Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[FrogReaver]

They seem complementary. Exploration is how the players go about accomplishing their goals while heuristics are what they use to decide where to explore. I’m not wedded to it though. I was just trying to suggest something that didn’t have “guesswork” in it.

There's definitely heuristics involved, both in determining which goal to currently focus in determining how to achieve that goal. And yes, the goals should be complimentary in the long term, though they can come into conflict in the immediate term. Classic example - when to retreat given that retreat helps ensure survival but fails to immediately let you defeat the bad guys. If you take a long term view then survival can help you defeat the bad guys, unless survival becomes your sole focus, in which case you start avoiding the bad guys altogether, in which case it hinders you in defeating the bad guys. There must be a heuristic that you utilize to help navigate between your goals!

 

[Campbell]

I think that's fair, but there's also an issue of people who would prefer to avoid temporal contrivances at all, but simply accept some are unavoidable. As such ones that, well, aren't will seem in a different class.

(This is over and above people who don't want the kind of interactions that are required for a lot of just-in-time result decisions of course ).

Sure, although I would counter that avoiding some of those constraints places some additional constraints on the scope of play and which sorts of characters/situations are appropriate. Albeit most of those constraints are pretty widely accepted in adventure gaming. That's really the subject of another thread though.

 

[Thomas Shey]

"Gritty unpredictability" means "needless, pointless, and unsatisfying" in a narrative sense. The death serves no greater purpose in the ongoing story, happens randomly and often for no cause other than "dice said so" (that is, not the result of doing a Really Dumb Thing but simply because the DM rolled hot or the like), and leaves lives unfinished and works indefinitely suspended.

But note you've qualified it with "in a narrative sense". Not everyone who plays RPGs focuses on things "in a narrative sense" so that's not the sense they're going to see it in.

That doesn't mean the design is needless, pointless, or unsatisfying. I had thought that by explicitly saying I know people enjoy it, that would be clear, seems I was mistaken. But there is no way AFAIK to make a clear separation in the terms between "this is an intentionally unsatisfying narrative because 'realistic' situations aren't narratives, just unstructured events often subject to the whims of time and chance" and "this is just Bad Qualities A, B, C." If there is vocabulary I'm missing or forgetting thst allows one to specify narrative pointlessness/needlessness/unsatifactoriness, please tell me, I would love to be more specific.

But of course you can. You just did it with me. That was my point that there needs to be more specific contextualization on some of these at the front end, because you can't make many assumptions how it'll be perceived at the receiving end.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The empty room with 2 or more nondescript doors is the most common example, but it can be extended to any situations where players must decide a course of action, but have no means to find information that makes their decision an informed one.

Huh. I'd assumed it was about the tendency for a lot of early dungeons to have lots of empty rooms for--verisimilitude? Taking up a lot of time but not really generating any interest.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Does anyone not realise that there are both obvious and subtle differences between "just in time" and pre-authored fiction?

That's not the question. The question is "does everyone understand why its important?" And the answer, from some responses I've seen in the past is many fans of Story Now really don't seem to. At least they often seem to be determined to convince people the distinction is not relevant, or at least not as relevant as they think it is. That does not seem to be the behavior of people who consider a distinction significant, even to other people.

 

[FrogReaver]

Huh. I'd assumed it was about the tendency for a lot of early dungeons to have lots of empty rooms for--verisimilitude? Taking up a lot of time but not really generating any interest.

Also, time in early dungeons also meant wandering monster checks. Taking time to thoroughly check each empty room for traps had a non-trivial chance of causing an encounter.

Also, sometimes just knowing there is an empty room nearby is itself a great boon.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It doesn't seem utterly nonsensical, or beyond understanding. But it's simply a preference. It's no more right or wrong than traditional play.

I'd revisit the common argument "but its all fiction" when assessing this. If that's not to argue the objection is nonsensical, its not clear what argument it is supposed to be making.

 

[FrogReaver]

Dunno.

