D&D 5E Allow the Long Rest Recharge to Honor Skilled Play or Disallow it to Ensure a Memorable Story

[hawkeyefan]

I was thinking specifically of inconsistency with prior facts or an established play-style, but that's not really any different. As you say in something I'm snipping, they'd really have to have several sets of advice, for the different playstyles they want the game to support.

My understanding is that the new Van Richten's book is almost more of a DMG style book than a setting guide. Or at least, large portions of it are.

I may check it out to see what kind of advice is offered.

I don't find it as incomplete as some of y'all do, but I gotta admit the game fit into my head from just about the first time I read the books. Clearly it matches my expectations and my understanding of what I want D&D to be.

Sure. At this point, there are a few different approaches to D&D based on editions of the game, and then any combination of bits and pieces of those that any given group may prefer. So everyone's game may be different. In that sense, the approach they took with 5E seems well suited.

Like I said, I enjoy the game. I just wonder if I still would if I had to play with an entirely new group whose expectations and priorities were less known to me.

meant ignore Morale for a specific instance or something, which would change play but might be a legitimate scenario design choice.

I suppose for a specific NPC or something. But I think the DM also decided when a Morale check was needed, although there were certain instances where it should be expected. But I would think that situaional factors could be argued for a Morale roll to be waived or something.

I mean, I was like 10 when I was running B/X so don't hold me to that!

 

[prabe]

My understanding is that the new Van Richten's book is almost more of a DMG style book than a setting guide. Or at least, large portions of it are.

I may check it out to see what kind of advice is offered.

I am ... underwhelmed, but I would absolutely take the word of someone who liked Ravenloft as a setting, or wanted D&D-type advice for running Horror in D&D, over mine. I feel as though I want to re-read it before letting that opinion set like a laundry stain, but I haven't made the time for that yet.

Like I said, I enjoy the game. I just wonder if I still would if I had to play with an entirely new group whose expectations and priorities were less known to me.

I specifically started my games at local game stores, because I wanted to game with people new to me and get out of my comfort zone. While running an edition I'd just read a couple months (if that) before starting to write a setting (which wasn't done yet when I had the first Session Zero). Which is to say I think I know whether I would enjoy 5E, playing it with people I didn't know.

I mean, I was like 10 when I was running B/X so don't hold me to that!

I never ran it and barely played it. I absolutely would neither hold you to any statement about B/X nor hold you responsible for being wrong.

 

[pemerton]

If it never happens at your table, is it really a bug you need to fix?

I don't think I've said it's a bug. I have tried to explain why I think the tension between "skilled play" and "story" arises in 5e D&D in a way it doesn't in 4e D&D, and in some non-D&D systems: because of different distributions of authority and expectations/principles around the way fiction is established/extrapolated.

I think those differences are not trivial ones (in the RPGing context).

 

[Manbearcat]

@clearstream

Gamefulness is a term used in game studies to mean play that incorporates rules. (All kinds of caveats should be on that definition!) So to be playful can be met in many ways that don't amount to being gameful (although being gameful is always also playful, in some sense). IIRC I first encountered the term in Salen and Zimmerman's "Rules of Play".

What @loverdrive rightly points to are dissonances that can arise from spatchcocking narrative onto game, rather than emerging narrative as game. Your tension, then, is a feature of an unsuccessful marriage. I believe that is not necessitated: it is not inherent to game when played as game. SP and gameful-narrative are on the same side.

Before I put together a post about system + narrative cohesion, I need to make sure I'm clear on the parameters of your "gameful narrative" usage.

So far as I can tell, this was your answer to my question. But its still not clear to me what the upshot and what the limits of this are. Are you meaning:

The way games wed Theme and Premise to Skill which, working in concert, create a process and structure of play which facilitates an emergent narrative that is an inevitable, coherent outgrowth of that marriage.

Is this what you mean? Because if this is what you mean, I have talked about this plenty in the last many, many years. But I don't use the term "Gameful" or "Gameful Narrative" to express this. I have used the term "systemitized."

Could you confirm if this is true or not?

If not, could you correct my understanding of what you're trying to communicate with "Gameful Narrative?"

