D&D 5E With the Holy Trinity out, let's take stock of 5E

[howandwhy99]

What does this even mean? The phrase "bound to the game" isn't an ordinary phrase of English

Games are bounded and are played when operated within. Simple enough. Being on a football field doesn't mean someone is playing football. They need to operate in conjunction with the field, a manifestation of the rules, with all the other rules.

I don't understand the point of this assertion. I am assuming that the players and referee are communicating in a natural language, most often (when it comes to D&D) in English. There is no upper limit on the number of well-formed sentences of English, so the requirement that the players must communicate their desired actions to the referee by way of a well-formed English sentence does not impose any meaningful limit on the range of possible actions.

Just because limits and boundaries of a game are not meaningful to you doesn't mean they don't exist. You might as well a say people are infinitely intelligent, strong, or knowledgeable here and now. But I'm not here to debate what a "meaningful limit" is for a game. Needless to say, D&D's is very broad.

"let's pretend"

This isn't a game because has has no design and no objective. I would agree it's bounded, but they aren't addressing a pattern either, a game to decipher. The mere act of invention isn't playing a game. It isn't even required to play a game.

There are modern RPGs which don't require rules to be made up on the fly (eg HeroWars/Quest), but the only version of D&D that comes close to this is 4e.

This is a muddled area. Lots of games need more rules to run functionally. Adding rules to a game can be part of the game rules, but few games include such rules.

This doesn't actual adjudicate anything. You have not stated any rule.

The rule is the map, the map is generated by following and is a manifestation of the system. It's already in the total possibility of game states, the DM probably should have had it on hand before play however.

I'll repeat my question.
...
How is this to be resolved?

According to the predetermined design by the DM before the game begins so players may be able to game it. Suggestions in the AD&D (or other) books are merely guidelines for the DM to settle before play.

In order to resolve the situation I have described the GM has to make all that stuff up

Not at all. I think that only applies to badly designed games or maybe a story game where narrative creation is the game objective.

From the point of view of play, it makes no difference when the GM makes it up (unless you a very worried about the GM being biased by the actual fact of action declaration).

Here is the major point of our miscommunication. D&D is like Mastermind, Chess, card games, boardgames, and in mechanics vastly more like wargames than anything else. The "rules" aren't rules. They aren't known to the players. They must never be known to them. They are a code hidden behind a screen and gamed (deciphered) through play. Just like in Mastermind a referee who switches the pegs, the code, around after the game has begun, the D&D campaign, has cheated the players out of a game. The game ceases to be a game. No gameplay can be had. No competition to achieve the goal first. No cooperation to work with others to do so.

Now D&D is more of a game than a puzzle because the objective is not to come up with the underlying algorithm to the game. Just like Chess we can learn, reach short term objectives (often scored with points), and improve our play without ultimately needing to solve the game. The objective in Chess is capture the other player's king piece. The objective in D&D is to be the best roleplayer one can by gaining points in the role selected (class), one the game has system design to support mastery of. There is no ultimate "end point" or endgame. The game simply gets harder level by level for the players. However, due to a number of design factors it has a practical end somewhere after level 10.

This simply isn't true - the DMG includes both advice on how to build a dungeon, campaign world etc prior to play, and also contains advice on action resolution.

That simply isn't true. You're misreading the books. There was no such thing as action resolution prior to the Big Model. Those ideas are not retroactive to the intentions of designers prior their origin.

Here is one example of its advice on action resolution (p 97):

You may use either of two methods to allow discovery of the mechanicsm which operates [a secret door]:

1. You may designate probability by a linear curve, typically with a d6. Thus, a secret door is discovered 1 in 6 . . .

2. You may have the discovery of the existence of the secret door enable player characters to attempt to operate it by actual manipulation, i.e. the players concerned give instructions as to how they will have their characters attempt to make it functin: "Turn te wall sconce.", "Slide it left.", "Press the samll protrusion, and see if it pivots.", "Pull the chain."

It is quite acceptable to have a mixture of methods of discovering the operation of [a] secret door.​

These are actually the same game attempt to learn the game's design, but two different strategies to reach it as selected by the players. The collapse of odds into a die roll is the act of exploring the discovery of the secret door within the odds of its current probability. Just like any maze solve can be rolled for. Now engaging with particulars may lead to changing those odds, even gaining 100% odds (or at least beyond the game's cap) and discovering the door through so-called "role play". What's actually happening is game play, further deciphering beyond the current situation. The player i selecting to navigate the maze or is selecting to trust their luck and attempt a die roll to reach the same objective based on the odds of the current game state.

