D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[EzekielRaiden]

Having done a fair bit of "duo" play as you describe, I can tell you from experience that it can and does work fairly well in 1e-adjacent as long as either a) the player is willing to run more than one character at a time or b) the character is willing to run as a party of one.

Sure, but I think you recognize that in so doing, you're either not "really" playing duo (you're playing "trio," it's just two of the players happen to be the same person), or you're accepting and rolling with the fact that there are serious and often deleterious effects for being "alone." Rules patches for this exist, like DMPCs (generally disfavored for largely good reasons, but still a functional solution), bulking up the hireling systems (even in the early editions, where hirelings were more central), or providing special/extra/unusual resources or tools to address the gap.

That's not a bad summary. Nicely done.

Thanks. I aimed to be as open-handed as possible, recognizing that my natural bias is toward more recent editions because I have more play experience with them.

Agreed. Where the debates arise is around which of the above aspects the rules are honed to support, as a few of those bullet points tend to push against each other a bit. Focising more on the mathematical (and mechanical) aspects, for example, risks pushing against the story-related and fantastical aspects, so designers have to walk a bit of a line there as you note just below.

Certainly. Even if we didn't have the mechanics vs thematics issue, there's the inherent underlying tension between structure, in the sense of needing enough consistency and proverbial material to work with, and surprise, in the sense of not wanting every result to be perfectly predictable in advance. Even if there were no true "mechanics," that tension between needing to be able to attempt useful predictions without having those predictions simply always come true (for weal or for woe) would ensure that some kind of balancing act would be required. For DW, the Principles are thus intended as useful cognitive tools for tacking toward good results and away from bad ones.

On a larger scale, the general design-level question of more mechanics vs less mechanics kinda has to be answered before much else can get done.

I'm not sure what you mean. This seems to imply a singular scale (possibly a sliding one) with "effectively none" on one end and "nigh-infinite" on the other, with every game falling on some singular point. I don't think that's a useful way of looking at game design, because different parts may warrant different levels of detail. D&D has always been designed that way, and indeed in its earliest form, it tended to default to very specific and narrow chunks of rules which could vary wildly in how detailed they were. E.g. melee combat had speed tables or something? Incredibly detailed and striving for mechanics for all sorts of things. But hit points are, and have always been, a fraught and difficult thing, glossing over a ton of details and treating all injuries as fundamentally the same. Hit points and damage are definitely a "less mechanics" subsystem, but weapon speed rules seem to be a "more mechanics" system, yet the two lived together (AIUI; again, talking about systems I don't know well.)

At a higher vantage point, D&D has tended to use less rules for "non combat" things (not no rules, just somewhat less), while using more rules for combat. I am given to understand that the vast majority of non-combat things in early D&D could be (and often were) handled simply by asking for a single d6 roll, 5-6 succeeds (or something like that.) So even with the earliest versions of D&D, a single binary or even single sliding scale fails to capture how the game was actually built and played.

How about something around keeping the players coming back for more - "The ultimate goal of play is, in the end, further play" or something like that. (I'm not sure if DW hits that one or not)

Well, would you say that falls under the umbrella of "Play to find out what happens"? Because that's sort of my first reaction here. You don't just sit there numbly, you respond--but that, itself, is more play. I do think you've got a very good preliminary stab, so don't take it in any way as dismissive. Just that it seems we can boil that, and other (but not all) important points, down into that relatively pithy phrase. If you're playing to find out what happens, there's always new things that can happen! This is where analogies to serial media, like a narrative-driven TV show (e.g. Babylon 5) come into play. (And believe it or not, JMS has actually said that the follow-up show, Crusade, was intentionally modelled after D&D parties! Sometimes, art imitates life imitating art.)

IMO the bolded bit should be painted in great big letters on the wall of every D&D designer's office.

Well, as part of my point there, I was trying to show that that is not the only valid form of design. It is a valid, and indeed extremely useful, form of design. But it is not the only one, and limiting yourself to only that one can lead to some very difficult-to-solve problems.

