overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
Generally trying to stay out of conversation and just learn. But this is more jargon. What are you using “align” and “resolve” to actually mean in plain English?
D&D 5E [+] Explain RPG theory without using jargon
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hawkeyefan
Legend
It's not really jargon.
There's no need to adhere to the illusion of cause and effect in story now. You can have the effect and then determine the cause after the fact.
There are different ways to have fun playing an RPG.
It helps if the system you use supports the kind of fun you want to have.
It helps if you are all trying to have the same kind of fun as each other.
One fun way of playing an RPG is to focus on the challenge of beating the obstacles and showing off your clever tactics.
One fun way of playing an RPG is to focus on the feeling of 'being there' in the game world and doing what would be appropriate for the genre and setting.
One fun way of playing an RPG is to focus on deliberately creating drama by giving players and characters difficult ethical dilemmas and following through on the consequences.
It helps if the system you use supports the kind of fun you want to have.
It helps if you are all trying to have the same kind of fun as each other.
One fun way of playing an RPG is to focus on the challenge of beating the obstacles and showing off your clever tactics.
One fun way of playing an RPG is to focus on the feeling of 'being there' in the game world and doing what would be appropriate for the genre and setting.
One fun way of playing an RPG is to focus on deliberately creating drama by giving players and characters difficult ethical dilemmas and following through on the consequences.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
That last one is good, but care needs to be taken because there's a difference between a "characters face problems" game, where the GM is coming up with things to pose to the players that aren't really about their characters but about setting or story things, and a game where play is 100% lasered in on challenging the very essence of the character. These things sound similar, but are not.
The prior Threefold (GDS) model used that and called it Dramatism. Part of the whole kerfuffle over GNS Narrativism was the Story Now essay, in which Ron Edwards, to put it mildly, radically altered the frame of conversation around story/narrative/dramatic play. He put "satisfying narrative" (GDS Dramatism) under Type 2 (or "S"), which ruffled quite a few feathers—and still does!
So we can add a Type 4, which is about generating events full of pressure and propulsion - wanting to have a game that constantly puts you on the spot, shoves hard decisions in your face, and is always escalating something. This is the "Story Now" others have already mentioned, and it's quite a different creature. The name's misleading at best but let's not get into that. In fact, I'm not even going to get into Story Now more than that, but some particular things that folks developed as a result of that essay & discussion.
Yep, I'm talking about Apocalypse World and its many offshoots. I'm not going to get deep into theory either, just talk about a few things this branch of game evolution brought about that 5e doesn't really cater to:
One is that dice rolls are not yes/no. "Nothing happens" never happens in Apocalypse World. You wouldn't be rolling the dice otherwise. Generally you're going to get what you want (or more!), get (some of) what you want but with complications, or things are gonna go pear-shaped on you, and hard. 5e could introduce this type of resolution in particular contexts, and has some optional rules for it (including marginal failures and crit/fumble rules variants), but a lot of the core game mechanics are premised on the spell just not taking effect, or the sword not connecting. Apocalypse World notably has no blow-by-blow rules for combat. Different priorities.
Another is that players usually know what the possible outcomes are before they roll the bones. The potential events are typically—not necessarily—presented in the open, and possibly even negotiated between GM and players (this negotiation process is quite prominent in Blades in the Dark). It's still possible for the GM to put forward something like, "If you miss, well, you don't know what'll happen, but you know you won't like it," of course. In any case, the odds are out in the open, and part of the process of play in these games is negotiating those odds. Once the dice fall, everybody knows how things are gonna shake out.
Also, the typical process involves the generation of fiction (or possible fiction) in the moment, rather than an exploration of a pre-written state of affairs, which is more typical in 5e. Prior events inform the moment, of course, but the moment itself can go in all sorts of improvised directions. Here again, the systems support that more, or less. As one example, Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark keep stats and such to a minimum, so that a GM can whip up an NPC or whatever on the fly. 5e is more heavyweight, so improv is harder (but not impossible).
That's just three things, there are more. And it isn't so much theory as specific design choices, but I figured it was worth getting into that in order to give something of an impression of what Story Now proposed.
Neonchameleon
Legend
GNS was something that came out of the late 20th and early 21st century when Vampire: the Masquerade was a legitimate rival in terms of popularity to D&D and had a lot more innovation behind it than the antiquated D&D 2e did. It came from from people who were interested in things like the "game of personal horror" that Vampire promised but really didn't deliver on. GNS more or less translates as the following:
- G: Hey, you guys. D&D is pretty cool whether or not it's what you actually want to do. Possibly we should stop sneering at it with White Wolf mandated terms like "Roleplaying not Roleplaying"
- N: This is what Vampire promises to be but doesn't deliver on. Let's clarify why we want it and work out how we can build games to that end. (Note: GNS was based on the usenet era GDS where the D stood for Drama)
- S: Here's what Vampire actually does, as do multiple other games like Ro. Let's see why people would want it ("the right to dream") because it really isn't giving us what we want. And from that we can learn some things.
