Challenge the Players, Not the Characters' Stats

[justanobody]

Narrative

"My guy moves over here, and hits the goblin with his sword", "Regdar greets the innkeeper"

Roleplaying

"I run up to the goblin and hit him with my sword", "'Hail, good innkeeper!'"?

But what does any of this have to do with challenging the players vs the character stats?

 

[MerricB]

Don't forget Role Assumption: taking the role of the character and making decisions as that character, though not actually role-playing/acting out the persona in speech.

Cheers!

 

[ExploderWizard]

4E PHB, p8: "Every D&D game needs a Dungeon Master—you can’t play without one."

That's his job.

-Hyp.

4E PHB, p195 "This might seem strange advice for a Dungeon Master's Guide, but it's entirely possible to play D&D without a Dungeon Master."

It seems this book is somewhat at odds with itself BTW your quote appears on page 6.

 

[Hypersmurf]

4E PHB, p195 "This might seem strange advice for a Dungeon Master's Guide, but it's entirely possible to play D&D without a Dungeon Master."

It seems this book is somewhat at odds with itself BTW your quote appears on page 6.

You're in the wrong book. My quote appears on p8, but not of the DMG. Your quote appears on p195, but not of the PHB. p6 of the DMG has something similar to what I quoted from p8 of the PHB.

Note that your quote carries on to qualify that it's if you're only interested in combat that you can get by without a DM.

-Hyp.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Note that your quote carries on to qualify that it's if you're only interested in combat that you can get by without a DM.

-Hyp.

IOW, if you want to eliminate the DM's role, you can play 4Ed like an extremely detailed tabletop wargame?

Imagine that!

 

[ExploderWizard]

You're in the wrong book. My quote appears on p8, but not of the DMG. Your quote appears on p195, but not of the PHB. p6 of the DMG has something similar to what I quoted from p8 of the PHB.

Note that your quote carries on to qualify that it's if you're only interested in combat that you can get by without a DM.

-Hyp.

ROFL I typed PHB instead of DMG oops!

 

[pemerton]

One thing I wish dnd had more of is the notion of "drama points"...similar to what is seen in the Buffy RPG.

Basically these are mechanics that let players "break" the rules in an organized way, such as having a key friend come in at the right time, the perfect clue just "happens" to fall into the player's lap, etc.

The skill challenge mechanics provide something functionally in the neighbourhood of this - have a look at some of the actual play examples LostSoul has posted, for example, or the discussion of "fact introduction" upthread.

 

[pemerton]

If skill challenges are simulations, how can they be shared narrations, while combat simulations are not?

For what it's worth, 4e combat resolution also has narrativist dimensions (eg the Come and Get It fighter power, which allows a 1x/enc pull of foes within a certain radius towards the PC, and which therefore in effect empowers the player to 1x/enc specify how, in the gameworld, it comes about that those foes move closer to his/her PC).

The DM has to base the existence of said tower or chandelier on his knowledge of what the world may hold or use whatever system is in place to determine such.

This is equally true in narrativist play, except that the logical relation will typically be one of consistency rather than entailment (which in any event is, in practice, unlikely to be made out given the paucity of detail about the gameworld). And the system in place to determine which of the various possibilities obtains (each consistent with the prior state of the gameworld, but all mutually inconsistent as extensions of that state) is one of game-mechanically-distributed stipulation.

If you want to include said determination into a Skill Challenge dice roll, you've changed role-players into role-players plus world creators.

Yes, for a certain value of "role-playing". Of course, in my view "roleplaying", as used to describe the activity of playing an RPG, includes the act of stipulating the state of the gameworld when this takes place during the course of play.

This doesn't work for most folks as the challenge stops being "beating your opponents as your character" into "beating your opponents by halfway wishing the world into existence to win."

<snip>

This is the difference between people jumping up from the table shouting, "WE KICKED YOUR BUTT!!" to "That was a good story we made."

<snip>

It is my assertion success is as important to role-players as it is to wargamers and cardsharks.

It's interesting that you seem to agree with Ron Edwards about the inconsistency of winning and storytelling. I think the tension between the two is not as great as you (and Edwards) are suggesting. For example, provided that the mechanics place certain constraints on narrative distribution, then there can still be a challenge in taking the story to where you want it to go (eg victory for one's PC). And overcoming that challenge might still be fun.

