D&D 5E [+] Explain RPG theory without using jargon

[Charlaquin]

I've bolded an unargued premise in your synthesis.

Abandon that premise, and then imagine what other possibilities there are.

Why? I like that premise.

 

[pemerton]

I can tell you what I’m envisioning is a system using Dungeon World’s core mechanic of rolling 2d6 + a modifier of up to +3 (which conveniently coincides with B/X’s relationship between ability scores and modifiers), with mixed success on a 6-9 and total success on a 10+, but tweaked to be used for “task resolution” rather than “consequence resolution.” I look at Dungeon World’s Act Under Pressure move and I see something very close to how I approach calling for checks in 5e. I can easily see massaging it into something like…

Ability Check
When you want to accomplish a goal, describe what you want to do and how you try to do it. The GM might describe a potential consequence for failure and ask you to roll…

• +Str if you use direct physical force
• +Dex if you use agility or fine manipulation
• +Con if you use resilience and fortitude
• +Int if you use memory or deductive reasoning
• +Wis if you use your senses of perception or intuition
• +Cha if you use charm and social grace

On a 7 or higher you accomplish what you were trying to do. If you get under a 10 you suffer the consequence the GM described.

This looks like a stripped back version of 5e resolution. It doesn't make me think you would like Dungeon World.

So, I read the primer on the Torchbearer Kickstarter. Sounds awesome, though I suppose that is the job of a primer. The one thing that gives me pause is the idea that it seems like on a fail the GM decides whether to let it succeed at the cost of a condition or impose a twist. Now, maybe there are clear principles laid out for when to do which, but without knowing what those principles are (if they do exist), that feels arbitrary in a way I wouldn’t really be bothered by as a player, but would feel uncomfortable deciding on as a GM. Maybe I’m stuck in D&D GM-as-referee mindset, but it feels too partial to me.

The GM in Torchbearer has to make key decisions about pacing. In that way it resembles Burning Wheel.

You apply success + condition when things are bogging down a bit. It's the analogue, in 5e D&D, to success with a complication. It helps the players make progress towards their goals and their loot.

You apply a twist when failure would be fun! There's no straightforward 5e analogue to this. A twist generally requires a new obstacle to be overcome and so adds to the grind, which imposes a condition every 4 obstacles, so it's kind of a quarter of a condition in itself. Extra obstacles are good for improving skills and abilities, and allow pursuing Beliefs just as much as success + a condition would.

As @Manbearcat has said, roughly equal amounts of each over time is probably best.

 

[niklinna]

Why? I like that premise.

Just for the thought exercise, put it down, see how that changes things. You can pick it back up any time.

"Abandon" is rather a strong word....

 

[niklinna]

This looks like a stripped back version of 5e resolution. It doesn't make me think you would like Dungeon World.

I think that was the point! @Charlaquin is adopting something from Dungeon World that they do like and applying it to B/X.

Edit: Corrected 5e to B/X.

 

[niklinna]

You apply a twist when failure would be fun! There's no straightforward 5e analogue to this. A twist generally requires a new obstacle to be overcome and so adds to the grind, which imposes a condition every 4 obstacles, so it's kind of a quarter of a condition in itself. Extra obstacles are good for improving skills and abilities, and allow pursuing Beliefs just as much as success + a condition would.

Oh yeah, I barely got into it, but Torchbearer has many interlocking parts that go into decisions like this. It's like a Swiss watch!

 

[pemerton]

Why? I like that premise.

I'm not asking you to abandon the premise as a principle of your play! What I'm saying is that your synthesis rests on a premise which is not essential to RPGing, even to RPGing with a group of players; and I'm inviting you to abandon the premise, at least for a moment, in thought. If one does so, then other possibilities reveal themselves.

Part of the point of thinking reflectively about RPGing is to recognise what the premises are on which our ideas are resting, and to see whether those premises are necessary.

For instance, someone who tells @Campbell that it is selfish to want to do RPGing in which the individual character is at the centre of play seems to be assuming as necessary a premise which can easily be abandoned, and which Campbell presumably has already abandoned.

 

[pemerton]

I got pretty stoked about a game that was pitched on the premise of being in constant tension between gamist and narrativist concerns…

You did. But your take on Dungeon World seems to involve stripping out all its narrativist components and inserting new ones. And you've posted that you really like the environment-exploration aspect of 5e D&D, to the extent that you would like to move beyond 5e D&D to the B/X style dungeon crawl but using your DW-inspired moves in place of the B/X resolution framework.

To me that seems a pretty coherent set of preferences. Just not narrativist ones . . .

Huh? Did I testify that? I seem to remember describing what I wanted as the use of performance measuring tools to lend weight to character development decisions, which were my ultimate goal.

I get an impression of you enjoying vivid, engaging characters. Absolutely.

But I haven't seen you talk about PC's dramatic needs, and your response to GMing techniques that are fairly central to narrativist GMing (including the legacy of those in Torchbearer) has inclined towards the negative rather than the positive.

I've not RPGed with you, nor seen you RPG, nor even read any actual play accounts that I can recall, so I could be way off-base. But to me your posts seem to convey a fairly consistent picture of Charlaquin as a RPGer.