Niche protection is not a matter of "for every strength you must have a weakness." We can make a very simple food analogy: proteins and vitamins. A "complete protein" is a food source (such as meat) one that includes all of the amino acids humans need for making all the proteins that make our bodies work. An "incomplete protein" is comparatively deficient in one or more (but usually just one), e.g. beans are an incomplete protein because they are deficient in methionine. Rice pairs well with beans because it is rich in methionine and deficient in lysine, and beans happen to be a great source of lysine. But there is no sense in which we can argue that beans "paid for" their lysine richness by being methionine-deficient or vice-versa for rice. It just happens to be the case that the set of things beans provide, and the set of things rice provides, are complementary sets that ensure full coverage.

Hence, it is also possible--and not uncommon!--to design games with both "zero-sum" elements, where you must always accept a penalty for every bonus, and with "positive-sum" but incomplete elements. All sorts of things use both types. I have, for example, been thinking about how to develop a "build your own weapons" system, which would be purely "positive" in that you have a starting baseline really really crappy weapon, and a pile of points to spend on making it better. Upping the die size, making it versatile, making it finesse, giving it a special property, etc. At its baseline, that would be a purely "positive" design, since all you do is add elements until you've spent your whole budget. But I also would include classes of weapon: simple, martial, or exotic. With those, you "pay for" getting access to more points (and thus a stronger overall weapon) by making it require special training in order to use.

Plenty of things have to be designed in the latter way. Most spells, for example, are not designed such that you "pay for" any good things they give by suffering a commensurate penalty--they are instead a purely positive resource that you consume.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

UPDATE!

Well, no one contacted me, but two of the players did show up today. Confused. No one knows what the others are doing or want to do. So maybe the group broke up?

Who could have seen this coming?

 

[Lanefan]

There seem to be a few different things being canvassed in these posts:

* Setting elements that are prepared by the GM in advance may end up not being known to the players, simply because the players declare actions for their PCs that leads to different setting elements becoming the focus of play. These setting elements thus end up not mattering to play, but they might have - it wasn't and perhaps couldn't have been known in advance that the players would not declare actions that made the ignored setting elements salient. The paradigm example in D&D play would be a dungeon room that the players end up simply never having their PCs explore.​

Or designing entire countries/cultures they never visit, or pantheons none of them choose to worship - yeah, I hear you on this one.

Still, I don't see that as reason not to design those things; for all I know were I to start over those same elements that were ignored this time might be front and centre next time.

* Setting elements may be prepared by the GM in advance with the expectation that it is likely they will end up not being known to the players, because it would take skilled play on the part of the players for them to declare actions for their PCs that oblige the GM to reveal the setting element in question. The paradigm in D&D play would be a secret door concealing a valuable treasure. These setting elements matter to play even if the players never learn about them, because they create the scope for skilled play.​

They can also matter as finding or not finding those things might have downstream effects or consequences for better, worse, or both.

One downstream consequence of their missing major things in an adventure - and I've used this a few times now - is that they end up having to go back there again later and finish. Example: in WG4 Lost Temple of Tharizdun there's a very major element that's fairly easy to miss; and if you miss it, you ain't finished the dungeon and the place will become active again pretty quickly.

Or, they might miss something big en route to succeeding at goal A in an adventure, only to have that big thing later become goal B...meaning they end up going back there. I've a situation like this right now, in fact: the group just did a good job of clearing out a dungeon complex and finding the McGuffin they were there for, but at the same time they missed another major item which before long they'll probably very much want (or need) to have for other, somewhat unrelated reasons.

​

* Setting elements that are prepared by the GM in advance, and that are not known to the players, may be used by the GM to make decisions about setting elements that are known to the players. (DW has a version of this, in the form of "fronts") - in that way they "mattered" to play.​

The second and the third of these can combine (as I think @Campbell is suggesting): an element of the third type might also be an element of the second type, and hence something the players can learn about through skilled play. A secret treasure room probably isn't a good example of this; but a secret villain might be.