This might help explain something I personally remember from my earliest Gencons in the last 1980s about Gygax believing all roleplaying games must have dice (or some other probability determiner) to be an RPG. How mocked would he be by the Big Model true believers today? This was just after Amber Diceless came out, but that game could easily be always 0% and always 100% probability with no further game play allowable when exploring the game.

Here is another, which I mentioned upthread, on secondary skills (p 12):

Secondary Skills were understood as bad design, but a phrase behind which a system could be included. Without the system this is handwaving.

This is advice to a GM on how to improvise adjudications of players' use of their PCs secondary skills. Right there on page 12 of Gygax's DMG.

He has even worse advice in those books. I advise not following it. This goes for those Basic line books too. [MENTION=6785802]guachi[/MENTION]

I have asked this question many times over the months and years, but have never recieved an answer.

It is particularly odd in the context of someone emphasising D&D "as it was meant to be played", given that off-the-wall actions based around manipulating the imagined environment of the dungeon were a bigger part of classic D&D play than they are of most contemporary games. It doesn't get any more old-school than surfing doors that have been removed from their hinges over super-tetanus pits in the frictionless corridor in White Plume Muntain, but the game has no mechanics to resolve that (either the door removal or the surfing). It's all up to GM adjudication!

I can't help but think we've covered a lot of stuff in the past, but maybe we still aren't clear on this.

Before a game can be played, a code, it must be created. This includes the map. Everything on that map is a piece of that map. It can also be explored as a maze. Everything in the game can be studied, mastered, and used in conjunctions with other pieces. These pieces could be places, items, people, even doors, hinges, pits, corridors, and the basic mechanics of surfing. But they are all added prior to play by the DM, generated on the fly during a session, or conformed to the players' description based on what the game can do in its preset design. When converting a module creation this means the overall area, the locations within, the monsters, the items, the treasure, the traps, everything in White Plume Mountain, must be converted to the design with appropriate maps and statistics. More will also likely need to be created based upon the games generation requirements. That's all standard stuff. Just like switching a level design from one game engine to another.

There exists a library worth of books in our hobby that actually provide this very support. They are suggestions to individual DMs to help them run their games. The sharing of created design is essential to a strong and healthy RPG community to support the running D&D games.

Of course, in no way is any of this required to play (there is no running) 1-page storygames. They don't need these designs in order to be played. They don't need game modules or setting designs, much less ones measured and weighted. Story creation doesn't need game systems or rules at all. Because collaborative storytelling isn't gameplay.

 

[guachi]

Funnily enough, Moldvay says exactly the same thing and it's out in 1980 IIRC. Funny how history works.

Gah! I was flipping through my Moldvay Basic set and I couldn't find where he said it so I didn't include it.

The foreward by Moldvay is dated December, 1980 and the first printing is January, 1981 so thinking it came out in 1980 isn't too much of a stretch.

 

[Hussar]

That's a boardgame. Tabletop Roleplaying comes from stepping beyond the rules on the page - as Arneson demonstrated with Braunstein. And that's why you have a DM. To be able to handle situations when the rules themselves wouldn't do the job.



And all tabletop RPGs are based on the idea that RPGs are not and can not have a complete rules set that can handle any action you can possibly take. And you have ways of sorting out what happens under these situations.

And the idea that the early 80s was early D&D caused my jaw to drop.

Well, let's be fair here. Early 80's is pretty early in D&D. I mean, the hobby is 40 years old, so, we're talking in the first quarter of the game's history. Not an unreasonable view to take. I have to admit, I tend to lump everything from before the first crash in 83 together as "early in the hobby".

 

[Hussar]

H&W99, why do you think that Gygax would be "mocked" for claiming that RPG's need some sort of random determiner of events, typically dice? Considering the vast, vast majority of RPG's use dice or some sort of random determiner (like a Jenga tower forex), claims that RPG's need a random determiner aren't really that contentious. Most indie, Forgie games use dice as well. The number of RPG's out there that eschew all forms of random determiners is actually very, very small.

