D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

[pemerton]

Switch the focus away from "individual PC" making the decisions and toward "party" making the decisions and this problem goes away.

PCs come and go all the time but IME it's very hard to kill a whole party.

Your bias is clearly shown by your inclusion of the word "popular" in there.

Did somebody say "playstyle"?

For that matter, did someone mention that biases are showing?

 

[pemerton]

favorite / best, in this context I see no difference. Why would I favor a game I consider to be worse…

Because there are things about it that you have a fondness for.

I know many RPGs that are better than AD&D. But I still have a very soft spot for AD&D, simply because of its colourful classes, colourful spells, colourful magic items, colourful rules text, etc. And so once every few years I play a session or two . . .

 

[pemerton]

I'll engage on this because I think it's an interesting question.

I (with no evidence) suspect that if D&D never existed, and some other reasonable trad RPG like MERP, Runequest, or WFRP had been the first published RPG instead, with the same level of marketing and support, that game would be (and have remained) the market leader like D&D is now.

Maybe not by as much. I don't deny that Gygax D&D has a certain kind of magic in the text and the imagery. Equally, I think some of its assumptions also put some people off, so maybe a MERP as the first ever RPG would have done even better. Who knows.

I suspect that if the first RPG ever had been something less trad, like FATE, PbtA, or Vampire, it could also have become market leader in the same way, albeit the original grassroots and playtest culture couldn't have come from the pre-existing wargaming culture, and would have to have built from something else (improv theatre?).

The emergence of RPGing from out of wargaming is pretty fundamental to how the genre has been received, and has developed. The work on RPG design that led to games like Prince Valiant, Maelstrom Storytelling, Hero Wars/Quest, Apocalypse World is all about taking some of the formal characteristics of a wargame (eg numerical ratings of attributes, a very tight correlation between game elements and in-fiction elements, etc) but adapting them to allow a radically different sort of game play. (Vampire, I think, illustrates an aspiration at the radically different game play that has failed to undertake the necessary development and adaptation.)

If improv theatre aficionados had invented something like RPGing back in the early 1970s, what would it have looked like? Maybe something closer to A Penny for My Thoughts? Which I personally don't consider a RPG at all, because it has no action resolution.

I strongly believe (and am certainly not the first to do so) one of the driving forces behind the huge success of D&D was/is the level system. As clunky as it often is, there is some kind of psychological magic that makes people REALLY want to advance to the next level, then the next - then the next. Something I do not see with point-based systems that lack the level mechanic.

This is connected to the wargaming origins - it's an individual avatar version of training your squad/battalion/whatever from raw recruits to elite guards. Separating that idea of advancement from the narrow military focus is clever design. Linking it, in a narrative sense, to things like the actual story of Ged's growth from apprentice to wizard (in the Earthsea books), or the implied story of Conan's growth from wandering thief to warband leader to self-proclaimed king (in REH's Conan stories) is also clever design.

The fact that the actual play of D&D - especially in its classic form - doesn't actually produce fiction that resembles either Earthsea or REH Conan, and yet this does not seem to have hurt the game's popularity, is a curious thing to me. It suggests that, at least for many player, trappings of fiction matter more than the deeper content of fiction.

For me the rules are there to help abstract those things we can't do for real at the table such as combat, exploration, and other in-character physical activities.

In-character social interaction, however, CAN be done for real at the table and thus needs minimal if any abstraction via rules; and in these situations play - in particular, immersive play - is best served by the rules getting right out of the way.

Social interaction is not being done "for real", though. No one is actually persuading anyone of anything. To take an extreme example, so as to clearly illustrate the point: the 3E module Bastion of Broken Souls includes, as part of its set-up, an angel who is a "living key" to a gate - that is, the gate can only be opened by killing the angel. Now the module itself has some good ideas but terrible follow through, and in this particular case it tells the GM that the only way to open the gate is for the PCs to kill the angel in combat. But when I adapted the module into a Rolemaster campaign, I ignored the bad advice. And one of the PCs in my game reasoned with the angel, explained to her what was at stake and why it was essential to open the gate, and as a result the angel willingly permitted the PC to kill her.

