D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[Crimson Longinus]

Note that none of my criticism or really any of the criticism I have seen leveled against 3e in the last couple pages comes from a grounding in the Big Model. It was criticism of its technical system design based on play experience and a firm grounding in systems analysis and design (something I have some experience with as a software engineer).

3e is not alone of this score. Classic World of Darkness, Shadowrun, Palladium and Legend of the 5 Rings (prior to the current edition) all have terrible systems design. Great product design that drew you into the setting and great attention paid to building cultures of players who identified with them. Great product design. Poor game design from the prospective of something you can sit down and actually play without wrestling against.

Isn't it good we don't have to choose now? That the overall quality of game design is improving quite dramatically from those days? It's so nice talking to one of the younger GMs in my group about how much smoother his experience running his first games with 5e and Vampire Fifth Edition have been then my painful early experiences.

Yeah, I fully agree with you that the overall quality of the game design has improved. It just also means that the bar has risen and at the time those games probably were judged less harshly than in retrospect.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think that when it comes to focusing on character, the games that actually involve elements of a character in the play processes tend to facilitate this a lot more than games that do not, or that do so poorly.

I have in mind two recent games that I played in. I tend to GM most of the time, but lately the players in my home game have been rotating as GMs and I’ve been playing. Then I also play in an online game with @Ovinomancer that’s run by @Manbearcat. The home game is 5e D&D. The online game is, as has been mentioned, Stonetop.

In the 5e game, I played Teemo Nines, a nine-fingered ranger with the folk hero background. He was once a scout in the queen’s army, but was captured and tortured (they severed the middle finger on his right hand). He would have been abandoned to his fate except he was included in a prisoner exchange between the queen’s army and their enemies, in order to ensure that a minor noble officer was returned. The experience soured him on army life and authority in general, so he went awol, and struck out to the frontier. He became a folk hero after standing up to soldiers of the duke. He’s got a pretty strong Robin Hood vibe.

He has two traits that I think are relevant. “I am an arrow” meaning he acts swiftly and directly, and “I hate to see authority abused”, which means he’s not likely to put up with tyrants, bullies, and the like.

A possibly significant point is that I crafted this character with the gist of the game in mind. Our group had discussed what we wanted to see in play, and what kind of setting we wanted. We went with a kind of low-magic, quasi-historical iron-ageish type setting. The starting region was to be a frontier with lots of room for exploration, but also a kind of contested region where one country holds sway, but where it is closer to another country that has designs on the region. So the possibility for some political intrigue type of stuff, too.

So I crafted my character with this setting in mind. I chose his traits and his background precisely to set up potentially interesting situations. This combo of character and setting would seem to have potential for some drama, I’d say.

In play, it was not always meaningful. Sometimes if was. At other times, it didn’t matter at all. When we came into conflict with the duke’s men, it would come up. The fact that Teemo was a deserter mattered in an early situation, then eventually got resolved in a very handwavey way. It seemed that his status as a deserter was a bit inconvenient to keep things moving for the group, and so he was pardoned as soon as events had made that even remotely possible.

After that, it mattered far less. My attempt to use my Folk Hero quality to gain shelter/protection from the commoners worked sometimes, but not others. Depended very much on GM whim. The further into the campaign, the less any of Teemo’s traits and background mattered. Then one GM decided to run Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and any possible character focus was abandoned. I could still portray Teemo in a man er consistent with what had been established, but calling play character focused at this point would be a very weak claim.

I suppose many people would cite that sone of this can be attributed to poor GMing. And while I get that, I don't know if that’s quite it. The GMs (there were three across the length of the campaign, though one had only a very brief stint of two sessions) mostly didn’t do anything that 5e would say “don’t do that”. The game itself doesn’t do anything to steer play toward character focused play. If it happens, it’s mostly independent of the actual game. The Traits and Backgrounds suggest such play, but they can be totally ignored.

Compare this to my Stonetop character. Interestingly, the basic premise of Stonetop is somewhat similar to that of the D&D campaign. The PCs are all inhabitants of the town of Stonetop, and they hold positions of importance there. It’s a town on the edge of civilization, and is a low magic, iron ageish type setting. My character is Cullen, the Judge, who believes he was chosen as a prophet of Aratis, god of law and civilization. In addition to his Background as a Prophet, he has another relevant trait, his Instinct, which is Harmony. He thinks everyone has a prt to play, and in the greater good.

So far, play has absolutely been focused on Cullen’s traits. Every situation that the PCs find themselves in, their instincts are put to the test, or their backgrounds are relevant. The text of the game tells the GM to do this. Play should not just be about random adventures in this frontier space, where one PC could be swapped out for another with little impact to play. The events are about, and reveal, the characters specifically.

