Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[pemerton]

I think your thoughts were thought provoking, but they certainly are disrespectful/undermining toward AW.

I appreciate the sentiment, but personally I don't think what @clearstream says is disrespectful. I just think it's false.

I'm referring particularly to this:

in its non-commital to principles, D&D leaves the door open for a group to bring into their play the same principles as are put in writing in PbtA games. I have argued that the consequences-resolution and degrees-of-success rules in the DMG give mechanical support for that possible approach.

I've not seen anyone actually set out a method of 5e D&D resolution that would emulate Apocalypse World. What are the basic (player-side) moves? What are the GM moves? How does Action Surge, or Sneak Attack, or the Web spell, fit into this?

The whole suggestion strikes me as simply preposterous.

EDIT: reading on, I see that @innerdude got in nearly 12 hours ahead of me!

 

[pemerton]

My thoughts are very much "Yes, and..." where the "and" is to wonder how much adopting principles and interpretations can adjust the ludic structure of meaning. In doing so, I adopt a radical stance that in some sense claims (in respect of TTRPGs) that we cannot possibly know what game is being played unless we know something about who is playing it. That, quite seriously, a distinct game is being played by each distinct cohort.

If your claim is that analysis and criticism are impossible, then I think you need to say more to defend that claim than what I've quoted.

If that is not your claim, then what is your point here? I mean, I think everyone posting in this thread is familiar with the Lumpley principle.

 

[pemerton]

Because for the 5e-only player/GM (or 1e, or 2e, for all that), of which there are a great many, it obviates the need to learn a whole new system.

<snip>

those with said preferences can change 5e through houserule, kitbash, social contract, and trial-and-error to suit those preferences, and due to its I-can-only-assume-intentional vagueness of design the system can handle it. Learning and adopting tweaks to a known system is light-years easier than learning a new one from scratch.

These are empirical claims about what is easy and what is hard. What's the evidence for them? I mean, consider this from @clearstream:

in our case, we played a string of six sessions applying my principles. I felt that to really understand it would need at least the same again, but we had agreed to rotate to MotW.

<snip>

An initial hitch was making sure everyone understood the agenda.

I think there is zero evidence that it is easier to play Dungeon World using "kit-bashed" 5e D&D, rather than just playing DW.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If someone is that uninterested in learning any non-D&D systems I'm not sure what they have to contribute to any discussion of game design/criticism/etc. Like hearing someone's take on writing when they've read one book, and refuse to read others.

Also, I just flat out don't believe that folks who refuse to look at other games are doing so for financial reasons. There are tons of cheap or free PDFs. People can download Mothership right now for free on DriveThru. That's not what's going on.

The message that @Lanefan was responding to was not specifically about criticism. It was answering why a person would rather change 5e than find and learn a new game.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

The message that @Lanefan was responding to was not specifically about criticism. It was answering why a person would rather change 5e than find and learn a new game.

Fair point, but only to a point. I still don't believe that just about anyone sticks with a single system for financial reasons, and the amount of time and effort it takes to wrestle 5e into other forms isn't any less than checking out something else.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I like the way you've laid this out. In some PbtA game systems (DW is an example), I see that the complications or trouble of some moves is up to DM (e.g. Volley, in which "you have to move to get the shot placing you in danger as described by the GM"). I agree that this is not intended to be unconstrained, yet within that I think there are still essentially infinite possibilities.

When I run the thought experiment of collecting ten DMs and giving them the same situation and result, I feel justified in predicting that what they describe will not all be the same. Perhaps it is that leeway, that speaks to the point @Pedantic is making?

This doesn't seem to me like a very meaningful or insightful conclusion, TBH. That is, sure there are an 'infinite' number of incredibly minute variations on the following fiction. ALL of them must honor the agenda and, for the most part, live by the principles of play which the game (DW in this case I presume) espouses. Not only that, but the fiction has to follow from whatever came before, and that is a VERY strict constraint!

So, basically, yes, the player rolls an 8 while conducting the Volley move. Lets assume they choose "move into danger" as the complication. There is a tactical situation here. That situation is going to be fairly well-specified in most cases, so there's really a limited repertoire of threats. Most likely the GM is going to have another enemy deal damage to your character (fiction will be something on the order of a bad guy moving in on you, or the PC getting too close and getting hit). Conceivably there could also be environmental hazards that could come into play, but those are again going to be dictated by the FICTION, not so much the GM! Finally, maybe the situation might call for an entirely new and thus-far unanticipated danger (IE because nothing much else is available). AGAIN this is a constraint of FICTION, not a GM whim. Here we all agree, there are probably a lot of options, but consider there are hinted-at dangers, fronts, factions, and dungeon moves. Most of the time the GM should be drawing from these, as opposed to spinning off into lala land to invent something completely new.

