D&D 5E The Illusion of Experience Points that Everyone Disbelieves

[howandwhy99]

Could you give me your definition of "simulation game"? I'm currently getting it conflated with the use of simulation in things like:

Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. The act of simulating something first requires that a model be developed...

This one from Google seems fine enough. D&D comes from wargames where the rules were a model of war. D&D took those and used them for fantasy, but the rules were still fantasy as physics, a world which followed certain designs however much we may never completely discern them. Look at the context for Gygax's quote. He's in a wargamer community which disavows fantasy and he's making a fantasy game. It isn't simulating any kind of reality. It's pieces of reality built into fantasies.

I've never said that the math and figuring out the game world weren't a large part of the game. I would argue that you are blindly following one model by denying that storytelling (in the colloquial, non-Forge, Moldvay crafting a novel usage) is a large part of the game.

I'd say it's about half of what players do when playing the game, players without the ability to know the code behind the screen attempting to discern it by... making stuff up. I'm not denying that at all.

You seem to be repeatedly trying to confine the first 20 years of RPGs to pattern recognition in spite of the personal experience of others and numerous quotes from the creators of the two most popular versions of those early games.

I'm saying games are patterns and widely understood to be so for hundreds even thousands of years. That D&D was so radical by moving the game board behind a screen meant other activities, like novel writing for instance, became useful metaphors to express an imperfect understanding of what had been created. But just like no one ever felt the need to define what a game was, it was simply understood throughout. Just as no one in prior history really talks about puzzle solving as two authors inventing a novel.

Simply repeatedly denying any and all ideas which conflict with non-storytelling all-pattern-recognition primacy is halting the exploration of interesting ideas in this thread ;-)

But point taken. I'll go back and try to suss some stuff out of your posts upthread later this evening.

Okay, it's hard to see where people are coming from. Thanks, it's cool you getting back to me, but there's a good chance I'll be out gaming tonight if I can get some more folks to respond to texts.

 

[Cadence]

I'd say it's about half of what players do when playing the game, players without the ability to know the code behind the screen attempting to discern it by... making stuff up. I'm not denying that at all.

Do you mean half of it is trying to find the patterns? Without the ability to know because its hidden? What code? I mean, in a board game I think a lot of people consciously attempt to figure out the optimal strategy so that the next time they can beat the snot out of the other people. In our D&D games I never get that feeling.

Okay, it's hard to see where people are coming from. Thanks, it's cool you getting back to me, but there's a good chance I'll be out gaming tonight if I can get some more folks to respond to texts.

Hope you rounded them up! I'll probably get back to you sometime tomorrow then and catch up on some other things tonight.

 

[howandwhy99]

Do you mean half of it is trying to find the patterns? Without the ability to know because its hidden? What code? I mean, in a board game I think a lot of people consciously attempt to figure out the optimal strategy so that the next time they can beat the snot out of the other people. In our D&D games I never get that feeling.

I mean that most of it is playing a game / deciphering a code. In Chess and most every game that's directly about game play and not something else, like sports athletes, this is almost everything players do. They play Tic-Tac-Toe in what I long ago termed Tic Phase. They are still trying to achieve the game objective by figuring out how the game works. Tac Phase would be those who have solved Tic-Tac-Toe (something most games are too complex even for computers to do), and Toe Phase are those who deny there is a game board, X's, O's, and all the rest. (I see The Big Model as a description of games that removes all understandings of them except from someone in Toe Phase and then with the mitigation of story making being an actual thing we can be sure is actually going on. In fact it goes on quite extensively about what things actually are. A sure sign to ditch a philosophy IMO.)

Okay, so D&D is a cooperative game, not a collaborative game, in that it makes working with other players in each player's best interest if they have any hopes of achieving goals in the game in the long term. And it's a long, long game.

You may not have seen players competing so much lately for stuff like kills or scrambling over who gets treasure, but that was part of the game early on and not determined by the rules. And while beating the snot of out of other was a possibility, competitive play is so rare it's far more likely you have experienced players who try and collectively beat the game - or at least a given game module.