And if I am correct, can you confirm to me how you feel that D&D 5e is that game. Because I know a lot of games that intimately wed Theme and Premise to Skill...and D&D 5e is NOT that game (by design...it couldn't be that game and achieve the heterogenous play that it sought...and attained by dent of its successful design). D&D 5e has intentionally designed in holes all over the place in it’s “marry theme/premise to skill” game. Where those holes are the 5e answer is <insert GM> (again, intentionally designed this way). In those other game's "the system's say" (another phrase you'll see me use a lot) is final. Its not a mutable characteristic that you can toggle off and <insert GM>. Its an immutable, constraining feature of play (on all participants, GM included...or even primary).

Before I put a lot of effort into a large, clarifying post on this subject (and especially in light of your most recent posts to Ovinomancer which, I feel, further serve to obscure your intent/meaning/positioning so that I'm not clear what series of ideas you're putting forth...it almost seems like you're now clarifying that you're claiming multiple positions in some sort of Devil's Advocate stance? There is a lot of half (but not full)-Steelmanning of several incompatible positions in what you're saying).


EDIT - And before I put together a large post on Win Cons in games, can you clarify why you feel that "Skilled Play (as its been constituted in this thread) is a chimera?" I've given a breakdown of Skilled Play in the various iterations of D&D. Further, I've given a very specific definition and explained at length why "Boardgaming" is necessary but not sufficient (because it doesn't include the "shared imagined space" component that is part and parcel of Skilled Play in TTRPGing). I don't see a disagreement in this thread from the primary participants, yet you continue to put forthe "its a chimera" as a response. So can you explain that (so I can comment before I put together a large post on Win Cons...I don't want to have to keep going back and forth or put something large together only to have the inevitable "I disagree with the premise!" plot-line emerge).

 

[Manbearcat]

I never ran it and barely played it. I absolutely would neither hold you to any statement about B/X nor hold you responsible for being wrong.

Morale is listed as (Optional), but I've never known anyone who didn't use Morale in Moldvay Basic (I'm sure there are some out there, but they can't be normative). My guess is most people don't even know its got the (Optional) tag next to it. Why?

a) Its trivial to use (check Morale at first Team NPC death and when 1/2 Team NPC has been incapacitated).

b) Its codified (Morale is listed on all NPCs and the rules are explicit, cogent, and in the same small manual where all the other rules are).

c) It "works" (It engenders a play style where "fight to the death/parley/surrender" is a dynamic thing...this game isn't about mega-cool combat buttans...its about interesting decision-points that impact the delve through line).

When you add those three things up, the uptake is pretty complete.

 

[pemerton]

The poll question asked "If following the rules would torpedo the story, do you follow the rules or break them to save the story?"

I just re-read the OP and the poll question. It doesn't ask that at all. Nowhere does it talk about breaking the rules. The OP does say this:

* The GM-Facing and the asymmetric power relationship say that the GM can just deploy move x, y, or z (or all 3 if they wish) to ensure that the Long Rest Recharge doesn't occur. There is nothing systemitizing this (like, say, the way the table-facing Doom Pool grows in Cortex as a result of play and there are rules about when/how it grows and when/how the GM can deploy it to erect a "block" of a player move). The GM is just extrapolating from the fiction (and almost surely leveraging offscreen/backstory info that hasn't been established in play) in order to make this happen...but the important part here is that their first principles to justify this "block" are The Storyteller Imperative requires the Long Rest Recharge must be disabled.

So its entirely possible for the GM to extrapolate the situation naturalistically such that the Long Rest Recharge should be enabled and the GM can naturalistically extrapolate "the block" (disabling The Long Rest Recharge), because, realistically, almost any situation can possess enough intersecting variables such that a model would yield a dozen or more reasonably likely outcomes.

I believe that my posts have been quite consistent with this: it's just that, as well as the option of literally blocking the long rest I've also been considering how the GM might permit the long rest to take place yet deploy some other x, y and z moves - which likewise involve "naturalistic" extrapolation of the fiction, mostly by leveraging offscreen/backstory material that has not yet been revealed/established in play - in order to functionally negate the effect of the long rest, by suitably amping up the challenge of the encounter that follows under the rubric of "the BBEG uses the passage of time to regroup/marshal its forces".

