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

[Maxperson]

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.

Your argument though was, " it requires metagaming to accuse other people of metagaming," which if you replace metagaming with race ends up being, " it requires racism to accuse other people of racism." That ought to show you just how absurd and wrong that argument was. You don't have to be engaging in what it is that you understand. I can understand metagaming when I see it, without metagaming.

 

[Yardiff]

In this case, the action points directly and doubtlessly to the motivation.

And in effect giving your character an extra skill/ability along the lines of "Knowledge: Monsters" for free.

Which means if I, as another player, have put a feat or skill points or any other char-gen resource into giving my character that same ability I'd have every right to feel a bit pissed off.

In my view the bolded is and always has been the baseline default, not the exception.

There was an Int skill in 3x that was called Monster Knowledge and a feat that gave +5 to that skill and if I remember right the frequency of the monster was a negative to the roll.

 

[Maxperson]

It's so weird how people who didn't start with the earlier editions somehow think that those of us who did treated the books as holy writ.

It was the opposite. Every 1e DM I ever saw chopped up the rules and made them his own. Adding, subtracting and changing them left and right.

 

[Oofta]

So, then, we're in agreement that metagaming is a GM caused issue. Coolness.

No. We do not agree.

Metagaming isn't inherently good or bad depending on group preferences. I don't care for it as DM or player, metagaming can ruin the fun for everyone else in the group. Or not, if they don't care.

Stop telling me what I think.

 

[Oofta]

Ok, skipping my own snark, you are just repeating the same point. YOU figured it out. Fantastic. For YOU. I never did. It took reading and learning and a LOT of trial and error to figure it out. It's not about playing "right". It's about having absolutely no help when following the advice of the game gives poor results.

Now, there's all sorts of help and advice for how to do everything under the sun.

Like I said, you managed to figure it out right away, so, things never changed much for you. Me? Not so lucky.

Sorry if this struck a nerve, I was only objecting to the idea that no one did role playing back in the day. Some people did back then, some people did not. Just like today.

For example I enjoy Critical Role (even if their lack of rules knowledge bothers me sometimes). I enjoy watching when I exercise or listen when biking. Other people find it interminably boring.

Role playing isn't an inherently better way of playing so there's no reason to feel bad if you didn't figure it out. If you enjoy role playing now, I'm glad you found a way to make the game more enjoyable for you.

But again, apologies if I offended you, it was not intentional.

 

[Oofta]

Great example of why I don't think this is worth spending any time on.

If you want to cast the spell, imagine that while you were being taught this spell your mentor mentioned in an off-hand way that it can drive out Intellect Devourers. Or maybe you and the other acolyltes were up late in the dorm and one of them claimed in heard this, and you didn't believe him at the time but now you want to try it. Or, duh, everybody knows this. Whatever.

Alternately, maybe you want to roleplay it that you don't know this fact. That's up to you.

What I personally wouldn't want to do is interrupt the game to have a discussion about it, and have the DM tell me to roll a knowledge skill. Talk about turning it into roll-playing!

When there is uncertainty one of the primary ways of resolution is to roll a D20. Pretty core to the game.

If the DM is uncertain whether a PC had reason to know the effect of a spell or ability, calling for a check is SOP.

 

[Hussar]

I can claim that it 1) did exist and 2) isn't an improvement. This would be saying that it's always better to play how you do now over how you did then. Perhaps true for you, but I'd never say that my play is a strict improvement over some play that flat out has a different point to playing. It's different.

What things like the Forge and ENW have done is to spread knowledge of different agendas and then also to improve understanding of these agendas. They didn't invent them. The narrativist style of play arguably exists with games like Pendragon in the mid-80's, and a few earlier than that clearly show proto-concepts.

But, that's very much like saying that cars have not improved. That a Model T is equal to a Prius. There are demonstrable improvements. Just like there are in RPG's. Things that were considered perfectly fine back in the day are now shown, pretty clearly, to be a bad idea. Again, look at the guidelines for listening at a door in the 1e DMG. Are you seriously claiming that there isn't room for improvement there?

 

[Hussar]

Great example of why I don't think this is worth spending any time on.

If you want to cast the spell, imagine that while you were being taught this spell your mentor mentioned in an off-hand way that it can drive out Intellect Devourers. Or maybe you and the other acolyltes were up late in the dorm and one of them claimed in heard this, and you didn't believe him at the time but now you want to try it. Or, duh, everybody knows this. Whatever.

Alternately, maybe you want to roleplay it that you don't know this fact. That's up to you.

What I personally wouldn't want to do is interrupt the game to have a discussion about it, and have the DM tell me to roll a knowledge skill. Talk about turning it into roll-playing!

But, if I decide that I had "heard this" somewhere, then how is that not meta-gaming. Sure, I can come up with some backstory bit that justifies it. You can do that with virtually anything.

So, am I meta-gaming or not?

At least the knowledge skill is leveraging the rules to justify why I might know this. Do I have the requisite knowledge skills? Then it makes sense that I know this. But, then again, the knowledge skills list is hardly encyclopedic.

My point about all this is "meta-gaming" is a very, very nebulous thing and is very hard to pin down.

 

[Hussar]

Sorry if this struck a nerve, I was only objecting to the idea that no one did role playing back in the day. Some people did back then, some people did not. Just like today.

For example I enjoy Critical Role (even if their lack of rules knowledge bothers me sometimes). I enjoy watching when I exercise or listen when biking. Other people find it interminably boring.

Role playing isn't an inherently better way of playing so there's no reason to feel bad if you didn't figure it out. If you enjoy role playing now, I'm glad you found a way to make the game more enjoyable for you.

But again, apologies if I offended you, it was not intentional.

It's not a case of offense.

It's this presumption that because you figured it out, it must be that everyone did. That the rules gave zero guidance, zero actual help, doesn't apparently matter. It's why I get very annoyed, very quickly in these conversations. This all started with the claim that AD&D was less adversarial in approach than 3e or later editions. Which, frankly, is utter bollocks. It's simply not true. And it's not true because I can point to fifteen different quotes from the DMG that show it's not true.

That you ignored the DMG does not change any of that.

 

[Bill Zebub]

But, if I decide that I had "heard this" somewhere, then how is that not meta-gaming. Sure, I can come up with some backstory bit that justifies it. You can do that with virtually anything.

So, am I meta-gaming or not?

At least the knowledge skill is leveraging the rules to justify why I might know this. Do I have the requisite knowledge skills? Then it makes sense that I know this. But, then again, the knowledge skills list is hardly encyclopedic.

My point about all this is "meta-gaming" is a very, very nebulous thing and is very hard to pin down.

Well, as soon as you ask yourself “do I know this” then you are meta-gaming.

Unless you are narrowly restricting the definition to only apply when the role-playing decision you make is, on the surface, the more advantageous one. (For all you know, driving the Intellect Devourer from its host could leave you in a worse situation, for reasons unforeseen.)

But if I were your DM and you paused the game to ask me what to do, I would just say, “Pick whatever you think makes the better story. You are all in deep fecal matter either way. Or, if you think it’s uncertain, give yourself a DC and roll the dice. But now that we’ve gone and made a big deal about this, if you (or the dice) decide that you do know, spin us a good story about how you learned it.”

You know, roleplaying.