 

[Umbran]

The objective in games that aren't storygames isn't to tell a story.

You may think I'm about to play a game of semantics, but there's an important point to be made, so bear with me....

Games don't have objectives - we may use that phrasing, but it is actually a bit sloppy. Games are non-sentient, without will, and so cannot seek goals. Goals are for people. Games, in the sense you're discussing, may have win conditions. It is the players who have objectives.

Golf has a clearly set win condition - get the ball into all the holes, using the fewest swings, within some restrictions of how you can move the ball. Now, maybe when some folks play golf, that is their objective. Their entire purpose is to get the lowest score, and that's the only reason for them to play. Me, that's not why I play golf. I play golf to go outside with some friends, have a nice walk, and an activity around which we can frame the afternoon. The win condition of the game is honestly not high on my list of objectives. Some other guy on the course that day may have the objective of getting an his girlfriend's father to accept him as a potential son-in-law. The old guy out there may really have the objective of getting exercise, to keep his arthritis at bay. There's tons of reasonable objectives for folks on the golf course.

And that's the problem here. You seem to be taking a fairly simple interpretation - the player's objectives are merely to hit the win conditions of the game. And that is "the objective". Singular. There's only one.

Now, we note that nowhere in the D&D rulebooks do they state what the game's win condition is. In fact, we generally all have a chuckle at the idea of someone saying, "I won D&D". This means that the simple interpretation starts to break down. The players must set their own objectives. And once people are doing that for themselves, all bets are off as to what "the objective" of the game really is.

Now, I agree with you, that D&D really needs to support the tactical-wargame objective crowd. It has always done so, so this is sacred-cow territory.

But then, we should be honest, and remember that the game became popular not just for it's tactical-wargame objectives, but because it has always supported a rather wide range of objectives. Supporting creation of a story - to think of your character as the protagonist of a series of novels - has always been there, too, and that's just as sacred a cow. It has also always supported the beer-and-pretzels objective of hanging out with friends with the game as a framing activity, akin to how I play golf.

Now, to fit all those objectives in, means that the game is not fine-tuned for any one objective. It has to have some mechanics you don't like, that you may want to house-rule away because you're not interested in the objective it supports. D&D should have XP, because it does serve the tactical-wargame objective. And, honestly, I don't think anyone has to worry that somehow it won't be in the core rules. It is a sacred cow, and a few folks on the internet aren't going to take it away. But, to be fair, that means some of the things the story-folks want, that make story-creation easy, also ought to be in the game, too. And the basic play needs to be fairly simple, for the beer-and-pretzels folks, and so on.

 

[ExploderWizard]

You may not have seen players competing so much lately for stuff like kills or scrambling over who gets treasure, but that was part of the game early on and not determined by the rules. And while beating the snot of out of other was a possibility, competitive play is so rare it's far more likely you have experienced players who try and collectively beat the game - or at least a given game module.

This is so funny. In my OD&D game I make it a point to award XP evenly to all who participated for both treasure and encounters/objectives. That doesn't stop the players from trying to justify to each other why they need larger cuts of loot. So long as they pay their hirelings I don't care how they divide the treasure.

 

[pemerton]

On the game vs story issue:

Here is an episode of play from my 4e session yesterday:

the PCs broke the hold that the Underdark god Torog has over the souls of those who die in the Underdark. They did this by destroying the metaphysical machinery of Torog's "Soul Abattoir".

At the climax of the action - which at this point was being resolved as a skill challenge, which is a fairly tightly defined mechanical subsystem for determining the outcome of certain events in a 4e game - the machinery had been destroyed, the cavern was collapsing, and the PCs were escaping as one of their number tried to hold the onrushing tide of soul energy at bay long enough for that escape to take place.

I invited the player of that PC to make an Insight check. He did, and succeeded. The PC therefore noticed that his imp familiar - which has the Eye of Vecna implanted in it - was channelling power from Vecna to try to direct the newly freed flow of souls to Vecna rather than the Raven Queen (who is the more orthodox god of the dead).

