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

[howandwhy99]

I think one can only really speculate what the original game design was constructed for. If the original designers wanted to continue to play a pattern-recognition game I believe they would have just continued to expand the wargame line. By moving into the field of becoming your character they broke new ground and created something beyond mere game-solving as had been played to that point. And the same two broad types of players we're discussing probably sat together at that first table. I think the game was designed to be ever-growing and led either directly or indirectly to the large spectrum of games we have today.

I believe they wanted to expand what they believed was gaming and we therefore received hundreds of thousands of words in multiple rulebooks. By searching for a name to call this new game they found role playing from the military buffs who understood it as improving class competency, military simulations now, and it worked. As Gygax said until the end, he wasn't looking for theatre games.

But yes, the game and the hobby have diversified greatly since D&D was first published and it should stay so. So I think I'll keep on denying storygames when held as some absolutist ideology only weirdos would deny when in comes to role playing and role playing games.

I don't believe that anyone here has suggested that D&DNext should be/support "pure story trading gaming". I certainly haven't - at least not intentionally. Nor do I want a game that requires competition. I have no qualms if the game supports competitive styles of play - I just don't want it to be the mandated, default style of play. I don't want the players to have to compete against the DM, each other, or the game itself. I want a game that allows the DM to create/run challenging, engaging scenarios - and, while I want the game mechanics to be engaging, I do not want them to be so challenging as to get in the way of, or take away from, the scenarios created.

I'm not suggesting that tracking XP in D&D be mandated and the designers have come out in favor of different designs. That games are designed to be challenging regardless of what they might be depicting seems to me a truism. But I fully agree difficulty should be able to be tweaked on both sides of the screen.

I don't need the game to tell us how to tell or create a story - if the people, the game, and the scenarios are engaging and interesting, then stories will be the happy accident of their interactions. D&D 3.X (which I play and enjoy) requires so much focus on the game mechanics, that it interferes with the other interactions at the the table - players, DM, and even the scenario are required to overly-engage the game mechanics and the penalty for failure is un-fun. If the players don't build their characters to be sufficiently combat-effective, if the encounter has not been properly balanced, or if the DM runs the encounter "incorrectly", the results are either tedious, frustrating, or catastrophic.

I've had the same issue with 3.x and I'm still running Pathfinder for my group of hardcore d20 char-op players. D&D Next should be quite easier to run and I'm guessing they are aiming squarely at 3e and 4e players with optional add-ons. That they want to do it in the same campaign is what blew my mind, but I think we're seeing not all playstyles can play in the same campaign regardless of a unifying ruleset.

Setting aside how accurate that suggestion might be....

Who cares? In this context, original intent is an historical curiosity. It does not speak to or limit what the design could be used for today.

Yeah, but I'd still like old school games and game play supported in the new edition. No, it doesn't have to be default game (do we need a default game?), but having XP, alignment, and a lot of other elements of mixed popularity in the game doesn't mean they must be used either.

And there is a healthy OSR crowd at conventions and on blogs who are re-popularizing old mechanics by presenting them with new understandings and new implementations. Not that we're ever going to stop being a piecemeal, ad-hoc, house ruling game, but old and commonly misunderstood isn't necessarily bad. I only stick to this side so firmly because I played under a DM who was more informed and proficient in early D&D than I would have imagined possible. And he didn't tell me anything of what he did - because it was behind the screen. But never revealing that design is essential to that way of playing the game.

 

[pemerton]

I'd probably say "Sandbox-to-adventure path".

Sandbox to story game is a spectrum

Yes, but in the sandbox, the plot is emergent from the gameplay.

I think "plot driven" is a good term for a railroad game.

<snip>

I don't think there's any "plot" in a real sandbox game. The word "plot" implies a pre-scripted story.

I agree that the word "plot" implies pre-scripting, and hence that there is no plot in a sandbox game (though after the event there will be a story, at least in the minimal sense of a connected series of events).

Also, there is at least one more viable playstyle for D&D (and similar, reasonably mainstream fantasy RPGs): namely, "non-railroad sceneframing" play where (like a sandbox) plot is emergent from gameplay rather than pre-scripted. The difference from an adventure path is that the content and sequence of scenes is not written in advance. So there is no more path than in a sandbox (ie the "path" and its contents are visible only at the end not the beginning). The difference from a sandbox is that, like in adventure path, the framing of scenes is mostly under GM rather than player control (ie the players don't get to "explore" a pre-established setting). To move from negative/contrastive to positive description: the GM frames new scenes having regard to the outcomes of prior scenes (which the GM did not him-/herself determine) plus the known concerns and priorities of the players.

