Legends & Lore: Roleplaying in D&D Next

[Ratskinner]

It's an OK start, they just need to make sure that they remember that, as much as they all love the metagame, the best RP usually comes at the cost of losing the metagame context.

I know its bad form to pick out one sentence, but this one seems the krux of the point I wanted to address.

My experience is actually quite the opposite. The singular best game that I have ever played with respect to creating/encouraging actor-stance roleplaying was Capes. Its mechanics were entirely metagame (I feel like its the anti-Simulationism game). Beyond that, as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] noted, there are many games with so-called "meta" mechanics that are well known for encouraging this sort of thing.

Additionally, my experience with games that lack any sort of meta mechanics indicates that they actively discourage actor stance roleplaying, and often encourage pawn stance...sorta the opposite of RP as defined by the article.

I do think that there are historical reasons for people to feel the way you do. However, I don't think they're relevant anymore.

 

[Ratskinner]

That's generally true, but things like Fate/Inspiration points cause one major problem. The player is encouraged to play a certain way to gain them. Seperately the DM/GM is supposed to recognize situations where he should hand those points out. I don't like games that require the GM to hand out points, because I'm not very good at recognizing when I should. My players enjoy gaining those points and after we've played such games express their displeasure at how few they gained, as they thought they did a good job of doing whatever it is you shoud do to get the points. This isn't either side being unreasonable. That's one of many reasons I like MHRP, it puts the earning of PP in the players' hands. It puts the earning of experience awards (which work more like Fate points than D&D XP) in the players' hands. Both sides get what they want. I don't have to account for another fiddly bit and the players have a way to earn the points they like to earn.

I don't really have a problem with the player feeling encouraged to play a certain way if its a way they choose to play. Although I think Inspiration points have a greater chance to make some players uncomfortable than FATE points do. FATE points only encourage the character to act in a certain way. You can narrate or act that out in whatever stance or mode that you wish. Inspiration points, as presented, seem to require you the player to act/play in certain ways to gain them. Which I think is a critical difference.

For your other problem, at least with FATE, players are encouraged to point out when they have played up an aspect or offer a compel when they think its appropriate. I will say that that is one of the big things that new FATE players from other game systems have to learn. (IME non-gamers don't seem to have a problem with this...:shrug At least in the systems I've seen that work that way, I can't see how that's a bad policy overall.

The Marvel solution is a very good one, IMO. I also like the way Awesome Points are handled in Old-School Hack, which, honestly, I think might be a better fit with the overall D&D gestalt.

 

[Ratskinner]

It's not just that. In our 2e game, we could expect nearly random rulings from the DM. Want to grapple a troll? Likely our 6 different DMs would give 6 different answers on exactly how that would work. One would rule it out immediately saying the troll was way to big to grapple, one would allow you to try it and then give the troll a free attack on you and make you make a dex check or fall off and take a bunch of damage, another one would come up with some convoluted rule that required 10 different checks for "realism".

If you tried to jump over something the distance you could jump would vary immensely from DM to DM. If you tried to talk to an NPC, one DM would use a charisma check and another would just rule that the NPC didn't like your face and ignore everything you said.

I think this is actually one of the reasons people have such fond memories of the AD&D era. DMs could/would cater their decision-making, and thus some very fundamental "feel" issues to what their players wanted. Of course "bad" DMs didn't... Nonetheless, people had a much higher chance of being in the game they wanted. Its only folks (at that time a bit rarer, I think) who had a chance to play with several DMs that came from different groups that noticed how wildly different AD&D could play. I know I was stunned by how play went with my first unfamilliar DMs in college.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

But isn't that the joy of an RPG? To try for a crapshoot and have it tunr out sucessfully beyond your wildest expectations? Or even to fail miserably, as long as it entertains the group and furthers the story? (And I think that's a part of why 4E didn't do as well as it shuld have, IMO; it tried to do emphasize things that it couldn't do as well as a computer/console.)

I'm not sure anymore. I know that our group stopped doing anything but attacking for damage in our 2e game because of this.

