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

[Manbearcat]

Has it? I think those are all simply very different games and each person plays the ones they're interested in. They might also, as you say, 'play the other next time'. OTOH I see little kids mushing things together all the time. I remember kids whacking a kickball with field hockey sticks, and other kids kicking it back at them, etc. Yeah, they had to make up 'rules' on the fly, but whatever they did was working for them!

Anyway, I think there are some fundamental differences in these activities (RPGs vs field sports) which account for the difference.

I don’t agree (obviously!).

All of these games involve significant creativity, self-expression, cognitive horsepower, working through social contracts, self-esteem issues, time spent on activity (a ball game and round of golf is the same as a D&D session), and working both inside structure and outside of it (including managing edge cases).

The overlap on the Venn Diagram is much more significant than what lies outside of it. And I think the signal of “being a kid” is much more a factor on the lack of structure/“bleed of play”/“propensity for Calvinball” that you’re speaking about above moreso than anything fundamental to TTRPGing. And I also think an amplification effect on that “being a kid” baseline is being picked up due to the opaqueness /rules-heaviness of most TTRPG design during the AD&D era.

 

[Manbearcat]

Imagine if AD&D was simultaneously as functionally structured and as rules-lite (while playing as reliably) as Soccer/Futbol.

My guess is if we could reinstantiate those years and sub that in, the impact on TTPRG (then and certainly now) would be seismic. My impossible to falsify hypothesis is that we wouldn’t be having conversations like this!

 

[Manbearcat]

Has it? I think those are all simply very different games and each person plays the ones they're interested in. They might also, as you say, 'play the other next time'. OTOH I see little kids mushing things together all the time. I remember kids whacking a kickball with field hockey sticks, and other kids kicking it back at them, etc. Yeah, they had to make up 'rules' on the fly, but whatever they did was working for them!

Anyway, I think there are some fundamental differences in these activities (RPGs vs field sports) which account for the difference.

Let me find an area of agreement though that should be placed squarely at the feet of the TTRPG community; the unwillingness to try new games/play paradigms.

That is the big distinction between past-times inside of the TTRPGing sphere and outside of it.

I’ve had about 10 non-TTRPG “gaming circles of friends“ in my life. In athletics, we can play 4-5 games together. Boardgames/parlor games double that. Card games several forms of Poker/Spades/Rook/Euchre. Almost every video game archetype imaginable. All kinds of movie genres.

Nothing like the “status quo-ification” of my TTRPG groups of the 80s-90s.

 

[Fanaelialae]

It seemed pretty clear to me that you did say that. Bold added for emphasis.


If it is useful to extrapolate in one direction and "a mistake" to do it in the reverse direction, I don't know how that isn't saying it's not useful. I don't generally think of "mistakes" as useful things.

Okay, fine, using the word "reverse" was a mistake. I can see how that may have muddled my intended meaning. However, given that the follow-up sentence left no question as to the meaning, my intention does seem obvious, at least to me.

To be clear, what I was saying in that sentence was it would be a mistake to assume that, just because actors don't necessarily jive perfectly with SP, that a particular actor won't jive with a particular SP group. That was the "reverse" I was referring to.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Let me find an area of agreement though that should be placed squarely at the feet of the TTRPG community; the unwillingness to try new games/play paradigms.

That is the big distinction between past-times inside of the TTRPGing sphere and outside of it.

I’ve had about 10 non-TTRPG “gaming circles of friends“ in my life. In athletics, we can play 4-5 games together. Boardgames/parlor games double that. Card games several forms of Poker/Spades/Rook/Euchre. Almost every video game archetype imaginable. All kinds of movie genres.

Nothing like the “status quo-ification” of my TTRPG groups of the 80s-90s.

Why do you say 80's and 90's? TODAY seems to be an era of rigid adherence to a pretty much formulaic D&D. I mean, sure, you and I and people in this forum talk about a variety of games and playing D&D different ways, etc. I guarantee you there are 99 virtually indistinguishable games of 5e going on for every one game of something I would run or you would run.

Again though, I think the issue is that it is very hard to merge different RPG process and rules. Finally, people are TERRIBLE at analysis (believe me, I work in an industry where half the people have the title 'analyst' and they really know nothing about what they're doing). Which means, nobody much really understands what we're talking about. They are fumbling around. Field sports are vastly simpler and nobody has a problem noticing that each side has a different idea of what scoring is. They know to work that out. We cannot even agree on what the goal of a given RPG is. Of course its hard for people to choose, and then we play long campaigns which require sticking to that choice.