It was really @hawkeyefan's Strahd example that sharpened my thinking on this. And I regard it as (very clearly) favouring storytelling over skilled play.

 

[pemerton]

I don't design dungeons. I never design enemy plots. I describe areas but usually they've been co-created. NPC reactions are based on mechanics, dice rolls, and player-side goals and relationships. So they're based on player ideas of a cool story, not mine..

So the game would happen just the same without you being there?

@chaochou didn't say that, nor imply it.

In my Classic Traveller game, the behaviours of NPCs are based on the intersection of their reason for being somewhere (eg guards guard; customs officials check papers; interrogators interrogate; etc) and the result of a reaction roll. I am normally the person who decides whether a NPC is a guard, or customs official, or interrogator, or whatever. (In that respect my game is probably less collaborative than the sort of approach chaochou describes).

But I don't make those decisions based on what would make for a good story. I make those decisions based on what does the fiction demand (eg starports have customs officials but not interrogators; secret outposts of offworld infiltrators have interrogators but not customs officials). I apply the outcomes of reaction rolls (eg What does it mean for an interrogator to have a positive reaction to the person she is interrogating? In our game it meant that she sided with him when he escaped, was able to grab some powered armour that was in the base, and proceeded to trash the place). So I am not redundant. But - contra @Crimson Longinus and consistently with what @Campbell and @chaochou have posted, I'm not letting story outcomes drive my decision making process.

I've already posted in this thread about the relevance to the tension discussed in the OP of various sorts of approaches to scene framing and extrapolating the fiction between scenes. Part of the skill of framing scenes well, in games that emphasise GM authority over scene framing together with Adherence to resolution process and outcomes when players declare actions for their PCs during scenes, is thinking up situations that will be interesting independently of any particular story outcome. @chaochou points to one useful thing that can help with doing that: drawing upon the players' ideas of cool stories, evinced by the goals and relationships they come up with for their PCs.

Of course I can't, and don't, claim to speak for chaochou. But I think there is enough similarity between us in how we approach these things that my response to the pretty absurd suggestion that the game would happen just the same without you being there would also fit him to a fair degree.

**********************************************

When you design a dungeon or an enemy plot, describe an event or an area, decide what an NPC does or says, your decision is never influenced by what you think a cool story would contain?

Are you talking about elements of the fiction, or outcomes.

Here are two posts from @Campbell:

There is a massive difference between caring about the game's narrative and a storytelling imperative. Curation involves more than simply being emotionally invested in how things turn out. It involves actively letting story outcomes drive your decision making process.

My own GMing has often involved a conscious rejection of storytelling as a play imperative.

<snip>

I prep dynamic situations in most games I run. Not story. The situation is meant to be engaging, but it exists in the form of questions and not answers. What will happen when the players come into contact with it? Who will they side with? Will they all choose the same side? Will they fight with, reason with, or sidestep this character?

As a GM I want to know what's going to happen as much as the other players. In challenge oriented play I want to see how the players will attempt to overcome the challenge and see how it turns out. In character oriented play I want to see how the individual characters respond and see how it turns out. I have no real interest in directing it.

There is no contradiction between these posts. Situations are engaging and raise questions in virtue of the elements that figure in them. This is quite different from outcomes or answers to the questions raised.

Drawing this distinction is especially important in RPGing because of the role of the players in contributing to the shared fiction by declaring actions for their PCs!

 

[pemerton]

I've understood that to be conditional. I mean, if it's established in the fiction that he can, sure; but if it's not--or if it's specifically been established that he cannot (such as because the PCs destroyed his reinforcements)--then no.

Strahd came up, and I think it was @hawkeyefan who said Strahd's forces are undefined (or defined as effectively limitless) in the adventure. I think that's pretty crappy design--because it puts decisions as to what if any limits Strahd has on the DM--but that's really beside the point. If the PCs have a way of finding out what Strahd's limitations are, and they do, what happens if they choose to take a Long Rest needs to conform to that.

I think the last sentence is true. It's very close to tautologous, I think, in the context of RPGing: subsequently-narrated fiction must conform to prior established fiction. (I'm putting special cases like Toon (cartoon "reality") and Over the Edge (deliberately playing with the fourth wall) to one side here.)

