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

[Ovinomancer]

It sounds like you might be rejecting the possibility of a singular definition, only multiple definitions. Is it down to each group?

Might it be right to say something like -

1. SP is SP-mode + SP-boardgame + SP-language

2. In SP-mode, SP-boardgame-moves are resolved mechanically - by the rules - to solve SP-boardgame-problems

3. In SP-mode, SP-language-moves are resolved by the DM to solve SP-language-problems

4. Players shouldn't use SP-boardgame-moves to solve SP-language-problems: that is not playing in SP-mode

5. SP is not all or nothing, a group might be doing somewhat-SP, and can play in SP-mode + other modes, such as SI-mode

Or something else? I think 4. is particularly important. Several times now it has been explained that just rolling dice to achieve something isn't enough. But rolling dice to achieve something is okay given the right preconditions or context. So what are those preconditions? I assume we don't count the player sitting, looking puzzled for a moment, frowning, face lights-up with inspiration - "I'll make a Persuasion check!" - right? We want them to have paid attention and done some kind of work. But what is that kind of work!?

I really am not sure why you keep insisting that oranges matter. You aren't engaging with the definition as given, you're insisting that it must engage with your other preconceptions. Like this whole boardgame thing, which no one advocating for skilled play is supporting yet you're insisting is a must.

Generally, when asking after others thoughts, you should first try to assume that they are honest and try to figure out how that can possibly work that way. What you shouldn't do is keep your preconceptions and demand that the other person accept those in their thinking. For instance, I have no idea what entails SP mode, SP boardgame, or SP language. These are not components of my thinking. You're not only insisting that they are and insisting that I choose between them, but you haven't even explained these concepts.

 

[Ovinomancer]

This starts to feel like a stitch up We are going with what you listed, right, in that earlier post.

It's a stitch up? Really. He pointed to the list, you engaged that list, and he's clarifying which on that list you actually want because it's like he handed you a menu and you said, "I'll take the lunch, thanks."

 

[clearstream]

I really am not sure why you keep insisting that oranges matter. You aren't engaging with the definition as given, you're insisting that it must engage with your other preconceptions. Like this whole boardgame thing, which no one advocating for skilled play is supporting yet you're insisting is a must.

Hang on?! So you are saying SP is only about engagement with the DMs fiction? Maps, rules, pieces - all that boardgamey stuff - is discounted? Is that really right? On surface that does not fit well with what others have said. The boardgame word in particular was introduced by another poster... which is why I was also using it. I don't see how B/X can be a good example of a system that supports SP, if the boardgamey stuff doesn't matter to SP.

I'm simply trying to find terms for what people seem to be describing and confirm back with them what I understand they are presenting. For example, they describe a "fiction" - so far as I know in RPG fiction is received as language. Player moves are given as language, as regards the fiction. Or do you mean to include something else by "fiction"? Is it that player moves are given in some other way, in connection with it?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Hang on?! So you are saying SP is only about engagement with the DMs fiction? Maps, rules, pieces - all that boardgamey stuff - is discounted? Is that really right? On surface that does not fit well with what others have said. The boardgame word in particular was introduced by another poster... which is why I was also using it.

I'm simply trying to find terms for what people seem to be describing and confirm back with them what I understand they are presenting. For example, they describe a "fiction" - so far as I know in RPG fiction is received as language. Player moves are given as language, as regards the fiction. Or do you mean to include something else by "fiction"? Is it that player moves are given in some other way, in connection with it?

No. Please stop bouncing around and inserting your own assumptions. No one has said this. I asked why you're insisting on whatever structure you've put together -- I can't tell because you haven't bothered to explain what SP mode, or SP language, or SP boardgame are.

Skilled play on the player side is about leveraging your resources and the system to achieve player goals. On the GM side, it is being a fair adjudicator of player actions and not advocating for any particular outcome of play.

I don't know what you're talking about with language or mode or boardgame. These things aren't important to my definition, which is in line with the other definitions presented in this thread.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Based on these two quotes, you (prabe) seem to be using story to mean the sequence of imagined/fictional events that unfolds in the course of RPG play, and seem to be using curation to mean deciding some of the content/topics of that story.

