Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[clearstream]

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.

Perhaps start here ([English] Resolution types in TTRPG) and think about how one might deconstruct resolution methods. As I said, I need to write something on this.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The bolded is just as true, I'd say, in typical D&D play as it is here. The exceptions, of course, in any system are those cases where the PCs really are in a madhouse setting - e.g. something like Tel'eran'rhiod (or however it's spelled; you know, the dream-world from Wheel of Time) or the Elemental Plane of Chaos or Alice's Wonderland - where logic and continuity go flying out the window; shortly followed by a space-warp causing the window to fly out of itself.

The essential phrase there being "Most of the time", because...

...there always has to be room for the unexpected.

Well, I would say a madhouse is pretty unusual... As for the 'unexpected', yes I agree that scope for being surprised, as a player, is good. I am not sure how to articulate a really solid rule about when it is the 'right time' to get surprised. I do think that typically in most games like BitD, for instance, the surprise will come from a fairly known space. This is one reason it is harder to build something like a PbtA that is VERY general. You could, but the specific game is probably more narrow.

 

[clearstream]

This claim is contentious and I reject it. Not all evaluation has to be in an instrumental context. We can also judge the intrinsic value of things. This happens in other aesthetic domains. RPGs aren't, and RPGing isn't, special.

I like this rejection as it provokes thought. My take is not that RPGs are special, but that we need to place them in their proper domain. I see TTRPG systems as categorically closer to the laws of sports, than to say movies or storybooks.

To give some examples of how that plays out

• How would one judge the offside rule in Football in the context of Field* Hockey (which lacks one)?
• If a game of Hockey is played clumsily, does that amount to a condemnation of the laws of Hockey?
• Should Football (aka Soccer) players pick up the ball and run with it, what game are they playing?
• The Lumpley Principle applies well to sports (mutatis mutandis), being to some extent a restatement of Suits' insight that the rules of games are upheld for the sake of the play it affords us (the LP ties that to the central needs of RPG, and perhaps identifying those needs is its key insight)

*Edited for clarity

 

[Lanefan]

This is prone to a whole host of problems, not least of which is Ship of Theseus syndrome. People have enough trouble confusing various editions of D&D with their small to large differences. You go changing the periphery of the root game (whatever that is), people are going to have more confusion rather than less compared to systems they know from the get-go are distinct (although as we've seen time and again there's always baggage moving from system to system).

I and others in our crew have over the years pretty much rewritten 1e D&D from the ground up; and yet I think someone who has only played 1e by the book would still recognize it not only as D&D but as a version of D&D that bore considerable similarity to what said player was used to; and that it would be easier for that player to adjust to our system than it would be for, say, someone who had only played PbtA games or even 4e D&D.

It's also a lot of work to kitbash. If you want an original magic system, you have to come up with it pretty much from scratch, except it has to work with the existing mechanisms of hit points, saving throws, etc. etc. Or is D&D's magic system part of the root game? If so, then D&D will never, ever fit my set of preferences.

It's a lot of work for the GM, yes; but almost none for the players.

What are your preferences for a magic system?

If you want to have formalized faction relationships, you have to make that up.

To me that would be part of worldbuilding or setting design, similar to making up kingdoms and guilds and so forth and figuring out how they relate to/with each other.

If you want to do combat in any way other than round-by-round, turn-by-turn, hp-ablative hit-or-whiff mechanics...well I guess that is clearly part of the root game, so I guess that's out of consideration.

More or less. Hit or miss? Yeah, that stays. Round-by-round turn-by-turn? Well, sort of - round-by-round kinda has to stay if only as a timing mechanism (though one could, I suppose, go to minutes and seconds), and turn-by-turn can be changed up by allowing simultaniety and re-rolling initiatives every round. Lipstick on a pig? Maybe; but still better than nothing.

If you want to go even broader and do conflict rather than task resolution, or actions with complications/consequences rather than success/whiff, you have to mutate the core d20 mechanic almost beyond recognition.

On this I disagree, in that if instead of looking at a roll as a binary pass-fail you look at it as also informing the degree of pass-fail it's easy to introduce either or both of fail-forward or success-with-complications on rolls that are close to the succeed-fail cutoff.

If you want characters that aren't defined by strict classes and levels, again, is that part of the root game or not? What even constitutes the root game of 5e?

Yes, those are all part of the root core.

Now, there is a lot in 5e that can be tailored and customized to fit different allocations of authority in setting & narration, genre trappings, and the like, but the root game (such as I'd expect many to agree on) remains one of success/whiff task resolution, a heavy mechanical focus on round-by-round ablative combat, and pretty fixed classes...whose abilities are heavily focused on round-by-round ablative combat and whose advancement is pretty regimented. And there's a big, wide world of other game styles than that which no amount of kitbashing around the periphery of that root will get you to.

I think at an even more "root" level the one thing I'd want to keep as a guiding principle is the ability to get down to a very high granularity of task/conflict resolution - i.e. resolve things step by step rather than all in one go, even if it takes longer at the table. This is where I fall off the 4e skill-challenge wagon, for example.

