D&D General Story Now, Skilled Play, and Elephants

[Thomas Shey]

Since we are going to take this a step further, let's look at how this works in play.

The player decided he wanted to bluff the guard and said X to the guard. The GM is deciding after knowing what the player is attempting what details about the guard are ultimately going to determine whether the player succeeds or fails.

Since those details were determined after the player attempted his bluff, the player had no concrete information to base his action declaration on. All the player could do was to try to guess before the action declaration what details the GM will fill in on the fly and ultimately use to determine the guards reaction and then try to frame the action declaration accordingly. That's not the kind of skilled play that OSR is about as I understand it. OSR is about attempting to use the established fiction to have your characters act in ways to guarantee you accomplish your goal. Things like, there's a pit trap we know about on the map, let's get the orcs attention and lure them into it and then shoot our bows at any survivors till the group of orcs is dead. In the bluffing the guards case, there's no fictional details prior to the 'PC bluffing' to base any decision on. So even if we resolve the guard bluff with no skill checks, it still won't be OSR skilled play.

I'm not sure I think that being able to predict the DM's moves makes something OSR skilled play.

To be fair here, there's nothing about the sort of narrative-only resolution that prevents the player from asking things about the guards reactions and such to try and construct a predictive model. This requires the GM to decide on those things on the fly still, but they're at least partly prior to the player deciding approach and the GM deciding output.

The problem is, its often useless. Unless the player and the GM see things in a similar fashion, or the GM is just willing to give the player the benefit of the doubt (and see my comments on this approach being ripe to breeding favoritism), this information may be next to useless to him; he can make a good faith effort and just find the result is "no" for reasons he likely won't even understand.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Since we are going to take this a step further, let's look at how this works in play.

The player decided he wanted to bluff the guard and said X to the guard. The GM is deciding after knowing what the player is attempting what details about the guard are ultimately going to determine whether the player succeeds or fails.

Since those details were determined after the player attempted his bluff, the player had no concrete information to base his action declaration on. All the player could do was to try to guess before the action declaration what details the GM will fill in on the fly and ultimately use to determine the guards reaction and then try to frame the action declaration accordingly. That's not the kind of skilled play that OSR is about as I understand it. OSR is about attempting to use the established fiction to have your characters act in ways to guarantee you accomplish your goal. Things like, there's a pit trap we know about on the map, let's get the orcs attention and lure them into it and then shoot our bows at any survivors till the group of orcs is dead. In the bluffing the guards case, there's no fictional details prior to the 'PC bluffing' to base any decision on. So even if we resolve the guard bluff with no skill checks, it still won't be OSR skilled play.

I'm not sure I think that being able to predict the DM's moves makes something OSR skilled play.

I addressed this a few posts up where I said that if the GM is very transparent about having clear resolution guidelines and principles, and telegraphs cues well, then you can achieve the necessary foundation for skilled play -- there is a system that can be leveraged. But, absent this, it's a black box decision process, for which each will operate differently. I used to play like this, but have moved away from it, largely because I felt frustrated by the opaque nature of the process as a player, and equally frustrated when GM because I constantly had to evaluate if that crazy thing the player just did was intentional or because I failed to provide adequately understandable cues.

 

[FrogReaver]

To be fair here, there's nothing about the sort of narrative-only resolution that prevents the player from asking things about the guards reactions and such to try and construct a predictive model. This requires the GM to decide on those things on the fly still, but they're at least partly prior to the player deciding approach and the GM deciding output.

IMO. This feels alot like a solution that 'solves' the problem in the current instance by pushing that problem back to a prior state. But, there's nothing in this solution that prevents the same thing from happening in that prior state and so the actual problem remains unsolved.

The problem is, its often useless. Unless the player and the GM see things in a similar fashion, or the GM is just willing to give the player the benefit of the doubt (and see my comments on this approach being ripe to breeding favoritism), this information may be next to useless to him; he can make a good faith effort and just find the result is "no" for reasons he likely won't even understand.

