D&D General Creativity?

[Manbearcat]

Which is fine, as there's some inherent limitations that mean the wizard (or cleric) isn't going to be able to pull it off every time and their being able to pull it off some of the time is quite OK, and is a large part of what makes playing those classes fun.

The limitations:
- the caster's player won't always recognize or realize that the situation could be solved with a particular spell, and-or won't connect the dots to the point of finding that spell in time for it to matter. Usual result: either someone else solves the Obstacle/Problem by other means or it remains unsolved
- the character might not have the key spell prepared, or (less commonly but is still happens) might be in one way or another out of gas, or in some cases might not know the spell at all (e.g. the adventure is written on the assumption someone in the party has Knock as a spell, but no-one does). Usual result: either a delay in solving the Obstacle/Problem until the caster can re-load spells, or it gets solved by other means, or it remains unsolved
- the enemy might take action to prevent the caster from casting, or to interrupt it. In the systems we're talking of, spell interruption is a thing; so a wise enemy might make use of archers or other disruptive effects to hinder casting.

This just reads as "the spellcaster player won't play skillfully." I mean...that's great...unless the player of the spellcaster (and this has certainly been my experience in running AD&D, B/X, and RC) is a highly skillful player! Which is basically the point (as much as anything else). Having an abundance of powerful lines of play is force-multiplied by highly skillful players (which, to no surprise, tend to gravitate toward classes with an abundance of powerful lines of play!).

Personally, I don't often find either of these issues to be a major problem. The game IME isn't as fragile as you seem to be making it out, and frequently has to handle sudden and massive changes in PC power both up and down. Just last night, for example, my party got hit by a couple of lightning bolts and after a series of unfortunate rolls both front-liners now have no armour left! The party's resilience and combat ability just took a serious kick in the you-know-wheres, but the game can handle it without me-as-DM having to change anything about the adventure as written. (whether the PCs can handle it remains to be seen, but the game itself has no problem with it!)

Same thing if they find some really powerful item - almost without exception the game can handle that sudden increase in capability quite well; or so I've found over time, at least.

As for the cognitive-load issue, I figure that just comes with the territory of trying to run high-level games. That said, it's on the players to worry about their characters' items, not on me.

Here is how I'm intending "fragile."

Your B/X Fighter has gained Boots of Levitation and a Sword of Flying! Huzzah! Except...you haven't just increased the lines of play for the Fighter (by giving them Y-axis capabilities) and rendered Flying/falling threats considerably less dangerous (or irrelevant in some cases)! What else have you done?

* You've just force-multiplied the clever Wizard player by increasing their lines of play! Instead of 14 spells with 2 slots typically allocated to Levitate and Fly, you've now freed those slots and responsibility for those lines of play up from the Wizard! Instead of Levitate, they'll now load out the powerful Invisibility or Web or Continual Light! Instead of Fly, they'll now load out the powerful Haste or Fireball or Invisibility 10' Radius!

So falling and flying get nerfed brutally or become irrelevant. We can still obviate or minimize y-axis Obstacles or Pits/Chasms and can access Y-axis opportunities. Light and loading out for it/bearing it now isn't a thing (we'll take Continual Light). We can now ingress and gain surprise/egress from threat/scout like crazy with Invisibility 10' Radius (we'll take that spell). This sort of Daisy Chain when adding a singular item or two to the game is the definition of "fragile." Play becomes an expression of a fault line whereby it becomes increasingly unwieldy in multiple, pivotal, oft-unintended, paradigm-shifting ways on the other side of it.

 

[Lanefan]

In this passage you are talking about what is happening in the fiction.

I am talking about what is actually happening at the table when the game is played.

In the example with the tapestry, the player reasons about tapestries, ropes, knots, running away - all elements of the shared fiction.

In the example of the Rope Trick and Wall of Force, the player reasons about spell descriptions - ie the game rules, not the fiction.

Let's try this again.

In each scenario there are two steps:

A -Step 1. The player reasons about ways and means of taking a tapestry along on leaving the area.
A -Step 2. That reasoning leads the player to creative use of ropes and brute force.

