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

[AbdulAlhazred]

I remember back in the 80s seeing people pull out their yellow notebooks with lists like that ahem cough cough cough.... I do not have proper words to explain how bleh that felt

Like I said, we literally had a handbook, you handed it to the DM and told them "these are the SOPs." If they didn't LIKE that, then they got to listen to us go through them all. Usually once was enough. Usually the DM got the idea and didn't bother to try to trick us with trivial stuff after the first time around, because it was NOT going to work.
Yes, it was 'bleh' and silly. There weren't games like DW back then, and we clearly didn't know that such a thing was even possible, let alone how to do it.

 

[Garthanos]

Like I said, we literally had a handbook, you handed it to the DM and told them "these are the SOPs." If they didn't LIKE that, then they got to listen to us go through them all. Usually once was enough. Usually the DM got the idea and didn't bother to try to trick us with trivial stuff after the first time around, because it was NOT going to work.
Yes, it was 'bleh' and silly. There weren't games like DW back then, and we clearly didn't know that such a thing was even possible, let alone how to do it.

RuneQuest had explicit character skills for all kinds of things.... and that was in 70s. yes its NOT Burning Wheel or Dungeon World or even Fate but it was at least analogous to modern D&D and 50 years earlier.

 

[Fenris-77]

Yup, but the outcome at the table is very different, or at least you'd think so if you'd played those three games. YMMV.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I like when things like SOP are handled in abstract by the dice roll, but 'Skilled Play' is expressed through decision making, problem solving, and dealing with unique situations. This actually helps to break down 'pixel-bitching' as its been referred to, and is much more meaningfully 'Skilled' since it requires in-taking, interpreting, and acting on information, the correct answer is too contextual for an explicit SOP to be reliable.

Then, your characters perception rolls and such is basically their ability to create or intuit useful SOP for various situations, and governs the amount of information you have to use to make those decisions. Information Gathering is in the area of mechanics, whereas Acting on Information is decision making, answering the question of what tool to apply to the problem.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I like when things like SOP are handled in abstract by the dice roll, but 'Skilled Play' is expressed through decision making, problem solving, and dealing with unique situations. This actually helps to break down 'pixel-bitching' as its been referred to, and is much more meaningfully 'Skilled' since it requires in-taking, interpreting, and acting on information, the correct answer is too contextual for an explicit SOP to be reliable.

Then, your characters perception rolls and such is basically their ability to create or intuit useful SOP for various situations, and governs the amount of information you have to use to make those decisions. Information Gathering is in the area of mechanics, whereas Acting on Information is decision making, answering the question of what tool to apply to the problem.

Well, remember, the parameters of skilled play in 1975 involved the twin goals of loots and levels. You SHOWED your skill be making it to 23rd level (or whatever) despite your GM's sincere attempts to kill your character! More seriously, that WAS the point of the 'danger factor' metric. It let survival signify mastery (though usually it signified weak DMing, so it was rather problematic).

 

[pemerton]

You SHOWED your skill be making it to 23rd level (or whatever) despite your GM's sincere attempts to kill your character! More seriously, that WAS the point of the 'danger factor' metric. It let survival signify mastery (though usually it signified weak DMing, so it was rather problematic).

Like the "ecological" issue I mentioned upthread, that issue of "weak GMing" is another basic challenge facing the generalisation/universalisation of Gygaxian D&D.

 

[Garthanos]

Like the "ecological" issue I mentioned upthread, that issue of "weak GMing" is another basic challenge facing the generalisation/universalisation of Gygaxian D&D.

so which was weak "killer DMs" seemed pretty weak

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Well, remember, the parameters of skilled play in 1975 involved the twin goals of loots and levels. You SHOWED your skill be making it to 23rd level (or whatever) despite your GM's sincere attempts to kill your character! More seriously, that WAS the point of the 'danger factor' metric. It let survival signify mastery (though usually it signified weak DMing, so it was rather problematic).

yeah it might be more useful to think of Skilled Play as moving on and being inclusive from more than that, even if not everyone likes the solutions equally a lot of our current mechanics were developed inter-textually with this idea of skilled play, to further develop the concept and move past the problems of it as we've identified in this thread.