Enforcing speed/efficiency of story advancement isn't even on my list of priorities; it'll advance as fast or as slowly as the players and GM want it to and if it's slow then so be it. There's always another session.

The rules kind of have to pay a lot of attention to combat as that's the one thing that pretty much has to be done entirely in the abstract. That said, round-by-round ablative combat has pros and cons to it, no question there; perhaps the biggest pro being that IME players just love-love-love! rolling dice and combat gives lots of reasons to do so.

 

[FrogReaver]

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:
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!

I think the question of just how close it could get is very interesting. I think your right that D&D combat abilities and spells would be really out of place, but skill checks coupled with the DMG variant rules that @clearstream mentioned and the DM's power to call for skill checks more or less as he sees fit, seems like that could work together to emulate the structure of AW Moves with the D&D skills corresponding to the Moves in AW - obviously the D&D skills don't perfectly map to the AW moves. So again, not the same game, not the same experience, but I find it interesting that 5e may could get close to one of the core processes of AW play.

 

[clearstream]

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.

I see that my claims are being railroaded toward a destination they are not intended to go. I do not say that 5e played following a set of principles drawn from AW will be the same game. More, I say it will be a much different game from 5e played under other principles, and that it will be in the neighbourhood of PbtA in significant respects (even while remaining a fantasy game, continuing to have its distinctive classes, spells, etc.) I point to rules in the DMG because it seems clear to me that in their absence, 5e could lack technical features required to emulate nuanced resolution.

If my claims are read to mean it would be identical, then unsurprisingly that seems preposterous. But that is a strawman. Recollect that at the outset, I endeavoured solely to exemplify a set of claims that I guessed could feel undermining to passionate fans of specific games. I did not provide them in order to say that 5e would become those specific games. My narrow conversation with one poster has been expanded quite ridiculously.

However, it now seems right to me to have chosen those particular claims as examples, as I can see that the very possibility has served as a red flag and evoked strong responses.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Okay, I have no problem with that notion in general. It's true in a very basic sense. The problem is with how that idea is being used to exclude me or gatekeep me or etc from the conversation. I must essentially 'play more games' or my opinions get to be immediately dismissed. That's never going to be a position that yields a productive conversation between anyone that holds it and me (and most likely anyone else in a similar position as me).

OK, suppose we were talking about, say, Martial Arts. Would you not simply be required to be practiced in this area to have meaningful opinions? I don't know how to answer you. Again, I am not attacking anyone's opinions, or even expertise with whatever it is they are actually experienced with. I just don't think people can have really meaningful opinions about stuff they are not experienced with. I don't think this is a generally super controversial idea in the world in general.

I don't think you (general) intend to - but on some level shouldn't I be the one to get judge whether my preferences are being attacked, dismissed or disrespected?

I think we all have an ability to judge for ourselves. No one opinion is absolutely superior to another.

Why is there a need to set yourself up as an expert? What do you hope to gain by having expert authority in the conversation?

I'm confused. I am certainly not trying to set myself up as superior to anyone else.

 

[Lanefan]

The idea that it is somehow a suitable replacement for say Dungeon World or Stonetop which use a fundamentally different set of play loops is beyond the pale.

How different can the fundamental play loops be, though?

I mean, when everything else is stripped away in what RPG doesn't the play loop boil down to:

1. Player(s) say what their PC(s) (are trying to) do next, as an action declaration or similar based on the current state of fiction
2. The game's resolution engine processes that declaration and generates a result
3. Someone (usually, but not necessarily always, a GM or equivalent) translates that result into a narration of what, if any, observable changes have occurred in the state of fiction as a result of that (attempted) action
4. Go to 1.

That different games have and use widely different resolution engines doesn't affect this fundamental play loop; and most of these discussions are really only about variants of resolution engines and-or different philosophies or principles involved in steps 1 and-or 3.

 

[FrogReaver]

I just don't think people can have really meaningful opinions about stuff they are not experienced with. I don't think this is a generally super controversial idea in the world in general.

Thank you. Now, in case anyone else is interested, this is precisely why this criticism/'rpg theory' conversation always breaks down.

 

[Lanefan]

When look at 5e, I see the same problems that I saw when I thought that 3e (d20 System) could be hacked into anything, back when I first got into the hobby. I knew the game well or so I thought. However, there was always something off from what I wanted the game to do. It was absolutely frustrating.

In fairness, 3e was pretty hard to kitbash - much harder than 1e or 2e before it - largely due to the removal of a lot of 1e and 2e's discrete subsystems in favour of a unified mechanic. Discrete subsystems are a kitbasher's dream, in that you can mess with one subsystem without too much worry (most of the time) about knock-on effects elsewhere. A unified-mechanic system can make this knock-on problem nearly insurmountable.

Honestly, I don't really consider 5e all that different in that regard.

From all I can tell from reading and hearing about it (having not actually tried kitbashing it myself), 5e is more forgiving of hacks than either 4e or 3e were, in part because some of the hacks - or at least good starting points for same - are presented right in the DMG as optional rules.