B -Step 1. The player reasons about ways and means of escaping a seemingly inescapable cell.
B -Step 2. That reasoning leads the player to creative use of a spell.

You keep trying to equate Step 1 in A with Step 2 in B. Further, you seem to be saying that creative use of a spell does not equate with reasoning about and-or engaging with the fiction...and with this I disagree, in that a spell and its effects are every bit as much a part of the shared fiction as are ropes and knots. The only difference (a difference that is IMO both arbitrary and artificial) is that spells have hard-coded rules around them that both player and DM are expected to honour, where ropes and brute force do not.

If there's hard-coded rules around the use of ropes and brute force, then what?

In both cases the player is simply trying to use what the PC has available to change the shared fiction to the PCs' advantage.

Another example is one I've posted about in this thread: my player who had to decide whether or not his PC was performing a ritual before working out whether or not a bonus was applicable - this meant thinking about what is happening in the fiction, and how it relates to the way magic works as part of the shared fiction developed through play.

This seems more like thinking about the mechanical benefits first, then trying to find a way to make the fiction work such that those benefits apply.

 

[Lanefan]

This just reads as "the spellcaster player won't play skillfully." I mean...that's great...unless the player of the spellcaster (and this has certainly been my experience in running AD&D, B/X, and RC) is a highly skillful player! Which is basically the point (as much as anything else). Having an abundance of powerful lines of play is force-multiplied by highly skillful players (which, to no surprise, tend to gravitate toward classes with an abundance of powerful lines of play!).

Even the most skillful of players can be undone by bad luck in spell acquisition (it's random in the TSR editions, remember), or bad luck in predicting what the day will bring when memorizing spells in the morning. If you ain't got the spell, you can't cast it very well.

Here is how I'm intending "fragile."

Your B/X Fighter has gained Boots of Levitation and a Sword of Flying! Huzzah! Except...you haven't just increased the lines of play for the Fighter (by giving them Y-axis capabilities) and rendered Flying/falling threats considerably less dangerous (or irrelevant in some cases)! What else have you done?

* You've just force-multiplied the clever Wizard player by increasing their lines of play! Instead of 14 spells with 2 slots typically allocated to Levitate and Fly, you've now freed those slots and responsibility for those lines of play up from the Wizard! Instead of Levitate, they'll now load out the powerful Invisibility or Web or Continual Light! Instead of Fly, they'll now load out the powerful Haste or Fireball or Invisibility 10' Radius!

Hmmm....while I wouldn't label this as fragility per se, that's certainly an angle I'd never really considered before; that giving non-casters items that replicate spell effects frees the casters up to do other things.

The flip side is that with those items the Fighter becomes much more independent, in that she doesn't need to rely on the Mage any more to provide those effects; which makes the Fighter more fun and interesting to play. And this increase in independence extends to the whole party - if the Mage leaves the party, or dies, or gets captured, etc., the party still has flight capability thanks to the Fighter.

End result: while it might look tempting to softly rein casters in by not placing items that obviate the need to cast some spells, I can't see myself going that route mostly because the non-Mage players/characters stand to lose too much in terms of the enjoyment and fun that comes from having those items.

So falling and flying get nerfed brutally or become irrelevant.

I've long since accepted the fact that any party at or over 5th level is probably going to spend a fair bit of time in the air.

We can still obviate or minimize y-axis Obstacles or Pits/Chasms and can access Y-axis opportunities. Light and loading out for it/bearing it now isn't a thing (we'll take Continual Light).

While I see what you're saying, this specific example doesn't hold much water: as Continual Light is permanent, a wise caster would have made dozens of "light rocks" during downtime in town and distributed them among the party, and thus would never need this spell in the field unless all the light rocks got dispelled or lost somehow. Replace it with Haste or Monster Summoning and you're on to something.

We can now ingress and gain surprise/egress from threat/scout like crazy with Invisibility 10' Radius (we'll take that spell). This sort of Daisy Chain when adding a singular item or two to the game is the definition of "fragile." Play becomes an expression of a fault line whereby it becomes increasingly unwieldy in multiple, pivotal, oft-unintended, paradigm-shifting ways on the other side of it.

