D&D General Has the meaning of "roleplaying" changed since 1e?

[Bill Zebub]

Oh, can we all play this game and just make blanket statements about populations that confirm our arguments?

So why do so many GM's want to play their players' PCs? Or, why are so many game so good that don't care about metagaming? Or, why do?

This is fun. I like these games.

Can I play?

Why are so many GMs and players so sure they know better than a player what that player's character "would do" in various situations?

Here's the thing I just don't understand: if everybody at the table knows the solution to a challenge (e.g., burn the trolls) there is not really any challenge to overcome. People are just enjoying roleplaying what they think their characters "would do" in the situation, but there isn't actually anything to solve. Right? Because everybody knows the answer, there's not an actual, real challenge being presented. The players are kind of like the cast members of a movie filming a scene: everybody on the set knows that you snip the blue wire, not the red wire, and the hero will eventually snip the right one, but in the meantime they're all pretending to be terrified.

So why is it "cheating" to "gain advantage" if one of the players suddenly decides their character knows the answer? Is the problem just that they went off-script, like if the actor in the movie snipped the blue wire without agonizing over it?

 

[Lyxen]

Not really, no. My character wanting to survive, etc and overcome the obstacles in their path isn't me the player playing to win. It's me playing the character. Not many characters go into a dungeon to die. Most want to come back out again with some loot so they can retire from the absurdity that it adventuring. Deciding to metagame, optimize your character, making only optimal choices, having the orphaned edgelord background package, etc is playing to win.

Playing competitively, playing to win, metagaming, pawn stance, playing like it's a boardgame or a wargame all come from a place of the player trying to win at a game rather than trying to play the role of their character. Swinging your sword in combat isn't necessarily roleplaying. It can be...if your character is trying to kill that particular creature for an in-fiction reason...like that gnome murdered your friend so you want revenge...that's roleplaying. If you as the player look at the battle map and decide that the optimal move is to kill that gnome, that's not roleplaying...that's wargaming. The difference is the decision making process. Is the decision coming from something the character thinks or would do or is it coming from what the player thinks or wants to do. Very rarely they can line up. But more often than not they don't.

I mostly agree with your post, but don't agree with the last statement. At our tables, we don't do dungeons, and when there's a fight, it's for a reason linked to the story. And even during the fights, the adventurers' motivations are the one chosen by the player, is it just surviving, is it battle lust, is it to make other safe, etc. And the ways used to fight are for roleplay too. When the lizardfolk decides to take a bite of an adversary, it first asks himself whether it would be reasonable to bite something like that or whether it would be disgusting, or even interesting for a new taste. And this is because the players wants to have fun roleplaying the character that way, so it aligns when you are playing story-orientated.

And when you are playing to win / wargaming, there is nothing to align to anyway, because only the player matters, he is using the character as just the pawn on a board/wargame.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Not really, no. My character wanting to survive, etc and overcome the obstacles in their path isn't me the player playing to win. It's me playing the character. Not many characters go into a dungeon to die. Most want to come back out again with some loot so they can retire from the absurdity that it adventuring. Deciding to metagame, optimize your character, making only optimal choices, having the orphaned edgelord background package, etc is playing to win.

Playing competitively, playing to win, metagaming, pawn stance, playing like it's a boardgame or a wargame all come from a place of the player trying to win at a game rather than trying to play the role of their character. Swinging your sword in combat isn't necessarily roleplaying. It can be...if your character is trying to kill that particular creature for an in-fiction reason...like that gnome murdered your friend so you want revenge...that's roleplaying. If you as the player look at the battle map and decide that the optimal move is to kill that gnome, that's not roleplaying...that's wargaming. The difference is the decision making process. Is the decision coming from something the character thinks or would do or is it coming from what the player thinks or wants to do. Very rarely they can line up. But more often than not they don't.

I would interpret what you consider my "meta" strategy to be my incharacter strategy, or at least ensure it makes sense in the fiction. I sometimes learn who my character is from their actions, but thats happened in multiple directions. Which is often how it works in real life.

The questions of build is unrelated, since the character doesn't exist to make decisions when you build them, that can only be a meta decision.

Ironically I make decisions like "it would be a really cool narrative thing if i did this or had Emrys act like that" in the same headspace, carving my decisions into the plot to help shape it.

 

[Oofta]

I hadn’t thought of that but I think you are right: it takes a mindset of winning and losing to analyze other players’ actions that way.

There’s a parallel to the observation that it requires metagaming to accuse other people of metagaming: if you are in the mindset of your character then all you know is your companion saved the day by burning the trolls. You have to be thinking as a player to worry about what their motivation was for choosing that action, or to claim that it “spoils your immersion”.

Irony abounds.

For me it's really not about "cheating" it's that I prefer people play in character with in character knowledge. That taking on the role of the PC includes taking into account the knowledge they would reasonably have and not being obnoxious and doing things like reading the monster stat block to the group from the MM. It's about not reading a module and ruining the fun of exploration and discovery for the other people at the table by using in depth knowledge of the mod to bypass everything.

Pretty condescending to say that it's only about "winning and losing" or that people are just flat out lying about what bothers them.

 

[overgeeked]

You know thinking about how at odds that line is from the material design of the game I suspect the part after the hyphens is carrying a lot of weight. Wins and losses exist, but they aren't absolute due to the fiction providing a lot more outcomes and possible outcomes. Winning and losing is usually understood to end the game, whereas play typically continues in DND.