I think all game styles have their degenerate states when pushed to extremes. But I'm not even sure this criticism falls there - A GM having one thing in his mind and his players another is always a potential issue as any mismatch can lead to actions that seemingly fail for no reason from the players perspective. That's just the price to pay for having the game world only be visible via the DM's descriptions of it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

IMO. This feels alot like a solution that 'solves' the problem in the current instance by pushing that problem back to a prior state. But, there's nothing in this solution that prevents the same thing from happening in that prior state and so the actual problem remains unsolved.

The difference is that if the GM has decided before any final resolution is done--and before the player has finished all input--its not fundamentally different than if he came in the situation with the NPCs motivations and personality all well defined.

I think all game styles have their degenerate states when pushed to extremes. But I'm not even sure this criticism falls there - A GM having one thing in his mind and his players another is always a potential issue as any mismatch can lead to actions that seemingly fail for no reason from the players perspective. That's just the price to pay for having the game world only be visible via the DM's descriptions of it.

The problem is there's no non-arbitrary interface here at all. Essentially you've pushed everything back to the human interface level. Obviously that can work--most pure chatroom style roleplay works on that basis.

But then, often it also doesn't have an authority figure either; either everyone agrees or nothing happens, and any resolution turns on mutual agreement. So the favoritism issue is usually much less pronounced (and my experience with MUSHes years ago tells me that yes, when there is an authority figure, the lack of anything but arbitrary GM decisions is a fervid breeding ground for clashes and favoritism. It isn't a given of course--but again, there's nothing else to fall back on. As a player, you have no criteria to even know if what you're doing is considered reasonable except previous experience with the GM, and that's even assuming the GM is consistent enough to give you a clue.

(And this isn't even getting into non-social interactions that are also not mechaniced, where the GMs idea of how easy something is to do and the player's can be vastly different, and the situation may not have come up often enough for there to have been an opportunity to establish that).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Since we are going to take this a step further, let's look at how this works in play.

The player decided he wanted to bluff the guard and said X to the guard. The GM is deciding after knowing what the player is attempting what details he will add to the guard and which of those are ultimately going to determine whether the player succeeds or fails.

Since those details were determined after the player attempted his bluff, the player had no concrete information to base his action declaration on. All the player could do was to try to guess before the action declaration what details the GM will fill in on the fly and ultimately use to determine the guards reaction and then try to frame the action declaration accordingly. That's not the kind of skilled play that OSR is about as I understand it. OSR is about attempting to use the established fiction to have your characters act in ways to guarantee you accomplish your goal. Things like, there's a pit trap we know about on the map, let's get the orcs attention and lure them into it and then shoot our bows at any survivors till the group of orcs is dead. In the bluffing the guards case, there's no fictional details prior to the 'PC bluffing' to base any decision on. So even if we resolve the guard bluff with no skill checks, it still won't be OSR skilled play.

I just don't think that being able to predict the DM's moves makes something OSR skilled play.

The guard is part of the environment and the player isn't just going to be bluffing in a vacuum even if the guard has just be introduced. But this example is terribly problematic. It relies on an exceptional case: an NPC being invented on the fly. Not all NPCs are invented on the fly. Many bluff attempts will be against known NPCs. And even if the NPC is invented on the fly, skilled play is going to involve the player asking the GM questions about the guard, and feeling the guard out in conversation. Anything from asking the GM what kind of man the guard looks like, if he has any visible weaknesses or traits, to chatting up the guard a bit before diving into the bluff. I am sorry but this is definitely something I see all the time being talked about as skilled play, and I see lots of conversations where OSR GMS and players complain about skills like bluff for this reason.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There is not general advice, though -- you're promoting a phantom. There's almost no advice on how to run these scenes in some games, and very good advice in others -- advice that generally suggests using the mechanical parts of those systems. And, this play is absolutely not at all confined to OSR, or even definitional of it. What it does, somewhat, define is early RPG systems where Free Kriegsspiel approaches were the norm because the systems were building to catch up. But, even, then, games like Traveler had mechanical systems to govern these things. There are vocal proponents of this approach in 5e. This isn't OSR related at all really.

