Alien forms of gameplay/game design you've encountered?

Mannahnin · Thursday at 10:43 PM

Bae'zel said:
DM does all the rolling. Players just say what they want to do.

I've seen this on TV shoes (eg Community). Is this really a way some people play? Or is it just done for television for some reason (easier to edit and flow the dialogue?).

I did hear of one group doing this from a friend of mine, but I didn't believe him at the time.

Lord_Blacksteel said:
I've never heard of any group running this way. I have seen games where the players are supposed to roll everything, the first edition of Icons worked this way, and it can work but it does take an attitude adjustment for the GM. At least it did for me.

Umbran said:
My very first game of D&D was run this way.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
I believe that may have been how it was originally played in Lake Geneva. It's a very old school approach.

There are some 1970s era ~~games~~ campaigns where the DM explicitly never told the PCs the rules and may not even have let them have character sheets.

billd91 said:
It's also the kind of play you might see in an environment where dice are relatively scarce - like early days of the hobby.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
I also have a vague memory of Arneson's Blackmoor campaign running like a black box at some point as well.

Yes, the original D&D rules state directly that the DM rolls up all characters, and the wording is nonspecific about who rolls otherwise. From what I can see every single reference in the three original booklets is either to the Referee rolling or uses a passive voice which doesn't specify.

As Bill mentioned, this may have been in part with the expectation that players would not own any of the specialized polyhedral dice.

Multiple sources have talked about how at times Dave Arneson did run in a "black box" style at times, not telling the players the rules and at times operating with the DM himself hidden behind a file cabinet or other LOS-blocking obstruction so as to operate as a faceless impersonal adjudicator of the rules/world.

The Elusive Shift talks quite a bit about the philosophical debate in the 1970s gaming community and reviews which suggested that these kind of games work better if the players don't know the mechanics, and lose their magic when people learn the rules and start interacting with them like games instead of just envisioning being in the scene and describing their actions. And the 1979 DMG shares some of this concept, talking about keeping the combat and other rules in it secret from the players, and opining at least partially tongue in cheek that non-DM players caught reading it should be punished.

aramis erak · Thursday at 10:44 PM

Bae'zel said:
Oh I have one:

DM does all the rolling. Players just say what they want to do.

I've seen this on TV shoes (eg Community). Is this really a way some people play? Or is it just done for television for some reason (easier to edit and flow the dialogue?).

I did hear of one group doing this from a friend of mine, but I didn't believe him at the time.

Yes, some do. I've played one session with such a GM. I hated it.

Edit to Add
I've one RPGish that's GM makes all rolls: Lords of Space. It's a 4x PBM ruleset that some people think is an RPG. I don't... but it is GM'd PVP and the GM makes all the rolls.

Thomas Shey · Friday at 1:15 AM

Mannahnin said:
Yes, the original D&D rules state directly that the DM rolls up all characters, and the wording is nonspecific about who rolls otherwise. From what I can see every single reference in the three original booklets is either to the Referee rolling or uses a passive voice which doesn't specify.

As Bill mentioned, this may have been in part with the expectation that players would not own any of the specialized polyhedral dice.

Though that would have likely felt pretty weird to the guys coming from a miniatures wargaming background. Though I didn't do that much myself (I was a hex-and-chit guy) they certainly expected to roll their own dice.

Mannahnin said:
Multiple sources have talked about how at times Dave Arneson did run in a "black box" style at times, not telling the players the rules and at times operating with the DM himself hidden behind a file cabinet or other LOS-blocking obstruction so as to operate as a faceless impersonal adjudicator of the rules/world.

The Elusive Shift talks quite a bit about the philosophical debate in the 1970s gaming community and reviews which suggested that these kind of games work better if the players don't know the mechanics, and lose their magic when people learn the rules and start interacting with them like games instead of just envisioning being in the scene and describing their actions. And the 1979 DMG shares some of this concept, talking about keeping the combat and other rules in it secret from the players, and opining at least partially tongue in cheek that non-DM players caught reading it should be punished.

Though I've got to say, if that was at all common that late, you'd certainly never have known from any convention I ever was at, or even the way people in APAs (many of them not from the West Coast) talked about it. My own feeling is if it was much a thing at the start it never propagated well.

Whizbang Dustyboots · Friday at 1:37 AM

Thomas Shey said:
Though I've got to say, if that was at all common that late, you'd certainly never have known from any convention I ever was at, or even the way people in APAs (many of them not from the West Coast) talked about it. My own feeling is if it was much a thing at the start it never propagated well.

Yeah, there's no real argument for it, especially since, I suspect, as it appealed to the most dictatorial sorts of DMs who would have a hard time attracting and keeping a lot of players anyway.

Thomas Shey · Friday at 4:00 AM

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
Yeah, there's no real argument for it, especially since, I suspect, as it appealed to the most dictatorial sorts of DMs who would have a hard time attracting and keeping a lot of players anyway.

I can see someone doing it because they wanted a more pure roleplaying experience, but I'm not sure how many people really obsessed about that would have gone for early D&D.

aramis erak · Friday at 5:17 AM

Thomas Shey said:
I can see someone doing it because they wanted a more pure roleplaying experience, but I'm not sure how many people really obsessed about that would have gone for early D&D.

More than you might expect. Quite a few groups in the early 80s lived by the phrase, "Sometimes we even roll the dice"...

There were a lot of groups doing mostly improv with occasional dips into mechanics every 3-4 sessions. I didn't play with those groups.

Retros_x · Friday at 12:31 PM

I am not sure I ever met really alien ways of playing, I just had once a noob player who came up with absurd ideas that didn't make sense for me even without considering any rules. I want to enable players to be creative and come up with good solutions, but hers just seemed random. Like in the middle of battle "I summon my snake familiar to hypnotize the enemy". I kinda liked the idea, but I also had to talk about expectations that I don't run my games on cartoon logic. Her ideas where often so out of place, I just couldnt deal with it, which I couldn't help but feeling I failed her as an enabling DM.

A_Carrington · Friday at 12:59 PM

And to think, she could have played a game where the rules allow for that. Unfortunate.

Thomas Shey · Friday at 4:27 PM

aramis erak said:
More than you might expect. Quite a few groups in the early 80s lived by the phrase, "Sometimes we even roll the dice"...

Tail wagging the dog problem. The point was, OD&D was largely obsessed with elements of play most pure roleplayers wouldn't be that interested in. It just happened to be the only game in town as it were, and the other things that were liable to grab that mindset (chatroom roleplaying for example) didn't really start landing until the 90's (and then spun off into the MUSHes and the like).

I'm not saying they never existed (or don't now far as that goes) but that D&D still wasn't going to be the game to primarily attract them.

SkidAce · Friday at 4:34 PM

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
Those folks are way too common in multiplayer computer games.

"How come I have the most kills in this battleground; what are the rest of you people doing?" when everyone else is trying to achieve the win conditions in a World of Warcraft battleground is super-common.

The game called Supremacy, while not coop (definitely a weasel game) had several levels of success.

The best was a "Five Star Win", where you conquered the board and its territories, and NOBODY used a nuke anywhere.

Of course my best friend "Dave the Weasel" would research nukes, build ONE, and then hold the Five Star Win hostage unless we negotiated trade, territory, etc.