E.g. if you dont get to the prince in time and he gets sacrificed to summon a demon lord when saving him was your goal, that is a loss, but the failure state isnt absolute-- you can find another way to stop the demon lord. Meanwhile saving the prince is a win. But either way play continues and the consequences unfold.

To win a competitive game means to defeat an opponent. The roleplaying game is a group of people sharing a set of game rules that help create a consistent shared delusion of fictional events. At the table, in the real world, who's the opponent? Who are you in competition against? It's not the DM. (If you think you are, that's a warning sign. If the DM thinks you're in competition, that's also a warning sign.) It's not the other players. So there's no win to be had.

In the fiction the players and DM collaboratively create, there are goals to achieve, monsters to fight, creatures to talk to, and treasure to collect. You achieve a goal. You defeat a monster. You negotiate with a creature. You loot some treasure. You can call those "wins" but that just muddies the definition.

In terms of the game there is no winning and no losing. There's only play. Even character death is not a loss. It's a pause in play at worst.

“The D&D game has neither losers nor winners, it has only gamers who relish exercising their imagination. The players and the DM share in creating adventures in fantastic lands where heroes abound and magic really works. In a sense, the D&D game has no rules, only rule suggestions. No rule is inviolate, particularly if a new or altered rule will encourage creativity and imagination. The important thing is to enjoy the adventure.” —Tom Moldvay

I mostly agree with your post, but don't agree with the last statement. At our tables, we don't do dungeons, and when there's a fight, it's for a reason linked to the story. And even during the fights, the adventurers' motivations are the one chosen by the player, is it just surviving, is it battle lust, is it to make other safe, etc. And the ways used to fight are for roleplay too. When the lizardfolk decides to take a bite of an adversary, it first asks himself whether it would be reasonable to bite something like that or whether it would be disgusting, or even interesting for a new taste. And this is because the players wants to have fun roleplaying the character that way, so it aligns when you are playing story-orientated.

And when you are playing to win / wargaming, there is nothing to align to anyway, because only the player matters, he is using the character as just the pawn on a board/wargame.

A clearer example is the player who constantly has to be reminded that their character doesn't actually have line of sight on a target. The player looks down on the battle map and sees the target. Only when they're reminded that the character exists and that the player needs to check if their character has LOS will they check.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Pretty condescending to say that it's only about "winning and losing" or that people are just flat out lying about what bothers them.

Damn right.

Wait…are you accusing me/us of saying that?

From where I sit, several people in this thread have refused to accept others’ explanations of why they don’t worry about metagaming and instead insist that they are doing it to “win”. That is, that they are lying.

I was just agreeing with somebody else that in order to see it that way you need to be thinking about the game in terms of winning and losing. Which is ironic.

 

[Ovinomancer]

What equates "metagaming" with "winning." The connection is asserted, but not supported. For instance, I don't care or enforce anything about metagaming, and my games aren't just pawn-stance races to "win." I'm sure this will be dismissed as either me being wrong and not understanding anything (despite the fact that 10 years ago I'd be in lockstep with those decrying metagaming) or dismissed as some outlier and not the usual case (which hasn't be established as the usual, just asserted as such).

 

[Hussar]

It may have changed for you, I don't see that much of a difference personally. Then again, it's not like we followed the books like a technical document. Not that you could with the earliest editions anyway. We just played the style of game that made sense to us and didn't pay much attention, or even know how, other groups played.

Really?

You play now in such a way that 12 year old you (or however old you were when you started) would immediately understand and recognize? I sure don't. Horrible little munchkin me wouldn't know role play from a hole in the ground. Fytor and Father Generic the Cleric, and Cookie Jarvis the Magic User? Yeah, they're not the way I play now.

I mean, I don't play with the same people that I played with forty years ago. And, as was mentioned, I'm pretty different from younger me. Add to the fact that my group is all in their forties, has decades of play with multiple systems, and they've all DM'd at some point or other and you have play that is quite different from how 12 year old me played.

I'd like to think that I've learned a couple of things about how to run a better game, and how to be a better player and how to improve the quality of play over the past several decades.

 

[Oofta]

Damn right.

Wait…are you accusing me/us of saying that?

From where I sit, several people in this thread have refused to accept others’ explanations of why they don’t worry about metagaming and instead insist that they are doing it to “win”. That is, that they are lying.

I was just agreeing with somebody else that in order to see it that way you need to be thinking about the game in terms of winning and losing. Which is ironic.

Which is ignoring everything I've said. It's not about winning and losing for me. It may be for some people, it may be that some people don't care. For me it's because I want a Role Playing game, not a Roll Playing game.

Or am I just lying? If you don't care about metagaming, that's fine. At a certain point I may not want to play at that table, but that doesn't make it "wrong". What I'm objecting to is that you accuse other people of lying because they have a preference that people stay in character at the table.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Really?

You play now in such a way that 12 year old you (or however old you were when you started) would immediately understand and recognize? I sure don't. Horrible little munchkin me wouldn't know role play from a hole in the ground. Fytor and Father Generic the Cleric, and Cookie Jarvis the Magic User? Yeah, they're not the way I play now.

I mean, I don't play with the same people that I played with forty years ago. And, as was mentioned, I'm pretty different from younger me. Add to the fact that my group is all in their forties, has decades of play with multiple systems, and they've all DM'd at some point or other and you have play that is quite different from how 12 year old me played.

I'd like to think that I've learned a couple of things about how to run a better game, and how to be a better player and how to improve the quality of play over the past several decades.

I wouldn't say "improved" in this sense, although you undoubtedly have improved. I'd say your goals of play have shifted.