This is quite relevant to the OP, and to similar sorts of issues that can arise in a type of fairly traditional, fairly mainstream RPGing. If a setting element is doing a lot of work in my third category (eg the GM is imagining very active secret villains) and is very opaque as an instance of my second category (eg the action declarations the players would need to make to learn about it are less "skilled" and more somewhat lucky or arbitrary - this can happen, for instance, if the GM is changing the fictional parameters around the setting element a lot) then the players can lose their grip on the fiction, and essentially become subject to GM dictation of what happens next.

Maybe. What more tends to happen IME is that the players give up on that thread (some DMs, myself included, aren't always perfect when it comes to dropping clues) and just have their characters find other adventuring to do, thus forcing the DM to toss whatever was prepped and hit curveballs for a while.

This is something on which I think it should be possible to give quite detailed and effective GM advice, but I don't recall ever having come across such advice myself. (Maybe it's somewhere on the web, and I'm mostly thinking of rulebooks.)

Perhaps. More generally useful, I think, would be some advice on player-thrown curveballs and how best to hit them. This advice would start by noting in no uncertain terms that those curveballs are to be swung at rather than denied (i.e. go where the players take you rather than try to keep them on the rails) but I'm not 100% sure what it would say after that as every DM is different.

 

[Lanefan]

And my objection to your objection is, damned that's a boring and uninteresting world/adventure! I mean, IF NOTHING ELSE, the characters become fatigued, their torches or water skins begin to give out, etc. Its hard for me to imagine a situation where I'd have to resort to that level of silliness, but there's no such thing as complete stasis. You rolled, you FAILED, you're done.

Yes. You failed, you're done; and unless you can come up with a different approach or have something materially change in the fiction, your only in-characters options are to stay and do nothing or to go and do somehting else.

Or else DW is perfectly fine with 'fail forward' as an answer, though on a 6- its probably going to look more like "Suddenly the lock turns, someone is opening the door from the other side!" or something like that. NOTHING is simply NOT AN OPTION in an RPG, it just isn't.

On the bolded, I really don't think we're going to agree.

Nope, its boring and non-optimal play in my book. I mean, I don't make a habit of judging anyone else's play, but beat me with a stick if such a situation arises, I've failed as a GM at that point!

I disagree. If nothing is happening and the players don't do something to change that, they've failed as players. You as GM have adequately done your job - you've narrated a scene, presented a challenge, and let the dice fall where they may resulting in no change to the status quo. At this point it's on the players to do or try something different e.g. go a different way, try a different approach, or whatever.

The one exception, of course, is a true death trap from which there's intentionally no escape, but things like this are very rare.

What I mean is, DW (or AW 2e, which I was just reading, awesome stuff) there's an unending sequence of dialog, which will surely trigger moves. Now, every move is obviously not identical, but what I mean is, every player will experience moving through fiction, declaring actions, and resolving triggered moves. Its just like every player in Monopoly will go 'round and 'round the board, even if they land on different squares each time. So, there IS strategy in DW, probably the fighter wants to Hack & Slash and Defy Danger +STR a lot because triggering those moves usually gets her what she wants (STR of +3 will get you exactly what you want MOST of the time on a +STR move). However, one way or the other, you're going to be making moves. So they are 'mechanically similar'.

In my view, to stick with the Monopoly analogy for a moment, unlike Monopoly an RPG also gives any player (including the GM) the option of deciding to stay put and not to move around the board for a while, which may or may not lead to having to repeatedly pay rent to another player depending where you have stopped; and also gives the game itself an option that sometimes forces you to you stay put for a while.

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, but I think you recognize that in so doing, you're either not "really" playing duo (you're playing "trio," it's just two of the players happen to be the same person), or you're accepting and rolling with the fact that there are serious and often deleterious effects for being "alone."

Kinda yes to both, but it still produces some wonderful play. (being married to the one player helps too! )

Rules patches for this exist, like DMPCs (generally disfavored for largely good reasons, but still a functional solution), bulking up the hireling systems (even in the early editions, where hirelings were more central), or providing special/extra/unusual resources or tools to address the gap.