I asked the player whether his PC - who at this point still had the erupting soul energy under his mystical control - whether he was going to let the souls flow to Vecna, or rather direct them to the Raven Queen. The player though for probably about 20 seconds, and then replied "The Raven Queen". (If he had chosen otherwise he would have felt the wrath of at least two other party members, perhaps all of them!) That was fine, and he then made the Athletics check to try and run out of the collapsing cavern behind his friends, being shielded from falling rocks by the burly dwarf fighter. (Whose player had made a successful check at a high enough DC that he could confer an "aid another" bonus.) But I also told the player who had chosen the Raven Queen over Vecna, something to the effect of Vecna being angry, and hence his imp being - at least for the moment - non-functional, as Vecna lashes out through his Eye. (There may also have been some damage there - I can't remember now.)​

The unfolding of the episode just described was heavily shaped by mechanical considerations: the successful Insight check let the PC learn what Vecna (via the imp) was doing; the fighter player's Athletics check let him shield the other PC, and but for that extra bonus that other player would have failed his check for escaping and his PC taken damage (and his PC is already at less than maximum hp with only 1 healing surge left).

The existence of the imp itself is also a mechanically-conditioned state of affairs (the PC has the Familiar feat). The player didn't know for sure what the mechanical consequences would be of blocking Vecna's attempt at getting the soul power, but he wasn't shocked when the imp was shut down - he knows that turning on Vecna is a fairly high-stakes matter with possibly serious consequences.

But the key decision that had to be made, in the episode I have described, was whether to oppose Vecna or to let him have the souls from the Underdark. And I don't see how this can be understood in the sorts of terms that characterise a decision in the play of chess or backgammon. It's a decision made by reflecting on the content and implications of the fiction - including evaluative implications - and then choosing by reference to them. It reflects the player's conception of his PC, including his conception of his PC's relationship to various gods and to the other PCs. It also reflects the player's conception of the broader fictional situation, including what is at stake in the fiction for the other players.

It seems to me that my game isn't very unique in having players make these sorts of decisions, based on these sorts of considerations. Whether or not "story" is the best way to describe what is involved, I don't think they are about "pattern recognition" or "guessing the code" behind the GM's screen. A D&D that hopes to be remotely mainstream has to have room for this aspect of play.

 

[Thyrwyn]

On the game vs story issue:

...snip...

It seems to me that my game isn't very unique in having players make these sorts of decisions, based on these sorts of considerations. Whether or not "story" is the best way to describe what is involved, I don't think they are about "pattern recognition" or "guessing the code" behind the GM's screen. A D&D that hopes to be remotely mainstream has to have room for this aspect of play.

Absolutely. These kinds of considerations and choices are the mainstay of the groups with which I have the good fortune to play.

 

[the Jester]

Think of XP as Gold Pieces for Dungeon! the boardgame. A lot of D&D elements came from that game including differing XP requirements.

What?

Um, I think you'll find it went the other way around. The Dungeon! boardgame was derived from D&D...

Right.

I'll note, firstly, that I do not advocate complete removal of XPs in 5E. I'm just saying, don't push them as the default assumption.

>snip<

Why remove them as the default assumption? Well at least to cut down on the XP calculations by the DM as he prepares adventures; by the DM when he needs to distribute XPs; and by the players when they receive XP.

Many posters mention that it's easier to ignore than it is to put back in. Not sure about that.

And again, it seems to me that you risk alienating a rather large group of gamers to appease a smaller group who already can and do just ignore the xp system. And I can't even fathom how it would be easier to put xps back in rather than just handwave them; one involves figuring out how many xp you need to advance a level, what you get xp for and how many; the other involves... handwaving.

FYI, playing a game, even D&D, isn't about expressing a story. There is no "creating a shared fiction" in RPGs.

A little off-topic, but:

Periodically a thread comes up where you start talking about the difference between story and game, and yet as far as I can tell, you are pretty close to being the only one on ENWorld who holds these positions vis-a-vis D&D and other RPGs. When they've come up on CM, same thing. Which isn't to say you're wrong, exactly, but it looks a lot like spitting into the wind. This line of thinking reminds me of the "video games can't be art because they're video games!" assertion; it's firmly grounded in your opinion and, as far as I can tell, little else.