And I think this is part of the challenge with some of these discussions. Someone will describe a game like Stonetop, and someone reading that description will have experienced a game of 5e D&D (or similar) that seems similar. The 5e games that I run tend to lean that way. But there’s a significant difference. One is designed to deliver a somewhat broad possibility of play experience. The other is designed to deliver a specific and deep experience.

To sum up, 5e said “sure, you can do that, but you’re mostly on your own” while Stonetop said “not only should you do that, you must.”

 

[clearstream]

I think I may be unfamiliar with your metaphor. I'm also not sure what the difference between "free-form" and "GM decides" is in games that have a GM calling stuff--which is what I thought "FKR" meant? That is, Free Kriegsspiel itself is...specifically a "Free" by becoming "GM Decides."

Freeform includes FKR.

FKR is not the only kind of freeform.

I am intentionally staying out of this overall conversation, but my two cents on "working" etc.: If the best you can say is "you can play it, and it won't horribly break the instant you try," that is NOT "working." That's like saying that a car that doesn't explode the instant you turn the key in the ignition is "working." (I believe you and I agree on this, I'm just singling this bit out to respond to it.)

Here we are speaking of a car that ran regularly for 8 years.

"It's playable"/"you played it" and "it doesn't prevent you from having fun" are absolute, barebones, rock-bottom prerequisites for a working game. They are necessary conditions. They are not sufficient conditions. Anything which fails to meet both requirements does not deserve the moniker "game." Frankly, if you design a game that is so utterly bad that it literally can't be played, you deserve an award of some kind, because holy toledo that's achievements in awfulness. And if you somehow manage to make a game that actively prevents the player from having fun, you should probably look into combat applications because that sounds like straight-up psychological warfare.

No game, no designed entertainment/aesthetic thing of any kind, that fails to meet the standards of "actually permits you to engage with it at all" and "actually permits you to enjoy engaging with it" should ever exist. As a result, holding up either of those requirements as though something that meets them has merited anything is not merely foolish, it's patently ridiculous. It is saying that "X is broken" can only apply to something that is the exact antithesis of perfectly flawless--that "brokenness" can only refer to something perfectly full of flaws.

Something can be badly-made and extremely broken and still somewhat functional. A game in specific can be badly made and extremely broken and still provide entertainment value. I, for example, actually enjoy playing gonzo games in Pathfinder. The system is already broken, so why not enjoy its brokenness? It's hard to find games that actively enable nigh-infinite cheese (sometimes, literal cheese!)

This feelts to me like extensive strawmanning. 3rd put a lot of tools on the table. It was easy to see ways to misuse those tools. It was still a terrific design. I imagine you know something about the design team, right? Their game design was ambitious. In places you can see them still figuring stuff out. It's as @Campbell said, game design has advanced a lot in the last two decades. I would add that is because of the risks taken by game designers such as those on 3e.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And I think this is part of the challenge with some of these discussions. Someone will describe a game like Stonetop, and someone reading that description will have experienced a game of 5e D&D (or similar) that seems similar. The 5e games that I run tend to lean that way. But there’s a significant difference. One is designed to deliver a somewhat broad possibility of play experience. The other is designed to deliver a specific and deep experience.

To sum up, 5e said “sure, you can do that, but you’re mostly on your own” while Stonetop said “not only should you do that, you must.”

Yeah, that's totally fair.

 

[clearstream]

I think that when it comes to focusing on character, the games that actually involve elements of a character in the play processes tend to facilitate this a lot more than games that do not, or that do so poorly.

I have in mind two recent games that I played in. I tend to GM most of the time, but lately the players in my home game have been rotating as GMs and I’ve been playing. Then I also play in an online game with @Ovinomancer that’s run by @Manbearcat. The home game is 5e D&D. The online game is, as has been mentioned, Stonetop.

In the 5e game, I played Teemo Nines, a nine-fingered ranger with the folk hero background. He was once a scout in the queen’s army, but was captured and tortured (they severed the middle finger on his right hand). He would have been abandoned to his fate except he was included in a prisoner exchange between the queen’s army and their enemies, in order to ensure that a minor noble officer was returned. The experience soured him on army life and authority in general, so he went awol, and struck out to the frontier. He became a folk hero after standing up to soldiers of the duke. He’s got a pretty strong Robin Hood vibe.

He has two traits that I think are relevant. “I am an arrow” meaning he acts swiftly and directly, and “I hate to see authority abused”, which means he’s not likely to put up with tyrants, bullies, and the like.

A possibly significant point is that I crafted this character with the gist of the game in mind. Our group had discussed what we wanted to see in play, and what kind of setting we wanted. We went with a kind of low-magic, quasi-historical iron-ageish type setting. The starting region was to be a frontier with lots of room for exploration, but also a kind of contested region where one country holds sway, but where it is closer to another country that has designs on the region. So the possibility for some political intrigue type of stuff, too.