Adventuring NPCs (nowadays called DMPCs as, I think, a largely derogatory term) are a near-constant in our games/parties anway, so nothing new there. Henches and hirelings are certainly another, but for ome reason have never been as common as one might expect (I suspect because people don't like having to pay them!). I try to avoid giving resources etc. that a normal party wouldn't receive; for example if I'm running a single player through a canned module I don't adjust the treasure - or the opponents! - because of that.

Thanks. I aimed to be as open-handed as possible, recognizing that my natural bias is toward more recent editions because I have more play experience with them.

Flip side for me; put the two of us together and maybe we'd have the complete history.

I'm not sure what you mean. This seems to imply a singular scale (possibly a sliding one) with "effectively none" on one end and "nigh-infinite" on the other, with every game falling on some singular point. I don't think that's a useful way of looking at game design, because different parts may warrant different levels of detail.

Indeed; I was thinking of the sum total of a system rather than individual parts; and I believe that sum total does sit on a sliding scale somewhere between zero and overkill.

D&D has always been designed that way, and indeed in its earliest form, it tended to default to very specific and narrow chunks of rules which could vary wildly in how detailed they were. E.g. melee combat had speed tables or something? Incredibly detailed and striving for mechanics for all sorts of things. But hit points are, and have always been, a fraught and difficult thing, glossing over a ton of details and treating all injuries as fundamentally the same. Hit points and damage are definitely a "less mechanics" subsystem, but weapon speed rules seem to be a "more mechanics" system, yet the two lived together (AIUI; again, talking about systems I don't know well.)

Well, there's a reason why many tables dropped weapon speed and some other over-complicated bits. And some tables (like ours) added some complexity to a few bits e.g. hit points, to give them a bit more detail and imply that yes not all injuries are the same.

At a higher vantage point, D&D has tended to use less rules for "non combat" things (not no rules, just somewhat less), while using more rules for combat. I am given to understand that the vast majority of non-combat things in early D&D could be (and often were) handled simply by asking for a single d6 roll, 5-6 succeeds (or something like that.) So even with the earliest versions of D&D, a single binary or even single sliding scale fails to capture how the game was actually built and played.

You're close-ish, but not quite on.

The way I see it, early-era D&D put its detail-abstraction level in direct inverse to what could be done at the table through roleplay. We can't live-roleplay combat, it has to be completely abstracted and so that part got highly detailed rules. Exploration needed some abstraction and thus it got some rules, but not as detailed as combat as the players could often just describe what they do and how they do it, in a more useful way than for combat. Social interactions got very few rules as there wasn't much abstraction needed: you just live-played it out at the table.

I'm not sure where you saw the 5-6 on d6 model for resolution; that one's new on me. What I'm more used to as a fallback resolution system where nothing else applies is to roll under a relevant stat on d20. So if you're trying to run along a narrow ledge you'd roll under your Dexterity score (with the roll perhaps situationally modified e.g. a bonus if it's a wide ledge or a penalty if you're in heavy armour) to not fall off, that sort of thing; and it's IME a very elegant and simple mechanic.

Well, would you say that falls under the umbrella of "Play to find out what happens"? Because that's sort of my first reaction here. You don't just sit there numbly, you respond--but that, itself, is more play. I do think you've got a very good preliminary stab, so don't take it in any way as dismissive. Just that it seems we can boil that, and other (but not all) important points, down into that relatively pithy phrase. If you're playing to find out what happens, there's always new things that can happen!

The thing with "play to find out what happens" is that, in the context it usually appears, it's supposed to apply to the GM as well as the players; where in my view while it's a great principle for the players it's not for the GM, who should already know what could* happen and ideally be thinking a few steps ahead of any likely outcome in order to best deal with it if it arises.

* - note 'could', not 'will'.

This is where analogies to serial media, like a narrative-driven TV show (e.g. Babylon 5) come into play. (And believe it or not, JMS has actually said that the follow-up show, Crusade, was intentionally modelled after D&D parties! Sometimes, art imitates life imitating art.)

I've never watched B5 and am not very interested. But Battlestar Galactica was similar; and while it was engaging to watch as a show I can't imagine porting it over to an RPG, because once you know the ending, what's the point?

