D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[Reynard]

Maybe someone who is a strong proponent can lay out a detailed example. @payn or @overgeeked or @Charlaquin ?

 

[Charlaquin]

I did tell them about things to interact with. A study with a desk, shelves of books, and a reading chair by a fireplace. Without warning is at the very heart of skill play. You have no idea what any given room beyond the most obvious has in store for it. My example might have worked better if I had several descriptions that narrowed things down as the players explored them. And, yeah, that takes a lot of time, but for skill play thats time well spent. My description was purely based on the thought of old school skill play. Did I miss the assignment?

But it doesn’t indicate that any part of what you described is worth paying attention to.

Skill play is a bit more direct than that. For example, a modern take might say something like "im searching the fireplace." The expectation is that they will get any and all pertinent details.

That is definitely not my expectation. “Searching the fireplace” is not even a complete action declaration, as it lacks a goal. It’s also not what I would call reasonably specific.

For skill play, you will be asked what part of the fire palce are you directly interacting with? You will get piece after piece of info as you investigate. Will you get pieces int he safest/best order? Thats where the skill of skill play comes in.

Yes, and depending on what you are interacting with, how, and for what purpose, you may or may not need to make checks to determine the outcome.

I thought this was a "general" D&D discussion on skill play? Older editions did better at it becasue they didnt have easy access to magic and nuanced skill systems for interacting with environments in a general sense, instead of a specific one.

My mistake then, I must have misremembered the tag on the thread.

I agree with you, many 5E groups probably wont bother with this level of escape room exercise, but it is the point of skill play. The activity is exploration in a way the game has largely abstracted in modern editions.

But it’s a general principle that can be applied to different degrees. Not every interaction needs to be full-on escape room detail for the general principles of skilled play to be applied. Again, the point is not to trick the players into falling for traps. The point is to encourage the feeling that it is the players’ own skills of observation, deduction, lateral thinking, and decision-making that have the greatest impact in determining their success or failure, not their character’s stats or random chance.

 

[Charlaquin]

Going back a little bit. I am curious what specific game(s) you're talking about here. What game(s) are you running in this style?

I most often run 5e. I have run 4e, but that was before I’d been turned onto this style, though I’d be interested in giving it another try with the benefit of what I’ve learned since then. Ran a fair bit of what’s now called Chronicles of Darkness. A smattering of Call of Cthulhu. Read some PbtA games but haven’t had a good opportunity to run them. Same with some of the popular OSR games. But, yeah, 5e is my go-to and what I have the most experience with.

 

[payn]

But it doesn’t indicate that any part of what you described is worth paying attention to.

It might not be. Whats the point of even being in the room? Thats for the players to decide. Sometimes the best thing to do in skill play is just close the door and walk away.

That is definitely not my expectation. “Searching the fireplace” is not even a complete action declaration, as it lacks a goal. It’s also not what I would call reasonably specific.

This gets to the heart of the matter. In the modern abstraction you have a search/perception skill. It isnt intended to be specific. Its intended to be abstraction of the character's skill.

Lets say a scroll is hidden in the dowel of a closet rack. The modern skill character rolls to search the closet. Too low, they come up empty, meet the goal or exceed they find the hidden scroll.

For a skill player they have to search the entire closet. The hinges, the boots on the floor, the coats hung up, the hangars of the coats, the boxes on the top shelf, etc... If they dont inspect the dowel rod, they dont find the hidden scroll. Its a first person specific inspection challenge.

The character skill abstraction keeps the game moving along as escape room process isnt the focus. Player skill is a scavenger hunt so its desired to spend time with the specifics as a focus instead.

But it’s a general principle that can be applied to different degrees. Not every interaction needs to be full-on escape room detail for the general principles of skilled play to be applied. Again, the point is not to trick the players into falling for traps. The point is to encourage the feeling that it is the players’ own skills of observation, deduction, lateral thinking, and decision-making that have the greatest impact in determining their success or failure, not their character’s stats or random chance.

Hmm, "encourage the feeling" implies a certain illusion or lead to the experience. Most skill players I know would find that offensive. They want the escape room experience and to solve the problem with their wits, they dont want to feel like they did. If they push instead of pull and it sets off a trap, better luck next time. Price of admission. They also expect that if they find a clever unforeseen answer, it rewards them. If you are not applying this top to bottom, you are not skill playing. You are being treated to an experience, which is a modern expectation.

 

[bloodtide]

Let's say there is a room description in a module that says "There is a swinging blade trap in the fireplace mantle. Anyone searching the fireplace must make a save..."

How do you (anyone, not just Scribe) turn that into a "player skill" situation?

