D&D General On Skilled Play: D&D as a Game

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's true. It may be productive to think about some RPG mechanics as defining player fiat over the shared fiction (which is distinct from player influence over that fiction).

I'm not saying SP falls outside roleplaying. I am suggesting it falls outside gaming, if to be a game depends on system, rules, quantifiable outcomes. (The view of Salen and Zimmerman, and others.) There are challenges to that view, yet if we want games to be something we can positively speak about, then we must be able to count some phenomena as not games.

Based on all the above - I might propose SP is play, and it is role-play, and when it plays out as or within rules and mechanics, it is role-play gaming. I like the way it pushes attention toward how well players parse and respond to what is narrated, and explore what the author has in mind (or has recorded). It is respectful to the author. I accept separating "your play" from your materiel, playfully, but not gamefully.

Eh, I'm not sure I agree, but I accept that you're using a specific definition of 'game'. I think this is another area where definitions are difficult because clearly a mutual story telling is not a game by most definitions. OTOH what happens if you put in some rules? Even if those rules are PURE PROCESS they make it more gamelike (IE go around the fire clockwise adding to the story). And yet, that rule probably isn't sufficient to get us 'over the top' into game. What if each participant has to toss one of their sticks on the fire to take a turn? What if whomever throws the most sticks on goes next? What if each participant tells the story only from one character's point of view, their character? I mean, AT SOME POINT there's enough there for everyone to agree it is now a game. I don't think we can exactly define that point. Also we may have disagreements on if the point requires 'in fiction' rules (IE what fiction you can tell at a given point) vs process rules (Who gets to go next).

 

[Savage Wombat]

I want a game system with ATOMIC actions now.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I feel there are exits from that mess. Chiefly when one thinks of RPG mechanics as points of player fiat over the fiction; typically (and in fact desirably) stochastic.

Example - In the Court of Stars our players want permission to open the Terrible Door. They of course role-play the negotiation and that may be enough, but they are able to make a gameful move also. The glamour bard might attempt an enthralling performance and make a Charisma (Persuasion) check. I wouldn't call this SP if there were no connection between their playful actions and their gameful ones, and this is achieved through managing the stochastic nature of the interaction. A DM might set advantage or disadvantage, might grant or deny a roll, and so on.

Being granted permission, they reach the door and must circumvent its traps. The arcane trickster might put mage hand or unseen servant to work here. Through recognising that in order to address game as game, SP must in the end engage with the mechanics, we might give ourselves permission to achieve a more delightful sharing of the narrative.

Right, I think you have hit on one of, probably THE, main reason why SP in the classic sense breaks down. That is that there is no complete and detailed world. If we were simply to RP free-form the bard and the paladin negotiating with Titania to allow them to open the door, that's fine, but that cannot incorporate considerations like what the bard's magic can accomplish. We need RULES for that, because there is no way the GM thought through every possibility and wrote down "If the bard plays a magical tune, then the PC's succeed." There are INFINITE tactics like this, and once you get into these kinds of situations you really aren't playing a game anymore unless you put some sort of mechanism in place.

Obviously we could simply claim that the GM can adjudicate every possible tactic, but what are the basis of his decisions? This is largely why D&D works fairly well in an old school mode when you are in the 'dungeon', but it breaks down pretty quick outside of that specific kind of play. @pemerton has often noted that B/X has problems with overland play for this reason.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Indeed, but that is not rationally where my argument leads: SP adherents perforce engaged with the game mechanics. It was - and is - only in the context of such mechanics that their playful pursuit became gameful.

This suggests that well-implemented SP does not require any kind of denial of the game mechanics. Rather the opposite: they should be embraced... in the mode that is valued.

The challenge is in defining some such set of mechanics. I mean, Saving Throws, and Hit Points, and to an extent ability scores, AC, etc. do produce some sort of mechanical underpinnings. You also have equipment lists, and other resources that your PC has (spells perhaps). These can all be managed. OTOH there really are few, if any, rules for how that management works (IE what damage do you take from a trap, the GM's key may say, but there's no other rule for that like 4e has). As I said before, this CAN work in terms of the 'dungeon' (a series of physical and mental challenges which are discrete and bounded, largely independent, and present themselves in sequence). It is MUCH harder and eventually impossible once you get into more complex situations like social situations, or even overland exploration.