Players seeking to play D&D to create stories and thinking of it only or mainly within the set of concepts available in literary theory has always been possible and not never wholly absent in our hobby (I'm guessing).

<snip>

using an RPG like D&D, a massive construction of game mechanics hundreds of pages in size, in order to do what rules usually get in the way of doing seems very counter intuitive to me

I learned a little bit of literary theory as a uni student in the 90s. But I started GMing D&D in the way I just described in the mid-to-late 80s (1986 onwards) under the influence of Oriental Adventures.

The difference, for me, between OA and the earlier AD&D books is that PCs in OA came with a built-in framework and context for play (families, inheritance, martial arts masters, etc) and the monsters in the book came with a loosely corresponding mythical context (the Celestial Bureaucracy). Hence scene-framing play becomes quite viable, because the PCs are already carrying the baggage to motivate the players to engage the scenes the GM frames without needing the GM to download or enforce (via railroading) a whole lot of backstory that motivates quests for meaningless McGuffins.

As to why use mechanics? Because they tell you the outcomes of action resolution without having to give any single participant authority in respect of that, and hence mechanics enable the collective setting of the parameters for the next scene. (OA also differed from earlier AD&D offerings in having richer action resolution via its NWPs.) Mechanics can do other stuff to, like manage pacing, let players and/or GM set stakes, etc, but determining outcomes is their basic role.

It may be that not everyone, and not even every RPGer, sees the attraction in playing a game in which the outcomes of situations, and hence the content of sequence of situations, isn't known until play actually takes place. But I believe from my own experience that for those who do enjoy it it's a pretty viable way to play D&D.

D&D has a board. It's hidden behind the screen by the referee and abstracted into a series of mechanical algorithms, but it is what the players are addressing. It's part of why there is a DM's map required for play.

I don't want to shock you, but I've GMed plenty of D&D with no map but for the one that I make up as I go along. In that sort of play, the players are addressing something other than the "board". As per my actual play example posted upthread, they are primarily addressing the content of the shared fiction.

As for the notion that boards and pattern recognition are intrinsic to games: when my children talk about "playing a game" they are sometimes referring to a board game, or a card game. But more often they are referring to an imaginary situation that they have framed (using their Lego, their dolls and plush toys, the rugs from the couch that get repurposed as tents, as beds, as oceans, etc) and the (imagined) demands of that fictional situation (most often a birthday party for one of their toys; but other things too, like sailing to an island to recover some treasure). When I play D&D it has much the same basic structure of that sort of game: there is a shared imaginary situation that imposes demands upon certain characters within it.

My kids are native English speakers. It is not any sort of misuse of the word "game" for them to describe their activity, or me to describe my activity, as playing a game. Of course it's not what Gygax was doing when he invented D&D. But if playing D&D was confined to what Gygax enjoyed donig, then TSR and WotC wouldn't have made the sales to me that they have, because one thing I know for sure is that I don't really enjoy Gyagxian "skilled play" all that much, and I definitely suck at GMing in that style.

 

[howandwhy99]

Mechanics can do other stuff to, like manage pacing, let players and/or GM set stakes, etc, but determining outcomes is their basic role.

Not really. I mean, they are in story games where all mechanics are simply variants of the single mechanic used in all of them: 1. We both make up stories. 2. They are necessarily in conflct. 3. We use some variation to determine whose story gets added to the big story. So this mechanic is about determining outcomes, but it isn't used in most other games. Most every game include rules for players to read and follow accordingly during play. That we think ahead according to those rules is what makes a game strategic, but strategy can be specifically designed for or it can be an accident of play, which appears to be the case in practically every storygame.

The primary mechanic in D&D as I understand it is the maze. The players must actually engage in solving the maze, whether it be spacial or otherwise, to reach any possible objective they determine for themselves. This can be codified, so codes behind the screen work to, but having the extrapolation of that code is vital so referee doesn't have to generate everything on the fly during a campaign. The other mechanic is the die roll. This is an abstraction for when players can't find to dig any deeper or decide to quickly risk to chance the current odds of finding their objective according to their current standing in the game. This usually requires multiple rolls and more maze/game solving on their part, especially for long term goals.

