D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[iserith]

Which is the point I was trying to make way upthread when I said that [MENTION=6787650]emdw45[/MENTION]'s game wasn't what I think of when I think of sandbox. Since everything he talked about was DM generated, and nothing he mentioned was player generated, it doesn't look like a sandbox to me. I consider player agency to be the hallmark of a sandbox. Judging with the sliver of information I have about his campaign, I'd call Emdw45's game a linear game with a lot of lines. And since those DM generated plots will directly impact the PC's, the players don't really have the option of ignoring them and going off to do their own thing. They have to deal with those DM generated plots or very bad things will happen to the game world.

My best description would be a linear campaign made up of a number of linear (since they're time based, they have to be linear) plots running in parallel. Cool idea and probably a lot of fun. Certainly a ton of work has gone into it. But, not what I would call a sandbox.

To be fair, just because [MENTION=6787650]emdw45[/MENTION] didn't mention his players' goals (so far as I can recall), doesn't mean they don't have some independent of the adventure opportunities the DM is offering as part of presenting a dynamic, changing setting. Perhaps that is why so many hooks are left dangling - the players are off doing their own thing, hooks be damned.

Whether or not leaving those hooks unresolved results in Very Bad Things for the world is irrelevant to whether a game is sandbox or not in my view. If anything it speaks to the PCs as protagonists and the only ones who can do anything to stop the villains from achieving their nefarious goals. That would simply be an established fact of the setting, not unlike magic or gravity existing. If Doctor Tendril completes his doomsday device and the city of Fort Castle is destroyed by malign entities from the Far Realm, then that's just something that has changed in the world the aftermath of which the PCs may or may not have to contend.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

You are right on the money about mystery stories. I'm talking about game play which has about as much in common with a story as a weasel does with the tarrasque. In a role playing game my character isn't doing stuff at the whim of dramatic appropriateness. Taken to the logical conclusion why bother trying to do ANYTHING. If it isn't dramatically appropriate for you to do then it ain't happening so just write he story and be done with it. During actual play I like to play the character as if it were actually in the setting and take action based on what makes sense in the setting and in the situation. Waiting around with thumb firmly up backside until some narrative convention "allows" activity to take place is for the birds.

D&D has always been story based to me. We are playing the story of whatever the DM comes up with. The first game I every played was on a BBS where I was handed one of the Heroes of the Lance from Dragonlance and played through the Dragonlance Chronicles. The first group I joined in real life, the DM spent his days at University writing up 50 page dungeons filled with traps and puzzles for us to solve. My brother learned to play and he'd spend weeks writing up every city and country on his planet filled with details of who we'd meet. One of the first people I ever met outside of my first D&D group would write in a 200+ page book about what magic items his players would find when they reached level 18...even though his game hadn't started yet and they were starting at level 1. When I started DMing, I ran the Rod of Seven Parts adventure along with adventures I took out of Dragon Magazine.

The thing is, when we play we do what our characters would logically do in that situation as well. No one is sitting around and saying "Oh, some dramatic device is preventing us from continuing. We do whatever the story wants us to." Instead people are saying "Well, we didn't find any information. We came up blank. What's our next plan?"

In the same way that in real life there isn't always answers available, in the story the same thing applies. The reasons WHY the information isn't available is probably different. In one case, it's because there were no witnesses to the crime and no evidence left behind. In the other case it was because the author thought it would be more fun for the answers to reveal themselves later. But to our characters, the metagame reason WHY we can't find the information are inconsequential. We didn't find information. What do we do about it?

I've said this in other threads, but there are always restrictions on your actions. You can't fly if your character doesn't have that power. You are restricted to the kind of things an Elf Fighter in a D&D world can do. Restricting this further to "things an Elf Fighter who is presented with this situation and has these social ties and complication can do" doesn't seem to be a huge stretch.