Well, first you want to establish with the players that they can use player skill and toss the silly rule book on the floor.

Also if the player is just doing the Stumble and Bumble where they say "whatever, search the fireplace, Huzza!", then the PC just triggers the trap.

A lot of traps have their trigger marked, even more so a trap in a public place like a fireplace. So having something like a painted line, grove, carving, metal gate or other thing servers as a warning to not stand there as the trap will trigger.

Symbols on the floor and fireplace do the same thing. Either standard symbols or custom ones.

If it is a reseting trap, there might very well be dried blood splatter around the fireplace.

I gotta push back on this a bit. Obvious is good when it comes to challenging the players in this sort of context. Unless the players are very experienced with this sort of play (which most of the 5e playerbase is not), they need obvious to have any chance of noticing the trap.

This is very true! And I can speak from long, long, long bloody experience here....it often takes the "5E fanbase" a long, long, long time to learn this. that single blade trap will kill a graveyard full of 5E PCs before the players open their eyes and see.

Also, even with a group of grizzled OSR veterans, telegraphs are always less obvious to the players than you think they’re going to be.

The part of being a good DM is making the telegraphs very obvious, but seemingly something else or otherwise harmless.

And the goal is not to get the players to fall for the trap. The goal is to make them feel rewarded for paying attention to the description of the environment, thinking about it like a real space, and making informed decisions about how to interact with that space. That requires finding the right level of subtlety for your particular group of players, to where when they do notice a trap, they feel like they almost missed it, and when they fall for a trap, they feel like they could have caught it - they should be able to retroactively identify the tell they missed and rationalize why they missed it, or it will just feel like a screw job. And unless you are very familiar with a group of players, you’re far more likely to overestimate the amount of subtlety they need to hit that sweet spot than to underestimate it. A good rule of thumb is, if it seems like just the right balance based on what you know of the players, make it a little more obvious. If it’s a new group of players, start glaringly obvious and work your way up to more subtle over time.

Agreed!

I guess I don't really understand the perameters of "skilled play." I don't understand how you can set up a puzzle for the players (in the form of a trap, an encounter, or a literal puzzle) and not have a deep understanding of its workings if what you want is for the players to discover the solution through asking good questions, paying attention to details, and coming up with clever actions.

If "skilled play" is just another way of saying "clever players" that is fine, but I don't think it is a particularly rare or special thing, then.

Well, a Good DM always has a deep understanding of any puzzle. This is part of being a Good DM. The DM that just throws out the vague trap with no idea how it works, is not such a good DM.

A good puzzle has at least one part of it is immediately visible, but maybe not obvious. It allows interaction and investigation. You don't have to telegraph the danger, just the mechanism. And while the DM should have in mind the "simple" way to get past the puzzle....that is the way whoever made it bulit into it how they would get past it if they needed too, you don't want solutions determined in advance. Anything, anyway can solve a puzzel, as long as it meets the set requirements. The solution depends on common sense, more then anything.

 

[loverdrive]

RPGs really are a different beast from cardgames and war games though. People think differently about metagaming for a reason.

I'm not super convinced about some fundamental difference between RPGs and every other type of games. In my experience, pretty much everyone is absolutely certain their favorite flavor of games is completely unique and defies comparisons or analysis through other lenses.

They are right, yes, all games (even within the same broader category) are unique and different from all others — that's why they are different entities with different names, but that doesn't mean parallels can't drawn between them.

Having a defined and understandable meta improves the experience of playing wargames, gives you clarity in your decision-making and allows for more variety in the game. If you don't know what you are going to face, decision-making process is dead simple: you just build the least exploitable army, which is a pretty trivial problem to solve.

That can be observed in D&D: as a general rule, it's pretty uncommon to see specialist characters with glaring weaknesses and specialist parties are basically unheard of.

 

[loverdrive]

Oh, there's an extremely good reason for this.

Scheduling for a sufficiently-sized group of people becomes essentially impossible.

To have this succeed, you need to get between nine and thirteen people to all have free time on the same day, consistently, every week/fortnight/month/whatever. Just the scheduling alone is simply a nightmare. I've had difficulties just scheduling time for a single one-off event for myself and three other people, let alone something involving a long-term time commitment like a TTRPG.

I don't know. I'm playing in two campaigns and running one and very rarely get anything but full table, but I consciously organize games around having more people than slots.

It is a logistic issue, sure, but solvable one. 7 people (3v3 and a referee) isn't that many people.

Add in the general preference for "CvE" content and general dislike for "CvC" content (to riff off Lanefan's "Character vs Character" term), because CvC has a very bad tendency to produce hurt feelings, and you get a pretty solid case for why it is vanishingly rare.