It is quite clear that, for many, many groups, D&D IS storytelling. You come across- at least to me- sounding like "You guys are doing it wrong!" And let's face it; they aren't. Regardless of the fact that I personally can't stand story-based games (or especially railroads), there are lots of groups who play that style of campaign and are perfectly happy with them. So I guess I just don't get why you think your opinions trump other groups' opinions of what makes a D&D game.

I say this with respect and puzzlement, btw, and I think we probably, when it comes down to it, have fairly similar playstyles- I just don't understand your position on "game" vs. "fiction".

Creating isn't the same as pretending nor is creating necessarily making a story. Stories are not inevitable. Going for a run, existing in any way, doesn't necessarily result in a story. That's confined thinking IMO and not cool to cultures who don't have stories.

Is there such a thing?? I'm no anthropologist, but I would be very surprised if there were any cultures anywhere- human ones, at least- without stories.

Guess what? Game play is about addressing the math, the patterns we are deciphering in the game. Don't want that to be the point of the activity for you? Great, then you aren't interested in game play.

Oh- if you're focusing on the story of the game, you're doing it wrong? You aren't actually playing a game if you only pay attention to the xp system and game math when you absolutely have to? I don't buy this at all; it's not just one-true-wayism, it's one-true-wayism based (as far as I can tell) strictly on your own opinions. It's as if I made the argument that you aren't really watching a movie if you aren't focused on the cinematography; if you focus on the story/plot, you're not really watching a movie, you're engaging in story-reading instead. Which, of course, would be nonsense.

What you want is the objective of the Forge's storygames. Games that are about making a story you and others like and less about actually playing a game. Storygame rules support storytelling. And what little rules there are are gamed for the real point of play: the story. Great storygames do this in such a way that the rules often seem part of the story told rather than rules followed by the players. That's awesome. But that wasn't the objective of RPGs for a good 20-30 years.

In your campaigns. In your experience. In your playstyle. But there are equally many for whom telling a story was ALWAYS the objective of D&D- and despite your assertions to the contrary, they weren't not-playing D&D. They were just playing it differently than you.

D&D Next is going to have a rough time accommodating not just game styles to satisfy different players. Complexity be damned, some players want to game the game world, while others want to take turns creating a shared story/world. Those are two seriously opposed games objectives. Not that those are the only two reasons to play D&D, but these two do not work in concert with each other. The first requires serious effort to create a code behind a screen for players to test their gaming acumen against with more nuance and game play than any Chess game could afford. The other begins as an empty page and is added to at every step with rules designed to support that.

I would dispute that the two can't go together. Sandbox to story game is a spectrum, not a black-and-white either-or.

When ideas are conflated, like attempting to make games into stories and vice versa, I find it's important to deny attempts to make life more uniform. The consequences are almost always a world where we annihilate other ways of thinking for what's being called one true way philosophies, in this case literary theory philosophies.

Isn't that exactly what you're trying to do?

 

[Ahnehnois]

It is quite clear that, for many, many groups, D&D IS storytelling.

I don't think it's possible to play D&D without telling a story. The whole game is people narrating events.

Even if a player just says "I attack the orc with a 20 attack roll" and the DM says "You hit. The orc dies", you've just told a little story about some fantastical character slaying an orc, using game jargon. You might never record it, and it might not be a story with any particular artistic aspirations, but you have narrated an event.

Sandbox to story game is a spectrum, not a black-and-white either-or.

That I disagree with. Sandboxe games create stories (often very good ones). Sandbox to railroad may be a spectrum.

 

[TwoSix]

That I disagree with. Sandboxe games create stories (often very good ones). Sandbox to railroad may be a spectrum.

Just to be persnickety, I'd probably say "Sandbox-to-adventure path". When you label a continuum with only one end being a pejorative, someone is going to to look at that spectrum and see a ranking, not a description.