But I don't agree that the point about Strahd in the module is beside the point. Because I think that, in practical terms, it is almost impossible to state the limits on what might count as regrouping, or marshalling forces, for a NPC in any situation that is less contrived or artificial than a pretty traditional dungeon. When you're talking about a Count - a ruler of a meaningful political unit - then in 8 hours that person can rouse guards who were sleeping or were on the walls rather than in the towers or whatever; if a vampire can summon packs of wolves or flocks (? not sure what the right noun of assemblage is) of bats; if a magic-user then perhaps can place magical traps or defences; etc.

Am I arguing for what you've called "naturalism?"

I don't think so.

By "naturalism" I'm echoing a term ("naturalistically") used in the OP. The OP contrasts "naturalistic" extrapolation of the fiction by the GM with "systematised" extrapolation such as found in Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP (the Doom Pool). I am drawing the same sort of contrast; as well as Doom Pool-style techniques (which can also be found in HeroQuest revised) I've mentioned games that systematically contrast the GM's role in framing scenes with the players' role in declaring actions for their PCs within scenes; and also 13th Age, which just uses a hard rule for recoveries of survive 4 standard encounters without an extended rest, or else suck up a campaign loss!

My experience is that many RPGers seem to object to these systematised approaches because they are "artificial". Hence my (and I believe @Manbearcat's) use of "naturalistic" as a label for the contrasting approach.

What you are arguing for - as I read you, at least - is that a naturalistic approach can still yield meaningful limits on the GM's moves within the fiction to "amp up" the encounter if the PCs take 8 hours of rest. I think this is true in the context of (say) Tomb of Horrors or White Plume Mountain. But as I've said above, I don't think it's true once you get into less contrived situations.

 

[pemerton]

The sort of decisions we make when designing an engaging scenario are entirely different in nature to the sort of the decisions made during the course of play where the GM is putting their hand on the scale by manipulating the game in motion. Even then great care needs to be taken in scenario design that you are not funneling players toward making particular decisions. When you start making decisions about what players should do, who they should ally with, who the villain of the story is then you have moved to what I would call story advocacy.

Especially common, in my experience, is a scenario assuming that the players, in playing their PCs, will treat a particular person as a villain more-or-less into perpetuity.

It's not uncommon for a scenario to frame the PCs into some sort of conflict. The first real encounter in my 4e game had the PCs being ambushed while travelling on a boat along a river. (The scenario is from Night's Dark Terror - I recommend it, and 4e D&D handles it especially well, much better in my view than the B/X it was written for.) It is almost inevitable that the PCs will oppose this force with force, and in my prep I did get ready for the eventuality (eg preparing combat stats for the NPCs in question).

Yesterday evening I was re-reading the harm and health rules for Apocalypse World and an example that Vincent Baker gives is of the GM declaring that Dremmer's gang (the NPCs) attacks Uncle's gang (Uncle is the PC) while the latter are out scouting. It's not inevitable that a firefight should ensue, but I think there's an obvious reason that Baker chooses this as an example of how gangs take and deliver harm; it's pretty foreseeable that a player's response to that situation might be to have his/her gang shoot back.

A classic Prince Valiant scenario might be a NPC knight challenging a PC to a joust; or an attack by robber knights, or by an ogre; and these sort of scenarios are foreseeably going to lead the players to declare attacks in response.

What I think is important - when it comes to playing to find out vs story advocacy - is what happens next? Can the PCs, after surviving the ambush, ally with their attackers? Or conversely, as happened in my Classic Traveller game, can they turn on their allies?

And the can here isn't the can of in principle might this happen conformably with the game's rules? It's is this a meaningful option at this table in this game given this GM and how s/he approaches scenario design and adjudication? For a lot of published scenarios, the answer is no. One of the few I can think of where the answer is an unequivocal yes is Robin Laws's Demon of the Red Grove, for HeroWars. (There are also some Prince Valiant scenarios that allow a yes answer, but the typical Prince Valiant scenario isn't intricate enough for the issue to really come up.)

 

[pemerton]

Part of the challenge in Curse of Strahd is, I think (or perhaps this was just how I ran it) that you cannot effectively remove all of the spheres of support he has available to him.