But the idea that action resolution is a Forge idea is ludicrous and a serious misreading of pretty much every single RPG prior to the mid-nineties. EVERY RPG, bar none, includes action resolution mechanics. All of them. There is no retroactivity here at all.

 

[pemerton]

In my personal experience, I thought about how I might bring 4e a little closer to BECMI, so I considered removing healing surges and moving to side initiative with a BECMI style Combat Sequence. But removing healing surges is major surgery, and there were so many knock on effects to consider with side initiative that ultimately it just wasn't worth the effort.

These sorts of concrete examples make this easier to discuss!

Upthread I said that removing healing surges from 4e would be like removing hit points from 5e - ie very non-trivial.

Side-by-side initiative I think is easier - in practice, in my experience, combat evolves to that over time in any event, as the players delay their PCs' actions to set up various sorts of combos, and as the number of enemy monsters/NPCs thins out.

If you want "full-fledged" side inititiative - eg action declarations prior to rolling the initiative dice for each side - then I think you would also want to get rid of out-of-turn actions other than OAs and mark enforcement. That would weaken some classes (eg rangers) for whom such actions make a significant contribution to their damage output, but I don't think that would be the end of the world. And not hard to implement - every class has plenty of standard action options at every choice-point.

 

[pemerton]

The objective in D&D is to be the best roleplayer one can by gaining points in the role selected (class), one the game has system design to support mastery of.

Yet this objective is not stated anywhere. The AD&D PHB says this about the objective of D&D (pp 7, 8, 18):

Into this world of weird monsters, strange peoples, multitudinous states, and fabulous treasures . . . stride fearless adventurers - you and your fellow players. Inexperienced and of but small power at first, by dint of hard fighting and clever deeds, these adventurers advance in ability to become forces to be reckoned with . . . By means of group co-operation and individual achievement, and adventurer can become ever more powerful. . . . There is no "winner", no fnal objective, and the campaign grows and changes as it matures. . . .

[O]ne player must serve as the Dungeon Master, the shaper of the fantasy milieu . . . The other participants become adventurers by creating characters to expore the fantastic world and face all of its challenges - monsters, magic and unnamed menaces. . . . [E]ach character begins at the bottom of his or her chosen class . . . By successfully meeting the challenges posed, they gain experience and move upwards in power, just as actual paying experience really increases paying skill. Imagination, intelligence, problem solving ability, and memory are all continually exercised by participants in the game. . . .

As players build the experience level of their characters and go forth seeking ever greater challenges, they must face stronger monsters and more difficult problems of other sorts . . .

Skilled players always make a point of knowing what they are doing, i.e. they have an objective. They co-operate . . . in order to gain their ends. . . .

The approach you wish to take to the game, how you believe you can most successfully meet the challenges which it poses, and which role you desire to play are dictated by character class​

The objective that this present is one of increasing your character's power by successfully and skilfully meeting the challenges posed by the game (through the medium of the Dungeon Master). Class dictates the role adopted to meet those challenges, but there is no suggestion that class either (i) changes the nature of the challenges, nor (ii) determines what counts as successfully meeting them. And the DMG experience rules are class-neutral (ie all classes equally gain experience for defeating monsters and for finding treasure).

[Gygax] has even worse advice in those books. I advise not following it. This goes for those Basic line books too.

I think that Gygax and Moldvay are better authorities than you as to what RPGing really is about, or how classic D&D is meant to be played. Neither you nor anyone else is under any obligation to follow their advice, but you can't just ignore what they wrote while setting yourself up as some authority on the true nature of the game.

The rule is the map, the map is generated by following and is a manifestation of the system. It's already in the total possibility of game states, the DM probably should have had it on hand before play however.

According to the predetermined design by the DM before the game begins so players may be able to game it. Suggestions in the AD&D (or other) books are merely guidelines for the DM to settle before play.

<snip>

The "rules" aren't rules. They aren't known to the players. They must never be known to them. They are a code hidden behind a screen and gamed (deciphered) through play.

<snip>

Before a game can be played, a code, it must be created. This includes the map. Everything on that map is a piece of that map. It can also be explored as a maze. Everything in the game can be studied, mastered, and used in conjunctions with other pieces. These pieces could be places, items, people, even doors, hinges, pits, corridors, and the basic mechanics of surfing. But they are all added prior to play by the DM, generated on the fly during a session, or conformed to the players' description based on what the game can do in its preset design. When converting a module creation this means the overall area, the locations within, the monsters, the items, the treasure, the traps, everything in White Plume Mountain, must be converted to the design with appropriate maps and statistics.