It may be that not everyone, and not even every RPGer, sees the attraction in playing a game in which the outcomes of situations, and hence the content of sequence of situations, isn't known until play actually takes place. But I believe from my own experience that for those who do enjoy it it's a pretty viable way to play D&D.

As I've said elsewhere I do not believe WWE wrestlers are playing a sporting game precisely because they know the basic outcome of the "match". Pretending to play a game isn't somehow less worthy or enjoyable, but there is no contest or challenge occurring, which is necessary for to be a game.

I don't want to shock you, but I've GMed plenty of D&D with no map but for the one that I make up as I go along. In that sort of play, the players are addressing something other than the "board". As per my actual play example posted upthread, they are primarily addressing the content of the shared fiction.

As for the notion that boards and pattern recognition are intrinsic to games: when my children talk about "playing a game" they are sometimes referring to a board game, or a card game. But more often they are referring to an imaginary situation that they have framed (using their Lego, their dolls and plush toys, the rugs from the couch that get repurposed as tents, as beds, as oceans, etc) and the (imagined) demands of that fictional situation (most often a birthday party for one of their toys; but other things too, like sailing to an island to recover some treasure). When I play D&D it has much the same basic structure of that sort of game: there is a shared imaginary situation that imposes demands upon certain characters within it.

My kids are native English speakers. It is not any sort of misuse of the word "game" for them to describe their activity, or me to describe my activity, as playing a game. Of course it's not what Gygax was doing when he invented D&D. But if playing D&D was confined to what Gygax enjoyed donig, then TSR and WotC wouldn't have made the sales to me that they have, because one thing I know for sure is that I don't really enjoy Gyagxian "skilled play" all that much, and I definitely suck at GMing in that style.

We've had some good conversations before and I haven't forgotten you don't prefer your RPGs to be games of skill. That's cool. It's more important we are all getting what we want from our games. But as this is a thread about ditching "the illusion of experience points that everyone disbelieves" specifically in D&D, maybe we could keep them for those of us who are keeping score?

And you may imply that D&D (and arcade games, adventure games like Legend of Zelda, MMORPGs, and even tactical games and most computer games in general) only became successful because it didn't include the addictive elements inherent to puzzles and non-storygames, but it runs counter to my own experience.

 

[pemerton]

Not really. I mean, they are in story games where all mechanics are simply variants of the single mechanic used in all of them: 1. We both make up stories. 2. They are necessarily in conflct. 3. We use some variation to determine whose story gets added to the big story. So this mechanic is about determining outcomes, but it isn't used in most other games.

<snip>

The primary mechanic in D&D as I understand it is the maze.

The sentence you quoted was in a paragraph which opened with the question "As to why use mechanics?", given that you're playing a scene-framing game. The sentence you quoted was an answer to that question. If you're playing a different game then your mechanics might do different things. I wasn't making any comment on that: I was answering the question I posed (which was also the question you posed): why use mechanics if your aim in play is to produce a story within a shared fiction.

Perhaps I've misunderstood, and you don't think I have answered that question you posed. But if so, I don't understand what your objection is to my answer, given that your objection seems to take as a premise that the aim of play is not to produce a story within a shared fiction. If you start with that premise, you will never answer the question you posed (and that I tried to answer), as you have ruled out any possible answer in framing your premise in such a fashion.

as this is a thread about ditching "the illusion of experience points that everyone disbelieves" specifically in D&D, maybe we could keep them for those of us who are keeping score?

Perhaps you missed my multiple posts on this matter upthread, where I pointed out that the 4e DMG already shows how to handle this issue satisfactorily, giving a range of ways for using XP plus explaining how XP-less levelling would work.

The post to which you have replied wasn't addressing that issue, though. It was refuting your claims about what playing D&D involves, and also your implicit claims about the meaning of the word "game".

 

[howandwhy99]

The sentence you quoted was in a paragraph which opened with the question "As to why use mechanics?", given that you're playing a scene-framing game. The sentence you quoted was an answer to that question. If you're playing a different game then your mechanics might do different things. I wasn't making any comment on that: I was answering the question I posed (which was also the question you posed): why use mechanics if your aim in play is to produce a story within a shared fiction.

