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

[Bill Zebub]

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).

Clearly you are just lying.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

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


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.

The entities you are competing against is not the GM, it is the fictional entities and challenges simulated by the GM as obstacles to overcome every time that element of the fiction comes into conflict with your goals (the environment part if player vs environment). This is one of multiple roles the GM plays-- just like how you aren't competing with the developers of Mario as you try to 'beat the game' the obstacles exist to test your skill, "contending with" would be the better wording.

Moldovay's words similarly seem to be taking place at a greater level of abstraction, speaking to the emergent story produced by the wins and losses-- but the process from which that story emerges certainly features success and failure, people trying hard, and victory and defeat.

 

[Oofta]

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'm sure I play differently now than I was when I was 15. But we always played our PCs to the best of our abilities and pretty much in-character. Not sure why that's so hard to believe, I was also an avid reader of fantasy and Sci-Fi books. Why is it surprising that I was trying to pretend to be a character from a book?

 

[Bill Zebub]

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.

What? Where did I say that? I completely believe you.

I just said that in order to be deciding for yourself if you think another player is role-playing or roll-playing, you have to be out of character yourself.

 

[Hussar]

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

Oh, no, I would definitely say improved.

My games are much, much better now than they were when I look back at what I did in my teens. My cringeworthy attempts back then are what they are - very basic attempts to emulate all sorts of ideas and failing spectacularly. DMPC's, railroading with the heaviest of hands, forcing outcomes, resolving adventures with NPC's, you name it, I'm very much guilty of it. I was definitely not a good DM back then. I might not be a great DM now, but, I'm certainly a hell of a lot better at running games now than I was back then. And a much better player as well.

The idea that roleplaying today, after years of indie games, examination by the likes of the Forge and multitude of others, and a bajillion hours of actual play is the same as it was in 1981 is, IMO, absurd. Of course it's different. The language we use is entirely different. The way in which we reflect on gaming is completely different, informed by years of experience it has to be.

To me, and I know this is going to get me in hot water, but, games like AD&D and certainly OD&D were barely role playing games. Hell, they were barely playable as games without a huge amount of effort on the part of the participants. So, of course role playing has changed over the years. I remember an Up on the Soapbox from an earlier Dragon magazine - I'll try to dig it out later - where Gygax was shocked by a polling done in the magazine where respondents actually felt playing in character was important to role play. And this was a post-3e Dragon magazine. So, yeah, it has changed.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

The entities you are competing against is not the GM, it is the fictional entities and challenges simulated by the GM as obstacles to overcome every time that element of the fiction comes into conflict with your goals (the environment part if player vs environment).

Not for a lot of the players who started with 3rd Edition and its very "DM vs Players" mindset. Those of us who started before 3rd edition generally do not think that way. Never played 4th Edition, so no idea if the Versus mindset was continued. And 5th Edition is back to the more cooperative mindset of the older editions.

 

[Ovinomancer]

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.

Oddly, you require rolls to determine what a character is permitted to know, while the other approach lets the player establish how the character knows things. But this is the choice of pejorative deployed. Irony!

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.

I don't think you're lying that you don't like metagaming. How you'd get there given anything anyone has said is weird.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Oh, no, I would definitely say improved.

My games are much, much better now than they were when I look back at what I did in my teens. My cringeworthy attempts back then are what they are - very basic attempts to emulate all sorts of ideas and failing spectacularly. DMPC's, railroading with the heaviest of hands, forcing outcomes, resolving adventures with NPC's, you name it, I'm very much guilty of it. I was definitely not a good DM back then. I might not be a great DM now, but, I'm certainly a hell of a lot better at running games now than I was back then. And a much better player as well.

The idea that roleplaying today, after years of indie games, examination by the likes of the Forge and multitude of others, and a bajillion hours of actual play is the same as it was in 1981 is, IMO, absurd. Of course it's different. The language we use is entirely different. The way in which we reflect on gaming is completely different, informed by years of experience it has to be.

To me, and I know this is going to get me in hot water, but, games like AD&D and certainly OD&D were barely role playing games. Hell, they were barely playable as games without a huge amount of effort on the part of the participants. So, of course role playing has changed over the years. I remember an Up on the Soapbox from an earlier Dragon magazine - I'll try to dig it out later - where Gygax was shocked by a polling done in the magazine where respondents actually felt playing in character was important to role play. And this was a post-3e Dragon magazine. So, yeah, it has changed.

There's a difference in improving technique and in changing the goals of your play. You could have improved but not changed goals and just have been better at running the same kinds of games. Instead, you've chosen a different goal, one that you find to be better. But this isn't improvement so much as alignment. Improvement is getting better at the process of play, which is somewhat orthogonal to the goals of play.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Not for a lot of the players who started with 3rd Edition and its very "DM vs Players" mindset. Those of us who started before 3rd edition generally do not think that way. Never played 4th Edition, so no idea if the Versus mindset was continued. And 5th Edition is back to the more cooperative mindset of the older editions.

I started with 4e, ive always seen it as players vs. environment with the GM simulating an opposition, but divorced from the adversial role since they are simulating everything else and having the full goals, powers, and responsibility of a game designer. Which is what I love about GMing.

 

[Oofta]

Oddly, you require rolls to determine what a character is permitted to know, while the other approach lets the player establish how the character knows things. But this is the choice of pejorative deployed. Irony!

I run a homebrew campaign so it is different than, say the kitchen sink campaign of FR, there is a significant percentage of the MM I've never used other than as inspiration for custom monsters that are often represented as variations of a more common monster. If a monster has never before appeared in a campaign world, how could the PC know about them?

It's not ironic to say that the PC doesn't know what a behir is if one has never existed any more than that a PC doesn't know what a cell phone is.