Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

Imaro said:

The main issue I've noted around language is that... One side of a discussion, argument, however you want to describe it shouldn't have a monopoly on deciding what language will be used to both characterize themselves as well as everyone else... it creates an automatic imbalance in power dynamics for the entire discussion.

Click to expand...

Right. Would you say that in these kinds of situations, such a power imbalance usually favors the majority stance or the minority stance?

FrogReaver said:

In some ways the authority structure of D&D resembles 'mother may I'.

Click to expand...

I’d say play that can be described as “Mother May I” is most likely degenerate in some way. Something’s gone wrong if the players have no authority at all. As such, I don’t think it’s an accurate description of functional D&D play.

FrogReaver said:

In some ways all actions require a roll for success structure of Blades in the Dark resembles 'Yahtzee'.

Click to expand...

I don’t agree with this at all. It’s certainly not any more true than D&D. If there are stakes, you roll.

FrogReaver said:

In some ways Story Now games typical method for establishing fiction resembles Schrodinger's/quantum mechanics.

Click to expand...

Again, this term displays a skewed view. It implies that if I make something up on Tuesday then it’s more valid make believe than if I make it up today. Both are made up… neither method is “more real”.

FrogReaver said:

In some ways the players of D&D trying to figure out where they should go resembles 'Pictionary'

Click to expand...

I think this is the least problematic of the bunch, but I’m still not crazy about it. I can see how the GM is kind of portraying something and it’s there for the players to figure out… but again I think it puts so much on the GM with the players as more passive… not great.

Micah Sweet said:

Fair enough. I still think people seeing the phrase "mostly random guesswork" as a judgement against their preferred play style was a foreseeable possibility.

Click to expand...

Well, wasn’t it @FrogReaver who introduced it to the conversation? Until he mentioned it, I don’t recall it coming up prior. And although I think one or two folks have argued its accuracy, I think plenty on both sides have also refuted it. I don't think it’s accurate overall as a descriptor of D&D.

I think that when it comes down to it, jargon is always going to be a part of these conversations. We have to be willing to accept that. I’m not crazy about any of the jargon @FrogReaver listed above, and I’ve explained why… but he’s explained his use and I can mostly accept them in discussion with him… I at least understand what he’s trying to say with them. I say “mostly” though because at times, the phrase may actually be ill suited, depending on context.

For example, if someone new to Blades in the Dark asked a question, and someone started in about Schrodinger’s, I’d offer a different take.

Campbell said:

One of the weirdest things about these conversations to me is that the way I think, talk about and organize my own play basically becomes verboten.

Click to expand...

Well, if your own position makes them verboten, it is time to reconsider your position.

If someone else's position makes them verboten... what do you care?

Also, discussions of Theory, when not sufficiently connected with real-world practice, can go to weird places.

I have a player who struggles with “success with consequences”. It’s a pretty core feature now of my homebrew system, so I’m not likely to budge on that, but he complains about how it makes it character feel incompetent. I think it’s just something that will take some acclimation and trust that the consequences will never screw him out of his success (a problem we all in my group have experienced in the past with “partial success” and a big reason why I dislike that term). Fortunately, if you don’t want a consequence, you can resist them with a Defense Check (effectively a saving throw). In fact, that’s how they work across the board, so players have more tools for dealing with nasty monsters (e.g., save or die effects, etc), but I digress.

hawkeyefan said:

Again, this term displays a skewed view. It implies that if I make something up on Tuesday then it’s more valid make believe than if I make it up today. Both are made up… neither method is “more real”.

Click to expand...

I’ll add more later but this stood out.

Through this particular lens that’s exactly what is being said. Through your lens it doesn’t matter whether something was made up on Tuesday or right before. Through others lenses it does.

Criticism involves lenses. Whereas what most people are looking for is actually ‘the truth’.

Hussar said:

I might agree or disagree if I could actually make heads or tails of what you just wrote.

It seems you are making this way more complicated than it is. In map and key play players rarely have enough information to make actual informed decisions.

Most decisions are made more or less blindly. That’s the point. Why does the party go over that hill or down that corridor?

To see what’s there because it might be interesting.

Heck there are more than a few play reviews I’ve seen that complain about empty room syndrome. The party is exploring the dungeon but because they are making mostly random choices, they have a fairly empty session with nothing but empty rooms.

It does happen. And it happens because of mostly random chance. Ie. guesswork.

Click to expand...

If a dungeon is designed such that you absolutely need to encounter the kobolds before the orcs (for whatever reason), and laid out so that it's up to chance whether you do, then that's a problem. But usually there's just some kobolds in one place and some orcs in another, so who cares what order you encounter them in? The decision to go left or right is not consequential. Especially when the most basic purpose of a simple dungeon crawl is to just clear the place out.

If a dungeon is designed so that different but interesting things happen depending on the order you encounter things, even if one is "worse" than the other from some perspective, that at least makes things a bit more engaging.

If a dungeon is designed to channel progress in meaningful ways by constraining and ordering what encounters happen when, and provide clues to inform players' decisions at branch points (whether in the dungeon itself or investigation that can be performed beforehand), then you're getting into fun adventures. The degenerate case here is a linear sequence of rooms, but even that is easily made more engaging by gradually building up challenge or offering clues to an unfolding story of why that thing was built or what happened there.

But if you just slap a bunch of 10' wide corridors and 30'x30' rooms together with absolutely no rationale, then yeah, you've just got a random sequence of encounters (and/or nothing). Why assume the worst, though?

None of these issues are exclusive to map and key, but they are definitely relevant to map and key.

Umbran said:

Well, if your own position makes them verboten, it is time to reconsider your position.

If someone else's position makes them verboten... what do you care?

Also, discussions of Theory, when not sufficiently connected with real-world practice, can go to weird places.

Click to expand...

Please refrain from engaging with my posts.

hawkeyefan said:

Right. Would you say that in these kinds of situations, such a power imbalance usually favors the majority stance or the minority stance?

Click to expand...

I think it favors whoever initiates the conversation and decides their paradigm is how the conversation will be framed. On ENWorld... I would say that does seem to mostly be the minority stance as they seem to initiate more of the conversations and set their terminology as the de facto lingua for both stances...

Grendel_Khan said:

Lack of map-and-key was one part of it, but I think I was most freaked out by success-with-consequence as the most common roll result, even when doing something I thought my character was good at. It felt out of control to me, or like the math was wrong. I hadn't heard of PbtA or storygames of any kind at that point, so the notion that I couldn't optimize every interaction, and that chaos and blowback was basically a given, was horrifying.

Embarrassing, really, given that FitD is now my favorite system!

Click to expand...

It's a bit of a leap to go from regarding a dice roll as being strictly about your character's competence, to it encompassing the situation as a whole, including elements that are not under your character's direct control. It opens up so much rich possibility, including that of you as a player having some say over those elements outside of your character's direct control—which gets kinda meta and breaks right through some conceptions of what a player should have a say over. But that extra-character bit is optional of course, for those who don't want to play that way.

Such action tests not being binary pass/fail are also integral to the model, of course, and what @kenada said about not having complications counter the core fact of a success is crucial.