So all in the context. No problem. I got to write some stuff about how D&D is designed anyways.

Perhaps I've misunderstood, and you don't think I have answered that question you posed. But if so, I don't understand what your objection is to my answer, given that your objection seems to take as a premise that the aim of play is not to produce a story within a shared fiction. If you start with that premise, you will never answer the question you posed (and that I tried to answer), as you have ruled out any possible answer in framing your premise in such a fashion.

Where in your quoting of me was a question? I'll read them later, but I might not comment as the thread is running down.

Perhaps you missed my multiple posts on this matter upthread, where I pointed out that the 4e DMG already shows how to handle this issue satisfactorily, giving a range of ways for using XP plus explaining how XP-less levelling would work.

I think I skipped it as I did most of that edition.

The post to which you have replied wasn't addressing that issue, though. It was refuting your claims about what playing D&D involves, and also your implicit claims about the meaning of the word "game".

Seriously? Because it didn't look like you were trying to refute anything. It was mostly personal experience and more on how the Big Model definition of game is the one you use. Most of the world doesn't. IIRC about the Big Model philosophy's definition it didn't include strategy in its whole length, but equated "gaming" to two or more people expressing themselves near each other.

 

[pemerton]

Where in your quoting of me was a question?

You said "using an RPG like D&D, a massive construction of game mechanics hundreds of pages in size, in order to do what rules usually get in the way of doing seems very counter intuitive to me". That implies a question, along the lines of "Why do it?" I answered that implicit question.

It was mostly personal experience and more on how the Big Model definition of game is the one you use.

And the ones my kids and all their friends use. I don't think they've been reading The Forge at kindergarten. (And I know I wasn't reading it when I was GMing Oriental Adventures in 1986.)

 

[howandwhy99]

You said "using an RPG like D&D, a massive construction of game mechanics hundreds of pages in size, in order to do what rules usually get in the way of doing seems very counter intuitive to me". That implies a question, along the lines of "Why do it?" I answered that implicit question.

My mistake. But to be honest you wrote almost nothing about using Oriental Adventures for a game. You wrote all about making a story like a movie director might. Setting the scene. Framing the scene. What are the actors motivations in the scene. MacGuffins. Pacing. And how the outcome of the game was predetermined - and hence not a game at all, but theater where actors depict playing a game. None of these are relevant to playing a game.

Please use actual game terminology if you're going to tell others about how you play a game. What is the field of play? What are the playing pieces? What are the rules the players follow? What are the rules for players using those pieces? How are these pieces used as game resources? What is the objective of the game? What is the starting state of the game? What are the end conditions?

The only mechanics you referenced was the Story trading mechanic as "action resolution" or (narrative resolution for whose story gets to be added to big story next) and gambling with stakes.

And the ones my kids and all their friends use. I don't think they've been reading The Forge at kindergarten. (And I know I wasn't reading it when I was GMing Oriental Adventures in 1986.)

Ask your kids what they think a game is: Something like playing cards or a boardgame or something like telling their friends a story. You might be surprised.

 

[pemerton]

You wrote all about making a story like a movie director might. Setting the scene. Framing the scene. What are the actors motivations in the scene. MacGuffins. Pacing. And how the outcome of the game was predetermined - and hence not a game at all, but theater where actors depict playing a game. None of these are relevant to playing a game.

<snip>

Ask your kids what they think a game is: Something like playing cards or a boardgame or something like telling their friends a story. You might be surprised.

With all due respect, I think I have a better handle on my kid's use of the word "game" then you do. I also don't see why I should trust their reports of conscious definitions above their actual usage as a sign of meaning: that doesn't strike me as very methodologically sound from a lexographical point of view.

On the substantive point: I did not talk about the outcome of the game being predetermined. I denied that that is so in my game. I also made the point that this is, in part, why action resolution mechanics are needed.

Indeed, it is of the essence of "Forge" play that the outcome is not predetermined. Unlike a director, there is no storyboard of scenes, because there is no script or screenplay. Unlike a director, the "actors" (a very poor analogy, and not one that I used) introduce their character's motivations.

In fact, there is almost no analogy between "Forge" play and theatre - theatre is about performance, not authorship, whereas "Forge" play is primarily about authorship, not performance. You are projecting your own apparent obsession with whether or not D&D is theatre onto my description of play without (it seems) even bothering to actually respond to what I wrote.