At least in my own experience the game can handle quite a lot of this sort of thing in the playable-levels range (i.e. about 1-10); though it probably helps explain why high-level play (i.e. at-around levels 11+) tends to make the system wobble and creak far more than it should. At those levels, yes, fragile is a good term for it.

 

[Celebrim]

At least in my own experience the game can handle quite a lot of this sort of thing in the playable-levels range (i.e. about 1-10); though it probably helps explain why high-level play (i.e. at-around levels 11+) tends to make the system wobble and creak far more than it should. At those levels, yes, fragile is a good term for it.

The biggest problems of 1e at levels 11+ is that the PvE isn't really designed for it and unless the DM is particularly insightful and creative he's unlikely to hit on really good ways to keep the challenge up. There were few to none good published examples of play for 1e at much above 11th level, and even fewer for above 15th (except possibly a few Companion level adventures like 'Saber River'). And while there are probably better examples published for 2e, they occur late enough in the editions run that they wouldn't have been much help to TSR era DMs.

The second biggest problem is that Unearthed Arcana broke the game's balance wide open. Double specialized fighters and Cavaliers (and Paladin Cavaliers!) and higher-level multi-classed demi-humans and bow specialization and so forth break the game wide open, to say nothing of the longer spell lists allow for more things in the toolbox of spellcasters with good stats.

I feel confident that I could keep the game going now up until quite high levels, but it would have required quite a bit of ideas that would have been novel at the time and like your game the resulting game would be rather divergent from RAW 1e/2e (though probably not in the exact same ways).

But I don't think 1e/2e is nearly as fragile RAW at high levels as 3e. Even though I prefer 3e as a framework because it has a skill system and more unified mechanics and cleans up a lot of problems, some subtle changes that the designers made really screws up the math. The biggest of them in my opinion is scaling the DC of saving throws by adding monster HD and spell level into the calculations. The game gets much more balanced when, as in 1e/2e, most things are going to make their saving throws most of the time at high levels. Spellcasters are forced more into a support role when they can't nuke everything with save or suck reliably which creates more teamwork and party synergy. PRCs are probably the second biggest offender in that allow of them allow stacking of things that shouldn't be stackable by taking multiple PRCs and frontloading then same effects over and over. Deal with those two issues and the game is a lot less fragile.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But I don't think 1e/2e is nearly as fragile RAW at high levels as 3e. Even though I prefer 3e as a framework because it has a skill system and more unified mechanics and cleans up a lot of problems, some subtle changes that the designers made really screws up the math. The biggest of them in my opinion is scaling the DC of saving throws by adding monster HD and spell level into the calculations. The game gets much more balanced when, as in 1e/2e, most things are going to make their saving throws most of the time at high levels. Spellcasters are forced more into a support role when they can't nuke everything with save or suck reliably which creates more teamwork and party synergy. PRCs are probably the second biggest offender in that allow of them allow stacking of things that shouldn't be stackable by taking multiple PRCs and frontloading then same effects over and over. Deal with those two issues and the game is a lot less fragile.

Though, really, if you're going to do that...why continue to have the save-or-die/save-or-suck spells? They aren't actually doing anything, because a 20% chance to make the enemy suck for a while is a spell no one will ever cast. Wouldn't it be better to cut out these chaff spells that simply can't be made to work properly (because if they work reliably, they're broken, and if they're unreliable, they're pointless)? Then, instead, try to build spells that induce tactical choices simply by...working as advertised?

It just seems really weird to consider it a fully satisfactory result that the game is chock-full of either pointless or overpowered options. Because that was the real underlying problem of 3e. It wasn't PrCs; that they went wrong was a symptom, not the disease. The actual disease is that it presumes that it is a perfectly logical and internally self-consistent system, but it is only the former, not the latter. It's extremely good at pretending to be self-consistent, though, which is why people actually enjoy playing it (a system that is obviously not self-consistent is usually not enjoyable, as people realize that whatever you achieve with it is trivial and thus not very satisfying.)

