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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Once we could cast continual light, every group I played with had at least one continual light object on each person in the party. I've never been in a game where we just cast it once.

Right, and they came with cases, reflectors, hoods, etc. Technically, we didn't have fire, but then by that point there was pretty much little chance that Burning Hands or some other fire spell wasn't available in some form. It pretty quickly got to the point where the only groups that had to ever worry about light were starting level 1 parties. Even if your group didn't have the spell, it was hard to imagine how you could not just buy such an item, given how easy they are to create. Hence later editions have simply included a 'sunrod' or somesuch as a 'mundane' piece of equipment. Oddly 4e lacks a way to make permanent light, so when I deleted the sunrod it created an amusing requirement for the PCs to manage light again. The 3e-conditioned players took a while to 'get' that... OTOH sorting out what they could see was kind of a PAIN.

 

[Krachek]

Where are you getting that from?

I mean that guessing all hidden possibility for avoiding a roll is a kind of waste of time.
Better read the DM notes, but what if he don’t mention where is the gold, put simply assign a DC.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

OK, maybe there's a point I'm missing here, but it SEEMS to me that the only difference between 'fighting with an orc' and 'searching for something someone hid' is that the other character 'the orc' is present in the moment. There's STILL a contest going on here. Even if the situation is 'man against environment', you can traditionally see that as a sort of conflict (climbing a wall might be an example). True PvP, I haven't really analyzed that, but I assume you were including NPCs in your comments.

I would say that all the same factors really apply here. I mean, suppose I personally am not super convincing, but my character role in the Braunstein is 'ambassador to East Bissel' or something. ALL of the same considerations that apply in our discussions of D&D apply here. I am not sure that the existence or lack of a 'party' is all that determinative. So, overall, I'm not sure we disagree much, but then you did say "not quite", . So maybe we almost totally agree.

Well, to start with, you used the specific example of combat (opposition) as opposed to diplomacy (persuasion). Hit an NPC as opposed to talk to an NPC.

As I explained, there is a very good reason for that historical distinction, and it is a distinction and a difference. It's the difference between Diplomacy (caps, the game) and a double-blind wargame with a referee.

The distinction comes when you have the referee "step in the shoes" of the NPCs.

To go to your issue with the Braunstein case- yes, that would be a problem if you were an ambassador! And you would likely lose. Doesn't make it not a game. Just like you can be bad at Diplomacy (the game). Of course, SP would imply that you would then look for a different approach; again, Arneson was handed a specific role (peaceful pamphleteer) but through SP "won" by using his own player skills differently and in a way that the referee did not expect.

This really gets down to the core of the issue; the greatest strength, and weakness, of SP is the referee (DM). A DM that is adversarial, or arbitrary, makes for a terrible experience (just like a biased referee in a sports contest ruins it). A good DM, one that can inhabit different roles and understand that they will have different goals, and one that is accepting of player innovation (and happy to see players find new ways to succeed) is crucial.

In other words, you need a good DM to allow for great SP. Otherwise, it doesn't work well for the players. As I stated earlier, most of the "rules" for DMs that we see today are just codifications of "best practices heuristics" that were around during the 70s.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not using D&D rules!

Sure. There might be corner case scenarios where my action might fail, but generally it will not and I'm still not asking permission. The action happens as I declared it. It just might not work out in a few rare cases.

And yes, you could destroy what it was you were searching for. I bashed open a few false bottoms in drawers that I found, only to discover some broken potions. No roll was needed to find the compartment, though, since my skilled play revealed it.

I would personally say that all this asserts is that there are different levels of difficulty. I could say to you "Oh, its a single goblin, you killed it." I could say "You searched and easily found the concealed thingy." In either case checks could be appropriate, regardless of what specific actions you declare. The point is, there's no clear boundaries here. Yes, SP has a, fairly arbitrary, convention that certain things are simply described instead of diced for. These are universally going to take the form of 'puzzles' where you must declare very specific actions in order to 'win'. I would note that 4e literally has a section of the encounter chapter which describes this process in detail.

I won't say there is NO rationale there, often it is a question of whether or not a situation is immediately harmful to the PC, and just how explicitly 'contest like' it is. Note how in classic D&D you just fall into a pit and take damage, but you fight a goblin and need to pass checks to kill it. This is really pretty arbitrary, in game process terms, but it has SOME basis in fiction. Clearly in the long process of 'evolving' these conventions, to use @pemerton's construction of it, a lot of these conventions 'froze out' and became set in SP tradition. I think it has mostly to do with just what made the GM's dungeon crawl paradigm work. There wasn't a theory to it, really.

