessions in a high society party". But the difference from (say) a lot of 2nd ed era modules that have that sort of stuff in them is that the GM designs the locals, and the parties, deliberately to trigger the thematic concerns that the players have built into their PCs. So rather than the main emphasis being on exploring and (vicariously) experiencing the gameworld, the emphasis is on generating thematically engaging story via play.

This is moderately hard to do in AD&D, because the only class that really bring much pre-packaged theme with it is the thief, but the only time the thief really gets to express that thematic material is in a party of other thieves! (Hence, in my view, the distinctive character of the "all thieves" AD&D campaign. Monks, druids and paladins have the promise of similar thematic heft, but at least in my experience the game doesn't really have the resources to let their thematic elements emerge.) The first AD&D book to try to get thematic material spread throughout the classes, and throughout the monsters that the GM will be using to build situations, is Oriental Adventures. (Though it also has mechanics, like its Honour system, that are an obstacle to "story now" because they try to constrain rather than facilitate player agency.)

4e in many ways resembles Oriental Adventures in its thematic laden-ness of both PCs and NPCs/monsters, but without so many of the mechanical obstacles.

BUT, why did 3E (and 4E and Next for that matter) go "back to the dungeon" after all the push for more story oriented play in the 80s and 90s? Why are old dungeon crawls still rated as the most popular adventures?

The reason is that it is a style of play that works.

<snip>

D&D mixes gambling & puzzles with popular fantasy motifs and you get to play archetypes while doing it. Whats not too love!

But some story is ok to.

My own view on this is that narrativist play is not all that popular among many RPGers.

I take it for granted that most players aren't very interested in a railroad game unless the railroaded plot is very much a backdrop for the real action of play (this is my sense of how the typical adventure path plays out).

But it also seems to me - and personally this is a bit more surprising - that many players don't like a game in which non-railroaded story is front and centre. Getting story front-and-centre requires the players to deliberately build their PCs to be thematically interesting, and requires the GM to deliberately frame scenes/situations in such a way as to push on those thematic pressure points, thereby triggering the emergence of story. You won't get this without fairly self-conscious metagaming by the players at the PC-build stage, and by the GM at the encounter design stage, and that sort of metagaming seems to be disliked by many RPGers.

My best understanding of Ron Edwards view of the situation is that RPGers scepticism about story arose from bad experiences with railroading and metaplot, and that once games were designed that reliably delivered story without railroading, via the techniques I've described, then those RPGs, and perhaps RPGs more generally, would grow in popularity. And my own tentative view, informed in part by the backlash against 4e, is that Edwards was wrong - at least among the existing RPGing base, there is a very strong hostility not just to railroading (which is entirely warranted), but to the metagame-heavy techniques that are the only known way (to date, ast least) for an RPG to reliably deliver story without railroad.

The Forge used to talk about "simulationism by habit", but to me it seems more like "simulationism by very strong desire".

To tie this back to dungeon crawls: one thing a dungeon crawl can achieve is some of the same results as "story now" play - a degree of pacing, some sort of narrative escalation in the stakes, etc - without the need for overt metagaming in encounter design. Instead the metagame techniques are concealed behind the ingame contrivance of "the dungeon".