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

"Trying Wandering Monsters in 4e is pain your highness (and deserving of hurt feelings). Anyone who says different is selling something."
OTOH I built two very nice successful adventures in which 'wandering monsters' were an integral feature. However, they were re-emagined as a pretty different thing from how they work in classic D&D. So, not really contradicting you, just a reminder not to write things off. It is always worth keeping all the tools in the tool box. You may not use that counterclockwise ratchet handle very often, but it is damned handy when you need it.
 

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FrogReaver

As long as i get to be the frog
What I really get from people complaining how boring and overlong 4e combats were, is that they never really understood the goal of that system and tried to run classic dungeon crawls with it. You know what I mean: lots of fights against 2d6 orcs in a 10' x 30' room instead of just a few big set pieces with lots of moving parts, environmental hazards and a good mix of monster roles.
I liked 4e but I never felt fun combat was its strong suit. Larger set piece battles were more enjoyable than ‘here’s some more orcs’, but I can’t say they were really all that enjoyable.

That said, 4e made character building very fun. 4e also greatly improved out of combat play for a variety of reasons. Skill challenges. Better DM advice on how to handle skill checks. And also fewer abilities and fewer uses of abilities that could just bypass obstacles.

But it’s probably best not to delve too strongly into 4e as it’s such a pain point for so many.
 

Games like Torchbearer, Dungeon World, Legend of the Five Ring Fifth Edition, and The One Ring show that you can successfully elements from different sorts of games into something new. That's the key though. A blending of styles produces something new that is distinct from its influences. Dungeon World does not represent the best of Apocalypse World and the best of D&D combined into a singular game. Rather it makes tradeoffs and hard design choices that leaves you with something that is really like neither. It's awesome at being Dungeon World, but fails utterly at being B/X or Apocalypse World.

I would make a similar claim for the way Pathfinder Second Edition combines elements of skilled play with elements of more modern takes on D&D. It offers something new. Not a best of both worlds type situation.
I'd have to take your word on most of the games you list here, but frankly 5e is STRAIGHT UP 2e in terms of agenda and process. I mean, dead on. Yes, it has a fig leaf here and there which you can pretend are things carried forward from 4e, but they are utterly recontextualized (and rather different to start with) such that nothing of the agenda, process, or principles specific to 4e exists within 5e, nothing.

Dungeon World is a bit different from what you seem to imagine. Its relationship to B/X is QUITE CLEAR. Dungeon World COULD NOT EXIST without B/X. This is because it exactly reproduces B/X fiction! That is literally what Dungeon World is FOR, is to produce a narrative which, obviously stripped of jargon, etc. is impossible to categorize as being DW or B/X (aside from perhaps quirky differences in monsters or existence or lack of a specific spell, something like that). I'm not claiming that the two narratives are built in the same way, or that the games share agenda, process, or much in the way of mechanics, but they are still closely related. Again, I'm not contesting with you on your statements, but in some sense PbtA WAS combined with B/X to produce DW!
 

pemerton

Legend
Advancing their positions by making player choices in the game sounds like skilled play generally to me, though the PC investing heavily in PC build to do so adds in the character mechanics optimization aspect I was not expecting.

Was it GURPS or some other game where you can spend xp to gain something like advantage House deVir is an ally/patron instead of putting those points towards the regular skills, attributes, spells, or powers?
The system was Rolemaster. One of the PCs built up social skills and (I think it was) certain knowledge-y/craft-y skills (maybe some sort of garden/landscape design?) in order to be better able to impress and influence the NPC in question.

Perhaps my use of the phrase "advance their positions" caused confusion? I meant it in the most general possible way - ie getting their PC into a preferred situation in the fiction (preferred both by the player and the character) in virtue of having a better relationship with someone.

But it wasn't done in order to solve a puzzle or overcome a challenge that the game posed. The characters could have disregarded these NPCs, or maintained a much more neutral posture towards them, and it wouldn't have set their PCs back in any material, tactical or strategic sense.

