D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[Reynard]

"Light on" does not mean "nonexistant" last time I looked.

Why are the rules different for finding secret doors than finding traps? What is the design philosophy and intentional mechanical abstract that supports this difference?

Or is it possible that it is based completely on Gygaxian whim and we should not take it seriously, like, at all?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Why are the rules different for finding secret doors than finding traps? What is the design philosophy and intentional mechanical abstract that supports this difference?

Or is it possible that it is based completely on Gygaxian whim and we should not take it seriously, like, at all?

Taking it seriously as proper design is not required to use it as a rotating point for skilled play. Its not like being ad-hoc in design choice has been a rarity throughout most of D&D's history.

 

[bloodtide]

The whole point is to bypass or circumvent the mechanics. It is a battle of wits between players and GM. Mechanics, in a perfect scenario, don't figure in at all.

In the OSR Sphere, there are two levels of skilled play.

One still uses a roll or two just to see if whatever the player(s) are trying to do works. An ancient Dragon Magazine had a fun suggestion of "let a player try anything, just assign a % roll to see if they can do it." In general most things should be around 50%(40-60%), and then up and down from there. Player wants to swing across a room on a chandelier, DM says easy 50%, player rolls a 41 on the d100 and swings across the room.

The next one is where you toss away the rules and dice completely. Player says "I slide down the banister" and then DM just says "okay".

In general, both are used, with no real clear line between the two. Though often if it was directly physical, most DMs would ask for a roll, other things 'just happen'.

For example in a recent game, the Pcs were exploring old underground ruins. They came across a mushroom garden room, now baddy over grown. They did not want to risk getting too close to the deadly spores that shoot out if the mushrooms are disturbed, as my game is a deadly game and they knew 100% this room could kill characters. They still wanted to get across the room to the other side though. Here is where the skill comes in: They go back to the dining room and knock the legs off a round table. Then they tie a rope to the table in the middle. Then they rolled the table top through the mushrooms several times to clear a path. I did not ask for any rolls here at all.

 

[zakael19]

Went back a few pages, wanted to note again that "skilled play" and "player skill" are, in this context, very different.

I think in an earlier set of comments I misused these to some degree. When I see "player skill" emphasized as per the OP/title, it's generally talking about "using your skills and knowledge as a player instead of relying on your character sheet/abilities to solve problems." To quote from the Shadowdark GM's Guide to provide a brief example:

"CHARACTER SKILL VS. PLAYER SKILL

Characters aren't the only ones who level up. Players also gain experience!

For example, players will learn where to look for secret doors and what the "tells" are. As they go on more adventures, they become better at gameplay.

Encourage this by giving players the opportunity to make decisions that rely on their creativity and wits, not on their dice rolls or stat bonuses."

There are many games for which that sort of "player skill" is deemphasized, and I'm personally content with leaving it primarily in the OSR definition to avoid confusion.

When I see "skilled play" emphasized that's generally at least for me referring to being good at a specific system of play. By system I mean "this game, with these people, at this table, with these priorities." For the game of 5e one of my players is in, this means being a high charop player who is building to maximize tactical combat outcomes. For the players of my Sunday night Stonetop, that means thinking deeply about character priorities and how to balance those with the pressures of the setting and premise, while making space for deeply felt emotional connections.

A key component of a "skill" is that you don't start out being good at whatever it is. Since I almost never play repeat games with the same group, that means that we start out in a series of slow developments as we all feel each other out, let the group norms shape out, comprehend the system together, and eventually settle into a rhythm of skilled play for our priorities. Very much follows in the vein of Tuckman's stages of group development!

I think that @loverdrive 's note about a specific GM can be extended to that specific group - I'm the same GM running the same game (Stonetop) for two different groups, yet the priorities of play differ between the two even within the confines of the same premise and ruleset and thus the skills of play we've developed to create the desired ongoing outcomes are different between the two (and I need to display different skills in what I say and elicit between the two tables!).

 

[Composer99]

I think skilled play is about a DM knowing the players at the gaming table. Then it’s about finding and leveraging the mechanics in the system being played to enhance the table’s experience.

If the system doesn’t have those mechanics then it’s time to look outside the system or dream up some new rules.

Players whose immersion is broken by the conceits of the game can always leave the table.

What some OSR circles have (unfortunately IMO) taken to mean by skilled play is rather like a narrated-exploratory play loop, appealing primarily to playgroups who value aesthetics of challenge and exploration in their RPG gameplay:

1. The DM/GM describes what the player characters perceive in the environment around them, including as a result of player follow-up questions.
2. The players describe their activities, attempting to logically infer from the details they have gathered what hazards might be present in the area that aren't immediately apparent, and attempting to use their own problem-solving skills to overcome known dangers or seize opportunities - ideally with as little recourse to the dice as possible, since many game mechanics in classic D&D often don't favour PC success. If, for instance, if you have a 1-in-6 chance of noticing a secret door because you're an elf, that's better than nothing but still very unreliable.
3. The DM/GM adjudicates the outcome, then returns to step 1 as the environment changes or the player characters move to a new environment.

The skilled play, then, is the attention to detail, possibly including good records-keeping, lateral problem-solving, risk management, and creative applications of the environment and gear in particular (with judicious use of spells here and there), that the players resort to in order for their characters to successfully navigate what is usually a dungeon environment.

Chances are, if you're seeing someone bringing up "skilled play" in a general D&D thread, unless it's about a very specific topic like character optimisation in 3.X, say, it's probably something like the above.

 

[pemerton]

I guess? It seems a pretty thin slice of the rules and a weirdly specific exception.

