howandwhy99
Adventurer
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.What does this even mean? The phrase "bound to the game" isn't an ordinary phrase of English
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.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.
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."let's pretend"
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.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.
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.This doesn't actual adjudicate anything. You have not stated any rule.
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.I'll repeat my question.
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How is this to be resolved?
Not at all. I think that only applies to badly designed games or maybe a story game where narrative creation is the game objective.In order to resolve the situation I have described the GM has to make all that stuff up
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.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).
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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.
Secondary Skills were understood as bad design, but a phrase behind which a system could be included. Without the system this is handwaving.Here is another, which I mentioned upthread, on secondary skills (p 12):
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]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.
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.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!
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.