I think if we use the "skilled play" label to describe any time a player takes a decision s/he thinks is good for his/her position in the game and his/her PC's position given the latter's goals etc, we obscure what I think is a pretty important contrast between games where the goal is overcoming puzzle/challenges, and games with different sorts of goals.
 

darkbard

Legend
I don't know if anyone (and, if so, who) has posted about this subject upthread. I have a lot thoughts on this (from character building, to tactical and strategic resource management - including Cohort management, to thematic management of the fictional positioning to open up the move-space for tactical gambits, to strategic management of costs/complications, to bulwarking teammates through any/all of the prior, to engagement with the premise of play/thematic character elements to achieve growth), but I think I'll summon @darkbard to post on this as he has a lot of experience playing a Dungeon World PC in a game I GM.

I think its better to hear how a player processes the overhead they’re managing in a game (vs a GM), so if/when darkbard has a moment, his thoughts would be better than my own (I feel)!

Well, summoned as I am, answer I shall!

I've been reading the recent SP threads with great interest though with no particular desire to weigh in directly, largely because I think the very term "skilled play" is fraught, elusive, and context dependent. Like so many of the discussions here, we participants get needlessly bogged down in intractable definitional arguments rather than the more salient points of analysis. But anyway.

I have virtually no interest in Gygaxian skilled play as it is usually described, often focusing on plodding procedural simulationism as means of exploring a fictional environment. (I acknowledge the other aspects of GSP identified in this thread, but for me the above epitomizes the style.) Such play demands thorough and precise preplanned GM notes to be fair to players, and that is a style of play I have moved further and further from in recent years, enthusiastically.

Dungeon World, by contrast, has SP of another sort. I would say its greatest strength is facilitating skilled play of thematic material important to PCs. Some examples of this are open to any character, completely outside of mechanical build, like the Basic Moves Spout Lore and Discern Realities. These are moves by which a player can choose to emphasize or introduce fiction when they believe it is important (though the roll of dice rather than fiat determines the nature of that fiction, beneficial or otherwise). Other moves are entirely build dependent, in the sense of optimizing characters, like the Paladin's choice of Smite as an advanced move (additional damage inflicted when on a quest). What is so very compelling to me about both these types of moves is their capacity for the player, through their deployment, to exhibit SP by creating the fiction they want now ("Story Now" play), or at least make the attempt to do so, rather than test the player's skill in anticipating/navigating preset GM notes (traps, riddles, and the like). The timing of when to put things to the mechanical test in DW in this way can absolutely be a gauge of SP.

Further, SP is evident in resource management in the game as another instance, resource here being broadly defined as the collective rules for encumbrance, Coin, gear and ration management (when both are resources that ablate; sure, you don't need to "purchase 10 pitons" when gearing out, but every time you make use of a piece of equipment, that's one less use of your abstracted Adventuring Gear available to you), and Cohorts/Hirelings. @Manbearcat has written extensively in these various threads about the current climb up an Everest-like peak that our PCs are now finishing. That climb has necessitated difficult decision making about how to allocate various resources every step of the way: from how many hirelings to bring (factoring in our desire to keep them safe, their vulnerability to hazards, their cost, their increase to our capacity for adding bonuses to specific action checks and encumbrance, etc) to choosing how much Coin to allocate for provisioning versus reserving it for use in Rituals or magic item creation and so on to spell load out and other build considerations by our PCs (do we prepare spells specific to managing environmental hazards or for combat against our expected foes or for magical travel that may obviate obstacles or ...). All of this falls within the purview of SP, I would say, in the sense that we, as players, make these decisions in an attempt to steer the fiction towards our desired outcome, by making difficult decisions between an array of appealing but mutually exclusive choices, each of which carries its attendant risk.

There are other components of Dungeon World that are open to SP, I think, but those should provide a good starting point for further discussion.

EDIT: I should have tagged you from the beginning, @clearstream, since Manbearcat responds directly to your inquiry by summoning me and my take on the matter.
 
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The-Magic-Sword

Small Ball Archmage
I liked 4e but I never felt fun combat was its strong suit. Larger set piece battles were more enjoyable than ‘here’s some more orcs’, but I can’t say they were really all that enjoyable.

That said, 4e made character building very fun. 4e also greatly improved out of combat play for a variety of reasons. Skill challenges. Better DM advice on how to handle skill checks. And also fewer abilities and fewer uses of abilities that could just bypass obstacles.