Sure, but this goes beyond that. If agendas are supposed to be about what your gaming priorities ultimately come down to, I’m pretty sure mine, in GNS terms are “exploration of character,” which I thought was similationist. Which is pretty wild, since I fought on the 4e side of the Edition Wars, so simulationism was a dirty word to me for quite some time.

I think the dirty-word simulationism was probably purist-for-system/process-simulation. Which 4e is the antithesis of!

But on the exploration of character thing, I am taking at relative face value your earlier post that part of how the character develops is in order to get out of the pickle and progress on the mission, and your more recent post about

an alternative synthesis (which is increasingly what I find myself drawn towards): The players should come in with as little already decided about their characters as possible, so that through the act of engaging with the challenges within the scenario they are playing through as a group, they discover more about their characters as individuals.​

That is foregrounding the challenge. The character is not being discovered (in a literal sense) but "forged" (in a metaphorical sense) in the crucible of the challenge.

If you dial down the performance metric - so eg players are freer (I mean: freer in respect of table expectations and social pressures) to "go with the character flow" even at the cost of losing the challenge - then the gamism dials down and the simulationism dials up.

Again, as I said, all I can do is infer from your posts..

 

[Scott Christian]

Second, I think that most RPG theory tends to try and discuss typologies, or to put it in more simple terms- most of it is trying to categorize either (a) types of players, or (b) types of games. I find that to be unhelpful, as most RPG games and players cannot easily be described in a single category, and there is a long history of these characterizations being used in unhelpful ways.

Very well said.

The brain is meant to categorize. It is how it is designed.

 

[pemerton]

It is very possible to integrate playing a game for sake of playing it with skill and guts with exploration of character and/or setting. It is also very possible to integrate the visceral character crucible with skilled play. There will be pain points, generally between players who value the play priorities differently.

My BW-loving friend basically cannot stop himself from sacrificing character priorities to the goal of PC improvement. He is the one who chose to take the catacombs to try and save his brother from assassination, rather than go overground, because he wanted the Cataombs-wise test.

In our Cortex+ Heroic LotR game, he plays Gandalf with wild abandon, racking up Doom Pool dice as he lets off spells left right and centre, which allows me to end the scene and thwart the PCs' desires. I see it as a manifestation of a similar tendency, an inability to throttle back.

On the other hand, my BW characters improve painfully slowly because I don't pay enough attention to getting the tests I need to advance.

However Story Now and Right To Dream are like oil and water because they require phenomenally different play structures.

Now imagine GMing vanilla narrativist Rolemaster without having yet worked out that all the advice on world building, world events, random encounters etc is inimical to what you're trying to do . . .

 

[Ovinomancer]

I understand the ideas “incoherence” is meant to communicate, and because of this am arguing incoherence is not a particularly apt term. In fact, it seems Edwards distinguished between “incoherent” and “hybrid” design:



Incoherent game design is distinguished from Hybrid design due to its confusing, disjointed, disorganized (i.e. “incoherent”) goals and presentation (though, he says he is “highly skeptical” that hybrid design is truly achievable). He writes this “unfortunately” applies to many games with which we are familiar, which are “dysfunctional.” In fact, “horribly dysfunctional.” This is a problem especially when it can’t drift from one agenda to another, and so becomes an “indigestible mix” of multiple agendas. This untenable situation can be seen in Vampire, where the incoherent design leads players to be “especially screwed.” Instead of just drifting their game to one agenda or another, the outcome is that in this incoherent game “including encouraging subcultural snobbery against other Simulationist play without being much removed from it.” In sum, he writes that “the prognosis for the enjoyment of such play is not favorable.”

So maybe “dysfunctional,” “indigestible,” “screwed,” and “unfavorable prognosis” also just technical terms within his theory describing a type of design or a state of play. But given everything Edwards writes above and more, I think its intended as a criticism and something to be avoided in design.

Which again, is fine. It’s sensible in its immediate context (you’ll hear no defense of vampire’s system from me) and introduces, though the agendas, a kind of focus that some designers and players have found helpful. But pretending that its not a criticism is bizarre, not only because it clearly is, but because the fact that it is a swipe at Vampire is what makes it an insightful point in the first place. Perhaps there was an idea that a theory needs to be abstract and neutral, devoid of historical context; certainly theory in other fields operates under this assumption. But I think you can admit that theory is motivated (the definitely not that aspect of it) and not only is it not a problem, but is helpful.

I suppose that if you want to lump all those terms together, so that if one is used all of the others are intended, then you can get there. I prefer to not do that. A game can be incoherent and not dysfunctional, or incoherent and dysfunctional, and even coherent and dysfunctional (for completion, we also have coherent and not dysfunctional). He's specifically talking to the Vampire system, which very much is dysfunctional in that if you try to do what the game suggests you should be doing while using the system, it doesn't work at all. Vampire was a primary motivator for a lot of the Forge discussion, because it's clearly telling you what it's supposed to do but then actually doesn't do that.

Of course it's a criticism. Criticism isn't negative, though, so... I'm not sure what your point here is? Is this another argument about negative connotations and that criticism has a negative connotation?