 

[Maxperson]

I mean that guessing all hidden possibility for avoiding a roll is a kind of waste of time.

No. It's not. It's better to take extra time in an areas likely to have hidden treasure than to miss the treasure because you went with a roll and missed it.

Better read the DM notes, but what if he don’t mention where is the gold, put simply assign a DC.

Then he's incompetent. If he can't even be bothered to know where the treasure that he hid is hidden, I don't want to be playing in his game anyway.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The main difference is that I can't describe what I do to the orc and through skilled play minimize or eliminate the need for a roll to kill it. Unless it's tied down or paralyzed, and depending on the edition sometimes not even then, I still have to roll to hit and for damage. With searching for the hidden item, I can through how I describe what I do, completely eliminate the roll due to skilled play. If the item is hidden under the bottom right corner of the mattress and I tell the DM I lift the bottom right corner of the mattress and look there, I find the item. No roll. Or I can just search the room and if I hit the DC 15(or whatever), the DM tells me that I find an item under the right corner of the mattress

Right, you are contrasting a 'puzzle' with a 'contest', but that is just GM framing. The GM could write in his notes just "there's a thing hidden in the room." He could also write in his notes "this goblin's fighting style is X, and move Y will always defeat it." and that would be a puzzle too! Puzzle and Contest are simply alternate framings of a situation. Or as Pemerton described, the chest could contain a very clever false compartment that the GM decrees you must pass a check to find.

At this point we start to get into areas that go beyond where this thread has ventured so far. @Snarf Zagyg hinted at that when he said something to, I think it was @EzekielRaiden about how framing a Diplomacy scene such that it was a bottleneck was a GM error, not a fault of any given style of play. You can go further and begin to analyze WHY would you want to have a puzzle here, or a contest there, etc. Maybe it is because you like one more than the other, or it could be that one or the other (or some third thing like just describing how the PCs move from A to B in the fiction with no mechanics employed) has more utility in a gamist sense in that situation.

Again, I think Snarf pointed out that Gary was thoroughly gamist. Nothing in his D&D suggests 'realism' was a consideration beyond the level of genre conventions and basically making situations 'cognizable' to the players so they could make sensible moves. His goal seems to be mostly to make things challenging for the players so they have fun playing a game of challenges, and THAT is probably the only definition of SP there can be. It is simply a game where the agenda is a specific agenda. I think we have got here a few times already, by slightly different logic each time

 

[Maxperson]

I would personally say that all this asserts is that there are different levels of difficulty. I could say to you "Oh, its a single goblin, you killed it." I could say "You searched and easily found the concealed thingy." In either case checks could be appropriate, regardless of what specific actions you declare.

You can indeed say things like that and I have. When an 11th level group encountered a group of 5 goblins or something I asked what they did. If they told me that they killed them, I would simply say that they were dead. It wasn't worth playing out. It also wasn't skilled play that resulted in my narrating those deaths due to how they described their actions to me.

What I'm talking about is a player describing how he cuts the goblins neck open and it dies. Well, that would work 100%.............................IF he hits. He doesn't get to succeed without a roll based on what he tells me that he is doing, unlike what can and often does happen with such descriptions of searching rooms.

Skilled play can get around environmental challenges with no roll and/or little to no danger. It can also avoid combat or reduce the chances of getting into a combat. It can give you advantages in combat such as shooting the rope holding the giant chandelier dropping it on the goblins or tipping over the giant oil pot and lighting it on fire. It's not going to just kill the goblin by describing how you are attacking it, though.

I won't say there is NO rationale there, often it is a question of whether or not a situation is immediately harmful to the PC, and just how explicitly 'contest like' it is. Note how in classic D&D you just fall into a pit and take damage, but you fight a goblin and need to pass checks to kill it. This is really pretty arbitrary, in game process terms, but it has SOME basis in fiction. Clearly in the long process of 'evolving' these conventions, to use @pemerton's construction of it, a lot of these conventions 'froze out' and became set in SP tradition. I think it has mostly to do with just what made the GM's dungeon crawl paradigm work. There wasn't a theory to it, really.