But, to the main point, it's also not skilled play. Skilled play is leveraging the system to achieve player goals within the scope of the game. Doing an improv scene with the GM is not leveraging the system -- it's sidestepping it. That you can do this with skill is well and good, and I'm not about to argue it cannot be done with skill as improv acting is very much a thing you can have lots of skill in, but it's not leveraging the system. This is detectable because this doesn't interact with the system at all, it's entirely outside the game system. You have inputs into the improv scene from the system (maybe) and the outputs possibly feed back into the system, but this function of acting out with the GM and having the GM then decide what their character does here is not within the system of the game (it's possible it is, but I'm not familiar with that system, and it's not any OSR or legit OS game I'm aware of). You're stepping out to do a thing, and that thing is, as I said, so dependent on the individuals involved that its going to be idiosyncratic to a large degree.

Meanwhile, knowing that you can leverage your build choices with a skill or check system, and use play to leverage additional improvements to make that better, is very much skilled play. And, to a large part, some of this can look similar to your proposed version. The difference is that the player can see going in what the decision structure will be and can play to that. If it's just the GM deciding how well you acted your part, then the player cannot see the decision structure, and cannot make good moves to improve it. Unless we're going to outright state that social manipulation of the GM is part and parcel of this, because that's the only real tool a player has to deploy into an opaque decision making framework.

I am not here to debate you on whether this is skilled play or not. If you don't accept it takes skill, that is on you. I don't particularly care what you think about it. All I am trying to explain to you is there is a notion of skilled play, and a use of the term in the OSR, that is what I describe. You might not consider that to be actually skillful, but that is besides the point: it is a concept and term people use to describe a style of play where they think using your skill against the setting is the priority. And it is definitely a totally different thing from the system mastery conception of skilled play. I have played both ways quite a bit. If you want to debate if there is merit to the style of play I am describing, that is a whole other thing. I am just pointing to a real distinction that matters since people were folding both approaches into the term skilled play.

But you can take it or leave it. I am here to have fun talking about games, not get into heated debates over minutiae. My only point in bringing this up to the poster initially, was to let them know skilled play means something slightly different as used in the OSR and in similar styles. I only popped in here to make that point. And you have a history of baiting me and trying to get a rise out of me for some reason. If you have an issue with me, state it clearly to me. But I am not going to continue having an exchange with you about this particular issue beyond this point because I honestly don't care if you agree with me or not about these kinds of playstyle concerns and I already got one warning from our last exchange.

 

[Manbearcat]

A couple quick thoughts based on the flurry of posts above:

1) Wheel of Fortune and Pictionary and Crossword Puzzles and Portal (inferring patterns/relationships + integrating with knowledge-base after examination and interaction and then solving the puzzle) absolutely require skill. There are clearly people who are better and worse at these types of games (and people that love them and people that hate them).

That looks to me like the Skilled Play we’re discussing here.

2) These games rely upon deeply structured, deeply coherent, deeply integrated puzzles where patterns/relationships can be inferred after both (a) GM foreshadowing and (b) interaction with/prompting the obstacle for more information.

Counter to what has been expressed, there are a LOT of obstacles/aspects of the imagined space that haven’t been pinned down/firmed up/granularity rendered even in very high resolution sandboxes. And characters are going to invariably bump up against them a fair bit (like the afformentioned guard). So in order for those things to plug into that skill set outlined in (1) above, the GM is going to need to do a lot of extremely deft (a) and (b) work RIGHT NOW for competitive integrity to be maintained (therefore Skilled Play to possess integrity).

I’m absolutely not saying it can’t be done…but, in my opinion, this is where a massive chunk in GMing skill is expressed (the other part being in the scenario/obstacle course designwork of the persistent/prefabricated/keyed items and in conveying them well during play…then refereeing the whole thing) so the play is hugely sensitive to GMing skill here.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What you seem to be missing is that there's similar assumptions for story-oriented play!