But this logic, ALL games have dramatic restrictions on your actions. You are playing a D&D game with friends. That means you aren't going to take any actions that make your friends angry at you. You aren't going to constantly attempt to take actions that aren't genre appropriate(like pulling out a laser rifle or attempting to mix up a batch of C4). You are restricted to actions that make sense within the "story" of the game world you are playing in. No one is going to go looking for Elminster when we are playing a Dragonlance campaign.

There's no such thing as a game without restrictions. I've just never understood the arbitrary line that people appear to draw between "I'm completely free to do whatever I want just as long as I restrict my actions to those I can take as a human fighter who is currently bolted down to a table and unable to move because I made the thieves guild mad, this is awesome!" and "You said I wasn't allowed to split the party, leave the adventure, and become a pirate because no one else wants to play that type of campaign....that's railroading!"

There's a HUGE divide between "I can't do anything, since it won't be allowed if it isn't dramatically appropriate" and "I'm not allowed to everything, but as long as my character continues to follow the basic plot of this adventure, I can do whatever I want."

How will discovering the nature of the succubus early on ruin anything? If the PCs correctly identify her nature then they can warn the authorities about her and prompt them to keep tabs on her while they go and deal with other things. Are there any clues or information that that the goblin's activity is abnormal in any way? If witnesses to the attacks claim that the goblins appeared to driven by some mad unholy force then they would be interesting enough to check out. I think that is preferable to artificially blocking player efforts mechanically just to steer game play toward some narrative goal.

Ummmm........well YEAH!!! That is kind of the whole point. Any stories that emerge from play are the PLAYERS stories. Events in a campaign absent a DM's story don't have to be random or unconnected. There can be things going on that affect other things and the players could get tangled up in any number of them. What they get mixed up in and how is up to them though. If a story already has a beginning, a middle, and end all worked out there really isn't a need to play it out because we know how the story ends. I don't want live game play to feel like watching a movie that everyone has already seen.

I don't want to write stories as a player. I show up to be entertained not to do the entertaining. If I wanted to write stories, I'd pull out a pen and paper and stay in my room writing a story. I don't have fun writing stories. I enjoy reading and experiencing other people's stories though. That's why I watch TV, that's why I watch movies, that's why I play video games, and that's why I play D&D. I like to experience stories. Video games let you experience a story but with a lot of restrictions. You can decide when the protagonist fires his weapons, which NPC he talks to first, and sometimes you get to make some basic decisions as to the direction of the plot. D&D is like that but with less restrictions. You get to decide the EXACT questions you ask the NPCs. You can develop some elaborate plans to catch the bad guys that don't involve shooting them. But you still get to experience a story.

The thing is, when we play a D&D story, it may have a beginning, middle and end, but the players DON'T know it. They get to experience it as it is unfolding. It's like watching a movie that no one at the table has seen before but everyone gets to be actors in and you don't get any scripts given to you, you just get the basic idea of your character and then improvise.

I liken it to a more structured improv acting exercise. One person acts as a mediator or judge of the improv. He sets the scene and tells you the rules of the scene. He can call out changes any time he wants and you have to flow with them. But you get to decide what your character says and how he "solves" the scene. The fun comes from working within those restrictions. Without them, it's really easy to "win". You just yell out "I pull out a missile launcher and shoot and it kills everyone!"

 

[ThirdWizard]

I guess I just like foreshadowing in my stories. I like stories that are unresolved but them pick up again later. TV shows with fairly tight story arcs that span multiple years are pretty much my favorite stories. Babylon 5 being my favorite show ever.

To me, playing this sort of adventure has the same kind of feeling for me. It feels like someone put the time and effort in to craft a story with a definite beginning, middle, and end with threads that run through the whole thing.

In my mind, there can be loose ends left lying around, but the game absolutely needs a satisfying resolution so that the players can see, keeping with the TV example, the end credits begin to roll. In a mystery TV show, the protagonist defeats the bad guy of the week, or whatever, and maybe a big bad guy remains at large. But, they still beat that enemy. So, they can move on.

