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

[Ovinomancer]

But, again, we're back to good faith. Just as I'm too close to the issue to be unbiased - obviously I want to be able to use this spell, it's a really good idea - the DM is also in the same position. Either way he rules, or, like you, just punts on the question and sends it back to me, the question is always out there as to why that particular determination was made. DId the DM allow it because he didn't want to start a fight with the player? Did he do it because it's a good story? Did he do it because he assumed that the players were going to do it? Conversely, did the DM say no because he wanted to protect his encounter from an ability and increase the "difficulty" as we've seen suggested repeatedly in the Exploration Pillar threads?

No matter what the answer we come up with here, it's going to have meta-gaming cooties all over it.

I mean, the fact that no one has actually given a straight answer here pretty much shows how nebulous the issue is. There's no significant difference between my example and the "Fire on a Troll" example that gets trotted out every time. It's pretty much word for word identical except that probably no one reading this knew that Protection from Evil/Good does that unless you happened to be recently reading the Intellect Devourer part of the Monster Manual.

But, your rather blithe answer of "You know, roleplaying" pretty much covers the ground doesn't it? I can 100% metagame, but, so long as I tell a good story, I'm not meta-gaming?

Oh, you want a straight answer. Sure. Whatever the player decides they want. It's their character, so the only decision point is theirs. As a GM, I'm only concerned with presenting the challenge, not in his it resolves. If it resolves with the spell, that's as good as it ending with the devourer puppeting a dead PC. All good, the game will move forward.

I don't think "metagaming" has cooties, so them being everywhere is only a problem for people insistent metagaming is bad. The reality is that they really only dislike metagaming that annoys the GM and are just fine with netagaming that pleases the GM. Meh, why care?

 

[Aldarc]

Can you please offer some arguments stronger than "no, it's not" ? And arguments that actually answer the post that you are responding to ?

My preference is to offer arguments to people who I can trust can respond in good faith without insulting others. You're not doing a good job of convincing me that I can trust you, so please understand my hesitancy to engage with you further.

Also, please have a look in the mirror, and see how you first responded to my post: "it certainly says a lot about how you view players as a DM." How belittling do you think that is, honestly ?

You mean your post where you belittlingly accuse these players of being entitlted rules lawyers?

 

[Ovinomancer]

If you think walking hasn't changed in the past hundred years, I suggest you try wearing shoes that were made using technology a hundred years ago and then go for a ten k walk. Oh, and don't forget your fitbit. Oh, and you have to wear cotton or wool. Zero synthetics. On and on.

This seems to being really trying to miss the point. I can still walk barefoot. Walking, no matter how many advances in footwear occur, will still be different from driving a car. So, advances in how cars drive cannot improve walking, even if walking otherwise improves.

You played the game in way A. Way B was possible, you didn't know about it. You later learned about way B, because advancements in talking about way B occurred and it came to your attention. Further, better ways to engage in way B also occurred, as they did with way A. You know play in way B. It is not an improvement over way A because way B improved. B improved. A improved. B is not A. You do B, ergo you didn't improve over A, you changed to B and then B improved, or you changed to be because you became aware of improvements in B. You did not improve from A to B.

But that is torturing the analogy. I would say that "Transportation" has radically changed in the past 100 years. Roleplaying has changed quite a lot from the early days. What was considered perfectly acceptable is now not. Heck, right down to the notion that the players should not be privy to the rules of the game. That, right there, is probably the biggest change in role playing. Never minding the hugely altered view of what the DM/GM is supposed to do in an RPG. Do you seriously think that something like Blades in the Dark could have been created in 1981? Fiasco? Any of the pass-the-story-stick-hippy-dippy-Indie games of the past fifteen years?

No, but I also don't think a Maclaren F1 could have been built in 1912, but cars existed. The ways the Blades leverages to play also existed almost immediately when the concept of RPGs arrived. It was very fast. Games like Pendragon rose to acclaim in 10 years, and that's in a world where you didn't have indie press and the internet -- it went the traditional ways. That isn't possible without a base of understanding sufficient enough to pierce the publication model of the time. This was also almost 2 decades before the Forge.

But, Pendragon isn't an improvement over D&D. It's a different beast altogether. It's model carried forward, and iterated, and we have some great games, but, you know what? Pendragon is still pretty darned good. And Prince Valiant came out in 89, and it's a straight up storygame. Storygames existed in non-formal contexts pretty much from the start. My first exposure to D&D was with a friend in middle school and we pretty much just made naughty word up and roleplayed characters in a storygame, taking turns. The first actual game of D&D I managed to play was some time later, and was much more traditional in nature.

Not a chance. Roleplaying just hadn't broadened to encompass those concepts yet. Sure, the seeds are there, I'll certainly grant that. But, if you look at the "what is an RPG" intro in virtually every RPG before, say, 1988, they are pretty much exactly the same. Now? Now we have arguments as to whether some games are even RPG's at all because they are so different from the mainstream.

This isn't an "improvement" in roleplaying in the ways you did as a youth. It's also not creation of these things. It's a wider conversation where people are acknowledging things and discussing them more openly, and a market that allows for indie exploration of concepts and ideas that where not feasible under older publication models. Heck, I think Cthulhu Dark is a tremendous conceptual piece, but it couldn't exist without the internet or an RPG hobby so large that such things are supportable. It might have existed, but it would have been in that one gaming club and no one else would have heard of it. I find your claims that it's new stuff and improvements instead of category shifts to be rather myopic.