Used in this way, all RPGing produces story and all decisions about framing and consequence narration are story curation.

Yes, exactly.

The way that I, @Campbell, @Ovinomancer, @Manbearcat and (I think) @hawkeyefan - maybe other posters too, but they're the ones who spring to my mind - are using the words is different. In particular, we are using them in a way that does not entail that all RPGing produces story (I think @Manbearcat and I have put the strongest emphasis on this) and that not all decision-making about the content/topic of the fiction is curation (I think @Campbell and @Ovinomancer have put the strongest emphasis on this).

Taking these in order:

When I talk about story in the context of RPGing, and when @Manbearcat in the OP refers to a storytelling imperative, we are using "story" in the fairly common sense of a narrative with a recognisable pattern of rising action, crisis/climax, leading to resolution and denouement. Of course there are infinitely many variations on this pattern. But there are also ways to string together events that would count as a story in the bolded sense I have attributed to you, but would not count as a story in the current sense (ie the sense in which I and @Manbearcat have been using it). The campaign I suggested, of module B2 followed by X1 followed by X2 followed by S2 followed by S1, is extraordinarily unlikely to produce story in the current sense. In the TV show Red Dwarf, part of the joke about Rimmer's Risk diary is that a recount of a game of Risk - while a recount of a sequence of fictional events - is not a story in the current sense.

In the history of D&D one can identify patterns of play which do, or don't, care about producing story in the current sense. Lewis Pulsipher wrote about them way back in the late 70s. In published adventures the publication of the DL modules is widely seen as a turning point; there are also interesting "intermediate forms" like Hickman's Pharoah and Ravenloft which are at their core dungeon crawls of the classic form, but are also intended to have not just superficial trappings of a story (as X2 Castle Amber does) but to actually produce something story-like in the course of play. (I've never played either and so can't comment on how successful they have been; my reading of Pharoah makes me have zero personal interest in running it, though.)

Of course any poster is free to use a word like "story" however s/he likes; but the difference in patters of play that I describe in the previous paragraph is a real one, and it is helpful to have a term available to describe it. In my own posts I do this by using the word fiction or the phrase fictional sequence of events to describe the stuff that is inherent to all RPGing and differentiates RPGs from boardgames and at least some wargames; while using the word story to refer not just to a fiction, but to a fiction that instantiates that typical pattern of rising action, crisis/climax and resolution/denouement.

I feel that you're using incredibly narrow definition of a story. There can be many different kinds of stories. East Asian kishōtenketsu story structure is rather differnt from the western dramatic structure, and other cultures have other patterns. And of course many stories from these cultures do not actually follow the pattern. Some stories are descriptions of real events, and thus cannot follow any specific structure, albeit the narrator may emphasise certain elements to create dramatic resonance (story is not just sequence of events, it is also how those events are described.) Story that doesn't follow a certain pattern doesn't stop being a story; it may be a boring or bad story, or perhaps it could be refreshingly surprising one. I feel the latter is what many of us want from RPGs. And there are many things that make 'a good story,' I feel that what @Campbell is talking about, living in the moment, creating a visceral real experience, it is still about creating a good story, because a story that has that is good.

Turning now to curation:

When @Ovinomancer or @Campbell uses the phrase "story curation", they are talking about making a decision for a particular sort of reason. Curation, in this sense, is a particular type of intentional act. I think it was @Ovinomancer who in a post upthread drew the comparison to curating an art collection: the intention is to achieve a particular aesthetic presentation or result. In the context of RPGing, the sort of curation they are referring to as story curation is making decisions so as to achieve a particular story result. Examples might be so as to achieve foreshadowing of some anticipated later event or so as to ensure that what happens next will be climactic (this is of course quite relevant to the OP). We can also imagine "negative" versions of this - making a decision so as not to negate some earlier intended foreshadowing or so as not to produce anticlimax (again this latter is quite relevant to the OP).