Someone would say "I'd like to try to leap on the head of that giant and stab it in the back of the head, that should give me extra damage right?" The DM would say, "Wait, you want to jump, 10 feet down from where you are onto the head of the giant who is currently flailing about trying to stomp on your friends below?" "Yeah, that's what I want" "Alright, give me a dex check at minus 5 to aim your jump onto him." "A DEX check? My dex is 8 and that makes the roll nearly impossible." "Well, it's a really hard thing you are trying to do: land on the giant while he's moving and also not slide off." "Well, I don't want to do it anymore if there's an 80% chance I'm going to fail. I thought it would be easy, given it's a giant and therefore nearly impossible to miss." "But he's moving around a lot and swinging his club around. It's actually VERY difficult to do that. Have you ever jumped 10 feet and tried to hit a precise point? Nearly impossible. And too bad, you said you were trying it, so you are trying it. Make the roll." "But I tried it figuring it would be easy. I don't want to anymore." "Well, you should know better. Your character didn't know the chance of success, so neither should you. Just make the roll." "*sigh* Fine, I fail by 10." "Alright, you leap, miss the giant and since you failed by so much, you bounce off the giant and hit the wall of the cliff you are jumping off of. Your head smashes into the rocks below for..*rolls* 34 points of damage." "Well, that kills me. Guess I roll up a new character."

Then, the argument starts about how the DM is just out to get us and he can't even let reasonable actions succeed. Blah, blah, blah. Then we spend the rest of the night arguing about the physics involved in jumping off a cliff onto a moving object.

After the 10th or 20th of these arguments we realized it was MUCH safer and less of a headache to roll to hit and roll damage. It's the one thing the rules stated how to do precisely and therefore was likely to work exactly as written.

I mean, if I want pre-planned options, I have Skyrim, DDO, or virtually any other computer or console RPG or action game.

I keep hearing this argument. If you enjoy Skyrim, wouldn't it be even better to have a DM in charge of the monsters so they act more tactically? Wouldn't it be better to have a DM in charge of the NPCs so they can answer your questions with a bit of intelligence instead of just reading verbatim what a voice actor recorded? Isn't it better to be able to play Skyrim with your friends?

I really don't understand the argument that says "If D&D is going to limit me to a bunch of pre-planned options, than I'd rather go play a game that limits me even more and makes me lose a bunch of other benefits I got from playing D&D."

If they ever come up with a video game that is multiplayer, has awesome graphics, allows a DM to control all the NPCs and monsters, and is easy enough for a DM to adjudicate in real time, I'd give up D&D in a heartbeat. To me, RPGs are about a combination of roleplaying and tactics. Tactics are sometimes enhanced rather than hindered by having limited choices. That's the reason people still play chess despite it's limited number of choices.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I think this is actually one of the reasons people have such fond memories of the AD&D era. DMs could/would cater their decision-making, and thus some very fundamental "feel" issues to what their players wanted. Of course "bad" DMs didn't... Nonetheless, people had a much higher chance of being in the game they wanted. Its only folks (at that time a bit rarer, I think) who had a chance to play with several DMs that came from different groups that noticed how wildly different AD&D could play. I know I was stunned by how play went with my first unfamilliar DMs in college.

I'm extremely torn about this situation myself. I started with 2e D&D and I loved it more than anything. But after many years of playing it, and being in a group of powergamers, we found all its warts. See my other post directly above this for the kind of things we dealt with.

But as bad as some of those arguments got and as much of a headache as they gave me, I'm beginning to regret the shift to 3e more than anything else I've regretted in my life. Instead of arguing about whether the DM's made up rules were stupid or not, we instead argued about the exact interpretation of the rules in the book. Instead of the arguments being "You made up a stupid rule, now change your mind" it was instead "When you move over there you provoke an AOO. Wait, unless you have that feat that ignores it. Ok, you do. But wait, you still used a ranged attack in melee so they get an AOO. No, I don't think your feat allows you to ignore that AOO. Are you sure it does? Let's look it up to be sure. Well, the feat is a little vague about which kinds of AOO it lets you avoid. I'm going to rule it doesn't stop this one. No, I know you feel differently, but I'm saying he gets an AOO. I understand what it says in the book, I just interpret it differently than you do."

Most people only had one DM, so they got used to their rulings and began to at least rely on what they could or couldn't do. Our group had 6 different DMs each with different rules. And since we voted on which game to play each week, we could go months between times we played with one of the DMs, so we'd completely forget their houserules. We'd get use to pulling crazy stunts in one game only to try it in another and die immediately.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I do think that there are historical reasons for people to feel the way you do. However, I don't think they're relevant anymore.

