D&D General Creativity?

[pemerton]

@Manbearcat I am taking your "love" response to signal agreement with my interpretation of your post.

Your post makes a strong claim!

Can we refine it a bit? Eg consider the following proposition:

In classic D&D (OD&D, AD&D, Basic), if the play is in a tightly defined and circumscribed dungeon environment (where the map and key do the work of definition and circumscription) and if the MU/wizard is no higher than level N then @Campbell's principle isn't violated.​

What value of N will make this proposition true?

I want to say that if N is 6 or even 8 it's probably true. I think if N = 9 then having access to Teleport and Transmute Rock to Mud and Cloudkill makes it false.

There's an argument that if N = 7 then Charm Monster and perhaps Dimension Door also make the proposition false, but within a tightly defined dungeon I think that's less obviously true.

I don't know 3E or 5e well enough to try and conjecture possible values of N. I'm also not talking about wilderness adventuring, where the changed relationship between in-fiction recovery cycles (still roughly daily) and in-fiction challenge cycle (roughly daily) makes MUs/wizards broken; nor about urban adventuring, where the failure of definition and circumscription can make even 1st level Charm Person broken.

 

[Lanefan]

@Campbell

It's an interesting model that supports a plausible conjecture (ie inside the play loop we don't want to establish/author new things that will reconceptualize the situation in question, at least not without extreme care).

As is the way with we academic lawyer/philosopher types, my first thought was of the following problem case:

The system being played is ostensibly "trad", so within your model its play loop is a session or two. The action involves the PCs entering an urban building stealthily. And a player asks "Is there a box/crate/piece of abandoned furniture/etc nearby that I can use to get up high and peer through the window?"

I don't think AD&D has a principled way of answering that question. Rolemaster doesn't; nor does Spacemaster. I don't think RuneQuest does. I'm not sure about HERO or GURPS but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't.

Define "principled", please.

If the presence or absence of something to stand on isn't noted in the prep or module, the DM quickly assigning the odds of something useful being present/nearby and then rolling (or having a player roll) against those odds seems principled enough to me. For me, assuming I hadn't already narrated the area below the window as being empty or being full of junk or whatever, it'd probably go something like:

Player: "Is there a box/crate/piece of abandoned furniture/etc nearby that I can use to get up high and peer through the window?"
Me-as-DM-whose-notes-don't-cover-this: "Good question. Roll a d20, the higher the roll, the better for you in terms of accessibility and sturdiness." <in my mind, a 20 would have something sturdy already sitting right there where it's needed, a decent roll would mean there's something useful close by, a middling roll would indicate issues either with convenience or sturdiness, and a poor roll might indicate there's nothing useful here and either the character has to look further afield, find another way to reach the window, or abandon the idea of looking through it. A 1 would probably indicate something went very wrong in the process e.g. a lot of noise was made in the search, or a box that looked sturdy collapsed with a crash when stood on, etc.>

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Aside from Wish, which often carries a large cost to cast, nothing in the Wizard toolbox really opens up the possibility of reconceptualizing the scene. All of D&D's spells are very specific blocks of narrative force that generally do one thing and one thing only. (The spell says, "In a scene, you can assert the following is true.") While this eventually gives you a Swiss army spell book of problem-solving tools for almost every occasion, it doesn't let you reconceptualize scenes.

I don't understand the distinction you're alleging here. "In a scene, you can assert the following is true" IS a type of scene reconceptualizing. It isn't as pervasive as wish, but the whole point of reconceptualizing a scene is that you are personally declaring what is true about it. That's why magic is and always has been a problem to balance in "trad D&D." Some classes have absolute and nearly inarguable power to reconceptualize scenes as long as they still have mojo, while other classes are totally dependent on leveraging only what is already conceptualized.

It's definitely a better starting point for talking about the problem of magic. Because I think this might finally be specific enough to explain the problem to folks who respond to allegations of caster favoritism with "the fighter can always be creative!!!" Or maybe not. The capacity to dismiss real problems simply because one has not personally experienced them should never be underestimated.

 

[Manbearcat]

You can use a wall of stone to bridge a chasm, but the chasm is still there, and the wall of stone has limitations on size, durability, and so forth.

You’re literally describing “reconceptualize scenes” here.