 

[turnip_farmer]

So, metagaming has never really come up as an issue in games I've played or run. Reading this thread, though, I can understand but why the Angry GM got so angry about the topic.

I can't really imagine playing a game where players are required to justify whether their character would have come up with the same good idea they did. Sounds excruciating.

To each their own.

 

[Umbran]

So if that's the best you can do in terms of discussion, honestly, it's a bit sad,

Mod Note:
Yes, well, insulting people is also a bit of sad rhetoric, too. You should probably stop the comments about the people speaking, and stick to the topic.

Can you please offer some arguments stronger than "no, it's not" ? And arguments that actually answer the post that you are responding to ?

Again - a moment ago you were insulting. You're not in a great position to dictate quality of responses at this moment.

My preference is to offer arguments to people who I can trust can respond in good faith without insulting others. You're not doing a good job of convincing me that I can trust you, so please understand my hesitancy to engage with you further.

Some posters feel that, after someone's taken an insulting potshot, it is okay to respond in kind by continuing the argument in a personal line. That's not a great idea.

Now, the discussion has become which of the two of you has a bigger ego, rather than the actual topic. Next time, I suggest you instead refuse to engage with insults.

If both of you will stand down from this conflict, it can be done and over now.

 

[Oofta]

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.

Your point? Because my point is that we did role playing whether or not we were "supposed to".

No one has ever claimed that the authors of the original books (especially Gygax) and several mods did not have a DM vs player feel. We just ignored it at the vast majority of the games I ever played back then. I had a DM that embraced it one time. It was a one time thing because no one wanted to play with them as DM again. I think I played one game at a con that was intentionally and explicitly in that mold. Actually, correct that, two games because my brother-in-law purchased a game session hosted by a WOTC employee shortly after they had purchased TSR and we had a one shot with one of the game devs, who's name I sadly can't remember. Now that I think of it, the con game was also run by a D&D dev.

So my point? Effectively all games that were more than a session or two I played with over the years were not adversarial and I started playing in the 70s. So your "utter bollocks" was just my real world experiences with real DMs. Practically all of whom ignored the DM vs player adversarial relationship you're obsessed with.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Your point? Because my point is that we did role playing whether or not we were "supposed to".

No one has ever claimed that the authors of the original books (especially Gygax) and several mods did not have a DM vs player feel. We just ignored it at the vast majority of the games I ever played back then. I had a DM that embraced it one time. It was a one time thing because no one wanted to play with them as DM again. I think I played one game at a con that was intentionally and explicitly in that mold. Actually, correct that, two games because my brother-in-law purchased a game session hosted by a WOTC employee shortly after they had purchased TSR and we had a one shot with one of the game devs, who's name I sadly can't remember. Now that I think of it, the con game was also run by a D&D dev.

So my point? Effectively all games that were more than a session or two I played with over the years were not adversarial and I started playing in the 70s. So your "utter bollocks" was just my real world experiences with real DMs. Practically all of whom ignored the DM vs player adversarial relationship you're obsessed with.

Everyone did roleplaying. If you picked a class, and played the game, that's roleplaying. Let's not confuse "playacting" or "character goals" as the definition of roleplaying, because that's just trying to claim the term for your set of preferences.

 

[Oofta]

Everyone did roleplaying. If you picked a class, and played the game, that's roleplaying. Let's not confuse "playacting" or "character goals" as the definition of roleplaying, because that's just trying to claim the term for your set of preferences.

We played in-character using character motivations, speaking in character, making decision that made sense to the character even if the player knew it wasn't the best idea. It was not "I'm a wizard". I don't know why you refuse to accept that not everyone played like you did.

 

[Lyxen]

Everyone did roleplaying. If you picked a class, and played the game, that's roleplaying. Let's not confuse "playacting" or "character goals" as the definition of roleplaying, because that's just trying to claim the term for your set of preferences.

Even the Basic set tells you exactly, under the heading "what is role playing ?", on the very first page of the rule book, which definition was in use at the time, and it includes playacting, sorry: "That means that you will be like an actor, imagining that you are someone else, and pretending to be that character. You won’t need a stage, though, and you won’t need costumes or scripts. You only need to imagine."

So once more, it is very precise since the very beginnings of the game, and specified by the game designers as the intent of the game.

 

[Mannahnin]

So my point? Effectively all games that were more than a session or two I played with over the years were not adversarial and I started playing in the 70s. So your "utter bollocks" was just my real world experiences with real DMs. Practically all of whom ignored the DM vs player adversarial relationship you're obsessed with.

He's not obsessed with anything.

Lyxen opined that 3rd created or substantially worsened the issue of adversarial play between DM & players. Hussar opined that this seems absurd ("utter bollocks"), because in the 1979 1E DMG we can see massive amounts of evidence of adversarial play in the official materials, endorsed by the game's creator.

The fact that you personally ignored that adversarial advice from the start doesn't mean that it wasn't common or happening.

Personally I think I get what Lyxen is getting at; WotC did try to empower players more by standardizing rules in ways which could be said to bind the hands of bad DMs. I don't think this in any way created adversarial play, but it might have fueled adversarial play and player entitlement in ways that 2E very much fought against, with its pretty strong DM empowerment stance. The 2E DMG is full of all kinds of wishy-washy "you could run it this way or that way" advice, trying to cater to lots of different play styles and preferences and largely leaving is up to the DM. The 3E DMG is full of all kinds of crunchy mechanics and definitions, which are GREAT for defining and rationalizing and standardizing the game and helping newer DMs, but also can serve as handles for players to grab and say "hey, that's now how that's supposed to work!"