Not to side-track too much, but I think the crux of my point rests on the generally mediocre understanding that RPG designers have of the psychology of behavior.

Think of something like the DM handing out a FATE point in exchange for a PC doing something in character but potentially harmful. Great role-playing mechanic, right? Only no. Because there needs to be a meta-reward from the DM based on the meta-need for the player to still "win" and when you're swapping tokens and when other people are determining your actions, you're not acting in-character.

It's a good mechanic and it encourages a PC to act in-character and I like it, but, setting Forge buzzwords to the side, it is not something I would consider good for pretending to be the character, for playing that role, because that character isn't in a game and doesn't get a reward for acting that way and isn't under the control of the other players.

Any time you're imagining the context of the game itself, you're forgetting the context of the character, because the character is not in a game.

It's worth a longer discussion elsewhere, I think, but suffice it to say that for now, what most of the Indie RPG world considers good "roleplaying" mechanics are perhaps more accurately called good genre emulation mechanics. And unless your character is Abed, your character is not aware of their own meta-context, so in order to think like your character, you must abandon that meta-context as a player as well. Which is why mechanics that encourage you to think like your character cannot be very meta-game, or else you will, by virtue of using them, not be thinking like your character anymore, and instead you will be thinking like the player of a game.

They can still be awesome and fun and useful mechanics, but they're not good for hitting that place on the Venn diagram between what you're thinking and what your character is thinking where the two overlap.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

At least from my perspective, I feel there is a big difference between GM discretion over how action resolution works (which is what most of your examples are about) and GM discretion over how action resolution is framed and how the results of action resolution are interpreted (which is what I was trying to get at in my post).

There is a big difference, I agree. My point was that some people view GM discretion over action resolution to be an important part of the game. If the DM has the leeway to come up with action resolution mechanics on the fly, it is easier to adjudicate "out of the box" actions.

I think GM discretion over the former - like what is the mechanic for grappling a troll, or resolving a jump, or talking to a stranger - tends just to lead to a poor gaming experience, as players cannot declare actions for their PC with any confidence, and hence in practice either (i) retreat to those areas of the system which do have reliable rules, like combat, or (ii) give up protagonisim and essentially "play along" with the GM's game.

Unfortunately, this has been my experience as well. However, allowing the DM nearly no discretion over the mechanics leads to situations where things simply cannot be tried at all because the mechanics don't allow it. Or at least, don't allow it easily.

Attempting to trip a monster in 4e D&D, for instance. There are many powers that do it. There are no clear rules on how to do it if you don't have a power for it. Allowing players to do it at-will without taking a power for it might seem like a smack in the face for players who had to use up one of their choices explicitly on a power that let them trip people. So, better to not allow it at all.

The broader issue of "DM empowerment" in D&Dnext is one I'm not sure about. I have a certain fondness for flexible, portable and robust action resolution mechanics. (4e skill challenges are one example, though perhaps not the best.) Stat checks have the potential to be one part of that. But other stuff is needed too, like guidlines on setting stakes and establishing finality of resolution (which is what hit points do in combat). At the moment I feel that that is missing. Without that, I think the same issues I mentioned above will tend to occur: either (i) retreat into combat, where hit points do establish finality; or (ii) surrender protagonism and just go along with the GM's thing.

Which is why I'm beginning to believe that we need something that is in between the two extremes. There needs to be a fairly robust skill system with clear guidelines on what each of the skills should be used for as well as what DCs are easy, medium, and hard. Meanwhile, the system has to be not exhaustive so as to allow DMs some leeway in adjudicating "out of the box" situations.

I found the Skill Challenge mechanics weren't altogether that well thought through. Which is why they tended to be clunky in their execution. Too many times we sat there saying "Alright, that's 5 successes trying to convince the bouncer to let you into the bar. You need 8." "Uh, I guess I use Diplomacy AGAIN." "Alright, you succeed again and the bouncer doesn't look completely convinced. What do you do now?"

On the other hand, a less formal system for using a number of skills to succeed in a larger problem would be excellent.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I'm not sure anymore. I know that our group stopped doing anything but attacking for damage in our 2e game because of this.

