Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
Good thesis, but I refuse to believe that people are using any parts of their brain when they are on an online forum.
D&D 5E Heteroglossia and D&D: Why D&D Speaks in a Multiplicity of Playing Styles
Good thesis, but I refuse to believe that people are using any parts of their brain when they are on an online forum.
Mad_Jack
Legend
Not technically true... I'm one of those people who can't type without looking at the keyboard.
Hussar
Legend
I’ve long believed that rpgs are not games in and of themselves. They are game creation engines.
The game you or I or Dave plays is the confluence of your or my or Dave’s group plus the rules of the time plus a thousand other factors.
And that game is unique to that time and place and cannot be recreated. It might be emulated to some degree but there are so many intangibles that it can’t be copied.
And while there may be some commonalities, at the end of the day every campaign will be a unique game and largely opaque to anyone on the outside (and often pretty damn foggy to those inside as well) to such a degree that analysis is often extremely difficult.
The game you or I or Dave plays is the confluence of your or my or Dave’s group plus the rules of the time plus a thousand other factors.
And that game is unique to that time and place and cannot be recreated. It might be emulated to some degree but there are so many intangibles that it can’t be copied.
And while there may be some commonalities, at the end of the day every campaign will be a unique game and largely opaque to anyone on the outside (and often pretty damn foggy to those inside as well) to such a degree that analysis is often extremely difficult.
the DMG, the nobody read book, identify 7 field of interest for players:
Acting
Exploring
Instigating
Fighting
Optimizing
Problem solving
Story telling
if you cross the importance of each field with the number of players around the table you got indeed a wide variety of play style.
Acting
Exploring
Instigating
Fighting
Optimizing
Problem solving
Story telling
if you cross the importance of each field with the number of players around the table you got indeed a wide variety of play style.
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Brotton Goodfellow
Explorer
@Snarf Zagyg you’ve put into words what has been bouncing around my head the last few weeks. So I thank you and wish to add my two cents (Canadian cents so it’s cheap).
5E, in spite of all its subclasses, feats, and options, is at its heart a toolkit for playing a fantasy TTRPG. Use as much or as little as you and the weirdos playing with you need to achieve fun. And for the love of Gygax, if you don’t like a rule or think something is missing in the game, fix it yourself.
5E, in spite of all its subclasses, feats, and options, is at its heart a toolkit for playing a fantasy TTRPG. Use as much or as little as you and the weirdos playing with you need to achieve fun. And for the love of Gygax, if you don’t like a rule or think something is missing in the game, fix it yourself.
Kurotowa
Legend
Another thing to consider is competing mediums.
There's a particularly satisfying gameplay loop of try - fail - learn - try again. It feels really good to practice and improve your player skills until you can overcome a challenge. My sense is that early D&D utilized this gameplay loop a lot with disposable PCs and an expectation of what we'd call metagaming today. If Jim the Fighter died to a particular hazard, his cousin Jimbob the Fighter would take his place and the player would have ideas on how to avoid that hazard in the future.
But here's the thing. Video games do that better. The proliferation of Rogue-likes and Souls-likes, or the MMO raid scene if you prefer a group project, are a far more refined arena for that particular gameplay. And so D&D has steadily been moving away that style and focusing more on character and story. It's not a recent shift, either, but one that's been happening over decades. We're just really seeing the culmination of it now, especially in the style preferred by a lot of the popular streaming groups.
There's a particularly satisfying gameplay loop of try - fail - learn - try again. It feels really good to practice and improve your player skills until you can overcome a challenge. My sense is that early D&D utilized this gameplay loop a lot with disposable PCs and an expectation of what we'd call metagaming today. If Jim the Fighter died to a particular hazard, his cousin Jimbob the Fighter would take his place and the player would have ideas on how to avoid that hazard in the future.
But here's the thing. Video games do that better. The proliferation of Rogue-likes and Souls-likes, or the MMO raid scene if you prefer a group project, are a far more refined arena for that particular gameplay. And so D&D has steadily been moving away that style and focusing more on character and story. It's not a recent shift, either, but one that's been happening over decades. We're just really seeing the culmination of it now, especially in the style preferred by a lot of the popular streaming groups.
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
D&D is often refered to as a "big tent" game. It covers a lot of different types of D&D-liek relations. But that's not all that is there. To make a horrible analogy, there are infinite fractions between 0 and 1, but that doesn't mean it can cover -1 or 134.
The rules of D&D provide both focus on what they want to do, and limits on what you can do. Look at how much of the PHB and the MM are devoted to material that is useful during combat. If I wanted to play a pure politics, drama and interpersonal relationship game under D&D could I? Absolutely. Will I have a lot of mechanical support for it? Well, no. I'd have some general bonus to use, like a few skills. Will the classes be balanced at it? Well, no again because casters can have all the skills plus spells, there aren't drama-related features other classes have that they lack, and the attrition resource model is tuned for the dense resource depletion of combat.
Again, since you don't need any rules to play an RPG, any RPG with rules can still handle everything. But that doesn't mean it does provides mechanical support for your concept.
Pivoting a bit, look at a game like Fate Core, where death is entirely off the table unless the player pushes for it and therefore the stakes of conflicts are about larger goals. Could I run the same scenarios in this as D&D? Sure. Will the mechanics of each provide a unique feel for that system? Yes. D&D has it's own feel, Fate will provide a different one. Both are good.
D&D has good bones, and is only moderately difficult to hack well. It's a big tent with lots under it. But the rules provide mechanical support for certain types of play, and other systems can provide mechanical support for types of play other than D&D, while not providing a D&D-feel. D&D does cover a wide spectrum, but other games cover other parts of the spectrum, wide or small. It's only by understanding and using a wide variety of different games with different goals that one can truly cover the whole spectrum.
