Player skill vs character skill?

[Xamnam]

GMs saying things fail because they're inadequately impressed

I don't necessarily interpret things in the best possible light, but this isn't a binary situation where the alternative is interpreting them in a negative light.

We are pretty much on the same page regarding competence, assuming there's no explicit reason to assume incompetence.



Based on what you've actually said in this thread, as long as you were willing to participate in good faith, I would see no reason not to want you at my table and no reason to think you wouldn't fit in. It's entirely possible that you're not looking for the same things as me in RPGs, but I don't see any reason to believe my GMing style would lead you to feel a loss of agency or as if you're playing mother-may-I, unless you enter the game already convinced that's what it's going to be.

I'm going to snip out the majority of this, because it's very kind of you to acknowledge everything you're agreeing with. It sounds like you do an excellent job of calibrating your players expectations, and working with them to make sure they can achieve their goals. I like to think that your table would be a different experience than the ones that have soured me. The three things I left included above are what I have been on the receiving end of, that pushed me away from OSR games for a long time. They very much made me the player feel like a failure, like I was not smart enough to play the game. It's fair to say I should be careful how much I let those experiences color me. Again, appreciate your consideration and understanding.

 

[SableWyvern]

I have had experiences...and I'm sure others have, too...where GMs, faced with an unexpected move by players, "save their plot" by preventing the idea from succeeding.

OK, but that's a reason to have a problem with railroading GMs, not player-skill GMs.

I can see how some players, having experienced the same, get a bad taste in their mouth for letting GMs have the authority to judge the soundness of their plans. They want rules, dammit.

I have little time for the idea rules can protect you from bad behaviour. Further, as mentioned earlier, as far as I'm concerned, it's the fact that the participants are able to make judgements about outcomes without being beholden to specific closed rules that is fundamentally what makes RPGs worth playing. But sure, if you want a game constrained to operate within fixed rules, you're welcome to do so.

However, none of that seems to relate to the specific point that was confusing me, which was GMs who claim to be running a player skill game, but who also claim the PCs can only succeed if the GM is impressed, and drive people away as a result. This just seems far too narrow and specific a scenario to be something that someone has heard has occurred to a lot of different people. Alternatively, the point being made is that player skill as a concept tends to drive people away, but I'm not seeing any actual evidence of this.

People are driven away either by outright bad participants (whether GM or player), or mismatched expectations, but not typically by the simple fact that a game focuses on player skill.

But it's just bad GMing, not bad game philosophy.

Exactly

 

[Bill Zebub]

For the record, I consider myself a neutral arbiter…on average.

Sometimes I am a benevolent god arbiter. Sometimes I am a vindictive god arbiter. It all averages out.

 

[Umbran]

re: Combat vs Non-Combat

I often see the argument, "We don't require players to know how to swing swords, so why should we ask them to know how to pick locks?"

Note: this is an artifact of playing a tabletop RPG. As soon as you move to live-action, bets may be off.

This holds especially for combat. There's a popular class of live-action games in which combat is simulated by players hitting or shooting each other (lightly) with what amounts to nerf weapons. And doing that well is definitely a physical skill that some are better at than others.

And, there are games that use physical representations for various skills - where lockpicking is actually represented by picking simple locks, where engineering skills were represented by, say, assembling a model without the assembly instructions, and so on.

And, in the live-action space, because there's a more full range of possibilities for how we can make the player simulate game-world activity, how much you make the simulation strictly player skill, and how much you mitigate it with game statistics, is A STYLE CHOICE. GMs choose whether they want to use live combat, and players choose whether they want to join those games, or stick to games that strictly use abstract mechanics for fights.

Entire conventions of Live Action RPGs exist with mixtures of games that make different choices, and they're all okay with recognizing that there's no objectively better approach. There's merely personal preferences.

 

[AnotherGuy]

My table is 16th level, I do not spoon feed them anymore particularly if I'm using map and key.
The party took on the ancient blue wyrm Iymrith and won, but knowing (and having seen) that blue dragons burrow - they did not think to search the "treasure room" for buried treasure. They used spells, searched for secret doors and all sort of other types of investigation and so failed to find the location of the sceptre they were looking for.
I did not at all feel compelled to give them further hints.