I spent 2009 to 2013 or thereabouts being repeatedly lectured about "dissociated mechanics", "it's not D&D (to me)", etc. I assume all those posters didn't see it as their duty to validate my play of 4e D&D. I certainly didn't take that to be their duty. It didn't stop me from developing my play, and improving my technical grasp of the game, in conversation with @Manbearcat, @Campbell, @LostSoul, Crazy Jerome and others.

If someone wants to post suggesting that fiction, in (say) a 4e skill challenge is "Schroedinger's X", I will post to explain why I think they're wrong. But I'm not looking to be validated by them. I don't rely on that sort of commentary to satisfy myself that a particular RPG is worth playing, or that I'm doing it well or poorly.

I get it. Non-4e fans were absolutely brutal to 4e fans in that era. I like 4e at the time - though never liked skill challenges which is one of your favorite parts. I didn't really have a problem with the concept of them, just in practice they never seemed to work well or feel right to me.

Anyways, more on topic here - i don't think anyone should be treated the way non-4e fans treated others at that time. (And it wasn't all, but it was a very vocal segment at the time). Though 4e fans in turn would treat non-4e fans badly too. Not too long in it became difficult to tell who had actually 'started it' but the hostilities were in full swing.

I think most of us just want the games we enjoy to be respected, they don't have to be liked, but we don't want to see them called crap or inferior or whatever else. This goes for both sides, or even all sides. And there's a fine line in saying i don't like it, for me it's bad and saying it's just bad. I'm perfectly fine with the former, but not with the later.

 

[pemerton]

Perhaps. I didn’t mean to seem harsh

I don't think that you seemed harsh!

I will ask you to indulge me in more autobiography (hopefully to a more generally applicable point):

A breakthrough I had in my thinking, somewhere around 10 to 12 years ago, was to realise that if all the map and key is doing is to serve as a type of index or checklist for encounters, with the players' choices of where to go and what to look at activating the encounters, but that being either arbitrary (as per @Hussar's posts) or pre-determined (as per the linearity that I think @niklinna mentioned upthread), then why bother with the map and key?

Why not, instead, manage the encounters through some more systematic framework like a skill challenge, and/or just have the GM make a non-arbitrary decision about which encounter to activate now, in light of the current trajectory of play?

(I realise that I'm not the first RPGer to have worked this out! What I've described in the previous paragraph is directly influenced by Burning Wheel, and clearly also has some basic similarities to AW prep of threats and fronts. And in practice I was doing it as long ago as 35 years, but it took me a long time to work out what was working in my practice, and what elements of received technique - like map-and-key - were just a burden or a fetish.)

It took another development in my thinking, in the past 5 years, to work out how map-and-key could be used as a framing device - basically for anchoring the fiction about a detailed bit of geography - that was different from the hidden gameboard approach I was raised on (see my post upthread about Classic Traveller).

To me, a lot of D&D play seems to want to use the map-and-key as a type of anchor of the fiction, and to do this with it serving as a hidden gameboard in the classic sense. I think there may be an aspect of "tradition" here that is not necessarily fully reasoned. I think there is also the element of hidden stuff being revealed is fun.

I'm sympathetic to your view that the less of it, the better - or (hoping that my rephrasing as I flip it around isn't losing your meaning) that if there is going to be a hidden gameboard, then the players should have the opportunity to uncover its secrets in a non-arbitrary way. But I think this may be a minority preference, or at least just one among a range of preferences, in the current RPG milieu.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Unless the campaign is coming to an end, won't there be ensuing complications anyway?

Will they come from resolving the last one, or will they be unrelated or only indirectly related ? If you don't understand that's a different feeling, I think that's a problem.

This is related to the fact that how failure in RPGs are handled in general has a frequent risk; that its perceived as the consequence of incompetence on the part of the character (rather than, say exterior factors you have no control over) . When its too frequent a result, or, say, the commonest "success" is mixed, it reinforces that problem. And its going to be very, very hard for people to not view consequences as a result of their die rolls as connected to them.