But it’s probably best not to delve too strongly into 4e as it’s such a pain point for so many.
I think it was very fun tactical combat for the time (and specifically for a TRPG), but it had a lot of kinks (early Monster Manual math creating dragging encounters, lots of trap options, relatively complex math) that held it back. I'm dripping with praise for 4e (it was my first TRPG) but I'd say Pathfinder 2e has surpassed it, and honestly 13th age probably did as well at the time, but I imagine a lot of this is games being intertextual with 4e and building on its ideas since it came out a decade ago.

In terms of Dungeon ethos, 4e benefits from fewer, but larger set piece encounters with lots of moving parts players have to manage, so that they can skillfully deploy their abilities in exciting ways (for instance, a Defender might question which enemy they mark, a controller might need to make value judgements about whether to shut down a big boi or clear the minions, and so forth-- which becomes in turn more interesting if you're fighting in a maze of short passageways, or if there's a massive environmental hazard, or if you're fighting on a platform suspended over a massive drop), but rather than exclusively making dungeons small, it actually (in my experience of course) encourages us to fill the rest of the dungeon with other elements-- opportunities to talk with NPCs, puzzles, descriptions of rooms and making those elements more of an event in their own right so that combat doesn't have to be filler.

Honestly this discussion is super helpful, I could benefit from a back to basics approach to my dungeon design.
 

You guys have very different experiences playing these games than I do, because for me what we're discussing as 'Gygaxian Skilled Play' is seamless with the dimensions of the game that are being rejected.

My understanding is that even in the very oldest incarnations of Dungeons and Dragons one would have a notion of being good at some things and bad at others, and hew towards solutions to problems that use one's talents-- the fundamental distinction between a 'thief' and 'fighting man.' Something clearly and obviously present in the tradition of war games that, through chainmail, the game was descended from. The notion of simulating elements through statistics, those strengths and weaknesses defining the viability of differing approaches, and the players learning from experience/game rules what they're good at and how to succeed?

I hate to break the illusion, but whether the meta centers on clear knowledge of simulation game rules, figuring out the sort of things your buddy thinks are reasonable, studying character options, or some other procedure, it all comes down to the same basic premise of identifying the rules of the game and how they affect the 'metagame' and optimizing your own play to seek the greatest degree of victory. That is the essence of 'Skilled Play' being discussed, the distinctions being made beyond that are entirely arbitrary and not particularly cogent. Which is why I want to break it down, because this becomes about including something, which is the sense of interacting with your environment to gain advantages as an aspect of Skilled Play, rather than it's totality (even within the concept of a single game), but with a healthy coexistence with other aspects of Skilled Play.

Even 4e players who had never played another TTRPG in their short, high school aged lives still engaged in what you're talking about, I know this because I started in 2010 under those exact circumstances. I have distinct memories of players casting fey step to get to the other side of locked doors by peering through the keyhole for line of sight, and of announcing a door, and solemnly telling my players that "SUDDENLY, the door continues to be a door" after they poke at it, trying to discover if it might be trapped, and making molotov cocktails to throw down underdark pits to smoke out foes.

This was concurrent, and often intermingled with their character optimization, and combat tactics as a skill set. Someone suggested 4e was 'classic' in terms of the six cultures of play, and I don't think that's a bad fit at all. It certainly fits how we played the games-- a series of challenges to be overcome, the rules stepped aside once combat was over and everything was entirely up to my discretion, full on descriptions of where they search and what they do to try and open doors, or remove gemstones from statues without incurring terrible ramifications.

In reality, I think it was the modern conventions and sensibility that turned those traditional skilled play people away, 4e had very different art, very different mechanics, you had the option to stand and fight with some degree of competence, you had elaborate character builds with lots of choices, you had eye popping anime esque martial maneuvers all over the place and a little power fantasy with minions, and explicit party roles that evoked MMO ones, and so forth. The milieu was so different from what they'd grown up with I see it as complete culture shock, because it totally was for me looking back after the fact, reading old ADND manuals, the Alexandrian, etc.
As @Manbearcat said, I find this interesting. Obviously there are a lot of ways to slice and dice SP. I mean, I agree with you and others that there is a lot of player skill in a lot of areas, even in classic D&D. I felt bound by the OP in terms of engaging with HIS definition (though he then kind of held my input up as a model of what he didn't want to see, lol, oh well...). Anyway, there were a lot of areas where you could exercise skill in classic D&D. It could be in terms of what items you had/got, character 'build' in other areas (not a lot of options, but there are some), equipment, spell selection, party composition, selection of henchmen/hirelings, as well as selection of what sorts of objectives to go after when adventuring. I mean, the MOST BASIC skill of all, AFAIK, was knowing when to call it quits and bug out for town! All of these involve an understanding of the 'environment', the GM, the rules, and 'being clever', as well as just basic planning skills.