Again, I don't see how. You keep saying that it's there. I'm trying to see how it's there.

If you are engaging in story-focused play there's an assumption that you're trying to make a coherent, interesting, and entertaining story out of the bits you have.

"Coherent," "interesting," and "entertaining" are dramatically more subjective than "tactically sound" or "logical for the character," though, and that's kind of my point. "Coherence" is anything you want it to be, when you are the author who is currently writing the story. You can make literally, genuinely, absolutely ANYTHING "coherent" with enough authorial effort. And that's why I said there are no rules.

Oh, sure there are rules. Go to your local library. Section 801-809, as enumerated in the Dewey Decimal System includes literary critique and criticism. There's tons of stuff there about what makes for good and bad storytelling!

When you analyze a story that's already written, yes. But a story you are currently writing, you can do anything with. You can make literally any move work, if you work hard enough. There is no such thing as "nonsense in context" actions for story-writing, because you have the power to make ANYTHING make sense. The author, while writing the story, IS God; it is only after the story is written--once it is expressed text, no longer clay on the potter's wheel but fired and fixed--that literary criticism can begin. That's, quite literally, why we care about the "Death of the Author" and such; once the text is released from the author, it is independent thereof. Before it is released, however, the author retains infinite freedom and the story retains infinite potential.

You have limited bits - a genre choice that lays down expectations of what's a valid approach to story. You have a number of characters, each with their own fictional positioning. The game rules lay out things you can and cannot do to manipulate the story.

"Genre choice" is something you can change as you're writing. You can always decide that you're going to pass the limits of a genre while you're writing the piece--who can tell you not to inject some fantasy into your sci-fi if that tickles your authorial fancy or paves the way for the thing you want to achieve as an author?

As for the second and third bits--those are literally the things I already called out as the limits of "roleplaying" and "game." They don't come from storytelling-qua-storytelling.

Miss Marple, when she has all the suspects in the room and is about to announce whodunit, is not going to whip out a laser sword and announce, "Aliens did it! ATTACK!" even if the rules allow it, because that's a frelling stupid way to end an Agatha Christie mystery.

Sure, but there's two problems with this. First, you're only able to say this because there's a significant body of Agatha Christie mystery canon to draw upon. If she had chosen to do that with her first mystery, this criticism would have no ground to stand on other than critiquing whether Christie had earned such an ending....but an author can always work harder before publication to earn such things. Heck, even WITH such a canon, you can change the direction of a series if you like, with effort.

Asimov's Foundation novels start out as vignettes of sociological analysis on real and utterly vast populations (psychohistory), but pivot into far more speculative, high-adventure stories later ("mentalics," Gaia and the potential for "Galaxia," etc. and following Golan Trevize as he escapes death in various ways). Or consider Dune, where the first book is focused on planetary ecology and noble houses etc., and then pivots into philosophical musings on the conflicting desires and behaviors of humanity. Ending Dune with a quick summary of Leto II's Golden Path and how it saved humanity from extinction would've been a handwave of the highest order and very poorly received, but with two full doorstopper novels to tease the ideas out, it works perfectly well.

Second, we're talking about a pretty closed-door thing. You don't need to appeal to whomever-might-read, like a book author does. Really, you only need to appeal to yourself and your DM; the other players are optional, though it is quite nice when you can appeal to them too. It's a hell of a lot easier to convince one person that whipping out a laser sword and announcing, "Aliens did it! ATTACK!" is the correct thing to do, than it is to convince whomever-might-read. That's a pretty vast difference between the kind of post-publication storytelling that literary criticism addresses, and the pre-publication storytelling that is relevant for TTRPGs.

