D&D General Why the resistance to D&D being a game?

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah it can absolutely be all those things.

Right, it’s all of them, not just a game. And IMO the point of all of it is to support the storytelling past time, which is one of the fundemental human experiences, right up there with making music and using tools and having abstracted emotional attachments to literally anything, sometimes really nonsensical stuff like a cool rock we found. Okay that last one might be more a neurodivergent thing idk.

Point is, RPGs exist to facilitate improvising a story with friends. A thing that generations of humans who knew how to be bored just did without a game structure, and kids do all the time.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right, it’s all of them, not just a game. And IMO the point of all of it is to support the storytelling past time, which is one of the fundemental human experiences, right up there with making music and using tools and having abstracted emotional attachments to literally anything, sometimes really nonsensical stuff like a cool rock we found. Okay that last one might be more a neurodivergent thing idk.

Point is, RPGs exist to facilitate improvising a story with friends. A thing that generations of humans who knew how to be bored just did without a game structure, and kids do all the time.

I don't think you can say 'RPGs are' or 'RPGs exist to', that's almost like trying to tell me the one thing that music is. I mean, admittedly, RPGs are much more niche than music, or even Rock'n'Roll, but still, some people play games with role playing, some people play roles in a game format with their friends, and others tell stories where they play the roles of the characters. Most probably do a mix of all three. Honestly, I've never found the 'story', the actual telling of the action happening in play, as being THE central part.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well you're sure of alot of things so no need to further discuss... since being sure means there's no room for a differing view.

Mod Note:

It’s minor snark, but it’s personal. You know better; do better.

 

[Reynard]

I'm referring to why people bounce off of ttrpgs when they seem to game-like.

What an accusatory way to ask me what I meant.

Fair enough. I apologize. Devoid of context as your post was, I interpreted it in a negative light. My bad.

Did you mean that you think people are more likely to enjoy their initial experiences if the game elements are obfuscated in favor of the more narrative elements of play?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I've enjoyed your posts in this thread. In this post, I want to suggest an additional consideration that relates to some of what you've been saying, and also to @overgeeked's OP.

To start, an example of "modularity" in a RPG, drawn from 4e D&D.

The core 4e D&D rulebooks set out the "tiers of play". This is an idea about the sort of fiction that is appropriate to PCs of different levels. Roughly, at low-to-mid levels PCs do heroic save-the-villagers and rescue-the-prisoners sort of stuff, and fight Kobolds, Orcs, Ogres and the like. At what the game used to call name levels, which 4e called Paragon, PCs save kingdoms, fight Drow and Illithids and demons and giants, and don't really need to worry about where their next meal is coming from. And then at epic tier, PCs travel the cosmos, deal with and sometimes fight Gods, seal the Abyss, restore the Lattice of Heaven, etc. The Monster Manual is written to support these tiers of play, in so far as it assigns appropriate levels to the appropriate sorts of creatures and NPCs.

I really appreciate conceptually that 4e did this. I think 5e would be improved if it would be more explicit about the tiers of play and what they mean, and I feel it would be the way to solve the eternal "is the fighter just a normal bloke from the real world with a sharp stick or a mythic champion with superhuman skills?" The low tier fighter is the former, the high tier one is the latter.

Paradoxically however I feel that mechanically 4e fails at representing the concept of evolving tiers. In my experience it is the edition of D&D where the feel the mechanics provide for playing your character changes the least as you level. First level 4e character already feels like highly competent experienced hero. Now this is not necessarily a flaw, but I feel it is in contrast with the big talk about the tiers. (And personally I feel that "from zero to hero" is big part of D&D, so I want to start from the ratcatcher tier to truly experience it.)

The Neverwinter supplement mixes this up: it offers new monster stats, which are designed to compress the story of the first two tiers of play (as per the core books) into the first 10 levels - so it gives us Drow, Ilithids etc which are statted out differently - at lower level - than in the core MM, and offers scenarios in which PCs who are mechanically of the lowest tier engage in adventures that, in story terms, belong to the Paragon tier.

(I would say that 4e Dark Sun mixes up in the opposite direction, stretching the fiction of Paragon tier into the mechanical zone of epic tier; but the books is less over about this, and because the execution of this is probably a bit more challenging I'm not as sure that it fully succeeds.)