In terms of 'good at some things, bad at others'... Hmmmm, I think some players maybe were more interested in playing a certain class, for example, so maybe they had a more detailed knowledge of some related tricks. I mean, I played mostly wizards, I was well-versed in certain spell-casting techniques. I also had a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of useful magic items, the rules around scrolls and potions, spell books, etc. Still, if I played a fighter none of that was useless, nor is there really a whole lot of 'special knowledge' WRT given classes. Outside of class, all I can say is maybe someone knows a particular field better. If a player was a civil engineer (one of ours was back in the day) well he'd surely be ready to explain things like roads, walls, sewers, etc. in realistic terms. I am not sure this was necessarily an advantage though...

4e. We ran it in extremely different ways. I mean, I get what you are saying here too. I just pretty quickly found it to be a story game and didn't make an attempt to shoe horn in much in the way of 'dungeon delve' type stuff, normally. I mean, 4e has a usable encumbrance rule. OTOH light, and usually other supplies, are rather readily procured (IE know the correct rituals, which are cheap and effective). You COULD certainly run things in a more skill-oriented way, but there are just not a lot of rules really developed for that. There's no exploration movement/time rules for example. Traps are modeled in terms of combat encounters, though you can obviously make up SCs and whatnot as alternatives. The Skill system can handle checks for searches, hidden things, etc. but there isn't really room for "tell me how you did it" classic skill play. And as Manbearcat also mentioned, random encounters are not a really useful thing in most situations.

Now, I don't think skilled play or lack of skilled play was a factor with 4e either. If people rejected it, it was because it wasn't like 2e, which is NOT a skilled play game! It was because of changes to the way the milieu was translated into mechanics (fireball is a 'power' not a 'spell' and the rules for that are a bit different in ways that bothered people). I'm not sure about any of the 'MMO part'. Maybe people were turned off by roles and power sources, I can't really say. I don't think they really introduced anything NEW to the game, just made things explicit. This was definitely a theme of 4e, making stuff explicit. IME players were definitely happy with the keywording and the way you could generally apply many powers even out of combat (the Fey Step example is pretty spot on). Obviously it seems there were a lot of very literal-minded people who didn't feel empowered by that... :(
 