With respect, this is all just verbiage. I'm not sure that "conformed to the players' description based on what the game can do in its preset design" is even a meaningful phrase of English. I certainly don't know what it means. (For a start, the game can't do anything - it is neither an agent nor a machine.)

I presented a concrete ingame situation: a player wants his/her PC to smash a winch mechanism using a hammer and piton, so that a portcullis will drop rapidly to block some onrushing orcs. [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] also presented a concrete situation - a player wants his/her PC to jump over a pit. You have not explained how either situation is to be adjudicated, nor pointed to any rule in any AD&D rulebook that would answer the question. (The Wilderness Survival Guide provides jumping distance - so the rulebooks answered Hussar's question (for non-barbarian, non-acrobat PCs) in 1986.)

The idea that all this must be created before play is absurd. How many adventures have been written in which there are tables with mugs on them? Hundreds, probably thousands? How many of those adventures specified rules for breaking the mugs in question? Few or none. But since 1974 it has been a completely legitimate action declaration for a player to say "I throw the mug to the ground so that it shatters and makes a bang". How is the success of that action to be determined? In OD&D and B/X there are no rules. In AD&D the GM has to choose whether to use the "fall", "normal blow" or "crushing blow" column of the item saving throw table (on DMG p 80 - another counter-example to your claim upthread that this is all about AC and hit points), to decide whether the character's to hit and/or damage bonus for STR is a penalty to the saving throw, etc.

As [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] has stated upthread, the whole premise of an RPG is that the players aren't limited in their action declarations to certain preset moves. And the GM is expected to adjudicate novel action declarations as part-and-parcel of running the game. Many players of RPGs call this aspect of GMing "improvisation". Being able to do it effectively is a core GMing skill.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Well, let's be fair here. Early 80's is pretty early in D&D. I mean, the hobby is 40 years old, so, we're talking in the first quarter of the game's history. Not an unreasonable view to take. I have to admit, I tend to lump everything from before the first crash in 83 together as "early in the hobby".

I'm not sure whether I think the first generation of TTRPGs ended in 1974 with the publication of oD&D or 1977 with Traveller or but we're definitely talking second generation here. But either way the 80s are in the second decade, post AD&D, and the game had changed fairly radically by then.

H&W99, why do you think that Gygax would be "mocked" for claiming that RPG's need some sort of random determiner of events, typically dice? Considering the vast, vast majority of RPG's use dice or some sort of random determiner (like a Jenga tower forex), claims that RPG's need a random determiner aren't really that contentious. Most indie, Forgie games use dice as well. The number of RPG's out there that eschew all forms of random determiners is actually very, very small.

But the idea that action resolution is a Forge idea is ludicrous and a serious misreading of pretty much every single RPG prior to the mid-nineties. EVERY RPG, bar none, includes action resolution mechanics. All of them. There is no retroactivity here at all.

The Wikipedia list of diceless RPGs is tiny. Almost every tabletop RPG ever has had a randomizer.

Side-by-side initiative I think is easier - in practice, in my experience, combat evolves to that over time in any event, as the players delay their PCs' actions to set up various sorts of combos, and as the number of enemy monsters/NPCs thins out.

For the record, for initiative hacks, I'm a big fan of popcorn initiative.

Edit: And one of my works in progress removes HP from 4e (and otherwise streamlines it)

 

[Iosue]

These sorts of concrete examples make this easier to discuss!

Upthread I said that removing healing surges from 4e would be like removing hit points from 5e - ie very non-trivial.

Side-by-side initiative I think is easier - in practice, in my experience, combat evolves to that over time in any event, as the players delay their PCs' actions to set up various sorts of combos, and as the number of enemy monsters/NPCs thins out.

If you want "full-fledged" side inititiative - eg action declarations prior to rolling the initiative dice for each side - then I think you would also want to get rid of out-of-turn actions other than OAs and mark enforcement. That would weaken some classes (eg rangers) for whom such actions make a significant contribution to their damage output, but I don't think that would be the end of the world. And not hard to implement - every class has plenty of standard action options at every choice-point.