I think you COULD build a stronger system though. It would include only mechanics that are concrete (IE a check that tells you how far you jump is OK, but one that handles whether you brought along an extra torch is not). It would need to include a mechanism for handling assisting another PC (IE the bard in my previous example). This gets you to the level where at least SOME GM arbitration in less nailed down situations can fall to specific rules and process. However, now you reach the issue of where 3e and 5e are at. That is, nothing tells us what the proper context and process is for when checks are required or what they signify in terms of change in the fiction. Usually other sorts of 'hard moves', like casting a spell DO show you how to handle that, in D&D. 4e tried to add skill challenges for that purpose, but that requires unlinking the results of the check from the specific fiction related to what you were trying to do. That seems to be the point at which SP really gets broken completely. Systems like 3e and 5e do break it before that though, because of that lack of context for checks something like Diplomacy can be arbitrarily potent in the fiction and bypass enough detail (elision) that it trips most people's "this is not SP" trigger.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not sure they would be justified in that, the distinction is entirely arbitrary and you can have both actively happening in the same time, I as the potential GM of this game, have no need to design or run by such constraints.

Well if you don't want to advertise your game under such labels, of course that's up to you!

And obviously the dimensions along which we can classify RPGs are (for practical purposes) unlimited - one famously classified itself as a FRPG with no elves!

But for me, knowing whether I'm going to be expected to engage in the sort of play that @AbdulAlhazred is describing, or in something closer to Burning Wheel, is pretty important!

 

[pemerton]

In the end it has to boil down to GRANULARITY. Here's an example: "My fighter lifts the gate." This is an ATOMIC action, it could invoke a skill check, or simply a comparison to the PC's STR ability score. Either way there's no realistic process by which to break it down into component actions. While this action might not be termed 'skilled' in that it is just an ordinary obvious application of your PC to the fiction, it is in keeping with the 'Skilled Play' definition.

OTOH "Roll your Remove Traps check to see if you can disable the pressure plate which triggers the pit trap" is NOT. It COULD be decomposed into a bunch of smaller specific actions. You could theoretically describe (and in original pre-Greyhawk OD&D would have had to describe) each component step that you took, moving up to the plate without touching it, chipping away a bit of stone next to the edge to make room to insert an iron spike, leveraging spikes carefully from each side of the plate so as to avoid putting torque on it, checking carefully to see if it will still move, etc. etc. etc. This is all elided into the Remove Traps check.

Now, IMHO, there is no real way to say if the later is or is not skilled play. That is we cannot say what the player's motivations and thought process are. This is because we cannot really know, as a player, if the GM really drew out a full engineering plan of this trap down to the last detail to gauge our work against, or if he's just following some conventions and agenda. Thus what have we really elided if we handle it as a thief skill? However, in terms of the classic definition 'Remove Traps' is NOT SKILLED PLAY because it elides some potential fiction.

I like this very much! Including your doubts about how much the GM is really adjudicating the fiction vs making things up. This is why I think the shared conventions/expectations of play, which are hinted at in things like the DMG text I quoted upthread, or Gygax's list of tricks in his DMG appendices, etc, are so important - they help establish what we could call the received degree and focus of granularity.

Is that really about any material difference, or is it only a distinction of quantity and not qualitative? I mean, FUNDAMENTALLY there's no difference, process-wise, in my mind between making a single Diplomacy check to convince the Court of Stars that you should be allowed to open the Terrible Door, vs a whole series of actions by the PCs, including or excluding any skill checks, which leads to the same thing.

I'm not 100% sure I've followed you here. I think the key feature of the single Diplomacy check is that we have elided fiction - eg what exactly did my guy say to the Court of Stars? - which by convention is meant to be adduced. Vincent Baker talks about this on one of his blogs:

Here's a quick resolution mechanism.

1. We each say what our characters are trying to accomplish. For instance: "My character's trying to get away." "My character's trying to shoot yours."


2. We roll dice or draw cards against one another to see which character or characters accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. For instance: "Oh no! My character doesn't get away." "Hooray! My character shoots yours."

What must we establish before we roll? What our characters intend to accomplish.

What does the roll decide? Whether our characters indeed accomplish what they intend.

What do the rules never, ever, ever require us to say? The details of our characters' actual actions. It's like one minute both our characters are poised to act, and the next minute my character's stuck in the room and your character's shot her, but we never see my character scrambling to open the window and we never hear your character's gun go off.​

3E, at least as played, seems to have a lot of us "never seeing the character actually poke around the room or say anything to the Court".

I don't think this difference from a "skilled play" approach detracts from your remarks I've quoted above about the limits and potential arbitrariness of the GM's adjudication of the fiction.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Well if you don't want to advertise your game under such labels, of course that's up to you!