Them not finding the item significantly changed the direction of some of the backstory and that is fine. At 16th level I mostly follow them around so it is not like the campaign ended. There are a two dozen+ open quests (personal and otherwise) they can pursue nevermind the quests they create.

I give enough information to ensure their players are equipped with the knowledge their characters should have and that is where it stops for me. If there is no map and key then I use more modern techniques, such as relying on the randomness of dice as well the the success and failures of skill checks - but I detest dropping breadcrumbs.

 

[Maxperson]

I think player skill at navigating fiction (like, say, doing things that sensibly can help to find a trap) runs into a fundamental issue: only one party can ever be punished for making a mistake.

A player makes a mistake and misjudges a situation => player gets screwed
GM makes a mistake and misrepresents a situation => player gets screwed

It's not that black and white. I think that it's the player who is predominantly on the short end of the stick with it, but there have been numerous occasions where I have described the fiction, whether it be a trap or something else, where the players have come up with something I didn't think of that made what I did very easy or just avoided it altogether. My misjudgment cost me and I got the short end of the stick.

 

[Maxperson]

I make my players lift heavy weights rather than make a Strength check. And Dexterity checks? That's what that tightrope is for!

Your players are going to end up in a lot better shape than my players.

 

[Umbran]

It's not that black and white. I think that it's the player who is predominantly on the short end of the stick with it, but there have been numerous occasions where I have described the fiction, whether it be a trap or something else, where the players have come up with something I didn't think of that made what I did very easy or just avoided it altogether. My misjudgment cost me and I got the short end of the stick.

But, did you, really? In the same sense that a player pays a cost?

Please tell us more about the cost you, as a GM, paid in this situation, if you don't mind.

 

[Maxperson]

But, did you, really? In the same sense that a player pays a cost?

Please tell us more about the cost you, as a GM, paid in this situation, if you don't mind.

It can be very disrupting to the game and campaign. Unbalanced things can(and have) fallen into PC hands, major NPCs have been killed or worse, etc.

The costs are the same. We can suffer in-fiction disruption and loss, and we can be have negative emotions occur in response to what happened. Generally, I don't get upset by these sorts of things, but they are concerning and sometimes cause me some anxiety when trying to figure out what to do.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Combat vs Non-Combat

I often see the argument, "We don't require players to know how to swing swords, so why should we ask them to know how to pick locks?"

Well, we also don't try to resolve combat with a single roll. "Give me a DC 18 Combat check. If you win the dragon dies, if you fail you die."

I think this is simply an artifact of the fact that most games are designed to focus on combat. D&D, obviously, but honestly we still tend to play that way in man genres. But I do feel that it's just a design decision about how what you want to focus on.

So in a standard d20 fantasy game you resolve persuasion tests, stealthy entry and a society dance scene with one roll, or maybe a short skill challenge, 1-3 rolls per player. Whereas combat will probably be more like 5-20 rolls for each person to feel engaging.

But this is just the focus of the game, looking at what people want top have fun doing. I could run a DramaSystem game (and have done so), which took 2 hours to resolve who was going to lead the army into battle, and then did indeed resolve the mass combat in one test.

Or I could play a heist game where 90% of the rolls are to work out how to get into a building, and any combat is an incidental step resolved with one roll (Several FATE games I have played/run did this).

Even in games I've run where combat can easily be a focus (e.g Night's Black Agents) players can spend most of the session prepping for an operation, and then resolution is short and simple.

And even in combat-heavy D&D games (I ran a lot of 4E ...) I very frequently would let players make quick rolls for entire combats, giving target numbers based largely on their (player skill based) descriptions of what they intended to do. Something like "OK, so your plan is to rig a landslide, hide behind the trees and then surprise them. We'll call that a skill challenge with three appropriate skills. For each fail everyone loses a surge. Who wants to take point on each task?".