D&D General Story Now, Skilled Play, and Elephants
clearstream
(He, Him)
On the one hand, any time a DM decides what happens next without following a rule that specifies exactly what happens next, they are doing something on the gradient of force. Their soft moves can be softer or less soft. Their hard moves, harder or less hard. Right up to simple fiat - what you call force - which may override what the rules specify should happen next. In all of these decisions they are shaping play.
For DM-as-player shaping play is a skill and can be done more or less skillfully. Their decisions create framing or context - constraints and opportunities - for player skill. That could elevate the skill requirement, not obviate it. I feel you see force as a very black and white technique. Based on my experience and what I see other DMs doing, I do not see it that way.
Oh, I thought you were aware of this thread On Skilled Play in which "skilled play" is introduced as a label. And either it was in that or related threads that it was connected to B/X and OSR.
I see. There is no such confusion. Checks are employed in my arguments only as an example of a way to achieve an outcome by employing a game mechanic without any detailed description of character actions in the fiction. Other examples that I see used by people is passwall and spells of that ilk.
In threads like the one I linked above, it was counted not very "skilled play" to rely on such mechanics unardorned. Even though I agree with you that they might still be used skillfully without adornment.
Adjudication is never consistent in human-arbitrated RPGs. Thus to say that it must be would be to deny the possibility of skilled play. However, that might give us insight into how to assess skill in such RPGs. It's a fuzzy construct. As I elsewhere mentioned, it isn't at all like simply counting wins in Chess to produce an Elo (skill ranking for players).
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clearstream
(He, Him)
Ah, well. I focused on system as the concrete game - the artifact. It is true that there is the matter of what players bring to it: how they grasp, enact and uphold the rules. It's also reasonable to include them in system, although perforce then each game session - each game-as-artifact + unique-cohort-of-players is then a different system. You can see that by reflecting on the divisions on these boards as to how to grasp, enact and uphold various rules.
So then as you say principles and technique are relevant. I'm not unmindful of that, I deliberately left it out because it introduces a lot of complexity and I did not know how complete a description of system you wanted. Whether we just wanted to consider what the game affords, or what games+players result in. I refer you to Espen Aarseth and his suggestion that games might be understood as mechanisms (thus appealing to philosophy on mechanisms). I see games more as tools. It is on the tool that I was focusing.
But yes, let's also think about principles and techniques as I would agree with your sense that they are relevant to our discussion. Foremost, I think you can agree that players come into the game from outside it, right? The principles and techniques you speak of can come in a few forms. First of all there are what have been called elsewhere exogenous rules - or house rules. Also house techniques. These come in with players from their own external context which may bear any number of influences. Then there are those informing the design and articulated as guides - not usually rules - by the game designers. Players of course must grasp, enact and uphold those and do so in different ways.
You can I hope see how that connects with my attempt at disambiguating the label "skilled play" from skilled play (no quotes). I hope to get to your problem to over-inclusiveness after this.
I don't agree with this.
Let's start with a boardgame/parlour game: Codenames. Codenames has rules about how one may or may not group and describe the words that are revealed on the playing surface. Those rules discuss how the semantic content may and may not be played with (what we could call rules for "punning"); the relevance of how a word is spelled; etc.
Those rules deal with how ideas are presented and how imagination is exercised. They're not house rules; they're rules of the game.
Let's now consider free kriegsspiel. There are principles that govern how the referee is to extrapolate the fiction. The referee is expected to apply his/her knowledge of warfare, and to be informed by that in making "realistic" adjudications. These principles are not house rules. They're rules of the game.
(There is at least one field sport I know of that requires its umpires to make counterfactual judgements based on their observations and expertise: cricket, in the call of LBW.)
The principles and techniques that govern action resolution and framing in Burning Wheel and Apocalypse World are not house rules/principles/techniques. They're stated in the rulebooks. As far as the player-side principles are concerned, the Burning Wheel rulebook refers to "the sacred and most holy role of the players". That's not mere suggestion as to possible house rules one might adopt! And if players neglect their duties (a word that is also used in the same part of the book) the game will fall apart, in some very obvious ways.
