D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[zakael19]

There's also the element I find most troubling as a dm.

What's the difference between "Skilled Play” and "Metagaming"?

Because in my experience there's a lot of overlap between the two.

A game culture/system which emphasizes player skill at the game does so over any concerns of metagaming that aren't straight up cheating (eg: grabbing the dungeon and reading through it). At teh most extreme end, characters are shallow disposable pawns to beat a challenge; either way the idea that your characters are competent at the basics of dungeoneering is pretty inherent and thus the sort of orthogonal thinking/using the game systems is just the player's best equivalent to make that happen.

 

[bloodtide]

. I don't really buy this as a generational divide: I think people in the 70s could rely on their character sheets, and I think people now can get creative.

Generations are a huge part of this, with also adding in where you live country vs city and how active you are in life.

What I do think is that the degree to which a game (and by game, I mean the thing happening at a particular table, not an edition) can be about "player skill" is entirely a function of the GM's willingness to present his "puzzles" in good faith. unfortunately, in my experience, what you actually get more often than not is a GM-May-I? situation in which the GM wants the players to read his mind and speak the precise words, rather than coming up with a novel solution.

When you go Beyond the Game Rules, things can get spicy.

What's the difference between "Skilled Play” and "Metagaming"?

There is not. Bad Players give this false impression.

I see three types of skilled play:

1.Game skill and mastery. You have read and understand the rules. You know exactly when to and how to use the rules. You are a good mechanical player.

2.Is still using the mechanical game rules, like above, but with the added twist of Game World Immersion. This is something like attacking some orcs at a tavern by the front door, while using a Wall of Ice to block the windows and back door, tapping the orcs in the tavern.

3.This is going beyond the rules, often, but not always 100%. As I have been known to say "just flick that silly rule book on the floor and Role Play(the acting kind)."


While #1 mostly follows the official game rules, #2 and #3 depend 100% on the GM's whims. And flat out, many DM will refuse to ever do #3 as they demand any game related action must use the game rules.

A huge number of DMs, Casual DMs and all the DMs that don't want to put much work into the game are a lot of them, keep the game world vague. The PCs are just in a "castle" or a "forest" and the players are left to imagine whatever they think it is like. With a vague world, it can be hard, even impossible to do #2 as they don't know the description of the game world.

 

[Older Beholder]

The real skill in OS play was in how consistently someone could roll an 18 on a 3d6 when rolling stats, compared to players using the 4d6 drop the lowest method that came later.

 

[payn]

The real skill in OS play was in how consistently someone could roll an 18 on a 3d6 when rolling stats, compared to players using the 4d6 drop the lowest method that came later.

You just run "Trap Fodder Randy" face first into every buzzsaw until you get them dandy rolls. Having a Randy is part of skill play too.

 

[Charlaquin]

Ok but a lot of the context I see it discussed in is absolutely looking at 3e+ D&D play in a very pejorative sense. "Oh you just look at stuff on your character sheet and click it, haha very skilled." Is all of it meant in an uncharitable way? No, but like the emphasis on "orthogonal thinking" and avoidance of challenge can also be said to just be "get really good at convincing the GM your idea has a good chance of working so it autosuceeds." Again, if there wasn't an undercurrent of "the other D&D sucks" I don't think they'd draw this line between skilled/unskilled play.

In my experience, people often interpret other people advocating for their own play preferences as “other ways of playing suck.” Which tends to make people who like playing in other ways get defensive, and attack the way being advocating for, leading the conversation to escalate. In general, most people aren’t trying to attack your play preferences, and conversations tend to go more smoothly if you give people the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, don’t let the small handful of people who are actually being jerks about the way you like to play sour your perception of an entire playstyle and everyone who likes it.

(now I do see some people use it to specifically mean "a player who actively engages with and learns the rules and conventions of that specific game regardless of play culture" and for that I think that "system mastery" is probably a better term?)

Yeah, I agree system mastery is a much better term for this.

When I played through some His Majesty the Worm we did a bunch of "creative problem solving" and poking at corners of the dungeon and going through landmark-hidden-secret stuff per procedure and player judgement. It was, for me, some of the least interesting play I've engaged in. All we did is talk about stuff and then the GM went "yeah that works" with a little bit of resource expenditure. Nowhere did I see any interesting skill besides reading the rule book and looking at quick references coming into play.

See, this is the kind of thing that tends to make people get defensive when they read it. Like, I assume this was genuinely your experience and you’re just expressing why it didn’t work for you personally, which is fine. But, anyone who likes His Majesty the Worm and that style of play is likely to read this and think you’re saying their preferred play style is inherently uninteresting and “just talking.” Better to talk up the merits of your preferred play style than to focus on what you dislike about another playstyle.

 

[Charlaquin]

There's also the element I find most troubling as a dm.

What's the difference between "Skilled Play” and "Metagaming"?

Because in my experience there's a lot of overlap between the two.

