D&D General Creativity?

[Pedantic]

Is that not true in 4e? If you want to be stupendously good at climbing then you take some feat and whatever. If it's a lesser obstacle you won't really even need that, but Cania is tougher, etc. In DW it's more about what fiction the table goes with.

What I'm trying to drive at is that a climb skill in a game with specified DCs maps to a set of discrete abilities. You could rewrite the climb skill as a series of "the player can move at Y speed up vertical surfaces" "the player can move at X speed up horizontal surfaces upside down" utility powers. Instead of the fiction changing over time to ensure the mechanic remains the same, the player will leverage their increased abilities against the environment in new ways. How does my decision making as a player change when I'm climbing a stone wall at level 4, and a sentient wall of teeth at level 22? Assuming I remained specialized in climbing, it doesn't at all, I'm still rolling a climb check against a level-appropriate environmental DC, and the game I'm playing, where I decide to climb some obstacles is exactly the same.

If Climb is actually shorthand for a set of abilities, some of which have a percentage chance to activate in the form of a DC the player can't hit automatically, then the game becomes the player taking those discrete packets of mechanics and trying to use them against the environment to best achieve victory.

Why are those goals special, RPGs can handle much more than just that.

The goals I just described are "get something done" and "survive." I don't know what you're talking about, those are about as broad as you can possibly get. I cannot imagine playing a character that does not want something, and I think it's a pretty reasonable genre convention of heroic fantasy that characters want to survive, up until they find a reason to make a noble sacrifice.

The point I was actually making is that you can design your game such that a player trying to optimize their gameplay decisions will, even if they paid no attention to their character's motivations once they had set a goal, end up making choices that their character would reasonable make in the fiction to achieve their goal. This point is nearly tautological, I don't think it's particularly out there.

Sure, some games, what I would call trad, like 1e AD&D work like that, the agenda is 'beat the challenge ', but there is a much wider range of agendas. To the point of the thread they all include creativity and skill.

I'm not honestly sure what we're talking about here or how to respond to this point.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not interested in steps 1 and 2. You can parse the steps however you like.

It won't change the fact that one example of play involves the player thinking mostly about the shared fiction, and the other involves the player thinking mostly about the rulebook.

You assert that this difference is arbitrary and artificial - why? The difference between participating in shared imagination and working out the conceptual and logical relations between two spell descriptions is not an arbitrary one.

Working out the conceptual and logical relations between two spells is participating in the shared imagination! (at least, if one assumes - as I do - the characters in the fiction are having the same conversation as the players at the table, i.e. the players are speaking in character as they work this stuff out).

Casters in the fiction know how their spells work, probably better than do the players at the table, and so their discussing whether spell X can achieve end goal Y is IMO every bit as much engaging with the fiction as is whether a character can haul a heavy object on a rope.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I am not trying to convince anyone what game they should be playing or like, but I think it's importantly to accurately describe how the play model actually functions. Blades emphatically is not a game inevitably decaying board state nor is it a game that does not support a skilled play imperative.

Right, there is potential for similar skilled play in DW as well. Use DR, or SL moves tactically or manage gear well, these can improve your move space and make a difference between a slow grind to a bad end vs achieving your goal. It may not matter in terms of the game will have more challenges regardless, but in D&D you will go on to the next adventure too...

 

[Clint_L]

In my experience, it's not true that imaginary situations require rules in the way you describe.

I'm thinking of the use of magic in Marvel Heroic RP and the fantasy adaptions of it I've GMed. And also the use of magic in my 4e D&D game.

Players can use their imaginations and make things up, in relation to magic as much as anything else. What matters is that there are rules that govern who gets to say what - as Vincent Baker puts it, to ease negotiations over what is to be true in the fiction.

I tried to address this distinction by focusing on detailed magic systems. Players can use their imaginations, yes, but getting other players or the DM to accept what they've imagined becomes easier with agreed upon parameters - more detail - in the rules. I think there's a reason that free form RPGs are almost always standalone games or very limited campaigns. When there are too few rules, the sustained fiction becomes harder and harder to keep cohesive over time.

I think this is particularly the case when trying to deal with a concept as abstract as "magic," upon which there are no real world parameters to govern us.

The reason D&D and all its variants work as long term campaigns (I just met some folks who have been playing interlocked campaigns for decades!) is that it is supported by a rules system that, while allowing for some flexibility, is nevertheless specific enough to create a cohesive substrate, a foundation, from which the stories can build. I love playing RPGs that are extremely rules lite, but those always work best as one-shots or mini-campaigns of maybe four sessions, tops.