So I crafted my character with this setting in mind. I chose his traits and his background precisely to set up potentially interesting situations. This combo of character and setting would seem to have potential for some drama, I’d say.

In play, it was not always meaningful. Sometimes if was. At other times, it didn’t matter at all. When we came into conflict with the duke’s men, it would come up. The fact that Teemo was a deserter mattered in an early situation, then eventually got resolved in a very handwavey way. It seemed that his status as a deserter was a bit inconvenient to keep things moving for the group, and so he was pardoned as soon as events had made that even remotely possible.

After that, it mattered far less. My attempt to use my Folk Hero quality to gain shelter/protection from the commoners worked sometimes, but not others. Depended very much on GM whim. The further into the campaign, the less any of Teemo’s traits and background mattered. Then one GM decided to run Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and any possible character focus was abandoned. I could still portray Teemo in a man er consistent with what had been established, but calling play character focused at this point would be a very weak claim.

I suppose many people would cite that sone of this can be attributed to poor GMing. And while I get that, I don't know if that’s quite it. The GMs (there were three across the length of the campaign, though one had only a very brief stint of two sessions) mostly didn’t do anything that 5e would say “don’t do that”. The game itself doesn’t do anything to steer play toward character focused play. If it happens, it’s mostly independent of the actual game. The Traits and Backgrounds suggest such play, but they can be totally ignored.

Compare this to my Stonetop character. Interestingly, the basic premise of Stonetop is somewhat similar to that of the D&D campaign. The PCs are all inhabitants of the town of Stonetop, and they hold positions of importance there. It’s a town on the edge of civilization, and is a low magic, iron ageish type setting. My character is Cullen, the Judge, who believes he was chosen as a prophet of Aratis, god of law and civilization. In addition to his Background as a Prophet, he has another relevant trait, his Instinct, which is Harmony. He thinks everyone has a prt to play, and in the greater good.

So far, play has absolutely been focused on Cullen’s traits. Every situation that the PCs find themselves in, their instincts are put to the test, or their backgrounds are relevant. The text of the game tells the GM to do this. Play should not just be about random adventures in this frontier space, where one PC could be swapped out for another with little impact to play. The events are about, and reveal, the characters specifically.

And I think this is part of the challenge with some of these discussions. Someone will describe a game like Stonetop, and someone reading that description will have experienced a game of 5e D&D (or similar) that seems similar. The 5e games that I run tend to lean that way. But there’s a significant difference. One is designed to deliver a somewhat broad possibility of play experience. The other is designed to deliver a specific and deep experience.

To sum up, 5e said “sure, you can do that, but you’re mostly on your own” while Stonetop said “not only should you do that, you must.”

Something that has to be called out is 5e is a DM-centric RPG. Where Stonetop says "not only should you do that, you must" 5e leaves it up to the DM. Throughout the rules you'll see that principle stated and restated.

The choice to make 5e-centric DM-centric has specific and intentional consequences. "You must" is off the table. That's empowering to some groups, frustrating to others. 5e says - even though we drop you in at the deep end, our rules are good enough to catch you - and that is almost always true. The system is streamlined, expressive, resilient. A product of a quantity of playtesting that few other design teams can match.

5e is by design a game that most people can play. It is designed for high functionality and expressiveness. What I mean by the latter is that you can see throughout the design the patterns and interfaces that create design-space and designability. The 5e designers, knowing their past, are on the whole avoiding using this expressiveness to sell a million splatbooks. Instead responding to what they see players leaning into or away from.

It is right that Stonetop has a different approach. That does not make it a better game than 5e (although I am very excited by each Stonetop update I receive.) Gods! Do we all want to play just one game? I love that we are in a world that has 5e and TYOV and TB2 and BW and Stonetop and Artifact and L5R and more. I love seeing the palpable advances in game design that come from each landmark game. I see folk here praise 4e and think - they do know it comes from 3e (Bo9S), right? I see them criticise 3e and think, they do know that one of the contributing designers wrote Everway and another Heroquest, right?

Sheesh.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Consistent with my philosophical skepticism as to knowing what game is played other than as settled from time to time by players, I mean this in a much stricter sense than you might assume.

Take another poster's problems with early 5e play. I've never encountered those problems, but I do believe that poster. Are we playing the same game?

Well, another issue: how many people does a game have to not work for before it counts? Does a game "work" if it does so for even one person? I suspect that point you've got a defintion of "work" that is a tautology, since its going to be impossible to find a game system that doesn't work in some sense for someone, even if its just its designer.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Note that none of my criticism or really any of the criticism I have seen leveled against 3e in the last couple pages comes from a grounding in the Big Model. It was criticism of its technical system design based on play experience and a firm grounding in systems analysis and design (something I have some experience with as a software engineer).