The prior gamestate was “impassable obstacle so no access to gamestate > over there” to “obstacle obviated and gamestate/situation reconceptualized.”

And, as you go on, Wizards have a Swiss Army Knife of these loadouts and deployments and it gets progressively worse as we move through levels.

Experienced GMs know what capabilities that spellcasters bring to the table and prepare for it.

And here you’re exactly depicting the above when I say: “unless the GM initiates blocks via Force and a, uniquely obnoxious for all participants, Spellcaster Rock/Paper/Scissors game that obliterates any concept of competitive integrity before it even gets off the ground).”

Trad GMs have an endless array of “throws” in the play-degenerating game of Roshambo to keep spellcasters in check. Not only are GMs not confined to the actual action economy of the game…but they aren’t confined to the options of Rock/Paper/Scissors! They can pull out anything from an alternative implement to a tactical nuke…because all of this overwhelmingly exists offscreen and is the exclusive purview of the GM’s pretense-to-simulation, extrapolation of setting/NPCs etc. A mental model that increasingly becomes untenable to both (a) run legitimately in the first place and (b) be sufficiently telegraphed in the actual play of the game such that the Wizard player can respond to the GM’s 3 x throw (to the Wizard players 1 x throw) of “block your spellcasting plays/moves.”

There are 3 realities once you hit level 9ish and above:

* The Wizard player is morbidly profligate + misplay-city in their loadouts and deployments.

* The Wizard player progressively reconceptualizes scenarios and dominates play.

* The GM intervenes with Calvinball buggery (of which we all know the regime of those moves and the simulation veneer that undergirds them).

EDIT - We’ve danced this dance many times in the past. If we want to bridge to yet another LFQW or F vs W thread, I’m for it (for all the good it will do)!

 

[Lanefan]

There are 3 realities once you hit level 9ish and above:

* The Wizard player is morbidly profligate + misplay-city in their loadouts and deployments.

* The Wizard player progressively reconceptualizes scenarios and dominates play.

* The GM intervenes with Calvinball buggery (of which we all know the regime of those moves and the simulation veneer that undergirds them).

I'm a bit lost on one thing here: are we talking about reconceptualizing scenarios before interacting with them in the fiction (i.e., trying to change them as and when they are first narrated), or during?

There's a big difference.

Changing or reconceptualizing a scene (or a component of a scene) before interacting with it in the fiction doesn't sit right, whether done by a player or the GM. A player stating there's a desk in the room where none was narrated, or a GM changing the narration to say the fireplace is blocked where it wasn't narrated as such before because someone decided to look up the chimney - not good, in either case.

Changing and reconceptualizing a scenario during or as a part of in-fiction interaction with it, however, would seem to be a fundamental part of the game; be it as simple as moving a chair so as to reach the top of a wardrobe or as complex as cutting down a tree to fall so as to bridge a canyon (or casting a wall of stone spell to the same end).

Yet it seems you're arguing against either type of reconceptualization*, so either I'm misreading you or something's come adrift.

* - that the wizard has progressively more and greater options to make these changes is another question entirely.

EDIT - We’ve danced this dance many times in the past. If we want to bridge to yet another LFQW AOR F vs W thread, I’m for it (for all the food it will do)!

Food? These threads can cook now?

 

[Pedantic]

I don't understand the distinction you're alleging here. "In a scene, you can assert the following is true" IS a type of scene reconceptualizing. It isn't as pervasive as wish, but the whole point of reconceptualizing a scene is that you are personally declaring what is true about it. That's why magic is and always has been a problem to balance in "trad D&D." Some classes have absolute and nearly inarguable power to reconceptualize scenes as long as they still have mojo, while other classes are totally dependent on leveraging only what is already conceptualized.

Hold up. If bringing specific narrative effects to bear necessarily involves "recontextualising the scene" what other room is there for resolution? All you've got left is some kind of roll to interact, and that's just gambling, not a mechanic that involves decision making on the part of the player.