But this doesn't mean that the player actually persuaded anyone to let him take her life! It's all just pretend. Someone who is not actually moved or persuaded is making decisions about whether an imaginary person is moved or persuaded. There are many ways to structure and guide that sort of decision-making procedure, and "I think it makes sense that this rather thinly-described person would be moved or persuaded by that" is one of them, but not the only one.

But if I had rules for something called "influence points" and there were specific ways of gaining or losing those influence points, would that impact the style of play? Many people would be more concerned about gaining points than exploring a character's personality.

Well, yes, if you have rules that don't produce the outcome you are hoping for, they will be bad rules. Vincent Baker makes that point nicely here:

your rules impose a structured causality upon your game's fiction. If they were a good match in design, then in play the game works the way you meant it to. If they were a bad match in design, then in play the game doesn't work how you intended. Bold barbarian warriors maximize their armor and when they go into battle it's a matter of grinding ablation, not decisive action; your grim & gritty noir detective has to carry an assault rifle because a .38 won't kill a dude; the team of morning-cartoon superheroes bicker, bean-count their resources, and wind up working for the highest bidder.​

If you want players to portray and inhabit vibrant characters, and your "influence points" rule is producing a tactical obsession with managing and hoarding points, then your rule is a bad one! That doesn't show, however, that it is impossible to have any other system of rules for structuring and guiding how someone decides that an imaginary person is moved or persuaded, beyond the ones suggested by @Lanefan.

Because, and @Oofta already hit this upthread, if you're thinking as a player using rules rather than as your character in the situation you've veered into the metagame.

Thus, if I'm in-character thinking up ways of how best to persuade the Duke to finance our risky venture into the wilds, that's "game". But if I'm instead (or even side-along) thinking something like "I need to score six influence points on this guy before his finance minister scores three against me", that's meta all the way and is going to (almost for sure negatively) affect how I inhabit and roleplay my character.

By this measure, D&D combat is metagame - when I resolve a fight in AD&D I'm not thinking about parrying and thrusting and dodging and maiming and the like; I'm thinking about how I need to score N more hit points of damage before my own hit points get ablated.

We have some structures in place with skill checks and whatnot but there is no metacurrency with the exception of inspiration which is a pretty minor benefit.

These are not the only possible components of a non-combat resolution system.

I suppose I don’t look at the game elements as being meta. They’re the game. I think you’re talking about things that are not connected to the fiction or not representative of things in the fiction in some way… but I don’t know why you’d assume that.

Anything that the player does that is not done through the words and deeds of the character is to me metacurrency.

So here's a rule for social resolution: when you, as your character, make an impassioned plea to a NPC, and there is no established in-fiction reason why the NPC is implacably opposed to what you want, then - if you spend an influence point - the NPC does as you requeset.

I don't think that's a very good rule - as in, I'm doubtful that it will produce compelling fiction and vibrant characters in play (although perhaps I'm wrong even about that, as the "no established in-fiction reason" clause motivates players to warm up to their impassioned pleas by trying to suss out how a NPC stands on various issues, and maybe that will produce some compelling fiction and vibrant characters; it would need testing to find out). But it doesn't involve the player engaging with anything other than the words and deads of their PCs, and so would not involve "metacurrency" in @Oofta's sense.

But it would be a resolution system that, like D&D's combat resolution system, permits a declared action to be resolved without the causal process that actually produces that outcome in the fiction being established in the course of resolution. To elaborate: when a character/creature/monster is dropped to zero hp (or fails a death save, or whatever) in D&D we know they are dead, but we don't know - in the fiction - how they were killed. Blood loss? Run through the heart? Decapitation? The rules don't tell us.

And in my imagined resolution system, we would know that the NPC was persuaded by the PC's impassioned plea, but we wouldn't know exactly how or why they were so moved.

And yet, as 4e showed, it is not enough.

But when 5e changed the rules back to be more in line with prior editions - the numbers came surging back and better than ever. Yes, I am aware there were many factors involved, but the fact still stands.

a lot of the player base does absolutely prioritize freeform thespianism as the point of play.

I've been directly and indirectly observing RPGers whose principal and preferred game is D&D for a long time. My sense is that many of them are not very interested in the technical game aspects of play.