This is what I mean by "you can go anywhere you want." Unlike tactical decisions or extemporaneous roleplay, storytelling at the level of "what is the most interesting/satisfying narrative direction I could go" has no time horizon. You can build up to the story you want for as long as necessary. You can add elements gradually, introduce genre shifts by supporting that the genre should shift. With tactical decisions, your behavior is limited by a fixed, discrete clock of turns and rounds. With roleplay decisions, your behavior is limited by a discrete, non-fixed clock of scenes and scenarios. But with storytelling? There is no time limit, you can build toward things for any amount of time you like.

What tactical decision-making allows you to hit pause, go off and earn more XP and treasure elsewhere as much as you like, then come back and apply that to that specific turn? What roleplaying allows you to step out of the scene, experience as many entirely different scenarios as your heart desires, and then step right back into the scene you had left? With storytelling, you can set your end-goal story for tomorrow or next week or next year or next decade for all you care, and you can stretch out the time between in-story "now" and in-story "after" with nearly absolute freedom (truly absolute if things like magic or sci-fi are in play, what with time travel and the like).

Well, there you go! There's a rule: "Don't be formulaic."

I could continue, but I think these are the constructive bits for the moment.

Except that I didn't say all formulaic writing is bad. Because it's not. Disney's Sleeping Beauty, for example, is one of the most utterly formulaic pieces of animated cinema ever made. It's also one of my favorite Disney movies. At the time, it was panned for being "sentimental" and even trite, but today it's understood to be a beautifully-animated ultra-classic love story. It checks all the boxes, has all the features, but because they're executed well, it works.

Formulaic writing is often risky, in a specific sense, because formulae are, of necessity, simple and straightforward. Just as, for example, composing a chiptune is artistically risky, because there is nothing standing between the listener and the melody. You have to have a melody worth listening to in order for it to be compelling, because kickass orchestral or choir sections can't carry any of the weight for you, nor can 1embellishments and finery dress it up. It becomes really obvious if a formulaic story is bad, because you can see exactly where it goes wrong. But that doesn't mean formulaic works are axiomatically bad--because nothing is axiomatically bad while you still have the ability to write more (and, as noted, this can include even such things as stark genre shifts if you take the time to build up to them first.)

Greek tragedies follow an extremely rigid formula, for example. (Introduce hero of high stature; establish the hero's hamartia; show how the hamartia leads to the peripeteia; feature the revelation of the change; conclude with the hero destroyed, often killed, as catharsis.) I don't hear people saying that Oedipus Rex is bad due to following the Greek tragedy formula to a T. (Can you tell I just watched the OSP video on this subject? Hah!)

 

[clearstream]

In classic D&D, if the GM decides to just frame a scene with an evil high priest even though that is not part of the map-and-key, and is not generated by a wandering monster role, that is the GM establishing a situation outside the system parameters. It means that the players' play of their characters up to that point, including their husbanding of resources, becomes negated.

I had a thought about this which perhaps we can dig into. Let's say that to simplify

• tasks can be grouped into a type (a label for the group) and ranked by difficulty
• success at tasks of a given type is predicted by a skill in common (so that success at type A tasks is predicted by skill A)
• a skill is a factor found in common across a cohort that predicts success at tasks of the appropriate type and known difficulty
• members of a cohort can therefore be ranked according to the difficulty of tasks a skill in common can overcome
• performance is predicted by skill but not identical to it: elevated stakes, time constraints, fatigue, group effects all impact on performance (in this thread I suspect we are frequently talking about performance when we say skill)
• skill usually can't be applied when a player doesn't understand the task - this is the first barrier to performance - and then skill usually quickly improves with practice to a plateau, after which introducing the player to a new strategy may unlock further growth

Many game tasks are complex: they stress multiple skills (present multiple axes of difficulty). An example might be a task that requires visual-spatial sorting, processing speed and memory. Skills seem to be layered so that fundamental factors collectively determine skill at higher-order tasks.

A key strategy in game play is to reduce the difficulty of a task so that it requires less skill to succeed at it. This idea - strategy - is differentiable from and works with (what I will call) mid-order skills. Hooking a player up to an fMRI vividly reveals the reduced workload. In older players, strategy does more work because it does not decline with fundamental abilities: it can even increase while fundamental abilities are all measurably in decline.