Someone would say "I'd like to try to leap on the head of that giant and stab it in the back of the head, that should give me extra damage right?" The DM would say, "Wait, you want to jump, 10 feet down from where you are onto the head of the giant who is currently flailing about trying to stomp on your friends below?" "Yeah, that's what I want" "Alright, give me a dex check at minus 5 to aim your jump onto him." "A DEX check? My dex is 8 and that makes the roll nearly impossible." "Well, it's a really hard thing you are trying to do: land on the giant while he's moving and also not slide off." "Well, I don't want to do it anymore if there's an 80% chance I'm going to fail. I thought it would be easy, given it's a giant and therefore nearly impossible to miss." "But he's moving around a lot and swinging his club around. It's actually VERY difficult to do that. Have you ever jumped 10 feet and tried to hit a precise point? Nearly impossible. And too bad, you said you were trying it, so you are trying it. Make the roll." "But I tried it figuring it would be easy. I don't want to anymore." "Well, you should know better. Your character didn't know the chance of success, so neither should you. Just make the roll." "*sigh* Fine, I fail by 10." "Alright, you leap, miss the giant and since you failed by so much, you bounce off the giant and hit the wall of the cliff you are jumping off of. Your head smashes into the rocks below for..*rolls* 34 points of damage." "Well, that kills me. Guess I roll up a new character."

Then, the argument starts about how the DM is just out to get us and he can't even let reasonable actions succeed. Blah, blah, blah. Then we spend the rest of the night arguing about the physics involved in jumping off a cliff onto a moving object.

After the 10th or 20th of these arguments we realized it was MUCH safer and less of a headache to roll to hit and roll damage. It's the one thing the rules stated how to do precisely and therefore was likely to work exactly as written.

Ugh. There is so much screwed up in that I don't even know where to begin. Forcing a player to commit to something that risky without a general estimation of difficulty is wrong. At least a "chances are high that you will fall, still want to leap?" is in order. Not to mention the can of worms opened up if it does succeed and extra damage is scored. Enter endless hit location requests, specific wound effects, etc. The entire abstraction of HP breaks down with all that thrown in.

To me, RPGs are about a combination of roleplaying and tactics. Tactics are sometimes enhanced rather than hindered by having limited choices. That's the reason people still play chess despite it's limited number of choices.

Chess is a competitive strategy game. Due to competition and the lack of a referee, choices must be restricted in order for the game to be playable.

Not to side-track too much, but I think the crux of my point rests on the generally mediocre understanding that RPG designers have of the psychology of behavior.

Think of something like the DM handing out a FATE point in exchange for a PC doing something in character but potentially harmful. Great role-playing mechanic, right? Only no. Because there needs to be a meta-reward from the DM based on the meta-need for the player to still "win" and when you're swapping tokens and when other people are determining your actions, you're not acting in-character.

It's a good mechanic and it encourages a PC to act in-character and I like it, but, setting Forge buzzwords to the side, it is not something I would consider good for pretending to be the character, for playing that role, because that character isn't in a game and doesn't get a reward for acting that way and isn't under the control of the other players.

Any time you're imagining the context of the game itself, you're forgetting the context of the character, because the character is not in a game.

It's worth a longer discussion elsewhere, I think, but suffice it to say that for now, what most of the Indie RPG world considers good "roleplaying" mechanics are perhaps more accurately called good genre emulation mechanics. And unless your character is Abed, your character is not aware of their own meta-context, so in order to think like your character, you must abandon that meta-context as a player as well. Which is why mechanics that encourage you to think like your character cannot be very meta-game, or else you will, by virtue of using them, not be thinking like your character anymore, and instead you will be thinking like the player of a game.

They can still be awesome and fun and useful mechanics, but they're not good for hitting that place on the Venn diagram between what you're thinking and what your character is thinking where the two overlap.

Thankfully, someone else here knows that genre emulation isn't roleplaying. I would XP you but I'm not allowed to right now.

 

[pemerton]

some people view GM discretion over action resolution to be an important part of the game. If the DM has the leeway to come up with action resolution mechanics on the fly, it is easier to adjudicate "out of the box" actions.

<snip>

Attempting to trip a monster in 4e D&D, for instance. There are many powers that do it. There are no clear rules on how to do it if you don't have a power for it.