Well, as part of my point there, I was trying to show that that is not the only valid form of design. It is a valid, and indeed extremely useful, form of design. But it is not the only one, and limiting yourself to only that one can lead to some very difficult-to-solve problems.

Niche protection is not a matter of "for every strength you must have a weakness." We can make a very simple food analogy: proteins and vitamins. A "complete protein" is a food source (such as meat) one that includes all of the amino acids humans need for making all the proteins that make our bodies work. An "incomplete protein" is comparatively deficient in one or more (but usually just one), e.g. beans are an incomplete protein because they are deficient in methionine. Rice pairs well with beans because it is rich in methionine and deficient in lysine, and beans happen to be a great source of lysine. But there is no sense in which we can argue that beans "paid for" their lysine richness by being methionine-deficient or vice-versa for rice. It just happens to be the case that the set of things beans provide, and the set of things rice provides, are complementary sets that ensure full coverage.

OK, let's take this one step further. We've got the beans class and the rice class. Each has a clear benefit and a clear weakness. Each of them would like to become the mythical "meat" class that can do everything, but that would bugger up game balance along with destroying niches; and the closer both get to becoming meat the less distinct they are, to the eventual point of their becoming both more powerful overall and indistinguishable from each other.

Now, let's say we want to introduce a "potatoes" class, that's as good as rice but has some added benefit (I don't know what - my knowledge of nutrition would fit into a teaspoon, with about a teaspoon's volume of space left over). Leaving it as-is will unbalance things, as potatoes become a clearly superior option to rice and maybe ot beans as well. So, we can either find some way of powering up rice and beans to compensate, or - and this is my preferred option - we can find a way to tone down potatoes to bring them in line with what already exists.

Hence, it is also possible--and not uncommon!--to design games with both "zero-sum" elements, where you must always accept a penalty for every bonus, and with "positive-sum" but incomplete elements. All sorts of things use both types. I have, for example, been thinking about how to develop a "build your own weapons" system, which would be purely "positive" in that you have a starting baseline really really crappy weapon, and a pile of points to spend on making it better. Upping the die size, making it versatile, making it finesse, giving it a special property, etc. At its baseline, that would be a purely "positive" design, since all you do is add elements until you've spent your whole budget. But I also would include classes of weapon: simple, martial, or exotic. With those, you "pay for" getting access to more points (and thus a stronger overall weapon) by making it require special training in order to use.

Plenty of things have to be designed in the latter way. Most spells, for example, are not designed such that you "pay for" any good things they give by suffering a commensurate penalty--they are instead a purely positive resource that you consume.

Spells specifically, no; but (ideally*) you've already paid for them by becoming a member of a class who can cast them and in so doing have lost out on a bunch of other things you could have done instead e.g. fight worth a damn.

* - ideally, though in practice this payment is becoming smaller all the time.

 

[Autumnal]

Who could have seen this coming?

The nice thing is that we don’t have to spend any energy at all wondering if the OP will decide that they they did some things fundamentally wrongly and that they should make serious changes to their usual style the next time they GM for strangers. We can move on without delay to whatever’s next on our respective lists of things to be concerned about.

 

[Oofta]

OK, so the follow-up here doesn't describe every RPG ever. The two things I notice about it are:

* It's not just that the players (as their PCs) can't get something to work and have to try something else. It's also that the GM is not making a move when everyone looks to them to see what happens next.

In D&D there is no "move" by the DM. The PCs are interacting with the world around them. Maybe they heard an alarm go off when they failed because this door was really a trap, maybe they set off an alarm somewhere else, maybe they wasted enough time that something else happens. Maybe there is no consequence. It all just depends on what makes sense for the scenario.

* The locked door is something the GM has established, prior to play, as part of their prep. The GM has notes about what's behind it (the toad statues). And so to a certain extent the significance of opening, or not opening, the door is already established - ie the players will or won't learn this pre-authored bit of fiction.

I agree that they will open the door or not. Beyond that, so what? I run a very open game, I have all sorts of things outlined they may or may not encounter. Perhaps I'll use those toad statues later, perhaps they'll go into the dustbin of ideas that never see the light of day. In any case, this would be something I only spent a few minutes on, if it's something I spent significant effort on I'll find some other way of using it. Reduce [prep time], reuse [the idea elsewhere], recycle [use the base idea with redesign].