I do this all the time in my games. I've got several plot threads running. For example, in one game the PCs were attacked by assassins. Which of their enemies hired assassins to kill them? Well, they were in the middle of something else, so they decided to ignore that for then. They could have investigated it, but they prioritized other things. Eventually, a session or two later, they decided to find out what was going on with that and took care of it, and it turned out to be part of a much larger whole. However, in the meantime, they completed a bunch of other tasks.

I think what we're not seeing here is that credit roll. What has been described in this thread feels more like a cliffhanger without a resolution than a dangling plot thread to look into later. It's as if we see Captain Jean Luc Picard turned into a borg, and after the commercial break Riker decides to take a vacation on Risa and come back to Picard later after he's had another adventure. STOP THAT RIKER!!! BAD NUMBER ONE!

Why is that bad? Because that's what the "episode" was about, and you want to have a resolution at the end of the episode (or episode arc).

Now, when the episode is about something else, then it's fine to have those long plot threads, and they're very common because they are not the main focus of each individual episode or they are part of an ongoing arc which is just equivalent to a really long episode. But, if its an arc, then you don't go off and leave that plot thread, you investigate it every single episode. Take X-Files. Every episode the viewer had their resolution. There may be signs that there's something going on in the bakground - the Smoking Man, Deep Throat, aliens, conspiracies everywhere! - but the monster of the week is taken care of. The audience needs that monster of the week to be taken care of. The foreshadowing, the conspiracy, that's background stuff. It happened, and it was interesting for the moment that it happened, but something else immediately took your attention away from it and said "I'm important! Investigate me now or everything is going to go wrong!" and so you know that that thing that just happened isn't what you should be looking into. Because the other thing demands immediate attention.

So, given the adventure you were running, I'd probably frame it completely differently. The PCs would resolve their adventure, catch the bad guard or whatever, and credits would roll. We'd start the next session in medias res with the guard having killed himself between sessions and the PCs talking with somebody about it, who is saying how odd it was, then immediately goblins would attack! The PCs would rush out to defend the town, but the main force would escape, probably with some kids or something. The PCs would then need to track them down right then and there, maybe rescue the kids but then discover something sinister the goblins were up to.

Given that scenario, you run into none of the problems you faced. The PCs get a resolution to the first session. The get the foreshadowing, but it is obvious that more important things are going on so they feel free to move on. They have to react immediately so there's no question of DM intent. They know that it's okay to leave the guard investigation. You're giving them implicit permission, so they can feel good about their decision to move on.



Now moving onto something a bit earlier, more the meat of what you were talking about in your OP, I believe.

I cannot find the post, but you said there was an issue where you were having an issue of expectations with the player in that he wanted to use rolls to determine success without, and I'm paraphrasing using my own words here, describing his interactions with the world and relying purely on mechanics to describe his character's actions. Would you classify this as an accurate representation of the given player's behavior?

Because, I know the topic has veered from this quite considerably, but I just wanted to point out that it might be worth it to run a one shot of Dungeon World with the player in question. I say this for a few reasons, but one of the biggest is that when changing systems, people are far more open to embracing a different playstyle. If someone has been playing D&D for a few years, and you say "Now I want you to stop playing that way and start playing like this," then there is a lot of inertia that has to be gotten over, not to mention the idea that any change means that there must be something "wrong" with the way you were playing before. But, when you're playing a brand new system, its a lot easier to say "Lets try a little more roleplay in our descriptions guys." Especially when that system is built on the idea of describing actions the way Dungeon World is.

So, if you aren't familiar, in DW players describe what they are doing in the in-game world, and they never say what roll they want to make. Never. That is 100% the purview of the GM. To attack a monster, the player has to describe how they are attacking the monster. To search a room, the player has to describe how they are searching a room. Then, the DM interprets their description as a game mechanic.

I think this would be good for the player in question to experience, and it might give him a deeper appreciation for that style of play.