Edit: one other thing I will argue is that having more detail can sometimes free the imagination. When anything is possible, it can be hard to know where to start, or players can just default to an obvious trope or cliche. But having a list of spells with various parameters can trigger some very imaginative problem solving. I think the rope trick example we discussed exemplifies some wonderful creativity!

 

[Lanefan]

You see what I'm saying? PbtA is literally not adjudicating success and failure in terms of what you did. The mechanism isn't really meant for that, its meant for driving the fiction.

Which, read at a basic level, tells me that it doesn't matter what my character actually does as long as it does something; which means I'd have the same odds of success* if I hang a bright cloth from a tree or pile stones on the beach to spell out HELP or just stand on the shore jumping up and down waving my arms.

That's just not satisfactory for me. I want the in-fiction "what I do" piece to influence the at-table odds of success beyond just the seemingly-binary I did something vs I did nothing divide. For example, piling stones on the beach to spell HELP is only likely to succeed if my potential rescuers are a) flying and b) literate; if I instead think to hang something bright from a high tree my odds of success should improve, and even more so if I do all three things listed above rather than just one.

Otherwise, what's the point of coming up with creative ideas for actions?

* - leaving the fire option aside for the moment so as to equalize the day-night issue.

Its an entirely different game architecture from trad RPGs. FUNDAMENTALLY different.

Indeed, if the resolution mechanism only takes into account the existence of an action rather than that action's substance.

 

[Baron Opal II]

These posts might give you some ideas:

Thank you.

I don't play 4e, but I have adapted a number of the non-magical maneuvers for fighters and thieves. In general, they can either do rolled damage or minimum damage plus a special effect.

I don't see anything here that requires it to be 4e specifically, but I understand that's just the system you were using at the time.

To everyone else, I see Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, My Life With Master... I can appreciate that there can be some good ideas floating about on how they do things, and I see a lot of discussion about this system does this, that does that. I see a lot of analysis, but little synthesis. Why should I care the first little thing about DW? Torchbearer? Is there a mechanic I can adapt? Is there a pattern of thought that can be adapted to my D&D game?

Because I love me some RQ and I hope to place some FATE someday. But I don't see anything here about improving a D&D game, or prevent authorial chaos, or what would be a reasonable mid point between the DM presenting a scenario and the players devising novel solutions to it.

Eta: And there's nothing wrong with theorycrafting! I'm just on the practical side of things.

 

[Pedantic]

I think @chaochou's point is apposite here.

The boardgame Seven Wonders has "involved victory conditions" in the sense that there are multiple dimensions of play in which victory points can be accrued, and for relatively casual players the maths at any given moment (particularly at earlier stages of play) is not easily solvable to yield an obviously superior move. There's a contrast in this respect with, say, backgammon.

This is a misunderstanding of my point. Seven Wonders has 1 very simple condition, "acquire the most victory points." The game is in tracking how best to achieve this goal as the board state unfolds. The thing I keep saying is different in a TTRPG is that you can set your own constantly changing goal.

But if the victory condition is "light a signal fire on top of the mountain", achieving that victory consists precisely in everyone at the table agreeing that, in the fiction, some character or other has reached the top of the mountain and has lit a fire. Which is shared imagination. Given that, in a RPG, no participant has unilateral authority to stipulate either that the fiction does or does not contain such a state of affairs within it, it's negotiated imagination.

Well, this is why I don't like getting bogged down in these discussions. Light a signal fire on a mountain is almost certainly a smaller part of a larger goal like "assemble a sufficiently large army to take down the incoming demon horde" or "trick a nation into declaring war" or something, and any challenge that can be resolved in a single skill check is probably too small to treat that way. But, I quibble quite a bit about "unilateral authority." Players get to declare actions, actions do what they say they do, the fiction is changed by those actions as they specify. Player agency is precisely that, unilateral authority to alter the fiction in some specific, mechanically mediated way.

On top of @chaochou's point:

I've played RPGs which do not involve unbounded play time. Agon is an example, with a formal structure to support its lack of unbounded play time (both at the session level and the "campaign" level). I've not played My Life With Master but believe it might be the first - certainly an early - example of a RPG with that sort of formal structure.

As well as formal structures to constrain play time, I've played RPGs with an understanding among all the participants that play time is not unbounded, and as the GM I've used my authority over the fiction to frame matters towards and then into a climax at the appropriate time.

That's reasonable. Some less absolute formation about playtime is probably more accurate, but I think it's reasonable to suggest that RPGs tend to be less constrained this way than board games.