In the case of Gygaxian D&D the principles and techniques are not fully spelled out (qv my post upthread about Classic Traveller, which is a much more cleanly edited and presented RPG text than Gygax's ones). But one can pretty easily infer them from what is said together with knowledge of how Gygax et al played the game, and looking at the design of the modules that most closely conform to or exemplify the sorts of things that the rulebooks talk about.
I don't think calling them "house rules" sheds any light. And I think it is potentially misleading. Trying to talk about Gygaxian skilled play without reference to the relevant principles and techniques won't shed much light.
clearstream
(He, Him)
Well, this speaks to why I didn't want to go beyond game-as-artifact. Unless I write a wall of text, it is easy to mistake what is meant. First, to say house rules is not to denigrate. I just wanted to give insight as to what "exogenous rules" might refer to.
To your point then, yes: games contain many categories of rules. One category might be termed principles, by which we probably mean guidance as to the way other parts of the game should be used given that those parts could be used in a number of ways.
Actually, in Free Kriegsspiel they are exogenous, and that is the value of them. The referee is supposed to bring their war experience from outside the game, and apply it freely inside the game. The principle is that the referee should do that, but the coherency to the referee's judgements is exogenous.
This is to restate or exemplify the point, right? The written principles guide the player as to the use of the rest of the game. Those are endogenous. (Refer to Jarvinen and Huizinga by the way, for more on this idea.) You are not however refuting the existence of exogenous rules though, right? When you say - "I don't agree with this" - is it right to guess that you agree that there are exogenous principles and techniques, but want to stress that there are also endogenous ones. I didn't say there were not.
I feel the issue here comes down to my use of "house rules" being misleading or problematic for you. Let's not use it then: I have no special attachment to it. I would offer the exogenous / endogenous idea as helpful. And I do feel it is possible to say something about what written-rules-as-principles are doing compared with other written-rules. As outlined above.
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clearstream
(He, Him)
Your example from Traveller is interesting. What I think we see over time is that groups of players form ideas about how they like to play. Eventually those are written into their rules.
The fact that happens tells us something about variance in grasping, enacting and upholding rules. If players all played those rules the same way, no one would ever need to write anything into the rulebook about it. BW etc must write principles into the rulebook because players come to the game with disparate exogenous rules.
The fact that happens tells us something about variance in grasping, enacting and upholding rules. If players all played those rules the same way, no one would ever need to write anything into the rulebook about it. BW etc must write principles into the rulebook because players come to the game with disparate exogenous rules.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
No. Making a decision is not at all on the "gradient of force." Force is about enforcing outcomes, not about making a call. A GM's call may be Force, but not all calls are some kind of Force. In your example, you have the GM making a call based on what they think a preferred outcome would be. This is Force -- the nature of the decision is not based on the inputs but the outputs; you are choosing a desired output of the process. This is Force. On the other hand, if the GM is following the fiction and looking at the inputs and adjudicating those to the best of their ability, this is not Force, because the outcome is not part of the decision process.
You're smearing Force into any call the GM makes. This is not what it means at all.
Oh, for sure, there's a skill in telling stories. This isn't what's meant by skilled play, and, if you stop a moment and consider it, you might think that having the GM tell you a story well is not at all the same thing as playing a game. The GM can exhibit great skill at their storytelling, but this, necessarily, removes the ability of the players to make skilled play choices -- because the actual input to the GM decision making process is not the players' actions, but rather the GM's story.
Now, a GM can be quite skilled at set dressing and evocative description, but that doesn't go to outcomes, and so isn't really part of skilled play. Recall that skilled play is the leveraging of the system to achieve player goals within the scope of the game. "The GM tells me a good story" is none of this.
No, and any such distinction is trying to create a special case where none exists. What skilled play means doesn't really change across games -- it's the leveraging of the system to achieve player goals within the scope of the game. What that looks like will, of course, be different in every game, because the system and scope of the game changes with each. There's no need to set aside OSR has having quoted skilled play, because saying skilled play in OSR does that already. The quotes just confuse issues and support a false idea of specialness.
Yes, people have odd ideas and tend to define things to protect their own play rather than in a useful analytic way. It's a large part of why a number of people become angry with me when I discuss 5e -- I don't sugercoat my analysis of the game. The fact I still very much enjoy and play it seems of little import when I say things like, "5e isn't actually all that flexible in genre."