We can, and IMO should, demand better of game design than "well most of the options are pointless, because they don't work often enough to be worth spending resources on, but the ones that are worth spending resources on are OP." Player creativity, to loop back to the thread topic, is given the best possible growing conditions when (a) you cannot just reduce decisions to calculations, so qualitative reasoning must be used to determine what choice is best, and (b) the options available to the player are sufficiently diverse as to actually provide distinct results but sufficiently narrow as to avoid analysis paralysis. The former qualification is why I don't generally enjoy 3e and its descendants (other than for intentionally "gonzo" games.) The latter is, I find, the big impediment for getting into "OSR" types of games, where things swing wildly between "you have 1-2 things you can do that matter at all" (usually with the added bonus of "and none of them are particularly engaging") and "you can employ the environment and your equipment in a nigh-infinite variety of ways, but a lot of those applications are unhelpful or even counterproductive and it's often extremely difficult to know what would actually be helpful in advance."

 

[Clint_L]

The difference is between thinking about how I could get a tapestry out of a sinister and probably dangerous burial chamber in a hurry, and then working out an answer to that question by further thinking about fictional details (like using rope to create a "harness"); and thinking about the rule book description of the Rope Trick spell and the Wall of Force spell, and how those descriptions interact.

One is about the fiction we are creating together at the table. The other is about the rulebooks.

These are substantially different situations. One is leaning on real world experience that the players presumably share - most folks have a pretty good sense of the forces and skills involved. D&D would handle that situation in basically the same way, except for making it a strength check instead of a labouring check.

The other is based around an entirely abstract, imaginary situation, so really the only way into it is through interpreting rules. But that doesn't mean that you are also outside of the fiction being created at the game table. When I thought about that rope trick example, my impulse was to imagine the situation in game, combined with the description of rope trick, to ascertain if the proposed solution made sense. Given some lack of specificity in the spell the best interpretation was to have the player's idea work because it does not contradict any explicit rules and makes for the best story. Any detailed magic system is going to be rules intensive.

The more abstract the game gets, the more you are going to need rules to maintain a sense of narrative cohesion unless your role playing group is really, really copacetic. Fiasco, for example, has very, very few rules but is a disaster unless the played with a small group who are very much on the same page. But the tighter the rules get, the more it comes an exercise in rules interpretation that becomes harder for the fiction sustain.

5e is an extremely rules heavy game, but a little less so than previous editions, and I like that. I would like it to be a bit more so, for example, by basing skill checks on character background rather than a compartmentalized checklist of skills.

 

[Pedantic]

You seem to be denying the following proposition: Roleplaying is negotiated imagination.

I regard that proposition as fundamental. It gets to the core of how RPGing is different from a boardgame.

I don't think that's particularly fundamental.

RPGs are different in from board games primarily in that they do not have set victory conditions and are unbounded in time, allowing play to continue after failure or success on any given victory conditions by choosing a new one.

To facilitate players choosing their own victory conditions, they have to accept a much wider variety of actions and provide adjudication for more situations than actually come up in any given game. "Engagement with the fiction" is primarily a concern at the layer players are setting goals in. Why do they want to get into this ancient temple? Why do they want this demon lord dead?

Once they have those goals, I don't particularly see how their attempts to achieve them are any different than trying to play any other board game well.

 

[Manbearcat]

I don't think that's particularly fundamental.

RPGs are different in from board games primarily in that they do not have set victory conditions and are unbounded in time, allowing okay to continue after failure or success on any given victory conditions by choosing a new one.

To facilitate players choosing their own victory conditions, they have to accept a much wider variety of actions and provide adjudication for more situations than actually come up in any given game. "Engagement with the fiction" is primarily a concern at the layer players are setting goals in. Why do they want to get into this ancient temple? Why do they want this demon lord dead?

Once they have those goals, I don't particularly see how their attempts to achieve them are any different than trying to play any other board game well.