Like all theories the map is not the territory and some of the adherents of any theory forget that. And like almost all theories dealing with human behaviour it wasn't so much a theory that explains everything so much as a manifesto to try to encourage behaviour. In this case the development of much more narrative games.
As a manifesto it succeeded magnificently, with the 00s and the Forge and post-Forge community drifting into the Storygames community producing a nice string of narrative games starting with My Life With Master and continuing through Apocalypse World that were spectacularly better at producing stories, character growth, and change in reasonably short periods than had come before.
As a theory? It's not really worth bothering with in the 2020s; having done its job all we are left with are flaws. The N part, the manifesto, is about as relevant to modern gaming as discussions about why THAC0 should be abolished or Monty Haul DMing is bad. We've moved beyond it. And it obscures the related Dramatist part where people don't play for stories but emotional engagement (although the two agendas overlap). The G part is fairly trivial; it didn't interest Edwards and is and always has been unfashionable. And the S part was badly done; some of what Ron Edwards said of the three or four overlapping groups under that banner is true but you'll note I said three or four groups; Ron didn't realise this and so called S an incoherent agenda
And above all Ron Edwards calls things that don't purely fit in one of his categories "incoherent" and then saying that being incoherent rather than focusing on one motivation above all was bad. This is wrong; people aren't pure and games aren't and shouldn't be pure. Railing against enabling people with different motivations to play together well is simply harmful to the goal of producing interesting social games.
If you want good RPG theory try reading D. Vincent Baker who actually gets into detail rather than staying at high level. Or for that matter the OSR people are often good at explaining what they are doing.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
I personally find such open antipathy for jargon counterproductive. It's not like you can explain even the math underpinning Einstein's work without using jargon! You need to know derivatives and integrals (which requires explaining functions and limits, or God forbid epsilon-delta proofs); vectors, scalars, matrices and tensors and all the special operations that come with them; Lorenz transforms (and often Fourier transforms too); and probably even more things I'm forgetting. It takes literally multiple years of calculus courses to actually get what's going on with relativity or quantum mechanics, which is why so many non-scientists have such a handwavy, mathemagical perception of both things: the dumbed down, no-jargon version of QM is a ridiculous caricature that makes no sense and does whatever the hell it likes because it can.
However, I do respect the desire to explain things as clearly and unambiguously as possible. And grant that this is an area where even the games themselves leave a lot to be desired: TTRPGs have tons of jargon (even 5e) and fail to explain much of it. E.g. "hit dice" is a legacy term, clearly jargon, and never explained.
So, in a follow-up post (when I'm actually at my computer and not on my phone) I will endeavor to explain my taxonomy without jargon. I warn you, by forcing me to circumlocute around every term, it will be long. Even by my standards. This is an unavoidable price paid for never using jargon terms. If that's a problem, you have only yourself to blame for asking for it.
However, I do respect the desire to explain things as clearly and unambiguously as possible. And grant that this is an area where even the games themselves leave a lot to be desired: TTRPGs have tons of jargon (even 5e) and fail to explain much of it. E.g. "hit dice" is a legacy term, clearly jargon, and never explained.
So, in a follow-up post (when I'm actually at my computer and not on my phone) I will endeavor to explain my taxonomy without jargon. I warn you, by forcing me to circumlocute around every term, it will be long. Even by my standards. This is an unavoidable price paid for never using jargon terms. If that's a problem, you have only yourself to blame for asking for it.
It's interesting to see things from the perspective of designers, but I think it would benefit both designers and rpg players in general to think seriously and gather information about what actually happens at the table. Design across many fields gets into a trap of arriving at a normative consensus at what counts as "good" design only to be frustrated by the ways in which users actually engage with their product or what users think of it (for example, look up "architectural determinism"). You can design something--a building, a chair, a spreadsheet application, a game--with a few use cases in mind, but users end up doing all sorts of things with products, some wildly innovative and some perhaps inefficient.
So trying to understand a game as it is actually played at the table has to, in my view, take into account a variety of factors aside from what's contained in the game manual (especially as players will interpret the manual in a variety of ways, or not read it at all!). The game manual is like a sheet of music or plans for a building: it guides play of the game, but is fundamentally incomplete.
So trying to understand a game as it is actually played at the table has to, in my view, take into account a variety of factors aside from what's contained in the game manual (especially as players will interpret the manual in a variety of ways, or not read it at all!). The game manual is like a sheet of music or plans for a building: it guides play of the game, but is fundamentally incomplete.
100%. The most important (and neglected) part of playtesting is not at all 'does this thing work as intended?' but instead 'in what unexpected ways is this thing fun, and how can I make that stronger?'.
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