Of course it isn't. But acknowledging this doesn't mean that it's not usually consistent, or often consistent, or that there are reasonable expectations. I'm not perfect at spotting forks in Chess (my elo is just north of 1200, which is nothing at all to brag about -- I'm solidly an intermediate skill player), but that doesn't mean you should expect to hang one when playing me because I will likely spot it. You're making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Manbearcat
Legend
I really don’t understand what is happening in these threads. I seriously do not.
This is so much more simple than it’s being made to be.
1) Are you trying to achieve x? Yes?
* Did this current move made take your closer to your objective? Would an alternative move made have yielded a less effective result (incorporating all possible outcomes up to and including calamity)?
* Did a prior move or a prior sequence of moves set up this current move? Would an alternative move or sequence of moves have put you in a less favorable position to either (a) make this current move or (b) make an alternative current move that is as good or better than this one.
2) Rinse/repeat (forward and backward in time across all possible moves made and their alternatives).
3) Evaluate on all timescales relative to the game at hand (eg, if a game requires you to play skillfully across multiple, integrated loops, then it’s necessary but not sufficient to play skillfully in one of those multiple loops…particularly if the play in one loop doesn’t, but should, synergize with/amplify the play in another loop).
4) Does the system engender thematic coherency or is thematic coherency a fundamentally competing priority across some relevant loops of play (eg if you have 3 concurrent loops of play that all must be managed, is thematically coherent play useful/integrated with skilled play in loop A, irrelevant in loop B, and adverse to in loop C).
That looks like that parameterizes the whole model for me. I don’t know what I’m missing.
This is so much more simple than it’s being made to be.
1) Are you trying to achieve x? Yes?
* Did this current move made take your closer to your objective? Would an alternative move made have yielded a less effective result (incorporating all possible outcomes up to and including calamity)?
* Did a prior move or a prior sequence of moves set up this current move? Would an alternative move or sequence of moves have put you in a less favorable position to either (a) make this current move or (b) make an alternative current move that is as good or better than this one.
2) Rinse/repeat (forward and backward in time across all possible moves made and their alternatives).
3) Evaluate on all timescales relative to the game at hand (eg, if a game requires you to play skillfully across multiple, integrated loops, then it’s necessary but not sufficient to play skillfully in one of those multiple loops…particularly if the play in one loop doesn’t, but should, synergize with/amplify the play in another loop).
4) Does the system engender thematic coherency or is thematic coherency a fundamentally competing priority across some relevant loops of play (eg if you have 3 concurrent loops of play that all must be managed, is thematically coherent play useful/integrated with skilled play in loop A, irrelevant in loop B, and adverse to in loop C).
That looks like that parameterizes the whole model for me. I don’t know what I’m missing.
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Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
There is a fundamental divide in the way we see games. I do not see games as tools or collections of mechanics to do what we wish with. For me the power of all games and sports is the Magic Circle, the shared purpose we take on as players when we play a game. For a short period of time we give up our usual social roles and take on the ones the game or sport provides.
For me personally the objectives, reward systems, and principles of play are the primary components of design. Changing those without changing mechanics is a much bigger deal than changing mechanics without changing the underlying principles. I personally see the transition from AD&D First Edition to AD&D Second Edition as a much bigger change than from Second Edition to Third Edition because the latter does not change our orientation towards the game in the same way the first did. It's also why I don't jive with the way some people refer to Powered by the Apocalypse as one system. The mechanisms from Apocalypse World and Monster of the Week might look similar on the surface, but they differ as games so much on the backend I barely see any fundamental similarity,
For me personally the objectives, reward systems, and principles of play are the primary components of design. Changing those without changing mechanics is a much bigger deal than changing mechanics without changing the underlying principles. I personally see the transition from AD&D First Edition to AD&D Second Edition as a much bigger change than from Second Edition to Third Edition because the latter does not change our orientation towards the game in the same way the first did. It's also why I don't jive with the way some people refer to Powered by the Apocalypse as one system. The mechanisms from Apocalypse World and Monster of the Week might look similar on the surface, but they differ as games so much on the backend I barely see any fundamental similarity,
clearstream
(He, Him)
The aim of disambiguating "skilled play" (quotes, per Snarf's thread) from skilled play (no quotes).
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