I don't know if it's possible to play 5e D&D without those two sorts of things being part of play. I do know that it's possible to play D&D without those two sorts of things being part of play. I've played AD&D (which is a bit creaky) and 4e D&D (which isn't) without those two sorts of things being part of play.

Relating this back to the OP, I would assert with reasonable confidence that using those two sorts of techniques - the GM not making moves when the players plans fizzle, leaving them stuck for the moment; and the GM establishing, by way of prep, some aspects of the significance of certain "revelations" - makes the sort of thing that occurred in the OP more likely.

I disagree. What caused the situation was a DM not establishing boundaries and then punishing the players for not following his unspoken boundaries.

And I think it's probably feasible for a DMG (or similar sort of GM advice book) to suggest methods and approaches - beyond "don't be a d*ck" - that will help a GM who want to use those two sorts of techniques to nevertheless avoid the consequences that use of those techniques makes more likely. (A rough analogue might be this: using power tools rather than hand tools increases the likelihood of certain adverse outcomes when cutting wood; hence good guidebooks for the use of power tools will include fairly concrete advice on how to mitigate those risks.)

The DMG does have guidance. It should have more, and clearer, guidance.

The first game system I thought of that exemplifies some of those methods and approaches is GUMSHOE. But there are probably others. For instance, I think the OP situation would have been improved by better use of NPCs to shape and guide the players' choices (the actual use of NPCs- ie confrontation with large numbers of hostile guards - was an obvious failure). This seems like something that a GM advice book could talk about; but I don't recall ever having seen much discussion of it.

You keep speaking in PbtA terms as if it's relevant to a D&D game. I don't think it is in many, if not most, cases. I establish the world and it's inhabitants. Maybe someone or something will hear if they try to bust the door down or cast knock. Sometimes nothing will happen because no one will hear it. The only response I'm going to have is one that's logical to the scenario.

Sorry, I just don't see anything relevant to D&D here and I'm not discussing PbtA any more.

 

[iserith]

The nice thing is that we don’t have to spend any energy at all wondering if the OP will decide that they they did some things fundamentally wrongly and that they should make serious changes to their usual style the next time they GM for strangers. We can move on without delay to whatever’s next on our respective lists of things to be concerned about.

Speak for yourself - but for all the Forge waffle and talk of PBtA, this is a hugely entertaining read to me.

 

[Autumnal]

Oh, I’m still reading, after all. I’m just saying that particular kind of common suspense is on vacation here.

 

[Faolyn]

That's a blundering bunch of opponents, making that much noise while they try to leave quietly...

So, like, basically every party in existence.

In my groups, we're roughly divided between "they have vanished into the ether" and "CLANK CLANK CLANK."

Sure there is: if they had reason to believe (or knew for a fact) that he was there, but now he isn't, that's a significant difference.

The needle and-or pit trap would be pre-written; the broken lockpick would likely only come on a serious fail (rolling very low is a bigger fail than not missing by much); the signs of others having tried before would have already been noticed (or not) if the Thief had examined the lock before starting to pick it (which most would); and it very likely wouldn't be the examining of the lock that caused movement on the other side, it'd instead be the rest of the party being a noisy enough to be heard by those on the other side (who would get what amounts to a 5e-like passive perception check).

And that's the difference between a PbtA game and a tradgame. They're very different mindsets and yes, it can be quite difficult to change the way one thinks when playing.

And those options? Again, just suggestions. There's a world of possibilities that can occur on a failed check. I just came up with a few off the top of my head.

Not unusual in my experience. Sorry to hear it's unusual in yours.

I've been gaming for a over 30 years. In all that time, I have known GMs who will run the same game for different groups, but... I think only one who ran different groups in the same game. And that was an In Nomine game, where the GM ran use through a brief adventure as angels so he could get a better idea of what his primary group (all demons) would do. IIRC, the demons got super-confused as to why we angels were frequenting donut shops (we were just buying donuts for homeless people) and were convinced we were up to something.