I don't see an in-principle reason why a person couldn't, with some intuition and playtesting, generate a home game that either includes most of those rules with relatively light changes, or takes one of those systems and adds in new rules that, while not identical in function, accomplish meaningfully equivalent experience-level AND rules-level functions. E.g., having played Dogs in the Vineyard (well, sort of--DM adapted its rules to the Exalted setting), I could see a game that has "spells" with "Range, Duration, etc etc." that require some amount of wagering your dice pool in order to work in the first place, as a sort of "safe bet," just to spitball an idea. And, again, this absolutely requires playtesting to be sure it works consistently, but as a first-pass, "well we could try this," it doesn't sound anywhere NEAR as problematic as "let's add travelling rules to soccer" or "let's have rules for the 8-ball in tennis," where these things genuinely make no sense whatsoever.
I think this is highly dependent on a specific model of RPG. That is, sure, it wouldn't be that hard to add the 1e rules for wandering monsters, turn-based exploration, etc. to 5e (you might want to remove a couple of spells that make things like light sources trivial, reduce encumbrance maybe, not sure). Why? Because they are VERY SIMILAR RPGS! They follow extremely similar models and basically have pretty much the same design at a high level! There are 2 participant roles, GM and Player, the functions of those roles are very similar and can shade into each other, etc. It gets a LOT HARDER when you start into very different games. So, for example, try adding wandering monsters to your PACE game (you can find the rules online, but it is basically a diceless story game where you bid 'chits' to resolve conflicts in your favor). EVEN THAT GAME still has a lot of similarity to games like D&D though! How about adding wandering monsters and turn-based exploration to a LARP? That's closer to combining baseball and futbol!
I think this is a big deal. What is "physical" about "govern[ing] play interactions/collisions"? To me, for a TTRPG, those "interactions" and "collisions" are much closer to "abstract" than the vast majority of rules in a sport.
I think there is abstract and there is 'intangible'. Intangible things are not necessarily abstractions. I would not consider 'Love' an abstraction. Nor would I consider 'Shared Fiction' an abstraction, but both are intangible. Abstractions have a character in which they 'abstract away' some of the properties of various specific things such that those things can be lumped together to form the abstraction. I have a really good handle on this, I make my living doing it as a highly accomplished developer. I will build an API, a specification for how code can accomplish certain tasks. It can abstract away the differences between files, a database, some cloud-based storage, etc. and present it all purely in terms of naming things, iterating, finding, storing, and reading, without regard to the vast differences between the abstracted things. RPGs certainly have abstractions as well, maybe of a slightly different character, but pretty similar. 4e or 5e have skill systems where you roll a d20, apply some modifiers, and compare the result to a DC. Every application of skills works the same, that is an abstraction. If I invented a new skill for 5e, it would hook right in, just make a check, even though it might involve your character's ability to carve headstones or something instead of jump long distances reliably.
The "wandering monsters" thing was obviously a bad idea, considering how many people have IMMEDIATELY jumped on how that's, like, the worst proposal ever™. Surely, though, the fact that we have a proliferation of initiative rules, or HP-regain rules (to use another "appears in almost every edition" example), or different approaches to the idea of "class" (race-as-class, different XP advancement rates, à la carte multiclassing, explicit vs implicit roles, etc.), demonstrates that there are numerous ways of doing effectively the same thing that, while possessing meaningful differences and context-specific nature, are amenable to revision and review in a way that basketball (where players must touch the ball with their hands, but not hold it overlong) and soccer (where only very specific players are even allowed to touch the ball with their hands) are not.
I think Wandering Monsters is not a bad example, but I think the whole idea of starting with examples like that may be flawed. You touched at some point on agenda and such. I think you have to start there! What am I trying to accomplish? What are the principles of play? What is the process? NOW, knowing that, really understanding it, do I have a reason to add 'Wandering Monsters' to my non-classic-D&D game? What are they going to accomplish for me? OK, what is the whole process that needs to exist, how do the pieces of game engine fit together to produce my goal? Wandering Monsters are simply a mechanism, they are agenda-neutral in-and-of-themselves. So, maybe my hypothetical game needs an exploration process, and I have some reasons within that to add these monsters as a mechanic, OK.
Wasn't the whole point of Dungeon World that its creators wanted to recapture how it felt to play their favorite early-edition D&D games? As far as I had understood it, that is why people compare DW to B/X (and World of Dungeons to Gygaxian 1e, AFAIK). Whether or not it mechanically manifests the same, the experience of play for the people who designed it is meaningfully how they remember enjoying early D&D. Memory is, of course, a funny and fickle thing, so perhaps Adam Koebel and Sage LaTorra have invented a game that resembles their memories only and not any part of early-edition D&D. If so, it at least seems to resemble the memories of other players too, which was the whole point anyway.
LOL, you kinda ninjaed me on this one. ;)
 

Well, summoned as I am, answer I shall!

I've been reading the recent SP threads with great interest though with no particular desire to weigh in directly, largely because I think the very term "skilled play" is fraught, elusive, and context dependent. Like so many of the discussions here, we participants get needlessly bogged down in intractable definitional arguments rather than the more salient points of analysis. But anyway.

I have virtually no interest in Gygaxian skilled play as it is usually described, often focusing on plodding procedural simulationism as means of exploring a fictional environment. (I acknowledge the other aspects of GSP identified in this thread, but for me the above epitomizes the style.) Such play demands thorough and precise preplanned GM notes to be fair to players, and that is a style of play I have moved further and further from in recent years, enthusiastically.