 

[iserith]

So, if you aren't familiar, in DW players describe what they are doing in the in-game world, and they never say what roll they want to make. Never. That is 100% the purview of the GM. To attack a monster, the player has to describe how they are attacking the monster. To search a room, the player has to describe how they are searching a room. Then, the DM interprets their description as a game mechanic.

That is also the case in D&D 5e.

 

[ThirdWizard]

That is also the case in D&D 5e.

It in no way comparable to the action resolution mechanic for D&D 5e.

 

[iserith]

It in no way comparable to the action resolution mechanic for D&D 5e.

What I'm referring to is that in D&D 5e, the players cannot decide to make checks. That is the province of the DM if and when the DM establishes uncertainty in the outcome of an action the player has described. See Basic Rules, pages 3 and 58.

Of course, it's pretty common practice for players to say they want to make a Perception check to search or the like. However, that's not what the rules say to do. Players describe what they want to do in fictional terms and that is all. In fact, it's not really smart play to ask to make a roll. It's effectively asking for a chance to fail when a DM could otherwise say you simply succeed at a given action. I recommend working with players to break them of this habit.

 

[ThirdWizard]

What I'm referring to is that in D&D 5e, the players cannot decide to make checks. That is the province of the DM if and when the DM establishes uncertainty in the outcome of an action the player has described. See Basic Rules, pages 3 and 58.

Of course, it's pretty common practice for players to say they want to make a Perception check to search or the like. However, that's not what the rules say to do. Players describe what they want to do in fictional terms and that is all. In fact, it's not really smart play to ask to make a roll. It's effectively asking for a chance to fail when a DM could otherwise say you simply succeed at a given action. I recommend working with players to break them of this habit.

Thing is, in Dungeon World, you can't make any roll without GM say so. So, you may end up with something like this:

Player A: "Hrothgar rushes in to attack the ogre with my dagger!"
DM: "The ogre laughs as he smashes your dagger away, and counters by swinging his other fist down toward Hrothgar's head. What do you do?"

In that case, the DM ruled that the dagger just wasn't a threat to the ogre so no attack roll was allowed.

Now, depending on how the player describes their character's action, the DM might respond differently.

Player A: "I try to duck underneath!"
DM: "Make a Defy Danger roll using Dexterity to avoid the blow."

Or maybe Player B sees this as an opportunity.

Player B: "I run up beside Hrothgar and hold my shield up to protect him!"
DM: "Roll your Defend Move with Constitution to protect him."

Unless the DM thinks it isn't possible for him to act that quickly.

DM: "There's no way you could get your shield up in time. But, I'll allow you to take the blow's full force for him."

I can't see this type of exchange being the norm for any version of D&D, but this is how Dungeon World plays. I suggest it above because it will encourage the player to really start to describe their actions in game instead of calling for rolls, because they are expressly forbidden from calling for rolls due to the nature of the game itself. Dungeon World just doesn't support it because there is too much DM fiat. That wouldn't even be a good thing for D&D, but it works in DW due to the nature of the game itself.

 

[iserith]

Thing is, in Dungeon World, you can't make any roll without GM say so.

I'm familiar with running and playing Dungeon World.

That the players cannot make rolls without the GM's say so is also the case in D&D 5e.

So, you may end up with something like this:

Player A: "Hrothgar rushes in to attack the ogre with my dagger!"
DM: "The ogre laughs as he smashes your dagger away, and counters by swinging his other fist down toward Hrothgar's head. What do you do?"

In that case, the DM ruled that the dagger just wasn't a threat to the ogre so no attack roll was allowed.

Also possible in D&D 5e. The player says what he or she wants to do. The DM narrates the results of the adventurer's actions. The rules serve the DM and come into play at his or her pleasure. In Dungeon World, moves come into play when the fiction demands it and according to the GM's agenda and principles.

Now, depending on how the player describes their character's action, the DM might respond differently.