<snip>

I do think that there was skilled play in what my players did. And they did set about removing certain strengths that Strahd has (he has a right hand man, there is a witch who is like a mother to him, and he also had Ireena as a hostage, and they ultimately rescued her).

But all of these were crafted more to present an interesting scenario and to see what the players would have the characters do. Yes, there were challenges they had to face and overcome, but that wasn't the focus of play the way it may be in some other scenario.

As you have probably noticed, I've really appreciated your Strahd example for providing a concrete focus for discussion in this thread.

Everything you say here makes sense. And resonates with my own play experiences (not of Strahd, but of other campaigns).

For instance, I'm going to conjecture that your players used skill in (say) rescuing Ireena. (I don't know the details: maybe there was a clever stratagem, or they used their spells well, or even just chose sensible targetting in defeating the guards who were holding her.) But as you say, the rescue of Ireena didn't really bear upon the subsequent encounter with Strahd from the "skilled play" point of view: it changed the range of story outcomes (eg maybe even if the PCs lose to Strahd and have to run away, at least they saved Ireena), but it didn't actually make it easier, when the rubber hit the road, for them to beat up on that key NPC.

There are some systems that allow a bit more "bridging" from scene to scene, but when I mention the systems you'll see why I still think this falls short of supporting a "skilled play" imperative in any robust fashion:

* In Burning Wheel, a successful check can allow a bonus die to be carried forward into a new check (this is called a "linked test") - in this sort of context that might be a Barovian Rumours-wise check to gain the bonus die for a Folklore check made at the moment of encounter with Strahd to deploy his weakness (eg five cloves of garlic tied in a bundle with a lock of Ireena's hair) against him;

* In Prince Valiant, emotions and morale can adjust the size of the dice pool, so maybe Strahd suffers a -1D penalty because he knows Ireena has been rescued;

* In Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP it is possible (based on GM adjudication) for success in a scene to generate a "persistent" Asset that is therefore able to be carried forward into a new scene - there are a range of ways that might happen in a Strahdish scenario that could mimic either of the above dot points or be something different again (eg Knowledge of Strahd's Parapet-Brooding Habits, which could easily figure as a bonus die in a range of pools for actions that benefit from knowing where Strahd is, or from reliably avoiding being seen by him).​

There may well be local moments of skilled play in generating these sort of augments/debuffs; but in all of these systems the GM still has a lot of authority in actually framing the ensuing confrontation with Strahd, including the benefits Strahd gets from any regrouping and/or marshalling of resources.

I think story curation is kinda baked into TRPGS. Even where it's not the GM, someone (or someones, or plausibly the whole table) will be making choices based on what the story is, and where they think the story should go.

I just don't think this is true. A perfectly feasible D&D campaign could start with B2 KotB, played in classic "skilled play style"; then move to (let's say) The Isle of Dread and Castle Amber played the same way; then White Plume Mountain; and finishing, just for laughs, with Tomb of Horrors.

This isn't a campaign I would want to GM or play in - see my most recent posts in the D&D General - Is this a fair trap? thread - but I think it's feasible, and is the sort of campaign that inspired traps like the one under discussion in that thread.

Even when we move away from that style of D&D (or D&D-adjacent eg Tunnels & Trolls) play, it still needn't be the case that we have story curation. The ideal of a whole host of RPG design is that the game works if the players make decisions based on what they think their characters would do and the GM makes decisions based on what the mechanical outcomes permit and what they think the fiction demands. I've approached my Classic Traveller game like that. The only time it really didn't work was when it came to onworld exploration via land-vehicle: it quickly became clear that I just had to make a decision, independent of any action resolution process, that the PCs arrive at the place they are heading to.

(The designer seems to envisage that this will be avoided because the GM will be able to do map-and-key resolution of the players action declarations about where they drive to. Besides the risk of terminal boredom, this is obviously utterly hopeless for a game that takes it as given that the PCs will travel from world to world to world.)

Of course in making decisions in my Traveller game about (for instance) who is in a just-encountered starship I make choices that (I hope) are interesting and provocative rather than dull and stultifying. But I think @Campbell already gave a good explanation of how this is different from making decisions based on story outcomes.