So back to the concern about negating husbanding of resources. For this to really count, we must have a series of tasks of reliably known difficulty. I am DMing Tomb of Annihilation at present, and for my party of six the difficulty of the tasks is unreliable. WotC playtesting resources are significant, but not unlimited. Additionally there is the problem of difficulty across successive tasks. It is impossible for WotC to thoroughly test all party compositions against all task orderings.

I am not denying the possibility of skill here. Rather I am pointing to a role for a DM in adjusting written map+key. They have information WotC did not have. So much as possible, it may be good for them to do this adjustment in advance. WotC give them a tool in the written material which is to introduce when they feel like it a Tomb Guardian encounter. It is through good judgement in advance and on the fly that a DM course corrects difficulty. They might follow solid principles (well, I find them solid) such as exercising restraint, letting the dice almost always fall as they may, avoiding forcing some kinds of rolls (for example, I often force random encounter rolls, extremely rarely do I force rolls for characters and foes, I never force clutch rolls that might take the campaign on a completely new course).

If characters are able to husband resources because the printed material does not tax them, no special skill is being demonstrated. Taken sincerely, we assume that this is not the case in your example... but it can well be the case in similar examples that might at the table be very hard to discern from yours (except by a skillful DM, naturally!) Hence while I am with you in disliking force in most cases and I agree with you that force can obviate skill, I do not agree with you in supposing that it necessarily obviates skill (and no more than making a softer rather than hard decision, when decisioning).

Something I like that this thread has made visible to me is the group impact on performance: generally players evidence more skill when the players around them are skillful. In hindsight I already had evidence of this. @Manbearcat's examples really crystallised it for me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Since those details were determined after the player attempted his bluff, the player had no concrete information to base his action declaration on. All the player could do was to try to guess before the action declaration what details the GM will fill in on the fly and ultimately use to determine the guards reaction and then try to frame the action declaration accordingly. That's not the kind of skilled play that OSR is about as I understand it. OSR is about attempting to use the established fiction to have your characters act in ways to guarantee you accomplish your goal. Things like, there's a pit trap we know about on the map, let's get the orcs attention and lure them into it and then shoot our bows at any survivors till the group of orcs is dead. In the bluffing the guards case, there's no fictional details prior to the 'PC bluffing' to base any decision on. So even if we resolve the guard bluff with no skill checks, it still won't be OSR skilled play.

Just to revisit this point: OSR and skilled play are not interchangeable terms. Skilled play is sometime you see in the OSR. So I wouldn't say it is the single thing that defines what OSR play is. However here I think you are missing what makes skilled play in the OSR. It is about creatively and intelligently hedging your bets (not necessarily about guaranteeing you accomplish your goals, but more than that, skilled play is about finding enjoyment in the challenge of overcoming these kinds of scenarios (ideally some of them will be challenging enough that there isn't a guarantee of success). And it isn't just about luring orcs into ambushes (thought that is part of it). Another approach you see is negotiation with the creatures inhabiting a dungeon. This comes up a lot in discussions. Skilled play in this sense often involves interacting with say the leader of one faction of orcs in the dungeon in order to pit them against another faction or another type of creature (so forming an alliance or finding some kind of shared goal). So this doesn't just have to be about bluffing a guard: this can be about involved negotiations with a group of monsters. And that does take skill, and it isn't something that usually gets left to die rolls in a typical OSR session (mechanics can certainly come up; for example the GM, if he or she is uncertain about how an orc chief might respond could call for a roll of some kind, but ideally the orc chief is responding to the specifics of what the PCs are saying because that is what makes the interaction skilled in this way of playing. The important thing is this is a much different approach to the idea of skilled play than say making a diplomancer. That too takes skill, it is also a viable form of play, but it where the emphasis is placed in most OSR games I've seen talking about skilled play.