There is an approach to GMing which emphasises having regard to such reasons in making decisions - whether framing decisions or results/consequence-narration decisions - about the content of the fiction. But (contra @Crimson Longinus, if I've understood that poster correctly) that is not the only approach to GMing that has existed in the history of RPGing, or that is possible. There are other approaches, and some have been described in this thread by me, @Campbell and @chaochou.

We cannot disconnect ourselves from our narrative preferences when running a game (nor should we try to.) It just is that differnt people do it differently, some are more like jazz players riffing on feels, whereas others think the story on more technical level, or more likely some vague mix of both. We have experienced various sorts of stories all our lives, the patterns, clichés, tropes are ingrained into us. And for a reason; they resonate. So whether you're planning to do so or just going with feels, this will affect you. When a GM invents things they're channelling their ambient understanding of stories. How many dungeons have series of weaker foes, with the big boss in the end? From rising action to the climax. And if we were to just improvise an adventure on spot, most people would probably improvise something closer to this pattern than first fighting the big boss, winning, then fighting some random unconnected kobolds. Even when Campbell is searching for 'what feels real at the moment' they're channelling certain sort of stories, albeit probably more the tone than the structure (not that these are completely unconnected either.)

So what I am saying there is not some binary either or situation, it is a continuum, with improvised riffing on feels influenced by your general understanding of stories on the other end and a predestined railroady adventure path on the other, most games probably falling somewhere in the middle.

 

[Campbell]

@Crimson Longinus

I feel like you are trying to smuggle in your play preferences to other sorts of play that fundamentally do not share them. It's true that we cannot fully disconnect from our narrative preferences and that all RPGs will produce narrative or story as an output. It does not follow from there that the purpose of all RPG play is the production of story. When I say story is incidental to play (except to the extent it generates fallout that impacts future play) I mean exactly that. Story happens, but I'm not there for it.

When we are playing something character focused I don't want to feel like we are in a writer's room or the GM is a film director. I want their minds to be focused on what we're doing right now. For this type of play to feel rewarding I need you here with me. I need your focus to be on your character and playing them with integrity. Your character deserves your advocacy and investment. Good stories often occur when we do this, but it's beside the point. I'm looking for as authentic embodiment of character here as possible. That's really hard. You should not have much time to think of anything else.

Likewise for more challenge oriented play I want your head in the game. The GM should be busy providing honest adversity, making fair calls, and extrapolating the effects of player decision making. They should also be enjoying when players do those Play of the Game type things. Players also need their heads in the game. They have challenges to overcome. If they can afford to spend cognitive effort on what's best for the story the challenge level should either be amped up or they're not contributing to the team like they should.

Obviously there are varying configurations of play priorities and I chose fairly extreme configurations here (that I happen to really enjoy). The overall point is that story need not be a high priority or even one at all. It's often the case that focusing on story can detract from the play experience if the group is prioritizing other things.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

@Crimson Longinus

I feel like you are trying to smuggle in your play preferences to other sorts of play that fundamentally do not share them. It's true that we cannot fully disconnect from our narrative preferences and that all RPGs will produce narrative or story as an output. It does not follow from there that the purpose of all RPG play is the production of story. When I say story is incidental to play (except to the extent it generates fallout that impacts future play) I mean exactly that. Story happens, but I'm not there for it.

When we are playing something character focused I don't want to feel like we are in a writer's room or the GM is a film director. I want their minds to be focused on what we're doing right now. For this type of play to feel rewarding I need you here with me. I need your focus to be on your character and playing them with integrity. Your character deserves your advocacy and investment. Good stories often occur when we do this, but it's beside the point. I'm looking for as authentic embodiment of character here as possible. That's really hard. You should not have much time to think of anything else.

Likewise for more challenge oriented play I want your head in the game. The GM should be busy providing honest adversity, making fair calls, and extrapolating the effects of player decision making. They should also be enjoying when players do those Play of the Game type things. Players also need their heads in the game. They have challenges to overcome. If they can afford to spend cognitive effort on what's best for the story the challenge level should either be amped up or they're not contributing to the team like they should.