Yeah. The goblin is opposing your attempts to kill it, so rolls are called for. The pit is just sitting there, so if you fail to notice it and walk into it, you fall.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This really gets down to the core of the issue; the greatest strength, and weakness, of SP is the referee (DM). A DM that is adversarial, or arbitrary, makes for a terrible experience (just like a biased referee in a sports contest ruins it). A good DM, one that can inhabit different roles and understand that they will have different goals, and one that is accepting of player innovation (and happy to see players find new ways to succeed) is crucial.

In other words, you need a good DM to allow for great SP. Otherwise, it doesn't work well for the players. As I stated earlier, most of the "rules" for DMs that we see today are just codifications of "best practices heuristics" that were around during the 70s.

Right, and that is why I said up thread a ways that there is NOT as much daylight between games like Dungeon World and OSR D&D as some might imagine. In both cases the GM's agenda is very similar. Gary is a 'fan of the PCs' and he's handing them adversity in order to allow them to shine (or not), etc. There are significant differences, but both systems are actually starting out at nearly the same point. What 'Story Now' games which bind resolution to direction of the fiction vs some specific notion of 'conflict' is just that, different use of resolution mechanics. The more modern games have observed the issues with the older ones and come up with some answers. OTOH the OVERALL agenda is a bit different, 'play to find out what happens' vs 'play to find out if the players can win the dungeon'. So, not entirely comparable, but they do start from answering the same basic question, 'how to have fun', and both inhabiting the role playing game genre.

 

[pemerton]

Note how in classic D&D you just fall into a pit and take damage, but you fight a goblin and need to pass checks to kill it. This is really pretty arbitrary, in game process terms, but it has SOME basis in fiction. Clearly in the long process of 'evolving' these conventions, to use @pemerton's construction of it, a lot of these conventions 'froze out' and became set in SP tradition. I think it has mostly to do with just what made the GM's dungeon crawl paradigm work. There wasn't a theory to it, really.

Building on this - when you read Gygax's rulebooks and especially his DMG, you can see in so many places how decisions that have been made by him in the course of adjudicating and preparing for an "evolving" game are presented as frozen/locked in completely devoid of that "ecological" context.

Which I think is quite weird, and in some ways self-defeating. Rather than give us his solutions to his problems - ear seekers, lurkers above, 100 rules for opening doors, guidelines on how NPC MUs will never teach spells, etc - it would be better to identify possible pressure point of play, and places where the GM is likely to need to exercise control. And then encourage each GM to find his/her own approach and way of handling things.

I know the previous paragraph is a bit unrealistic in that it is calling for a degree of self-conscious reflection that is unlikely in the early days of an activity. (Though in some ways Tunnels & Trolls has more of this than Gygax, and was written not that much later.) But it's a bit odd that things are still frozen all these years later.

 

[Maxperson]

Right, you are contrasting a 'puzzle' with a 'contest', but that is just GM framing. The GM could write in his notes just "there's a thing hidden in the room." He could also write in his notes "this goblin's fighting style is X, and move Y will always defeat it." and that would be a puzzle too! Puzzle and Contest are simply alternate framings of a situation. Or as Pemerton described, the chest could contain a very clever false compartment that the GM decrees you must pass a check to find.

What if I tell the DM that I'm taking the chest apart and cutting the bottom into small pieces? It wouldn't make sense for the DM to maintain the "You must pass a check to find it" attitude. If a player skillfully does something that would find the cleverly hidden compartment, it should be allowed or the DM is violating the social contract. Not to mention stifling player agency.

Again, I think Snarf pointed out that Gary was thoroughly gamist. Nothing in his D&D suggests 'realism' was a consideration beyond the level of genre conventions and basically making situations 'cognizable' to the players so they could make sensible moves. His goal seems to be mostly to make things challenging for the players so they have fun playing a game of challenges, and THAT is probably the only definition of SP there can be. It is simply a game where the agenda is a specific agenda. I think we have got here a few times already, by slightly different logic each time

Gary wasn't trying to simulate reality. That's clear. He did create the game to make some sort of realistic sense, though. All you have to do is look at his rules and you can see that crystal clear. Poison kills. If you make the save, the poison doesn't get into the blood somehow. He could have just left that part out, but he wanted it to make sense. Plate armor protects better than leather does. A shield can be used against a limited number of attacks in a round, rather than all of them.

It's very apparent that he wanted a level of realism in D&D. He just wasn't trying to treat it like a simulation of reality like a lot of wargamers wanted their wargames to be.