In other words, I can tell you with some fairly high reliability things like "what is @Manbearcat going to say happens here?" I won't likely be exactly right, but I know it will be one of a small menu of possibilities that meet certain well-established criteria. This is really no different from the sort of choices that GM's make in, say, classic D&D, when a player does something aside from 'make an attack' or some other established type of 'move'. The GM, constrained by various factors picks a response. In a few cases that might be directly based on pre-existing notes, but 99% of the time it won't be, certainly not entirely.

The real question though is, what ultimately is the worth of this kind of statement in the first place? Clearly "stuff happens which nobody anticipated" should be pretty routine in RPGs, right?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Ironically (considering my thoughts above) I believe it is in part because most D&D groups do not take the words in the DMG on resolution seriously that it can seem like such a remote possibility that the game could ever play in such a paradigmatically different way. I see you posted Harper's two diagrams. I should add that I believe there is another more appealing graph that I think of as goal resolution, that to me makes better sense of task resolution. However, I also do not embrace a simple conflict-task binary: rather I think in terms of features of resolution methods that can be assembled in a great variety of different ways.

Is there some enumeration of some of these multiple ways? Honestly, IMHO, they will all fall into a very few categories, but I'm curious.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Fair point, but only to a point. I still don't believe that just about anyone sticks with a single system for financial reasons, and the amount of time and effort it takes to wrestle 5e into other forms isn't any less than checking out something else.

Strong disagree on the change 5e point; often it doesn't even take that much to get 5e where you want it to be meet one's preferences, and even if it does, the GM is in all likelihood doing most of that work.

If your players don't want to learn a non-5e system, you can't make them. "Fixing" 5e is the better option in that case.

I will mostly agree on the financial bit. That's a hurdle that can usually be stepped over, one way or another.

 

[innerdude]

I already have D&D 4e, Stonetop, Dungeon World, Old School Essentials, Worlds Without Number and Pathfinder Second Edition. Why would I want 5e to change to suit my preference sets? I mostly just want the attendant styles of play enabled by those games to be treated with the same level of attendant respect as any other D&D like. Especially when it comes to sideswipes in unrelated threads or condemnation of particular techniques like collaborative world building.

The same applies to many other games. Not just indie games, but also trad games like Dune 2d20 and Legend of the Five Rings Fifth Edition which get cast off as "narrative games" as if they were not fundamentally built off the same precepts as other trad games.

This gets me too. The switch from PF 1e to Savage Worlds for me back in 2012 didn't change my overall GM approach nearly it all. It just made my usual "trad" approach much easier, as Savage Worlds is 10x easier to improvise on the fly in play.

Claiming that Savage Worlds is somehow an entirely different category of game from 5e is an incorrect statement. Which for me contradicts somewhat Lanefan's assertion. Mechanically Savage Worlds bears very little resemblance to 5e. Yet it produces an overall gameplay loop with a 75-85 percent overlap of D&D.

Why? Because it fundamentally assumes in its core the same kind of discrete task resolution + map and key play as D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This gets me too. The switch from PF 1e to Savage Worlds for me back in 2012 didn't change my overall GM approach nearly it all. It just made my usual "trad" approach much easier, as Savage Worlds is 10x easier to improvise on the fly in play.

Claiming that Savage Worlds is somehow an entirely different category of game from 5e is an incorrect statement. Which for me contradicts somewhat Lanefan's assertion. Mechanically Savage Worlds bears very little resemblance to 5e. Yet it produces an overall gameplay loop with a 75-85 percent overlap of D&D.

Why? Because it fundamentally assumes in its core the same kind of discrete task resolution + map and key play as D&D.

For my part, I generally consider any game that makes consistent, moderate or stronger use of "tags", "qualities", "aspects" or similar rules for descriptive phrases to be a non-trad game in my estimation. It's why I consider Star Trek Adventures to be such, despite many traditional leanings in its ruleset.

Edit: adding heavy use of metacurrency to the system just makes my feeling in this matter stronger.