I'm still not seeing a huge amount of overlap here between sports and RPGs. The overlap I see is TRIBALISM. You have the people who decided baseball is the cat's ass, and the people who decided it is a pansy 'not a sport' and only football is a real sport. Just like you have a hard core of people who think Gygax classic D&D is THE ONLY WAY. I don't think most of them really HAVE analyzed that or truly experienced any other form of play, except as "this is impure, I will help you fix it." Meanwhile you have the other 'clans' calling those guys all grognards... There's nothing hard to understand about any of that! lol.

 

[FrogReaver]

Here's my take:

What's being called Gygaxian skilled play depends on a Gygaxian dungeon environment. There was a shared goal in Gygaxian play - overcome the Dungeon. Tactics and Strategies that would allow one to better achieve that goal were skilled play and it just so happened that the best way to overcome the Dungeon was to not typically rely on combat or ability checks as their chance of failure and the consequences for those failures were very high.

So what got termed skill play back in the day of Gygaxian dungeons was exactly what is colloquially meant by skilled play - play that enhances your chances of success. I think it does the idea of skilled play a disservice to limit it to only the kinds of play that were skilled for Gygaxian Dungeons. I just don't think it makes a very coherent question to ask about Gygaxian skilled play in modern non-gygaxian environments.

So I think skilled play really needs to retain it's natural meaning and that skilled play in a more modern RPG can look very different than skilled play in a Gygaxian dungeon. That is, it's possible that something which would be skilled play in a gygaxian dungeon may actually be unskilled play in modern RPG scenarios.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Another observation is that a big part of what makes the "actor" thing seem not to work with SP is the neo-trad idea of character concept as something you predesign. This creates friction between the world, and the character which wasn't made for it. An actor discovering their character over the course of the game, wouldn't have the same problem-- the character's view of reality is informed by their actual experience of the game world rather than the player imitating tropes from other stories. This is also why we've started to see so much of a preference for 'combat as performance' because the dropping of uncertainty is what enables these preintended narrative arcs to take shape, so players assume that 'roleplaying' demands predefined narrative arcs and a stance where the players are directors framing a scene in a narrative-- trying to 'make it happen' instead of it arising naturally from the circumstances.

But that assumption isn't necessary, your player and character could both be trying to succeed at something, and reacting to events and each other as they unfold and you wouldn't have meaningful issues. The central obstacle is the idea of the incompetent character who nevertheless expects to survive to end of the story as a result of movie-like plot armor. Their overall success becomes detached from their ability to earn victories because a lot of our narrative tropes frame stories that way, and people emulate the bad decisions, but since those players don't have a writer who has already decided the PCs will survive, the tropes don't execute.

So really, you have to get away from the idea of plot armor to make them compatible, you have to focus the story on skillful people genuinely trying to overcome challenges with their best efforts a relatively rational outlook, even if that is permeated by some drama that everyone agrees to not let them get killed. So I'd hazard that its just a different realm than some roleplayers expect, especially currently, but not one with less story and acting intrinsically (because you can still inhabit that space of a skilled character invested in winning, and create excellent stories through your actions and performance, without those stories being about lucking through your failures constantly.)

 

[HomegrownHydra]

What is this "neotraditional playstyle" people keep mentioning? I had never seen the term until the last few weeks.

 

[pemerton]

The central obstacle is the idea of the incompetent character who nevertheless expects to survive to end of the story as a result of movie-like plot armor. Their overall success becomes detached from their ability to earn victories because a lot of our narrative tropes frame stories that way, and people emulate the bad decisions, but since those players don't have a writer who has already decided the PCs will survive, the tropes don't execute.

So really, you have to get away from the idea of plot armor to make them compatible, you have to focus the story on skillful people genuinely trying to overcome challenges with their best efforts a relatively rational outlook, even if that is permeated by some drama that everyone agrees to not let them get killed.

An alternative to what you describe is one in which the character is incompetent but the player is not, and the player has various resources to deploy (luck, fate, allies, retainers, etc) which do the job. The so-called "princess" warlord in 4e is an example of this.

But a lot of RPGers seem not to want that sort of thing. Which means, in a challenge-based game, either following the advice of your second paragraph I've quoted or relying on the GM to provide the plot armour (which has been a popular approach since the mid-80s!).

Another alternative is to give up on challenge-based play, but that takes things in a pretty different direction - eg something like Wuthering Heights or some of the PbtA-ish games.

 

[pemerton]

What is this "neotraditional playstyle" people keep mentioning? I had never seen the term until the last few weeks.

This blog seems to have given the phrase some recent oomph: Six Cultures of Play

It's a reference to play that, on the player side, emphasises characterisation and perhaps character arcs in a way preconceived by the player, and on the GM side emphasises curation of the fiction to create room for the players' various characters to shine.