D&D General Styles of Roleplaying and Characters

[Umbran]

I don't think we need significant rules around social interactions beyond what we already have.

Who is "we"? You and your players? If so, then fine, then don't use such rules. Continue on as you wish. I don't see anyone saying otherwise. If you perceive anyone else as saying otherwise, we should check on that and make sure.

If "we" is some other group, it'll bear some discussion as to whether it is fine.

So I'm not allowed to express a personal opinion? Because that's what it sounds like.

You're fine to express your personal opinion. But, if you ask one question, get an answer, and then proceed as if the answer was to a different question, there's a problem.

As far as design principles, I like what D&D does.

Which is, again, fine. You keep plugging away at D&D then.

I think D&D has done a dutiful job of having rules for its traditional main foci. But, if D&D was designed intending romance to be a major focus... it'd probably have rules for it, weapon speed factors and all.

We might infer from this that maybe you aren't really itnerested in a game with romance as a main focus. And that's fine. But then you're not really in a position to object to "for people who do want...".

What can I say? There is tactical thinking when it comes to some interactions.

In every game design, there's a choice for what interactions should have tactical thinking. D&D is largely a game about who kills whom, so there's a whole lot of tactical thinking around combat. D&D has chosen a focus where most conflict resolution is physical, and often violent.

But, we can imagine a game with different focus, say, less about who gets killed, and more on who marries whom. Mr. Darcy does not need a two-handed sword or magic missiles. He doesn't need rules for moving about on 5' map squares, he needs rules for wooing and social climbing.

Which is really to say, D&D-fantasy isn't the only genre out there. If it is your favorite, that's great.

However the moment you set up a framework for people to lean on, for me it would break immersion and limits options.

So, if you don't want limited options... why have a combat system? At this point, you know enough about game combat interactions to just.. narrate combats, no?

I've played in larps with such - narrative combat scenes, with no strict rules applied. Indeed, one of the most character-defining moments I've had in a larp was in a narrative combat scene in the first episode of a 5-year campaign. There's a lot to be said for it...

But, everyone wants D&D to have a robust combat system. Folks who want romance as a game pillar are also likely to want to have robust romance rules. And that statement doesn't equate to you, Oofta, having to use robust romance rules at your table. You get to continue to do you.

 

[pemerton]

I strongly disagree.

What you are describing is no different than playing a board game, other than the board is an agreed upon construct of the collective group's imagination. In fact, you can actually directly plot every single element to a physical board and it would not change a single thing.

This isn't true.

In a board game there's no way to (say) come up with the idea of bribing the ogre to fight the kobolds; or of anticipating that the evil high priest is evil, and trying to exploit his propensity for treachery to your advantage, or any of the other stuff that can happen in the play of KotB that (i) depend on the fact that fictional positioning matters (as @Campbell posted upthread) but (ii) do not depend on portraying a character beyond saying what it is that one's character does.

Trying to insist that the game that was the first RPG is in fact not a RPG just strike me as odd. (And the linguistic component of your argument seems to me like trying to insist that rugby isn't football because the foot isn't used very often to move the ball.)

EDIT: Ninja'd by @Aldarc.

 

[Manbearcat]

I strongly disagree.

What you are describing is no different than playing a board game, other than the board is an agreed upon construct of the collective group's imagination. In fact, you can actually directly plot every single element to a physical board and it would not change a single thing. In other words, you have played a game, certainly. But, without any actual attempt to decide your actions based on the persona of the created character, rather than pure pawn play, there is no role being played.

I know people REALLY want to insist that just because there are D&D books sitting on the table, we're role playing, but, frankly it's not true. As I said before, you can certainly inject role play into a board game. I'm sure most of us have done that. Well, the reverse is also 100% true. You can play D&D and, really, any RPG without any actual R. Congratulations, you've drifted a role playing game into a game. There's nothing wrong with playing that way, and, I think a lot of tables play that way, certainly in the early days of gaming anyway.

But, without the assumption of some sort of persona by the players, even if it's not backed up by mechanics, and purely free form, without that assumption of a persona, there is no role playing going on. You're playing a game. No different than being a full back on a soccer field. Yes, within the game, you have a role - full back - and that role has certain rules around it, but, there's no persona assumption going on there. No one is going to seriously claim soccer is an RPG. So, without the assumption of a persona, there is no role play.

Yeah, I don’t agree that an RPG is defined by participants having multifaceted personas.

The defining feature of an RPG is the multifaceted situation-space (obstacles and fictional positioning) which then interacts with a multifaceted move-space for the players, each of which possess some measure of discrete purpose (even if that purpose isn’t profoundly differentiated from another such that it qualifies as a niche), and some goal (often, though not always, a collective goal).