And obviously the dimensions along which we can classify RPGs are (for practical purposes) unlimited - one famously classified itself as a FRPG with no elves!

But for me, knowing whether I'm going to be expected to engage in the sort of play that @AbdulAlhazred is describing, or in something closer to Burning Wheel, is pretty important!

I think I would argue that my game includes both, rather than it being absent entirely.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If you enter a bedroom, you can search the dresser with a search check, or independent of those rules you can...
<snip>
None of that is mother-may-I. You aren't asking if you can do anything, but instead telling the DM what it is that you are doing to find any treasure hidden within the dresser. Nor are you trying to guess/game the DM.

"You aren't asking if you can do anything, but instead telling the DM what it is that you are doing" sounds like a distinction without a difference. If you just tell the DM "I maneuver around stealthily, catch the orc by surprise, and cut off her head!" you aren't actually going to have it happen, because the DM is almost certainly not going to just let you have that. Every single one of these "telling the DM what it is you are doing" is, implicitly, asking for permission--by your own way of viewing things, I might add, since you have been so strident in declaring the absolute power of the DM.

Moreover? I don't see any way in which this doesn't equate to, "Know what kinds of questions your DM will answer usefully." Which, yes, is a more nuanced version of "learn to second-guess your DM," but I'm not seeing much daylight between the two things.

I think the absolute easiest example is the Sphinx riddle, in my OP. The reason I like it as an example is it's relatively "clean."

I'll grant it's clean, but that's sort of a problem from the other direction: actual play IS messy, and it's the messiness that makes the question difficult (and interesting). It also gives us a perfect example of a flaw even in non-degenerate SP: the problem when no one at the table comes up with a solution, and thus play grinds to a halt. This is particularly apt in an equally-clean example: "Persuade the king to help you." If that's based purely on player skill, it may quite literally be the case that no one at the table is bold and charismatic enough to convince the king, even though convincing the king is fantastically important. Such cases are not uncommon; they may not happen constantly, but if you have a group of very shy people (e.g., mine) they'll crop up a lot more often than is acceptable.

I think that the problem a lot of people have when thinking about these issues is that we have gone so far away from this particular model, for the most part, that we don't often see it in pure terms. Instead, we see echoes of it in other conversations (inclusion of meta-game knowledge, RPing a low intelligence character, lethality as consequence, etc.).

All fair, but even in-context there are concerns. I still don't see the salient difference between a 10' pole, or some other piece of equipment the party happens to have available, and an unseen servant spell, or some other bit of mojo the party happens to have available, yet multiple people have drawn a clear line in the sand between them (and multiple others have rejected or questioned it).

I have no idea what you mean by a degenerate use case.

You are likely already familiar with the underlying concept, even if the term is new. A degenerate use case, like a degenerate strategy, is one that technically uses the rules/structures/paradigm as presented, but in a way that violates the intent or spirit of play. A common example of a degenerate strategy is finding the easiest-to-execute, nearly-impossible-to-block attack in a fighting game, and then spamming that attack and no others. It won't succeed against a skilled player, but the vast majority of players aren't that skilled, and will fall before it. Magic: the Gathering added the 4-card limit for non-basic lands for a similar reason--people kept loading decks with tons of identical gimmick cards, which is counter to the spirit of play even if it was, technically, abiding by the rules.

Degenerate use cases, on the other hand, aren't "strategies" but rather the way you go about using a thing. The degeneracy here doesn't arise from one (or more) players exploiting some legal but boring loophole. Instead, it arises from the process of play itself becoming degenerate. A theoretical example could be (say) a dice-pool skill system that features explosion, but which permits expanding the explosion threshold until it is too big, thus making nearly every roll explode repeatedly. Such an outcome isn't, strictly, a strategy in and of itself, but is rather an approach or procedure that produces divergent (and, generally, overall-undesirable) results.

Stripping every roll of its narrative precedent and weight is something you can totally do, in that the rules don't force you to give rolls narrative precedent or weight. But doing so is using the tool in a way it specifically wasn't designed to be used, and therefore one that inherently produces undesirable results, even if it is technically a "valid" use.

(This use of "degenerate" generally comes from the way "degenerate" is used in logic: that is, a degenerate or vacuous truth is one that is true by some technicality, without actually revealing anything interesting or meaningful. "If the present King of France is bald, then the moon is made of green cheese" is, properly speaking, a completely true statement, because there is no situation where the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. But this is only because the antecedent is always false, because there IS no present King of France to be bald or coiffured. Conditionals like this that have false antecedents are vacuously true, only really showing us that conditionals are only useful when they have true antecedents. It is, technically speaking, a valid use of logic to talk about such things...but it is not a productive or desirable use of logic to have that be the ONLY way you use logic.)