Dungeon World, by contrast, has SP of another sort. I would say its greatest strength is facilitating skilled play of thematic material important to PCs. Some examples of this are open to any character, completely outside of mechanical build, like the Basic Moves Spout Lore and Discern Realities. These are moves by which a player can choose to emphasize or introduce fiction when they believe it is important (though the roll of dice rather than fiat determines the nature of that fiction, beneficial or otherwise). Other moves are entirely build dependent, in the sense of optimizing characters, like the Paladin's choice of Smite as an advanced move (additional damage inflicted when on a quest). What is so very compelling to me about both these types of moves is their capacity for the player, through their deployment, to exhibit SP by creating the fiction they want now ("Story Now" play), or at least make the attempt to do so, rather than test the player's skill in anticipating/navigating preset GM notes (traps, riddles, and the like). The timing of when to put things to the mechanical test in DW in this way can absolutely be a gauge of SP.

Further, SP is evident in resource management in the game as another instance, resource here being broadly defined as the collective rules for encumbrance, Coin, gear and ration management (when both are resources that ablate; sure, you don't need to "purchase 10 pitons" when gearing out, but every time you make use of a piece of equipment, that's one less use of your abstracted Adventuring Gear available to you), and Cohorts/Hirelings. @Manbearcat has written extensively in these various threads about the current climb up an Everest-like peak that our PCs are now finishing. That climb has necessitated difficult decision making about how to allocate various resources every step of the way: from how many hirelings to bring (factoring in our desire to keep them safe, their vulnerability to hazards, their cost, their increase to our capacity for adding bonuses to specific action checks and encumbrance, etc) to choosing how much Coin to allocate for provisioning versus reserving it for use in Rituals or magic item creation and so on to spell load out and other build considerations by our PCs (do we prepare spells specific to managing environmental hazards or for combat against our expected foes or for magical travel that may obviate obstacles or ...). All of this falls within the purview of SP, I would say, in the sense that we, as players, make these decisions in an attempt to steer the fiction towards our desired outcome, by making difficult decisions between an array of appealing but mutually exclusive choices, each of which carries its attendant risk.

There are other components of Dungeon World that are open to SP, I think, but those should provide a good starting point for further discussion.

EDIT: I should have tagged you from the beginning, @clearstream, since Manbearcat responds directly to your inquiry by summoning me and my take on the matter.
I guess the question would then be, does this sort of play really justify using the same term as 'Gygaxian Skilled Play', as the goal is completely different? I mean, it is clear to me that in a classic D&D game failing to manage your resources correctly will result in some adverse result WRT the players agenda, like they will fail to accumulate treasure, XP, etc. and may even leave their frozen corpses on the side of the mountain, necessitating starting over with new PCs. It is less clear exactly what the failure to manage resources means in DW in general. It certainly exposes the PCs to pressure from the GM from a particular direction, but they will be exposed to some sort of pressure regardless! There is no explicit goal to achieve any particular fictional result either. Character death, successfully mounting the summit, or turning back, all of these are results falling within "Play to See What Happens." Clearly both paradigms require that the result be in doubt. It is less clear that DW requires that the result depend in any way on 'player skill'.
 

FrogReaver

As long as i get to be the frog
I guess the question would then be, does this sort of play really justify using the same term as 'Gygaxian Skilled Play', as the goal is completely different? I mean, it is clear to me that in a classic D&D game failing to manage your resources correctly will result in some adverse result WRT the players agenda, like they will fail to accumulate treasure, XP, etc. and may even leave their frozen corpses on the side of the mountain, necessitating starting over with new PCs. It is less clear exactly what the failure to manage resources means in DW in general. It certainly exposes the PCs to pressure from the GM from a particular direction, but they will be exposed to some sort of pressure regardless! There is no explicit goal to achieve any particular fictional result either. Character death, successfully mounting the summit, or turning back, all of these are results falling within "Play to See What Happens." Clearly both paradigms require that the result be in doubt. It is less clear that DW requires that the result depend in any way on 'player skill'.
I think a good way to ask that is - what is the goal in DW and how does being skilled at DW help the player acheive that goal? And What negative impact does being Unskilled at DW have on that goal?
 

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