I'm partial to specific, discrete narrative powers behind spread about more liberally than just the wizard class, and specifically think many of them should be in the skill system and effectively always on for some "mundane" specialists, but I don't want to play a game without them. Resource management and finding efficiencies between your abilities and the situation is the entire non-combat game in classic D&D. If those effects are unbounded ahead of time (i.e. you can alter the narrative however you want, or as the result of some negotiation) then you've already lost half of the potential mechanical hooks to play a game with. Resource management without the potential for efficiencies is at best a push your luck game asking you when to withdraw, and at worst, completely determined and not a game.

I suppose you could make the efficiencies entirely reactive. You decide which obstacles to spend on, and have to evaluate their costs for not doing so? That quickly runs into an information problem, because optimal pay becomes about depending your HP or will or taking on conditions or whatever in the the best combination (probably either all in on one, or spread out as evenly as possible). That's still a game, but I don't see why removing half of the possible decision making space would make a game more interesting.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Hold up. If bringing specific narrative effects to bear necessarily involves "recontextualising the scene" what other room is there for resolution? All you've got left is some kind of roll to interact, and that's just gambling, not a mechanic that involves decision making on the part of the player.

I'm partial to specific, discrete narrative powers behind spread about more liberally than just the wizard class, and specifically think many of them should be in the skill system and effectively always on for some "mundane" specialists, but I don't want to play a game without them. Resource management and finding efficiencies between your abilities and the situation is the entire non-combat game in classic D&D. If those effects are unbounded ahead of time (i.e. you can alter the narrative however you want, or as the result of some negotiation) then you've already lost half of the potential mechanical hooks to play a game with. Resource management without the potential for efficiencies is at best a push your luck game asking you when to withdraw, and at worst, completely determined and not a game.

I suppose you could make the efficiencies entirely reactive. You decide which obstacles to spend on, and have to evaluate their costs for not doing so? That quickly runs into an information problem, because optimal pay becomes about depending your HP or will or taking on conditions or whatever in the the best combination (probably either all in on one, or spread out as evenly as possible). That's still a game, but I don't see why removing half of the possible decision making space would make a game more interesting.

I apologize; I did not mean to say nor imply that these things should be removed. Simply that the Wizard (as emblematic of full casters), to me, appears to be built on a form of recontextualizing the scenes they are in, while the Fighter (as emblematic of non- or low-casters) is effectively forced to exclusively work within the existing context. I agree that these tools should be more widely available and indeed used much more frequently than the "every few sessions" note. My favorite edition is 4e where in some sense all powers give a little bit of recontextualizing input. The game I run is Dungeon World which (as Pemerton said, albeit about Apocalypse World) puts the recontextualizing right into the moves themselves, since that's literally what moves do. They resolve open questions and return new context for the fiction. So yeah, I'm very big on spreading around the recontextualization love, and if the resources are well-designed I'm absolutely in favor of using resource management, as one tool among many, to encourage players to make reasonably informed decisions and to evaluate the results thereof.

 

[chaochou]

The action involves the PCs entering an urban building stealthily. And a player asks "Is there a box/crate/piece of abandoned furniture/etc nearby that I can use to get up high and peer through the window?"

I don't think AD&D has a principled way of answering that question. Rolemaster doesn't; nor does Spacemaster. I don't think RuneQuest does.

To be a bit nitpicky on the detail - but Runequest does have a principled way. Your POW * 5 is your luck - being closer to the gods through a high Power attribute brings greater attention and favour. So that's your basic principle - although the actual process of implementation and interpretation of any roll remains firmly rooted in the rpg technology of 1977. A bit like Traveller, there's lots of stuff in Runequest, interesting and useful stuff - most of it with no attempt to enunciate how actual play proceeds!

 

[Manbearcat]

@pemerton , that looks right to me.

Food? These threads can cook now?

Ha! My mobile autocorrects in the most annoying way possible!

I'm a bit lost on one thing here: are we talking about reconceptualizing scenarios before interacting with them in the fiction (i.e., trying to change them as and when they are first narrated), or during?

There's a big difference.

I'm talking about game as game and the ability to obviate or advantageously reframe adverse gamestates with a frequency and a potency that is unparalleled by level 9 and only becomes increasingly so (without GM-facing, offscreen, "extra-play," competitive-integrity harming intervention). In terms of "reconceptualizing scenarios" that is what matters when we consider the functionality of the game layer.

 

[pemerton]

@chaochou Thanks for the correction re RQ!