<snip>

the system has to be not exhaustive so as to allow DMs some leeway in adjudicating "out of the box" situations.

I agree that there is (at least) a certain delicacy in reconciling 4e's p 42 and its powers. But that is (in my view, at least) mostly a consequence of 4e being very specific with its powers. Games like HeroWars/Quest, or Marvel Heroic, show how you can have systems which are at one-and-the same time exhaustive while leaving plenty of room for out-of-the-box situations. The GM doesn't have to make up new mechanics for those situations, but just has to adjudicate the fiction. So while I agree that some have the belief you state, I think they are mistaken.

The examples of this that I mentioned upthread are Iron Man powering up his suit by hooking into the power grid, or by standing outside in a thunderstorm. The mechanics are clear: Distinctions - something like Fate's Aspects - establish the fictional parameters, and on a success Iron Man's player establishes an Asset (a buff) or Restores (ie reactivates) a shut-down power, while on a failure the GM imposes a complication (eg Blacked-out New York) or stress (eg physical stress from being struck by lighting). In this system there is no problem of crowding out powers, because powers are defined using the same vocabulary - eg Spider Man just has a buff to attempts to establish grappling complications, because of his webs. But the actual process is the same as anyone else wanting to establish a grapple.

The closest that 4e comes to this is the skill challenge, where the GM doesn't have to invent a new mechanic, but just adjudicate the fiction of succeeding or failing at a skill check - and a player who uses a power, an action point etc just gets a buff.

I found the Skill Challenge mechanics weren't altogether that well thought through. Which is why they tended to be clunky in their execution. Too many times we sat there saying "Alright, that's 5 successes trying to convince the bouncer to let you into the bar. You need 8." "Uh, I guess I use Diplomacy AGAIN." "Alright, you succeed again and the bouncer doesn't look completely convinced. What do you do now?"

It's a bit of a tangent, but I think the problem with this is that the GM isn't doing his/her job. S/he isn't introducing complications, or developing the situation, in a way to which the players can respond. If the GM has nothing interesting to do with his/her NPC on a failed Diplomacy check, s/he shouldn't be running a skill challenge! (Robin Laws emphasises this point in HeroQuest revised, and that bit of the rulebook was cut-and-pasted into DMG2.)

 

[pemerton]

Not to side-track too much, but I think the crux of my point rests on the generally mediocre understanding that RPG designers have of the psychology of behavior.

<snip>

It's a good mechanic and it encourages a PC to act in-character and I like it, but, setting Forge buzzwords to the side, it is not something I would consider good for pretending to be the character, for playing that role, because that character isn't in a game and doesn't get a reward for acting that way and isn't under the control of the other players.

Any time you're imagining the context of the game itself, you're forgetting the context of the character, because the character is not in a game.

It's worth a longer discussion elsewhere, I think, but suffice it to say that for now, what most of the Indie RPG world considers good "roleplaying" mechanics are perhaps more accurately called good genre emulation mechanics.

<snip>

mechanics that encourage you to think like your character cannot be very meta-game, or else you will, by virtue of using them, not be thinking like your character anymore, and instead you will be thinking like the player of a game.

They can still be awesome and fun and useful mechanics, but they're not good for hitting that place on the Venn diagram between what you're thinking and what your character is thinking where the two overlap.

To me, this reads like theorycraft. I want actual play examples that prove the point, or at least that give some reason to think that it is more than one person's statement of preference.

Because, like [MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION], I've played a lot of games without meta-mechanics, and the only one of them that had any general tendency to encourage "inhabitation" of the character was Call of Cthulhu, and that's because the players just sit back and emote their PCs while the GM drives. As soon as the players are expected to exhibit any protagonism, they will be motivated by the meta-context, be that Gygaxian XP-for-treasure advancement rules, or the knowledge 4e players have of their available dailies, surges and AP. Depending how that meta-context is shaped, the resulting play may or may not lead to inhabitation of the character. The idea that a player can't inhabit the character simply because s/he also is responding to the metacontext has, for me at least, no supporting evidence in real life play. Apart from anything else, one important element of metacontext is enjoying the experience with one's friends at the table, and this can make a big difference to inhabitation (ie it is easier and more fluid, for me at least, when part of an enjoyable shared experience).