I guess we could move to a NSP (Neo-Skilled-Play) terminology but its like Rob discussed in the OSR thread, he doesn't like the boundaries presented by enclosing him and his friends within that particular school of thought with those particular elements presented, because they've continued to develop and tinker with a clear lineage from their earlier work, so the purity might be problematic from a design standpoint-- instead of taking us away from skilled play, elements like character mechanics that provide information and SOP level details could be read as an improvement within the Skilled Play context. This would also be beneficial because it would allow us to view and design around those mechanics to avoid damaging the Skilled Play component overall.

By and large, this seems to be a sticking point many of these threads return to, where the discussion is being perceived as in service to and policed by the terminology, rather than vice versa. Questioning these accepted bounds is rendered difficult, because they're perceived to be definitive (and therefore intrinsically truthful) rather than descriptive (and therefore subject to commentary, criticism, and debate.) I'd liken it to notions of the 'canon' in literature criticism, and how there are accepted interpretations and value judgement that can cause the medium to stagnate until the hold can be broken and the excluded works and interpretations 'break in.'

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

so which was weak "killer DMs" seemed pretty weak

I would say this was a bit of a different issue where many DMs emulated the 'form' of deadliness, but not the 'function'. Creating a deadly maze where it takes skill to achieve victory (loots) is one thing. Creating a maze where you deploy DM rulings and gotcha! elements to reap a high murder threshold of PCs, but don't really provide meaningful skilled challenges is another thing. Obviously this is a "bad DM" argument, but it was a really frequent and easy pit trap to fall into. I'd say 50% of starting DMs back in the early days immediately fell into that trap. I can even remember it being pretty much the first thing I figured out about DMing, you could be devious, but you had to be on the player's side in a sense, always making sure to give them a way through.

This is also my problem with ToH, the demi-lich part is 100% nonsensical, there's no way to know how to solve it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

yeah it might be more useful to think of Skilled Play as moving on and being inclusive from more than that, even if not everyone likes the solutions equally a lot of our current mechanics were developed inter-textually with this idea of skilled play, to further develop the concept and move past the problems of it as we've identified in this thread.

I guess we could move to a NSP (Neo-Skilled-Play) terminology but its like Rob discussed in the OSR thread, he doesn't like the boundaries presented by enclosing him and his friends within that particular school of thought with those particular elements presented, because they've continued to develop and tinker with a clear lineage from their earlier work, so the purity might be problematic from a design standpoint-- instead of taking us away from skilled play, elements like character mechanics that provide information and SOP level details could be read as an improvement within the Skilled Play context. This would also be beneficial because it would allow us to view and design around those mechanics to avoid damaging the Skilled Play component overall.

By and large, this seems to be a sticking point many of these threads return to, where the discussion is being perceived as in service to and policed by the terminology, rather than vice versa. Questioning these accepted bounds is rendered difficult, because they're perceived to be definitive (and therefore intrinsically truthful) rather than descriptive (and therefore subject to commentary, criticism, and debate.) I'd liken it to notions of the 'canon' in literature criticism, and how there are accepted interpretations and value judgement that can cause the medium to stagnate until the hold can be broken and the excluded works and interpretations 'break in.'

Right, I mean, you have seen pushback on the SP definition that @Snarf Zagyg provided. Not so much because people have an issue with it as a descriptive term to apply to 'classic Gygaxian' play (and Snarf perfectly adequately covered the somewhat misleading nature of the term itself in the OP) but because it does tend to be seen definitive.

So, I'm fine with it being used in the way Snarf does, I agree with his description of what is generally intended by it and that it is historical. OTOH I agree with those who would simply discuss what ELSE is skilled in RPGs and how skill has evolved as an element/goal/value within the game. I didn't want to go too far into that in this thread, since I don't think that is entirely 'on topic' of the original proposition, though we have strayed somewhat into that territory.

A 'what does skill mean in D&D?' thread might be interesting though.