I think in this particular post you are reiterating this point made by @LostSoul a while ago now:

But anyway: one key point that I take @AbdulAlhazred to be making, or at least pointing toward, in his discussions of Dungeon World and 4e D&D, is this: who gets to decide whether balancing on a cloud, or any other feat of heroics, will help the PC achieve the goal that the player has set for the PC?

I think @Manbearcat is pointing toward something similar in his post upthread about the technical aspects of climbing, and genre logic.

At some tables, the answer is the GM. Some RPG systems - eg 3E and 5e D&D - tend to reinforce this answer in their rulebooks and in their procedures of play.

At some tables, the answer is the table - both player(s) and GM.Some RPG systems - eg BitD, DW, 4e D&D, Agon, Burning Wheel, MHRP - tend to reinforce this answer in their rulebooks and in their procedures of play.

Ah! This feels significant. I'm rejecting this as a dichotomy.

I would not assign that authority to the GM, nor to the table at large. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I keep using the word "objective." The question of whether an ability is useful should be mediated by the mechanics. Taking an action will change the board state, and after a variety of actions have been taken, you can tell if the goal has been achieved, or not. In fact, I'd contend it's basically essential to have a meaningful state of gameplay (a term I'm using here to specifically refer to the process of trying to navigate a complex system of decisions to achieve a desired outcome; the basic play loop of any eurogame, for example), that this not be a decision made by a person (or people), but a process.

It is possible to have a system with "objective" difficulties (like DC120 for balancing on a cloud) that otherwise fits in the second category of pointed to: Burning Wheel is an example. But in my experience that is aesthetic and has little relevance to player agency.

Suppose a player knows that, should it be relevant to achieving their goal, their PC in this game is almost certain to be able to climb any wall at full speed, one handed while wielding a weapon. How does that give them agency? Who decides the relationship between performing such a feat, and achieving any goal?

That is all about who gets to decide the content of the fiction - in framing, and then how performing certain feats in the fiction will allow certain goals to be achieved. Negotiated imagination.

The assumption here, seems to be that a GM, upon creating a fiction world, will necessarily then map out the interaction of player abilities and that world. A GM that presents the players with a castle, will know (and can/should know) what the interaction of every ability the players can bring to bear against that castle will be, and will apparently have designed the castle with that in mind. I just don't think that's true, particularly if you assign players the choice of "what to care about" in the first place, that determines if they're even interested in walking into castles.

The interesting gameplay part is finding efficiencies between an obstacle the players are facing and their abilities. Consider a classic combat example, like fighting a fire elemental. A player with the option will opt to use their Frostbrand to attack with, over a +2 mace, and will opt not cast burning hands. That is the least interesting possible optimization problem, doesn't offer a ton of room for customization, and will still absolutely the fighter who had two weapons to pick from, because it is satisfying to make a choice that has an impact on the situation. Add some more dimensions to combat and things start to get more interesting from there.

That same decision making web can absolutely extend outside of that realm to the rest of the experience, if you build your design to offer the same sort of mechanically mediated outcomes to all player declared actions.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hopefully to avoid tautology?

In the broadest terms, I'm arguing that the basic structure of play from some related mediums can absolutely be applied to the TTRPG, which can differentiate itself from them without changing it. The unique features of an RPG can be expressed without changing the nature of mechanical engagement; I can use the same skills, decision making tools and get the same enjoyment from a game of Descent and a game of D&D, and they can still be meaningfully different activities, separated by other features. I've been saying consistently that I think that process of play you're describing is less fundamental than an unbounded play time and involved victory conditions. All this engagement with the fiction stuff can be offered into the actions/tools your game makes available, instead of a required part of action resolution.

I think you cannot offer what DW, for example, does in D&D, not really. Process of play is fundamental and leads to different places. They're all RPGs and some things will hold for any of them but we're doing different things, system matters!

 

[Pedantic]

I think you cannot offer what DW, for example, does in D&D, not really. Process of play is fundamental and leads to different places. They're all RPGs and some things will hold for any of them but we're doing different things, system matters!

I don't disagree? My complaints have mostly been about attempts to categorize specific play structures as intrinsic to RPGs, or as superior for encouraging player creativity. This is sort of orthogonal to that point.

 

[Lanefan]

That same decision making web can absolutely extend outside of that realm to the rest of the experience, if you build your design to offer the same sort of mechanically mediated outcomes to all player declared actions.

While I mostly get what you're saying, there comes a point for each of us where the use of mechanics generates more impediment than benefit.

Mine is probably "social mechanics"; I'd rather just role-play social scenes out in-character at the table and let them resolve organically rather than involve mechanics. So if your declared action is to persuade the Duke to lend you some troops, I want to hear your persuasive in-character words and I-as-DM will react in-character as the Duke.