Obviously there are varying configurations of play priorities and I chose fairly extreme configurations here (that I happen to really enjoy). The overall point is that story need not be a high priority or even one at all. It's often the case that focusing on story can detract from the play experience if the group is prioritizing other things.

Nah. I get what you're saying, I too feel that endeavouring to create that intense engagement at the moment is super important. I just feel that you (and certain others) have bizarrely narrow definition of 'story'. This is just the jazz method of creating an engaging story.

And I don't think that "good stories often occur when we do this, but it's beside the point," is at all besides the point. That's like super crucial to the point. You're using intuitive method for creating good stories, and that the players feel engaged and that the story is good are not separate unconnected things, they're basically the same thing!

 

[prabe]

I think you have done a good job of getting at the differences in how posters are using the language.

Based on these two quotes, you (prabe) seem to be using story to mean the sequence of imagined/fictional events that unfolds in the course of RPG play, and seem to be using curation to mean deciding some of the content/topics of that story.

Used in this way, all RPGing produces story and all decisions about framing and consequence narration are story curation.

I do believe that story--or at least narrative--emerges from play, yes, but I think it's (at least mostly) only visible looking backward.

When I talk about story in the context of RPGing, and when @Manbearcat in the OP refers to a storytelling imperative, we are using "story" in the fairly common sense of a narrative with a recognisable pattern of rising action, crisis/climax, leading to resolution and denouement. Of course there are infinitely many variations on this pattern. But there are also ways to string together events that would count as a story in the bolded sense I have attributed to you, but would not count as a story in the current sense (ie the sense in which I and @Manbearcat have been using it). The campaign I suggested, of module B2 followed by X1 followed by X2 followed by S2 followed by S1, is extraordinarily unlikely to produce story in the current sense. In the TV show Red Dwarf, part of the joke about Rimmer's Risk diary is that a recount of a game of Risk - while a recount of a sequence of fictional events - is not a story in the current sense.

Story structure is a thing, but there are enough different types of story structures that I wouldn't say that every story will fit into the structure you describe. It seems easy and natural to me to describe a D&D campaign as a picaresque, for instance, which is a story that often eschews that sort of structure.

That said, there is without question a difference between a narrative and a story.

Of course any poster is free to use a word like "story" however s/he likes; but the difference in patters of play that I describe in the previous paragraph is a real one, and it is helpful to have a term available to describe it. In my own posts I do this by using the word fiction or the phrase fictional sequence of events to describe the stuff that is inherent to all RPGing and differentiates RPGs from boardgames and at least some wargames; while using the word story to refer not just to a fiction, but to a fiction that instantiates that typical pattern of rising action, crisis/climax and resolution/denouement.

Sure. There's a difference between playing a game to go through a pre-planned story, and playing to generate a narrative. I think I'd use fiction to include setting and character stuff that might not directly effect or reflect in the narrative as well as the events; the narrative would be pretty much your "fictional sequence of events." In this context I think I'd think of story as being a narrative authored instead of generated through play. So most adventure paths would seem to have stories inherent in them, and any GM working from the OP's "Storytelling Imperative" plausibly has a story in mind.

There's probably space between us, here, but I don't think it's unbridgeable.

Turning now to curation:

When @Ovinomancer or @Campbell uses the phrase "story curation", they are talking about making a decision for a particular sort of reason. Curation, in this sense, is a particular type of intentional act. I think it was @Ovinomancer who in a post upthread drew the comparison to curating an art collection: the intention is to achieve a particular aesthetic presentation or result. In the context of RPGing, the sort of curation they are referring to as story curation is making decisions so as to achieve a particular story result. Examples might be so as to achieve foreshadowing of some anticipated later event or so as to ensure that what happens next will be climactic (this is of course quite relevant to the OP). We can also imagine "negative" versions of this - making a decision so as not to negate some earlier intended foreshadowing or so as not to produce anticlimax (again this latter is quite relevant to the OP).