3e is not alone of this score. Classic World of Darkness, Shadowrun, Palladium and Legend of the 5 Rings (prior to the current edition) all have terrible systems design. Great product design that drew you into the setting and great attention paid to building cultures of players who identified with them. Great product design. Poor game design from the prospective of something you can sit down and actually play without wrestling against.

Isn't it good we don't have to choose now? That the overall quality of game design is improving quite dramatically from those days? It's so nice talking to one of the younger GMs in my group about how much smoother his experience running his first games with 5e and Vampire Fifth Edition have been then my painful early experiences.

Though I do note your second paragraph is doing some heavy lifting, still. As an example, how much people "struggle with" compex designs is a heavily varied issue. Obviously there's going to be a bridge too far with some system at some point no matter what, but when talking about "bad system" design, you at least have to unpack your definitions considerably.

 

[Aldarc]

5e is by design a game that most people can play. It is designed for high functionality and expressiveness. What I mean by the latter is that you can see throughout the design the patterns and interfaces that create design-space and designability. The 5e designers, knowing their past, are on the whole avoiding using this expressiveness to sell a million splatbooks. Instead responding to what they see players leaning into or away from.

It is right that Stonetop has a different approach. That does not make it a better game than 5e (although I am very excited by each Stonetop update I receive.) Gods! Do we all want to play just one game? I love that we are in a world that has 5e and TYOV and TB2 and BW and Stonetop and Artifact and L5R and more. I love seeing the palpable advances in game design that come from each landmark game. I see folk here praise 4e and think - they do know it comes from 3e (Bo9S), right? I see them criticise 3e and think, they do know that one of the contributing designers wrote Everway and another Heroquest, right?

I would correct this assessment somewhat and say that "5e is by design a game for curated play," which happens to be how most people are used to playing TTRPGs.* There are strong elements of GM as storyteller. There is strong support for this "(Neo-)Trad style" of play in 5e, combining 2e style GMing with 3e/PF1 style adventure paths.

* I would argue that most people can play most other non-D&D games just as easily, if not easier in some cases, but there is often a privileging of D&D as a gateway TTRPG and the "normal." Yet there are plenty of TTRPGs out there, IME, that are just as easy, if not easier, for most people to play than 5e D&D.

 

[Thomas Shey]

On reflection, I retract it as not explaining my idea in a complete enough way. If we recall the poster wrote


I pictured a group playing 3.0 and 3.5 for the entire life of those editions together. That is eight years, and I would guess on average my own D&D campaigns have each run 2-4 years, so I am thinking about 2-4 full campaigns. How many sessions? We play weekly, but perhaps the poster played monthly? Perhaps a few hundred sessions?

It was in this context that I felt justified in observing that


I should have written, you played it for hundreds of sessions, ergo it appears to have functioned. The game as played is what counted.

I still don't think I can go there. There have been games we played through entire campaigns of that, by the middle, we'd decided were critically flawed systems because wanted to finish off what we'd started, and could at least work around the worst of them. I think calling that "the system worked" is setting the bar at "if it wasn't completely unplayable, it worked" and again, I don't think that's a useful definition of "worked".

 

[Thomas Shey]

I am intentionally staying out of this overall conversation, but my two cents on "working" etc.: If the best you can say is "you can play it, and it won't horribly break the instant you try," that is NOT "working." That's like saying that a car that doesn't explode the instant you turn the key in the ignition is "working." (I believe you and I agree on this, I'm just singling this bit out to respond to it.)

Yeah, that's pretty much my position there, too. As I said, there can be some grey areas, but I just can't get on board "We worked our way through a campaign with it even though we'd all decided the system was super annoying and fought us" as defining the system as "working".

"It's playable"/"you played it" and "it doesn't prevent you from having fun" are absolute, barebones, rock-bottom prerequisites for a working game. They are necessary conditions. They are not sufficient conditions. Anything which fails to meet both requirements does not deserve the moniker "game." Frankly, if you design a game that is so utterly bad that it literally can't be played, you deserve an award of some kind, because holy toledo that's achievements in awfulness. And if you somehow manage to make a game that actively prevents the player from having fun, you should probably look into combat applications because that sounds like straight-up psychological warfare.

The former does, indeed, seem a challenge, though I've heard rumor of a couple cases that hit it, more because of crucial mechanic errors that seem to have been just that--errors--rather than part of intent.

Your second, though, I think can happen easier with people with certain tastes. Some elements of some games are sufficiently unpleasant/offputting to some people to some people that they will effectively drown out any other theoretical fun the game has. I've seen cases of people soldier through some games out of a sense of obligation where that seemed to be the case.

That said, I don't have any disagreement with your broader points at all.