But yes, absolutely. In any actual conversation scenario someone who does not want to engage in having a conversation and talking to someone because they are IRL shy can become disengaged from the play when the play involves talking to someone.

Right. This demonstrates a degenerate, but unfortunately difficult to manage, use-case for "pure" SP-like play: that the players may simply lack the necessary skill(s), and feel unable to learn them, or have an understandable aversion to doing so.

Yes. No mechanics are involved.

So a 10' pole has no mechanical attributes whatsoever? That would seem to belie its literal name, which specifies its numerical length of ten feet. And that's where my sticking point is. I don't understand how "10 ft pole," which has a length, a purchase cost, sometimes a weight, and various other potential values within the ruleset (even, to get incredibly barebones, the raw number of them you have on hand). Those are mechanics. Yes, they're mechanics attached to something with narrative weight, but that's literally everything in D&D; we don't play Scores & Spreadsheets, despite some aspersions cast to the contrary.

Agreed. It's a play style, so exactly where the line sits is subjective.

Which unfortunately makes it really hard to discuss in any meaningful way. When the borderland isn't just fuzzy, but literally differs depending on who you ask about it, what can you really say? (I said more or less the same thing earlier to Snarf Zagyg.)

From what I can tell, skilled play means "negotiating with/manipulating/persuading the DM to rule in your favor using lateral thinking/fictional positioning/logical reasoning."

Yeah, that's...basically my position as well. Which is why it's hard for me to view it much as "skill," because it feels far too much like "know the right code-words to induce the DM to rule favorably rather than unfavorably."

I think there's a slightly cynical edge to this (introduced especially by "manipulating") but it's basically right. In the D&D context, though, we have to talk about the content/topic of that "lateral thinking" and "logical reasoning" - the focus is very much on geography, architecture, and certain physical actions. In principle the sort of approach you describe might be used for a politically-focused RPG, but that wouldn't be much like Gygaxian D&D!

I am generally not a cynical person; I just find that the cases people gush about look, from the outside, rather a lot like "manipulating" rather than "strategizing."

 

[Maxperson]

"You aren't asking if you can do anything, but instead telling the DM what it is that you are doing" sounds like a distinction without a difference. If you just tell the DM "I maneuver around stealthily, catch the orc by surprise, and cut off her head!" you aren't actually going to have it happen, because the DM is almost certainly not going to just let you have that. Every single one of these "telling the DM what it is you are doing" is, implicitly, asking for permission--by your own way of viewing things, I might add, since you have been so strident in declaring the absolute power of the DM.

First, name one thing I'm asking for permission to do in those statements. Second, while the DM has the power to say no I can't do any of that, I have also been strident in declaring that doing so would be a violation of the social contract, so the DM simply will never do that.

Moreover? I don't see any way in which this doesn't equate to, "Know what kinds of questions your DM will answer usefully." Which, yes, is a more nuanced version of "learn to second-guess your DM," but I'm not seeing much daylight between the two things.

There is nothing there which asks a question or permission. Nothing. I'm simply being thorough in my declarations to him about what I am doing to search. Why leave it to a roll when I don't have to?

 

[clearstream]

AT SOME POINT there's enough there for everyone to agree it is now a game. I don't think we can exactly define that point.

Agreed. I used to run a homebrew dice-less RPG. Rules were thin - one page - but felt like enough to call it a game.

Also we may have disagreements on if the point requires 'in fiction' rules (IE what fiction you can tell at a given point) vs process rules (Who gets to go next).

In the example above, the majority of written rules were in-fiction rules. There were written process rules listing the elements of a character. I think there were one or two tacit - but consistent - process rules about the flow of play.

I've argued that there is a chink in the wall: SP does not necessarily conflict with engaging with the game mechanics. One possible motivation for this is to update the concept. RPG rules have advanced over time - they've become more sophisticated, flexible, resilient, and streamlined. To me, one benefit of thinking about SP today is to apply it in a more sophisticated way. I believe the route to that is to allow that one can be properly doing SP while engaging with all the mechanics. That's the "nettle" I talk about. (I may be mistaking the arguments, but I sense a reluctance to accept that SP can mean SP of all the rules and not solely the fiction. In part because were it only the fiction, then it could not be what we call role-play gaming.)