This creates complex decision-points where the participants are using as inputs (a) all the stuff around them in the situations-space, (b) their discrete purpose/faculty within that purpose, and (c) their goal (integrating all of this to winnow their decision-tree to a singular action declaration).

So how is that different from a boardgame or sport? (a) is considerably more dimensionally complex, (b) is much more broad, and how (c) integrates with (a) and (b) must be revisited and renewed continuously (even a Moldvay Dwarf who is merely “dude who protects their allies so they can get treasure out of dungeon” has some “goal drift” as their personal resources dwindle or Team PC resources dwindle…up to and including “I can’t protect you anymore…let’s cut out losses and GTFO”).

The decision-trees navigated are just way more complex, the cognitive loop much more fraught, and goal drift is a recurrent feature of play.

 

[pemerton]

So, we should ask then, why the fictional positioning matters.

In a traditional board game, it doesn't matter because of the highly constrained action space. By prescribing a very limited set of actions to the player, all questions of fictional positioning can be baked into the abstraction of the game rules. When playing chess, maybe the knight is stabbing the opposing bishop with a sword, tilting at the rook/castle with a lance, and maybe they are wooing the pawn romantically until the pawn is convinced to leave the field - the abstraction makes such distinctions irrelevant.

I think that this tends to miss the fundamental reason why fictional positioning doesn't matter in chess: there is no shared fiction! Chess is not a game in which fiction is created: the labelling of pieces as knights, queens etc is just that - labelling.

I own multiple LotR CCGs (the ICE one; the Decipher one) and enjoy playing them with my daughter. These have nice pictures, rich flavour text, the ICE one has a nice map, etc. The "story" aspect of the game is a fun part of play: I'm Aragorn carrying my ranger's bow and shooting Orcs across the river Anduin is evocative in a way that I'm a deal-X-damage-for-Y-resource-expenditure game piece is not.

Still, there's no fictional positioning because there's no shared fiction! The labelling of a game piece as Aragorn is just that - a label. It's an evocative label that is a big part of the game's appeal, but it's just a label.

Another game I play with my daughter, Mystic Wood, is an old Avalon Hill tile-based game that's a bit like Talisman but fun. If my knight gets ensnared by the Enchantress then I can't escape until I roll a 6. Just like the CCGs, the flavour text is part of what makes this game fun: it's not just that the tile with the Enchantress on it says "Miss your turn unless you roll a 6" - I get to imagine my knight trapped in the castle by the Enchantress, like an episode from Morte d'Arthur.

But still there's no shared fiction, and hence no fictional positioning. There's simply no framework, in Mystic Wood, for saying I suggest to the Enchantress that we team up to do such-and-such and thereby change my chance to escape to 5 or 6 on the dice, but with the consequence that now I'm bound to help her out. Because there's no shared fiction to be manipulated in that fashion. It's a boardgame with evocative flavour text, and that's all.

We can then see that it entirely possible to play D&D in a simple squad-level tactical wargame mode, where the fictional positioning is merely dressing, if the player simply takes no actions in which the fictional positioning determines action resolution.

I don't think this is true. It's impossible to play D&D without engaging the fiction. I open the door. I look in the chest. I empty my backpack of rations so I can pour in the gold pieces. Etc. Creating a shared fiction, and then manipulating it by way of action declaration, is fundamental to even the most basic D&D play.

For me, this is also why I agree with Colville that (what he calls) one-dimensional characters are kinda orthogonal (at best) to roleplaying. I've played D&D characters who had less manifested personality than I've seen from one of my kids playing her knight in Mystic Wood. (And she was hardly going to win an Oscar for her portrayal!) But I was RPGing - engaging the fiction via declaring actions for my PC - while my daughter was playing a board game, albeit with a relatively high degree of flair and colour.

 

[pemerton]

If you want a mechanical influence on your PC, that's fine. I understand why some people might like that, 5E does a little of it with traits/bonds/etc. It doesn't mean that I would.

<snip>

Again, why is this a problem?

I don't care what you do or don't like. I will never play in your games, and you will never play in mine.

What frustrates me is when you say things that betray little or no understanding of the games you're notionally criticising; particularly when you say them with an apparently high degree of confidence.

For instance:

There is tactical thinking when it comes to some interactions. However the moment you set up a framework for people to lean on, for me it would break immersion and limits options. If I know I have X influence points which exceeds the threshold to get jiggy with the barmaid or gain the approval of the king then it breaks immersion for me. It becomes a mechanical resolution that I don't want for that aspect of the game.

What game do you think you're describing here, with your X influence points to exceed a threshold?

On top of that, there's an additional reason I find your post frustrating, namely, that if I posted I don't like D&D combat because it breaks my immersion that my sword can't kill an orc until I've whittled away X "try and kill it" points - that's why I play Rolemaster and RuneQuest and Burning Wheel I'd have half these boards howling at me that I don't understand the intricacies and subtlety of D&D hit point-attrition combat. And I'd have a good chunk of the other half howling at me for dismissing their fun with my one-true-wayism.