Framing the scene. <snip> MacGuffins. Pacing.

<snip>

Please use actual game terminology if you're going to tell others about how you play a game.

Last I checked, ENworld didn't have any rule prohibiting posters from explaining their games using what is pretty conventional terminology for discussing RPGing - "scene framing" and "'pacing" are hardly foreign notions, for instance.

And D&D module writers have been writing crappy modules with no rationale other than to kill X orcs to gain random object (crown, princess, secret map, whatever - the so-called MacGuffin) since at least the mid-80s. The last one of these I personally tried to make something useful of was the 3rd in Green Ronin's Freeport series. (Madness In Freeport, I think it was called.) If you've got a beef with that sort of adventure design, take it up with those module writers. In the meantime I'll just stay over here running my McGuffin-free game.

Also, you have never answered a question I asked you some time ago: how does a GM in White Plume Mountain adjudicate a player's decision to use doors to surf over the tetanus pits in the frictionless corridor, other than by imagining how those (non-existent) doors might behave on a (non-existent) frictionless surface punctuated by (non-existent) pits? That is reasoning about the causal properties and processes of an imaginary state of affairs. I don't particular care how you want to describe it, but there are only two canonical terms I know of for describing such a cognitive process: in science it is called doing a thought experiment; and in contemporary analytic philosophy it is called reasoning within the scope of a fiction (and the asserted propositions are taken to be governed by a fiction operator). And I have yet to see a D&D adventure specified with sufficient imaginary detail to constitute a thought experiment!

This is the fundamental difference between D&D and a boardgame or typical wargame: player action declarations are open-ended rather than confined to a list, because the player is free to declare any action for his PC which s/he regards as feasible within the (non-existent but imagined) game situation. That is what people are talking about when they talk about "the shared fiction" and "fictional positioning". It has nothing to do with literary theory - it's an attempt to describe the metaphysical and epistemic circumstances of play, not any sort of aesthetic state of affairs.

 

[howandwhy99]

I apologize for the heat of my last post. It's been obvious we disagree about the most basic elements of what it means to play a game, play an RPG, and even role play for some time. Your game is about authorship - something only partial to playing a game, my game actually needs a game for the players to solve while achieving objectives within it. Yours is theater because it posits game play as creating a shared fiction, mine is a game because it requires a prepared mechanical design players seek to decipher for playing it to occur. Scene framing is practically a requirement to create collaborative fiction, but actual game playing isn't. Treating roleplaying as storytelling doesn't match up with the design of thousands of games in our hobby. I'm guessing because they weren't really designed to do so. Those rule sets were designed to be gamed.

how does a GM in White Plume Mountain adjudicate a player's decision to use doors to surf over the tetanus pits in the frictionless corridor, other than by imagining how those (non-existent) doors might behave on a (non-existent) frictionless surface punctuated by (non-existent) pits?

It all depends upon the referee and the code used to create the game board these terms are referring to. If it exists on the game board, there must be some mechanics to be referenced by the referee when the players engage with it. There is the metaphysics of games: they are about what the participants actually have to do, not about those reporting on it. Sports rules may reference a sports field, but playing sports isn't performing a fiction. We've gone over this before, about how D&D is about a fantasy game not creating a fiction or non-ficton because it requires a game to actually be played, what the players actually do, not how its results match up with somewhere else in our shared reality. How do we know we know this about games? Because as people we seek to distinguish between fantasy and reality every day, but we don't necessarily have to be telling a story about to do so. You and I know both know when we are creating a story by making things up and when we're not.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Those rule sets were designed to be gamed.

If you demand to deal in absolutes then my response to the above is "No." The rules sets were designed to adjudicate actions a fictional persona takes within the fictional world. They were not designed to be code-broken as a player always tries to figure out the "right" way to game the system and thus "win" the game.

"Roleplaying Games" may have been a manufactured term by the creators, based on the relevant existing definitions "Role Playing" and "Games", but they broke new ground and formed a new thing that is neither of its two pieces but instead a whole new approach.

I'm willing to back away from my absolutism above and agree that some RPGers approach RPGs more from the game aspect and others from the role playing aspect. And that the original designers had similar intents in their design as players do in their approach (if that's even a relevant concern now as posited upthread). Are you?