The rules of D&D provide both focus on what they want to do, and limits on what you can do. Look at how much of the PHB and the MM are devoted to material that is useful during combat. If I wanted to play a pure politics, drama and interpersonal relationship game under D&D could I? Absolutely. Will I have a lot of mechanical support for it? Well, no. I'd have some general bonus to use, like a few skills. Will the classes be balanced at it? Well, no again because casters can have all the skills plus spells, there aren't drama-related features other classes have that they lack, and the attrition resource model is tuned for the dense resource depletion of combat.
Again, since you don't need any rules to play an RPG, any RPG with rules can still handle everything. But that doesn't mean it does provides mechanical support for your concept.
Pivoting a bit, look at a game like Fate Core, where death is entirely off the table unless the player pushes for it and therefore the stakes of conflicts are about larger goals. Could I run the same scenarios in this as D&D? Sure. Will the mechanics of each provide a unique feel for that system? Yes. D&D has it's own feel, Fate will provide a different one. Both are good.
D&D has good bones, and is only moderately difficult to hack well. It's a big tent with lots under it. But the rules provide mechanical support for certain types of play, and other systems can provide mechanical support for types of play other than D&D, while not providing a D&D-feel. D&D does cover a wide spectrum, but other games cover other parts of the spectrum, wide or small. It's only by understanding and using a wide variety of different games with different goals that one can truly cover the whole spectrum.
Thomas Shey
Legend
In addition to the other things you say, there are some elements of D&D that are, frankly, jarring to some people and don't stop being jarring with experience. And some of them are core to D&D style design. Some of them are persistent enough that they come up again and again and again. That doesn't mean they bother everyone, or course, and the popularity of the game would suggest that enough people can get around all of them so its still functional, but it still calls into question the frequent attempts to use D&D as the all-purpose power tool.
Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
So., this isn't exactly what I was getting at, and it's kind of a separate post. But here's the gist of why I don't agree (building on the last paragraph of the OP)-
Yes, some games are INFINITELY better at certain things than D&D. It's not even close. Heck, trying to get a Fiasco-like experience out of D&D? Yeah, good luck. Or, for that matter, BiTD- sure, you can do a heist in D&D, or advance in a criminal organization, but it's not exactly made for it.
In a way, its similar to kitchen gadgets (the good ones). There are a lot of great kitchen gadgets that are perfect for certain things- a cookie scoop, if you're into making lots of cookies. A rice cooker. A lemon juicer. Heck, maybe you need that Williams-Sonoma stainless-steel pineapple slicer and dicer because you make so much pineapple pizza. I am not saying this to be a dismissive Alton Brown, by the way- things that are purpose-designed for a task will be better at it.
It's like that with games- there are a lot of great games out there that superbly cover a narrow niche- either a narrow genre niche, or a narrow gameplay niche, or (usually) both. If someone said, "I have a group of really enthusiastic gamers that wants to play a cinematic-style heist game," I probably wouldn't be recommending D&D.
But that's not what I'm getting at. Your concentration on what the rules support misses what is popular about D&D. This is where I draw the line at the people that are hard supporter of, um ... let's say rules matter. Because D&D isn't just about what the rules support ....
1. It's about what the rules don't support. The negative space in D&D (the places the rules don't exist) is actually an important feature, not a bug, of the game.
2. It's about the community of D&D. Right now, I can play a game of D&D with a grognard who is running a highly hacked version of OD&D with a 200-page player supplement that, inter alia, details how he allows the original White Dwarf Barbarian as a playable class, or I could play D&D with a group of high-schoolers that use a lot of 5e homebrew to make it an anime/manga game with Wuxia influences. And all of those people are communicating and cross-pollinating in the greater D&D community- something that no other game has, and no other game is even close to having (in terms of both size and history).
3. It's about the flexibility within the game- this is, perhaps, the most important. Building on what @Gradine posted (re: types of fun), D&D has a long history of being able to engage different kinds of players, seeking different kinds of fun, at the same time. On these boards, we often hear about groups that try another game for a while, and then "return to D&D." I suspect that this is because a lot of games are built to primarily appeal to certain kinds of fun, but are not as engaging for all types of players. Take BiTD, for example- it's a great and brilliant game. But players that are really into narrative, discovery, or abnegation (yeah, I don't like submission either) ... maybe not so much?
And that's where D&D (esp. 5e) can shine. Yes, the drawback of it, the failure point, can be a bad DM. But a good DM is able to run session so that players who enjoy different kinds of fun can get their needs at least partially met during the game. Just run through the categories-
a. Sensory Pleasure- I like to roll dice and move miniatures and paint miniatures and look at the maps.
b. Fantasy- "Olaf's honor demands that I kill the brigand!"
c. Narrative- Well, that's what the APs are for, right?
d. Challenge- "+2, +1, or +1, +1, +1? THIS DECISION WILL HAUNT ME FOR THE REST OF THIS CAMPAIGN!"
e. Fellowship- Yo, who ordered the pizza? No evil PCs, right?
f. Discovery- I like to draw the maps, and take the notes, and write down the treasure. Wait, there's a rumor of a lost town?
g. Expression- Just wait until you read my 58 page character backstory!
h. Abnegation- I'm here to drink beer, eat pretzels, and play a champion. Now get out of my way and let me roll that d20.
D&D is not a great game system for everything, or every person. But it's a really good system for a lot of people when you have groups with mixed interests. IMO, etc.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Eh. I'd say its a really good system for people who have mixed interests and have internalized D&D's approaches as an okay way to get to them. The latter is extremely common because of the networking effect, but I don't have much sign that there's anything intrinsic about D&D's mechanical structure that even supports varied desires better than other choices; its just what a lot of people get exposed to early and imprint on if they don't, at the time, have strong wants it doesn't fulfill.
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