Hurt feelings are produced when players expect cooperation and get betrayed, I think. If they expect that the other team is out to get them, then if they get screwed over that's on them. Foolishness deserves punishment and all that.

My favorite format of RPGs is Apocalypse World-esque "everyone for themselves" kind of play and I very rarely witnessed real-life conflicts about it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Oh, and I'm not keeping up on the thread, but the Adventure also has to support 'Player Skill'.

If the adventure is nothing but a door kicking hack and slash and the players are given no options, then the 'Player Skill' style is much more difficult.

How does this square with the way a lot of old-school adventures are presented? Because, frankly, a lot of them look like"door-kicking hack and slash" to me, from the outside looking in. Especially if the adventure is quite linear.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

One thing I think is important, is there needs to be some benefit beyond not getting hurt by a trap. Skill play ought to be rewarded to encourage it in the first place.

Above and beyond anything else in the thread, this is a lesson I wholeheartedly embrace and wish more GMs would heed.

Doesn't matter what the behavior is. Doesn't matter what system you're using. Reward the behavior you want to see happen, and cause genuine player-affecting complications for the behavior you don't want to see happen.

Murderhoboism arises from both a push and a pull in this sense. The "pull" comes from GMs attempting to punish folks who are naturally inclined to murderhoboism....by putting attention on them, challenging them, forcing them to fight. That's what most such folks want. Giving them what they want--attention, action, immediate consequences--fuels their behavior. It's trying to fight fire with gasoline, teaching them that they can always get a rise out of you and a good fight if they just act out. Boring them is what punishes them: make them sit through dull situations, make them wait unconscious while the other players act, whatever responses achieve the desired end, and then show them how doing things the right way gets them cool action scenes, immediate consequences, attention, praise, rewards, etc.

The "push", conversely, comes from GMs not just failing to give rewards for non-murderhobo behavior, but outright punishing such behavior. I call it the "mercy is a sucker's game" problem. The GM who always or nearly always thinks, "Ah, the party just showed mercy to a captured enemy. That enemy will reconnect with his buddies, alert them to the party's presence, and thus the enemy will be on high alert now!" The GM who makes law enforcement always obstructive and meddlesome and unforgiving and (etc., etc.), who consistently has party allies suddenly reveal treachery and stab the party in the back, etc., etc. This teaches lessons: never trust, kill first, don't take prisoners because doing so is always worse, take whatever you can while you can get it because you'll lose it if you don't, never trust authority figures, always betray your so-called "allies" before they can betray you, and so on.

Be wise. Show restraint. Ask: "If I want to see X, am I giving worthwhile rewards for X?" Because your players will notice, and they'll respond. Show them why doing something is worthwhile, and they'll do it. Consistently give outcomes they don't like for something, and they'll avoid it. Sometimes, what you think is a realistic outcome is not always the most effective thing for getting a game that you actually find fun to run. (The reverse is also true, but I find these problems crop up much more with GMs who have a very fixed idea of what is "realistic" behavior.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I gotta push back on this a bit. Obvious is good when it comes to challenging the players in this sort of context. Unless the players are very experienced with this sort of play (which most of the 5e playerbase is not), they need obvious to have any chance of noticing the trap. Also, even with a group of grizzled OSR veterans, telegraphs are always less obvious to the players than you think they’re going to be. And the goal is not to get the players to fall for the trap. The goal is to make them feel rewarded for paying attention to the description of the environment, thinking about it like a real space, and making informed decisions about how to interact with that space. That requires finding the right level of subtlety for your particular group of players, to where when they do notice a trap, they feel like they almost missed it, and when they fall for a trap, they feel like they could have caught it - they should be able to retroactively identify the tell they missed and rationalize why they missed it, or it will just feel like a screw job. And unless you are very familiar with a group of players, you’re far more likely to overestimate the amount of subtlety they need to hit that sweet spot than to underestimate it. A good rule of thumb is, if it seems like just the right balance based on what you know of the players, make it a little more obvious. If it’s a new group of players, start glaringly obvious and work your way up to more subtle over time.

Something I am quite proud of with my Dungeon World game is that, on more than one occasion, the players have had this response, not to a "trap" per se, but to a situation or world element that they had partial information about beforehand. It was an immense relief the first time I heard one of them say, "Oh that's what that meant. Wow, I totally should have figured that out earlier." Because that meant I was doing my job. Leaving enough clues, ideas, and pointers so that most of the time, the players can figure it out--and in the times they don't, they very quickly see how the dots were supposed to connect together.

There's nothing worse than a blank stare (or, in my case, uncomfortable silence) when you had hoped that something would be a cool/interesting revelation.