Depends on your definition of metagaming. Is taking information you’ve learned from past adventures into account metagaming? Is considering game-mechanical functions like DCs when deciding whether or not to pursue a course of action metagaming? Because so-called “skilled play” does certainly involve those things. Personally, I don’t think metagaming is a very useful term. Like “railroading” it seems mostly to exist as a mark of shame to place on gameplay behaviors one dislikes, rather than neutrally describing a specific play pattern or phenomenon.

 

[overgeeked]

“Skilled play” is a terrible name for it, for many reasons, this among them. Though, I don’t think the intent is to imply that other ways of playing don’t involve skill. The emphasis is meant to be on player, and the term is kind of a response to the adventure-writing advice from the 3e area to “challenge the character, not the player.” The intent behind the so-called player skill focused play patterns is to lean into challenging the player.

And that’s as good of a replacement phrase as any. “Player-challenging design” or “player challenge.”

 

[loverdrive]

As a tangent, the most annoying part is that the word "meta" when used in RPG context is completely divorced of any broader definition of the word.

Having a meta game, as in, some understanding of what options you are likely to encounter, is crucial for any skill-based game featuring extensive customization. Card games work only because there's like 3-4-5 good decks in a given format, Warhammer works only because you mostly know all the army lists you are going to encounter, etc, etc.

I guess in some sense, that's using information outside of the game in the game, but nowhere outside of RPGs people ever think it's a bad thing.

 

[Charlaquin]

As a tangent, the most annoying part is that the word "meta" when used in RPG context is completely divorced of any broader definition of the word.

Having a meta game, as in, some understanding of what options you are likely to encounter, is crucial for any skill-based game featuring extensive customization. Card games work only because there's like 3-4-5 good decks in a given format, Warhammer works only because you mostly know all the army lists you are going to encounter, etc, etc.

I guess in some sense, that's using information outside of the game in the game, but nowhere outside of RPGs people ever think it's a bad thing.

Even within spaces like TCGs and Warhammer where this (correct) definition of “the metagame” is relevant, a lot of people don’t even know that definition. An alarming portion of people in competitive gaming communities think “META” is an acronym meaning Most Effective Tactic Available, and just use it to refer to the strongest option within the metagame, or occasionally to any metagame-viable option. You especially see it in competitive video game spaces, like any time a League of Legends player says such-and-such character “is the meta.” At first I thought they meant the character was so dominant that they “are the meta” in the sense that practically the entire metagame is people playing the character in question. But no, they just think “meta” means “best.”

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think “player skill” as a jargon term has accumulated too much baggage to lead to productive discussion. It’s a lot like “dissociated mechanics” or even my pet “goal and approach.” There’s a valuable concept that the jargon term expresses, but people have very strong feelings about the jargon term that end up distracting from any useful discussion about the concept.

In fairness, I don't think I've heard the phrase "goal and approach" before, so perhaps the baggage isn't as big? But yes, what I'm hearing in this thread and the previous definitely points in that direction. The other phrase doesn't have baggage, it IS baggage. The fact that its creator has now had to tie himself in a knot, explaining how no no no you don't understand this system I like that does this is actually amazing, is simply proof that it was always baggage from the word "go".

How I’ve recently started thinking about the fundamental ideas here is that players decide, characters act. The success or failure of an action (assuming that both are reasonable possibilities) should be determined by the rules governing the character and their capabilities. But, the character has no ability to make decisions about what actions to perform when; that has to be on the player. The player makes choices and declares actions, then the DM uses their judgment to decide what rules (if any) are most appropriate to use to determine the action’s results, relying on the character’s statistics and possibly the roll of a die as factors influencing that determination.

When people talk about “skilled play” positively, they are usually advocating for leaning more into the “player decides” aspect of the above play pattern. When people talk about it negatively, they are usually hilighting the information gap between the player and their character, that can make it difficult for the player to make meaningful decisions, and/or common DMing pitfalls related to the player decision points, such as expecting an unreasonable degree of specificity in the player’s action declarations.

This seems pretty reasonable to me, but I would add one further element: the strange idea that these things are zero-sum.

That is, using your Decisions vs Actions description, there is this incredibly strange notion amongst those who speak positively of "player skill", that any increase, any increase whatsoever, in the quantity, quality, or applicability of Actions necessarily means a proportional reduction in the quantity, quality, or applicability of Decisions, and vice-versa. A game which offers multiple, generally useful, quality things-a-character-can-do Actions, is somehow guaranteed to be a game where reasoning, resourcefulness, and creativity become completely irrelevant. Conversely, a game which offers few, generally niche, weak things-a-character-can-do Actions, is somehow guaranteed to be a game where reasoning, resourcefulness, and creativity are always present (and, moreover, richly rewarded).

I genuinely don't understand where this zero-sum assertion comes from. The two are orthogonal. Tic-tac-toe has just about the most constrained decision space possible, and creativity flat-out doesn't exist there (your only "creative" option is whether you intentionally permit the other player to win.) Similarly, several video games can offer enormously more and more effective options than many old-school TTRPGs, and yet be hailed for the degree to which smart player choices matter.