If one is using "curation" that way, I think a GM who chooses the types of instigating events to frame into the fiction is plausibly curating the fiction, or the narrative, in such a way as to achieve a particular presentation or effect--but maybe without concern as to the result. If I frame in a fallen wizard's tower (on a crashed flying island) presentation is self-evident, and so is aesthetic (I think); if I don't care what the PCs do, though, I don't think I'm curating a story--though I would say I'm definitely curating the fiction.

Talking about foreshadowing in a TRPG seems kinda like trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. Playing a TRPG isn't the same experience as reading a novel, and foreshadowing is one of those things that works well in literature but not so much in a TRPG. Same goes with "ensuring what happens next will be a climax."

I think that's at the heart of the conflict in the OP, which I don't see: It's taking as a given that one can or should reproduce literary effects in a TRPG. Since I think it's not possible--and in fact I think it's a bad idea to try--because the media are so different, the conflict in the OP pretty much literally does not exist for me as a GM.

It's also worth noting that there are ways of designing an RPG which will tend to ensure that, in the play of the game, story-like elements (foreshadowing, rising action, climax, resolution) will emerge without the need for curation. Generally they eschew the sort of "naturalism" that @Manbearcat and I have referred to and that I posted about upthread in reply to you; perhaps for that reason they do not have the market share of 5e D&D. But they also sidestep the tension that is described in the OP.

I'd say that if the rules for a given game ensure a literary structure will emerge from play without the people at the table doing anything to make it happen (other than play the game by the rules) then the rules are curating the fiction to generate a story.

But 5e D&D is not one of those RPGs; one feature of it that makes that so is its reliance on "naturalism" rather than overt allocation, among the participants, of responsibility within parameters for the creation of the fiction at various points of play. Hence it is at least moderately unlikely to produce story in the sense that I am using that phrase without curation; and as the OP notes, that curation - which mostly works by the GM exercising his/her extensive authority in respect of as-yet unrevealed backstory/offscreen fiction - has the potential to negate or undo the gains of skilled play. Hence the tension which prompts the question in the OP.

I think part of the reason those games don't have the market share (other than D&D being first-to-market, lo these many years ago, and all the advantages that entails) might be that 5E doesn't curate the fiction, and explicitly allows the people at the table to make fiction in any shape or structure they want/choose.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Sure. There's a difference between playing a game to go through a pre-planned story, and playing to generate a narrative. I think I'd use fiction to include setting and character stuff that might not directly effect or reflect in the narrative as well as the events; the narrative would be pretty much your "fictional sequence of events." In this context I think I'd think of story as being a narrative authored instead of generated through play. So most adventure paths would seem to have stories inherent in them, and any GM working from the OP's "Storytelling Imperative" plausibly has a story in mind.

When I say 'story' in context of an RPG, I just mean the sequence of events unfolding at the table and the manner they're described.

 

[Manbearcat]

This starts to feel like a stitch up We are going with what you listed, right, in that earlier post.

I don’t know what a stitch up is?

And yes.

There are 6 games listed (which I’ve GMed so I can speak to them):

AD&D
RC Hexcrawls
Moldvay Basic
3.x
4e
5e

Each game has multiple Skilled Play subheadings listed for each of them.

I asked you to list 3 of those Skilled Play subheadings but not combat.

You listed:

* An actual game but without either of the 2 Skilled Play subheadings.

* Something that isn’t on that list (but looks like the 1st Skilled Play subheading after 3.x).

* Something that isn’t precisely on any game’s list but can be zoomed out to be on every game’s list (the closest I could read to the exact wording you used was under 5e).


So, for instance, something like this would be what I was looking for (the game and the exact subheading...so I can focus precisely on that Skilled Play in that particular game):

RC Hexcrawls: Optimizing recon/surveillance for optimizing spellcaster loadout and refresh for everything else (obviate obstacles, render combat rounds after rd 1 moot, sustain "heavies").

3.x: Class and build choice minigame (pick Druids, Wizards, Clerics).

4e: Skill Challenge creativity in action declarations and Skill Power/Utility deployment.