I also think that you are wrong in suggesting that roleplaying (in your sense) and narration are inconsistent speech acts. In many cases I think they are performed simultaneously. I'm reminded of Davidson's essay on Quotation (1979), in which he says (pp 80-81 in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation):

"I once resolved to adopt a consistent way of using quotation marks in my professional writing. My plan was to use single quotation marks when I wanted to refer to the expression a token of which was within, but double quotation marks when I wanted to use the expression in its usual meaning while at the same time indicating that the word was odd or special ('scare quotes'). I blush to admit that I struggled with this absurd and unworkable formula for a couple of years before it dawned on me that the second category contained the seeds of its own destruction. Consider . . . [my earlier remark that] Quine says that quotation '. . . has a certain anomolous feature'. Are the quoted words used or mentioned? Obviously mentioned, since the words are Quine's own, and I want to mark the fact. But eqaully obvious is the fact that the words are used".​

As Davidson notes, it is possible to both use a word and to mention it at the same time. Likewise, I think it is possible to both tell a story (ie occupy the authorial "god" role) and to play a role (ie occupy the protagonist role) at the same time - an example would be a player who says "I take a drink from my water-bottle, which of course I refilled before we left town." Here the players is both playing the role of his/her PC and occupying the authorial role.

This is why I think that Edwards is correct that no particular role (protagonist or authorial) is indicative of whether play is simulationist or narrativist. To work that out you need to look at what sorts of expectations and constraints determine what is done by any given player occupying any given role.

 

[pemerton]

In the way discussed in the DMG. There are three basic steps, the second having two components.

First step: The level of the skill challenge (which has been predetermined by the GM) tells us the DCs for Easy, Medium and Hard skill checks.

Second step: Any given skill check suggested by a player must be classified as Easy, Medium or Hard. This is done by the GM (presumably most GMs would accept input from their players) and is determined by a combination of (i) the GM's intuition as to how easy the task described by the player would be in ingame terms, and (ii) the GM's view as to how much s/he wants to reward and encourage players having their PCs attempt that sort of task. (This second component is a metagame consideration, not an ingame matter - one example of how a GM can take this thing into account is given on p 42 of the DMG, in the discussion of a PC using an acrobatic manoeuvre to push an ogre into a fire).

Third step: The GM may vary the DC by +/- 2 based on the degree of flamboyance, enthusiasm, cleverness etc of the player's description of her PC's action. (This overlaps to an extent with (ii) in the second step above, but I think (ii) is concerned with a more generic question about a generic sort of activity being undertaken by PCs in the campaign, wheras the +/-2 seems to be more about responding to the strengths of a particular player's narration/roleplaying).

That's not a mechanical process, but in a cooperative playing group I think it's a reasonably tractable one.

So the DM is just making things up and givings bonuses to die rolls. There is no real way to quantify those actions, except by DM fiat.

Well, if by "making things up" you mean reading certain numbers of a table in accordance with certain guidelines of the sort I discussed, and then allocating +/- 2 adjustments in accordance with certain guidelines of the sort I discussed, then I guess so.

On this understanding of "making things up" then that is equally the case for Classic Traveller, RQ or RM.

Of course, 4e differs from those games, but not in the GM having to make judgement calls. It differs in the guidelines. In RM etc the DC is a function of difficulty in the gameworld. In 4e the DC level (Easy, Medium or Hard) is a function of metagame desirability. Do you think the latter is more likely to be contentious than the former?

 

[pemerton]

2. Simulated role-play. This is all the educational role-playing testing real people's real abilities. It's also RPG role-playing. Not the GM, of course. He's running the game. GM is a type #1 kind of role-play. He's not actually in the simulation. He's the one doing it.

<snip>

It's my assertion people want to play D&D to role-play as #2. GMs fill a #1 role of running the game.

I believe objective portrayal of the simulated reality is best. That's my preference though as it doesn't end up in "we won because the DM let us win".

But the more the rules are something the players follow vs. rules the PCs follow to model a world, the less real successfully overcoming any challenges endeavored in that world will be.

There is winning in role-playing. You winning as your character.

The best exposition of this playstyle that I know is by Lewis Pulsipher in an article collated into the Best of White Dwarf vol 1. The discussion in the 1st ed AD&D PHB of how to go about preparing for an adventure is located in the same paradigm, but is less explicit than Pulsipher. (Interestingly, the 1st ed DMG doesn't say all that much about what is involved in GMing this sort of play - I think Pulsipher is better in that respect.)

What is noteworthy is that, when Pulsipher published an article located within the same paradigm in 1983 (Dragon 79) it already seems to have been a more controversial presupposition about the aim of play (Forum response published in Dragon 81).

I'm personally not persuaded that most people play D&D (or other RPGs) in order to test themselves in the way that you suggest.