Doors are a huge chunk of Gygax's AD&D rules! If you take out the combat rules, and the rules for door, there are very few rules left other than all the rules for spells and magic items. (And even some of them are about doors!)

In the classic dungeon, the door is the trigger for a "scene"/situation: by having their PCs open a door, the players "activate" the scene/situation that is behind that door (as per the GM's dungeon key/notes). Listening at doors is a way of getting information about the still-latent scene/situation without activating it. (The other ways of doing that tend to be magical: detection/scrying magic in its myriad forms.)

So I think the focus on doors is pretty fundamental to the game. What I think is weird is how D&D continues to have a bit of an obsession with doors even though relatively little contemporary D&D play seems very close to that classic Gygaxian dungeon play.

 

[pemerton]

For example in a recent game, the Pcs were exploring old underground ruins. They came across a mushroom garden room, now baddy over grown. They did not want to risk getting too close to the deadly spores that shoot out if the mushrooms are disturbed, as my game is a deadly game and they knew 100% this room could kill characters. They still wanted to get across the room to the other side though. Here is where the skill comes in: They go back to the dining room and knock the legs off a round table. Then they tie a rope to the table in the middle. Then they rolled the table top through the mushrooms several times to clear a path. I did not ask for any rolls here at all.

I posted about this issue a few years ago: D&D General - Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

I think that there is such a thing as "skilled play" in the OSR-ish sense that can be distinguished from both (i) guessing what the GM thinks is the right thing to do, and (ii) manipulating the GM. My canonical example for this is taking doors off their hinges and using them to surf down the frictionless corridor in White Plume Mountain, thereby avoiding the pits with the super-tetanus spikes. Because this sort of play does involve "manipulating" the shared fiction, it does require generating consensus at the table, which will include the GM. But I don't think explaining to the GM why an idea can work, and/or persuading the GM, is the same as manipulating or playing the GM. And unless the GM is extremely narrow-minded or unimaginative, it should be possible to come up with ideas about what is possible in the fiction that aren't ones the GM had already thought of.

Some examples from my own play (not OSR, but I think illustrating the idea): in a Classic Traveller session, the PCs wanted to power a vessel for a jump, but because of <reasons> didn't want to charge it's drive in the conventional fashion. So the players (as their PCs) came up with the idea of charging that vessel's jump drive by running heavy-duty cables to it from another vessel's jump drive which they were happy and able to charge in the conventional fashion. I can't remember now what checks were made - maybe a roll to check the availability of the cables, and/or Engineering or Electronics or Mechanical checks to jury-rig the cables (and it certainly helped that one of the PCs had Jack-of-all-Trades-4). But in any event, it happened pretty smoothly.

<snip>

what matters is table consensus on the shared fiction and fictional positioning <snippage> there is good reason to be liberal rather than fussy in reaching consensus. I posted a similar thought about the door-surfing in WPM recently: of course in principle we can think of ways that might go wrong (eg a door's momentum and/or the weight distribution of the "surfers" is such that instead of gliding over a pit it topples front-first into one); but if play is not going to grind to a halt, then once the players have thought up the basic solution and explained how they're going to do it, it is probably better for the GM to err on the side of saying "yes". (I think the same principle was also at work in the heavy-duty-cable example from Traveller.)

In WPM, there is a frictionless corridor with pits in it. The pits are spiked with blades that cause anyone landing on them to be infected with near-intantly fatal super-tetanus. The frictionless surface means that PCs will slide into the pits. The module says (p 11):

The trick here is to get a rope strung through this room and fastened securely at both ends. Once this is done, a party can pull themselves across, regardless of the surface. A clever party may even be able to come up with other methods. Ingenuity is required.​

The most famous example of ingenuity I know of, here, is taking doors from elsewhere of the dungeon and surfing them down the frictionless corridor (they are too long to fall into the pits).

That is skilled play. It depends upon the fiction being (1) clearly established, and (2) being amenable to transparent and consensual reasoning. If in doubt, the GM probably needs to say "yes" - eg notice that no checks are required for PCs to traverse the rope, even though we could imagine in "real life" that a tired PC might slip and fall from the rope down onto the frictionless surface.

We could also imagine doors that are long enough to slide over a pit nevertheless tumbling down into one, rather than sliding across it, if there is too much weight on its front compared to its back when being used as a "surfboard". But the game is not really meant to be an exercise in calculating rotational forces operating on sliding doors. If anyone thinks to ask the question, it surely should be enough for the players to say "we sit at the back of the surfing doors".

 

[pemerton]

What some OSR circles have (unfortunately IMO) taken to mean by skilled play is rather like a narrated-exploratory play loop

It's not their coinage, though - the term goes back to the 1970s. Eg both Gygax and Pulipher use it, to describe the wargame-y play that you identify in your post.

 

[Bagpuss]

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.

Funny notes on a recent scenario I wrote, for dealing with the main villian at the end..

"There are multiple ways to deal with the Schattenkind, and you are encouraged to take on board any suggestions the investigators come up with."

Basically they will have hopefully researched and discovered all about the Schattenkind by the end of the scenario. I didn't bother coming up with a solution, you just accept whatever method the players come up with that sounds logical.

 

[bloodtide]

The skilled play, then, is the attention to detail, possibly including good records-keeping, lateral problem-solving, risk management, and creative applications of the environment and gear in particular (with judicious use of spells here and there), that the players resort to in order for their characters to successfully navigate what is usually a dungeon environment.

Sounds good to me.

It is a very different game then the Push Button play:

DM:Your character encounter obstacle: door
Player(looks down at their character sheet) : I use ability six: Open Door
DM:Your character opens the door