In the old days, for instance, when spell load out was an important thing, they were not very interested in the wargame-y/planning/tactical aspect of choosing spells, working out when to cast them, etc. That stuff was grist to the mill for RPGers of a wargame-y or even more generally game playing bent; but not very important to players who mainly wanted to imagine their PC getting up to hijinks. On multiple occasions in the 1990s I surprised, sometimes delighted, sometimes shocked these sorts of D&D players by showing what was possible, within the formal AD&D PC build framework, when it came to building and playing a mechanically effective character.

I think this is one reason why many D&D players did not like 4e D&D very much: it's not a game that lends itself to imagining my PC getting up to hijinks without having to engage with the technical components of the game. Like many contemporary "indie"-esque RPGs, 4e tried to tightly integrate the technical components of the game with the imaginative elements of play.

5e D&D, on the other hand, considerably relaxes that outside of the combat domain. (For some reason - I conjecture that it is due to the received skirmish wargame legacy of RPGing - it is widely accepted that combat will be a hijinks-free domain that is resolved via application of technical rules.) The players can imagine their PCs getting up to hijinks, with the GM using a combination of responsiveness to PC-build-elements-as-descriptors (in 5e D&D speak, this is described thus: "if a character has a high enough bonus that the DM thinks the results of the declared action are not uncertain, then the GM is not required to call for a roll") and sheer fiat to make the game move along.

Expecting these sorts of players to enjoy 4e D&D is like expecting them to enjoy Burning Wheel - it's not going to happen!

 

[pemerton]

Part of the reason a show like The Diplomat (good show by the way) is so fun is because we never know who we can really trust, who has ulterior motives. If the ruleset is too transparent we lose some of that.

This is an empirical conjecture. And all my experience suggests that it is false. I play RPGs with very transparent rules. And yet there can be, and often is, uncertainty about who can be trusted. Good rules for resolving social conflict, integrated with good rules for framing and establishing stakes and consequences, will allow for this sort of thing.

 

[mamba]

In-character social interaction, however, CAN be done for real at the table and thus needs minimal if any abstraction via rules

At that point the character is as good at it as the player is, rather than as good as his character sheets says they should be

 

[mamba]

If my natural position on a hockey team is left wing then sure I can try my hand at playing goalie but I (and worse, my team-mates!) have to accept that I'm not going to be anywhere near as good at it as someone who has a talent for goaltending.

but that is you as you, not some character that is separate from you and whose stats say that they are a great goalie

 

[mamba]

Because there are things about it that you have a fondness for.

so you would say your favorite game is one where you know of better games, because of some sentimental attachment, ok. I would not consider that my favorite then, even if I played it every now and then, but I guess that is just me

 

[pemerton]

so you would say your favorite game is one where you know of better games, because of some sentimental attachment, ok. I would not consider that my favorite then, even if I played it every now and then, but I guess that is just me

Well I certainly would not say that AD&D is my favourite game - but I do have a sentimental attachment to it, so I play it sometimes even when I could be playing a better RPG.

Another example is Classic Traveller: I suspect that there is a PtbA game, or even Scum and Villainy, that would be a better experience than Classic Traveller for low-ish gonzo somewhat retro sci-fi RPGing. That hasn't stopped me playing a fair bit of Classic Traveller over the past several years, because of my fondness for the system (which dates back to it being the first RPG I ever owned and tried to play).

 

[pemerton]

At that point the character is as good at it as the player is, rather than as good as his character sheets says they should be

And see, we don't even know this. Suppose my player gives a powerful portrayal of a character who wants to persuade an angel to allow herself to be killed - does this mean that that same player would actually be good at persuading an actual person to sacrifice themselves for some greater value? I think that's a pretty open question.

 

[tetrasodium]

I've got a few questions for all the folks saying that they would allow players to sub personal social skills in place of character's missing social skills.

• Would you allow a player to buy or commission a wagon jack
  • Use it to ignore a high DC lock?
• Toss a door latch board thing off the locked side of a door using an under or over door tool?
• Ask an innocuous question like "does this door open in so it would be easier to bash in, or does it open out so it would have the door frame helping to stop it from being bashed in?" Yes great! assume you said it opens out...
  • Cool I pop the hinges & step back
• etc

Edit: fixed the last two links