Player A: "I try to duck underneath!"
DM: "Make a Defy Danger roll using Dexterity to avoid the blow."

Or maybe Player B sees this as an opportunity.

Player B: "I run up beside Hrothgar and hold my shield up to protect him!"
DM: "Roll your Defend Move with Constitution to protect him."

Unless the DM thinks it isn't possible for him to act that quickly.

DM: "There's no way you could get your shield up in time. But, I'll allow you to take the blow's full force for him."

I can't see this type of exchange being the norm for any version of D&D, but this is how Dungeon World plays. I suggest it above because it will encourage the player to really start to describe their actions in game instead of calling for rolls, because they are expressly forbidden from calling for rolls due to the nature of the game itself. Dungeon World just doesn't support it because there is too much DM fiat. That wouldn't even be a good thing for D&D, but it works in DW due to the nature of the game itself.

There is actually less DM fiat in Dungeon World when it comes to adjudication in some ways because, as the GM section says, "This chapter isn’t about advice for the GM or optional tips and tricks on how best to play Dungeon World. It’s a chapter with procedures and rules for whoever takes on the role of GM." Also, "From the get-go make sure to follow the rules. This means your GM rules, sure, but also keep an eye on the players’ moves. It’s everyone’s responsibility to watch for when a move has been triggered, including you." This last bit might even suggest that players can say when a move is triggered.

Compare this to D&D 5e where the rules serve the DM, the "Master of Rules," and come into play whenever he or she likes: "The rules serve you, not vice versa" (DMG, page 235). As well, "The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren't in charge. You're the DM, and you are in charge of the game" (DMG, page 4). The players, on the other hand, may only "describe what they want to do" (Basic Rules, page 3).

So while Dungeon World is an awesome game that I think every D&D fan should try, D&D 5e already comes with the assumption that players are not asking or deciding to make checks. That is securely in the province of the DM by the rules, if not in practice. In any case, I think the player in question was just an unreasonable person given what was established upthread, making it a social problem rather than a game system problem.

 

[ThirdWizard]

[MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] I don't think the player was specifically unreasonable, I just think that they had different expectations on how to play D&D from previous play experiences that were very, I suppose you could say, rudimentary. He didn't appear to understand how to overcome a task via anything but the dice, and I know how hard it can be for a player to overcome that hurdle that is changing how you approach playing. The complaining about things being too difficult is probably a worse sign than the expectation that dice can solve everything.

It wasn't my intention to pull this thread too far off topic into an entirely different RPG than D&D, so suffice to say that regardless of the nuances of how Dungeon World or Dungeons & Dragons should be played, it is easier to get players to change play style if you change the game completely, and Dungeon World is built perfectly for getting players to move away from the dice and interact with the fiction. Surely, you can agree with that assessment?

 

[iserith]

@iserith I don't think the player was specifically unreasonable, I just think that they had different expectations on how to play D&D from previous play experiences that were very, I suppose you could say, rudimentary. He didn't appear to understand how to overcome a task via anything but the dice, and I know how hard it can be for a player to overcome that hurdle that is changing how you approach playing. The complaining about things being too difficult is probably a worse sign than the expectation that dice can solve everything.

Ruining the game experience and then throwing stuff around tells me that there's more wrong with this player than his inclination to want to solve problems with dice more than anything else.

It wasn't my intention to pull this thread too far off topic into an entirely different RPG than D&D, so suffice to say that regardless of the nuances of how Dungeon World or Dungeons & Dragons should be played, it is easier to get players to change play style if you change the game completely, and Dungeon World is built perfectly for getting players to move away from the dice and interact with the fiction. Surely, you can agree with that assessment?

I can agree that it's good to play other games to broaden one's breadth of experiences. That said, D&D 5e is a different game than D&D 4e, the similarity in name and tropes notwithstanding. This player, however, appears to be unaware of that or unwilling to change to reflect the assumptions of the new game he has chosen to play.