Initially what made it so intimidating is that there are so many powers you have to consider and adjust for. One insight that 5e gave me was to pare the game down -- if I want BECMI style play, might as well bring the game to the BECMI classes. A "Basic 4e", if you will. One type of build for each of the Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard classes. Of course, Essentials gets you half the way there. The other issue is "until the start of your next turn" powers, and the like. I've thought of a number of different fixes for that, but it's hard to find something wholly satisfying. One idea I kicked around was doing away with powers entirely (except for spells), and sticking with basic attacks and class features.

But the upshot is, whether we're talking removing most of the classes, or all of the powers, at that point you've removed a lot of what makes 4e 4e. I would understand if someone came into the game expecting 4e and felt cheated about what the actual game was. So in the end I chose to play BECMI for BECMI, and 4e for 4e.

The interesting thing with 5e is that it's been released with certain frames pre-selected. I can say, "houseruled Basic 5e", and somebody has a good idea of what I'm talking about going in.

 

[pemerton]

Initially what made it so intimidating is that there are so many powers you have to consider and adjust for. One insight that 5e gave me was to pare the game down -- if I want BECMI style play, might as well bring the game to the BECMI classes. A "Basic 4e", if you will. One type of build for each of the Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard classes. Of course, Essentials gets you half the way there. The other issue is "until the start of your next turn" powers, and the like. I've thought of a number of different fixes for that, but it's hard to find something wholly satisfying. One idea I kicked around was doing away with powers entirely (except for spells), and sticking with basic attacks and class features.

I agree that at that point you've lost a lot of what makes 4e the game that it is. You're probably also overpowering casters compared to martial PCs.

With end-of-next-turn powers, the easiest solution would probably be to have them last through one initiative cycle after they are used.

As far as paring back classes, I think there is scope for that. A common complaint about Runepriests and Vampires was a lack of options, but as long as the options actually presented are solid, it doesn't matter for the play of any given PC that the character's growth path was pretty much pre-determined.

All of that said, I feel that 5e probably makes much of this redundant. It pretty much gives you what you would have left of 4e (bounded accuracy, a relative degree of class balance) without needing to take so much stuff out.

 

[aramis erak]

That simply isn't true. You're misreading the books. There was no such thing as action resolution prior to the Big Model. Those ideas are not retroactive to the intentions of designers prior their origin.

Yes, there was. Several games used the term before the mid 90's. Likewise, MegaTraveller and 2300AD both used "Task Resolution" - the early discussion that eventually lead to the bat-excrement that is the "big model" was observational, grounded in what was already being seen.

To be blunt: most things predate the terms which describe it, and the Usenet Rec.Games.FRP model† was descriptive, not prescriptive. It classified what already existed; it did not invent anything but the classification groups.

D&D was a mess of levels of resolution - there was the abstract tactical combat, the very concrete action resolution for picking locks and pockets - and a clear description of the consequence of failure. And some mechanical resolution at both the daily abstraction level (travel) and hourly level and 10-minute level (non-tactical dungeon movement) which allowed for checks to do various things. That these different levels of abstraction, including some that were discrete action level, doesn't require that they have been defined by some label to later; it is clear from the wording that the thief's pick pockets is used as an action resolution roll (to put or recover an object into/from a purse or pocket). The hide in shadows is also clearly intended for use as an action resolution.

D&D still is a mess of different resolutions, but, since the introduction of NWP's in late AD&D 1E, it's always included a consistent method for resolving a bunch of types of action, and made it clear that it was OK to use it as a discrete action resolution as well as a larger scale process resolution. It was a system of resolution that really broadened the game's utility.

And a game is rightly bounded by its rules - on this we agree – but note that the whole point of rules is to provide a framework in which to have a reasonable number of choices to pick from.

Humans as a whole do not deal with wide open choices all that interestingly, let alone creatively. Creativity works best within a constrained space. (This is an axiom within education - you get the best creative writing by limiting student choice of subject.) The point of the game rules is to narrow the choices down to manageable levels. That they are extensible by inferential reasoning (if A≈B and A≈C, and D≈C, then whatever resolves A, B, and C should likewise be similar, so resolving D can be done by modifying the process for A, B and C...)...



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† which the Forge adopts at outset, then expands, then mutilates beyond recognition, until it resembles a pile of guano.