You're not just expressing a personal opinion. You're doing so by mischaracterising games that by your own admission you're not familiar with.

 

[Lanefan]

This claim is not tenable. I can play through Keep on the Borderlands, consistently with all the rules in OD&D, Moldvay Basic, or AD&D (ie any classic version of the game), and never have to portray my character beyond making decisions that respect the fiction of where my PC is and what they can do (some of that second bit is also defined by mechanics rather than just fiction).

You're right - you don't have to portray your character beyond the minimum required to play the game.

The question is, even though you don't have to do this, should you at least try to do it anyway? And, if you do, will it make the game better for all involved?

My own answer to both those questions is an unequivocal YES.

 

[Lanefan]

Understandable, on the first bit. That second bit would be...extraordinarily difficult to design. It's hard enough to design just two systems that are reasonably similar enough that you can translate a character between them without much issue. What you're asking for is...an awful lot more than that.

Well, they pretty much did it with Basic and Advanced in the 0e-1e era; so historical proof exists that it can be done.

That said, I wasn't so much thinking of translating characters between the systems as translating rule blocks and adventure modules. By "rule blocks" I mean modular parts of one system's rules being transferable to the other.

As an example: let's say I'm looking at using the Low-Mech (a.k.a. Basic) system to run a game but I really like how the High-Mech (a.k.a. Advanced) system does its classes and character backgrounds. Ideally I should be able to port those Advanced elements into the Basic system and not miss a beat.

Flip example: say I'm looking at running the Advanced system but I want to replace some of its fiddly combat pieces with their Basic equivalents. Again, ideally, doing this shouldn't be a problem.

And an adventure for one system should be runnable in the other with very little if any conversion required.

I mean, I was hoping for something you could put on a box label. Those sound like the marketing department has been taken over by engineering students.

Touche.

 

[Lanefan]

To be frank, this isn't about "resolving situations". I'm talking about making romance a "pillar" of the game, to use the recent D&D parlance. Do you advocate having game pillars with no significant rules around them?

You weren't asking me, but my answer is yes; it's what I advocate now for the existing social pillar.

 

[Malmuria]

Maybe instead of necessities we can think in terms of affordances. The absence of a mechanic, procedure, or articulation of gameplay intent (gm advice and agendas, etc) doesn't necessarily inhibit any sort of playstyle (e.g. playing dnd as a shopping game); rather, we can ask, does the presence of particular mechanics, procedures, advice, or even aesthetics help to enable those same playstyles. And here I'm also torn. I can see how an answer to that question would be, yes, having playbooks and specific xp triggers, and an overall strong focus on a particular genre guides pbta games in a particular direction. On the other hand, maybe the "mechanics" don't have to be so tightly focused.

For example, what dice do you have available to you? In OD&D games, you get used to improvising mechanics using x-in-6 or 2d6 rolls; in 5e, you might think in terms of d20 rolls with modifiers, in CoC or AD&D, you might think in terms of percent chances. And here too, and I can see an argument saying that what dice you use (and how) are central to the mechanical design of a ttrpg, and that's true, and also that when you get into the spirit of ROLEPLAYING*, what dice you use and how many don't really matter.

*all-caps ROLEPLAYING = 4D, obviously

 

[Umbran]

I think that this tends to miss the fundamental reason why fictional positioning doesn't matter in chess: there is no shared fiction! Chess is not a game in which fiction is created: the labelling of pieces as knights, queens etc is just that - labelling.

With respect, that's not the causal relationship.

We can see this, because there is absolutely nothing in the rules of chess that prevents a pair of players from building a shared fiction around their play, and making their game choices based upon that fiction. My pawns may be John, Paul, George, Ringo, Bingo, Bango, Bongo, and Irving. The Bishop of Canterbury may threaten the denizens of Castle Black with excommunication, until the knight Sir Didimus falls upon him with a sword...

However, there is no room in the rules and constrained action choices to allow that shared fiction to impact resolution of the action. The Knight will take the Queen's Bishop's, no matter what the fictional positioning says. Thus, while we can have it, the shared fiction is not useful in the game, and so we do not bother to develop it - the lack of the fiction is the result of it not mattering, not the cause of it.

The cause, as already said, lies in the extremely restricted action space, and highly abstracted rules that require no judgement, no interpretation to resolve the action. Nobody playing chess ever has to ask the question, "What should happen here?" so the fictional positioning is not relevant, and is in fact excluded by the design of the game.

The development of RPGs from board games is the development of taking a wargame (with a fiction colorful enough that we maintain it, regardless of not needing it) and admitting into play sufficient clearly defined regions of doubt and uncertainty to how to resolve the action that the fiction can be used to resolve the doubt.