This modularity requires recognising that what level a Drow is, or a lich, or an Illithid, etc, and how one stats it up, is to some extent arbitrary. It's just a gameplay device. Likewise on the player side of things: whether my fighter who can (to use 4e language) Shift the Battlefield (1x/day solid damage AoE with forced movement) or (to use 5e languuge) perform 3 attacks in a round is a village saver (like Robin Hood) or a kingdom saver (like Achilles) is to some extent arbitrary. Again, it's just a gameplay device.

But that aspect of the 4e approach (and the other aspects of 4e that underlie it, like the system of minion vs standard creature statblocks) was wildly controversial. There are a lot of D&D players who are insistent that the game tell them what level an Illithid really is (or how many HD it really has), how many attacks Sir Lancelot can really make in a single combat round, etc. The idea that you can just toggle these things around, to support different relationships between the mechanics of PC or NPC/creature build and the associated fiction is anathema.

The same thing applies to your suggestion about equipment. The idea that there is no truth or reality about what difference it makes if you have "shovel" written on your PC sheet under "Equipment" is anathema to some considerable chunk of D&D players. They are insistent that the game rules tell us what a shovel really is in the context of the game.

And this, I think, is the source of some of the resistance to thinking about D&D as a game.

I mean sure. It is the desire for simulation. Now no one imagines any edition of D&D to be any sort of exact or accurate simulation, at best only rather impressionistic broad strokes one. But the desire to have the mechanics to actually tell us about the fictional world is pretty common. I definitely share it and I feel that it is one of the main purposes of having rules.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't think you can say 'RPGs are' or 'RPGs exist to', that's almost like trying to tell me the one thing that music is. I mean, admittedly, RPGs are much more niche than music, or even Rock'n'Roll, but still, some people play games with role playing, some people play roles in a game format with their friends, and others tell stories where they play the roles of the characters. Most probably do a mix of all three. Honestly, I've never found the 'story', the actual telling of the action happening in play, as being THE central part.

“Telling of the action happening in play” doesn’t quite parse, to me.

It sounds like you are defining story different from how I would, but it’s hard to say.

To be clear, story here means “the fictional events, character moments, situations, etc, that could be described after the fact with or without direct reference to game mechanics”.

I don’t know anyone who wants to play Icon 1A, making Attack A1, against Icon 2z. They want to be Gerald The Elfling Paladin, slaying Gurne the duplicitous advisor to the Ogre King, with his inherited sword Heart-Light, which gives off sunlight in the hands of a true hearted champion. Or murder old Gurne as Thornhollow the Halfling Assassin with a dagger coated in a poison of her own design. All of that is storytelling. A conversation in character is storytelling. Describing your attacks at all is storytelling. Giving any background at all, any aesthetic, attitude, or description in the world.


Every game element has story elements attached, and/or creates them in play.

 

[FrozenNorth]

And 'doll' and 'action figure'.

Much like comics, there's also an element of denying that we're playing pretend and instead doing super important grown-up activities.

But it IS a super grown-up activity! I have a spreadsheet and everything!

 

[Cadence]

But it IS a super grown-up activity! I have a spreadsheet and everything!

Keeping track of your comics? Or your characters? Or both?
(I mean, there's a whole inventory website for MtG cards, that makes it super adult, right?)

 

[Shardstone]

Fair enough. I apologize. Devoid of context as your post was, I interpreted it in a negative light. My bad.

Did you mean that you think people are more likely to enjoy their initial experiences if the game elements are obfuscated in favor of the more narrative elements of play?

Indeed. People like the illusion the game creates more so than the actual game itself. Many people like the game itself too, but the game is almost pointless without its narrative dressings. Riding the line between just enough narrative elements and an engaging enough game is difficult. 5E almost had it, but lost the thread when Mearls was removed IMO. The golden ratio changes depending on game genre, complexity, and stated purpose too, making it more an art than a science.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Keeping track of your comics? Or your characters? Or both?
(I mean, there's a whole inventory website for MtG cards, that makes it super adult, right?)

On a more serious note, as a DM, I have added all monsters in the books I own to a spreadsheet, filtered by book they appear in, CR and monster type. Makes it much easier to create encounters.