I'm puzzled how to open with a response here that doesn't come off as snark. I guess let me just say that something weird is happening here because my jaw is on the floor with incredulity at the position you're taking here. I initially thought you and @pemerton had some kind of miscommunication, but your post here is...pretty clear.

There is an endless abundance of examples where players have to index the shared imagined space before (a) winnowing their prospective action declarations to the subset of "legal" moves and then (b) fully considering the myriad possibilities of that "legal" move-space before settling upon a choice.

DOGS IN THE VINEYARD

Player: Can I Help (borrow a die from the player's future Raise to lend another player a die for their current See or Raise) Brother Isaiah here with some covering fire? Let loose with my Colt Dragoon so he can get from the kill-box of the Faith House porch, with the two other soldiers with long guns in an overwatch position, over to me to help me with this soldier (the fiction, being in kill box on the Faith House porch while 2 x Fort Denning soldiers rain down fire from above - and 2 dice equaling 12 total to represent that, that Brother Isaiah's player has to See in the current conflict)?

GM or other Player: You're tangled up in a grapple with the Fort Denning Soldier, battling for wrist control and sprawling to not get taken down. I don't see it.

D&D 4E SKILL CHALLENGE (to track down the Warlock and attack him in his lair before he becomes aware and can ready his defenses)

GM: The entrance to the subterranean complex beneath Tarquin’s estate is profane as it cuts through the heart of the family cemetery and dredges the bowels of the crypt.

The chain is slack and the wrought-iron gates are narrowly open, swinging subtly in a chill breeze. The mausoleum stares at you, well downrange of the long avenue that bisects the grave plots. Vultures look on like sentinels in the trees. The stench of carrion does not hang in the air. Hunger does not direct them. They are in service to another master.

The litanies required to circumvent the main avenue by walking the perimeter that is the ancient family plots are inscribed on the gravestones in “the old tongue.” Either deeds of the family or the sacred rites and hymns must be delivered unbroken, lest the spectral guardians of this place will cast you as grave robbers and defilers whether it be true or not.

PLAYER: <instead of attempting a ridiculous, degenerate move that defies rather than indexes the fiction like "ok, I'm going to do a bunch of burpees (Athletics) or a fancy card trick (Thievery) to impress the sentinel vultures or spectral guardians into quiescence", they declare the following action> CHANVATI has visited the family crypt on several occasions in the past, for no death of a significant relative has gone unmarked by the rites and hymns passed down among House Audaseie in maintenance of the family deeds and achievements. But though he knows the old tongue, he is no Custodian of the Annals. Is his reading true, and does his pleasant tenor carry the proper nuance?" > History check

---

I'm confident I could cite endless examples of this in pretty much any system I could think of.

Am I missing something? Are you and pemerton referring to something conceptually different, perhaps?

 

[Pedantic]

I mean, you picked two examples I find frustrating precisely because they don't allow for much agency in player decision making, or have particular interesting gameplay.

I've railed for years about how skill challenges are not a particularly good game, precisely because the range of player decision making (mechanically, I'm willing to conceded there's plenty of choice in fictional positioning, it's just not generally relevant to the actual game) is very small and usually trivial to optimize.

I was just thinking about the discussion in the other thread we were having about Blades, actually. A friend of mine (over a game of The Great Zimbabwe, one of our favorite Splotter designs) talked about how much he enjoyed a session of BitD, knowing my prior frustrations (and that I'm somewhat infamous for having opinions about TTRPGs). He enjoyed it immensely and will likely go join a campaign somewhere, but assessed it as "oh I'm not sure it is a game" in the sense of the activity we were about to engage in.

Obviously that's an incomplete analysis from off-hand commentary. But I think it's a good example of where I'm coming from. I'm not looking for a fundamentally different activity from the board game we just played. I don't see any reason TTRPGs shouldn't be designed first and foremost as games, and everything you're talking about can flow from there.

If an action doesn't make fictional sense but could still be declared, that's a design problem, not a gameplay prompt. Skill challenges are frustrating because they abstract a thing that doesn't need abstracting. Just say the situation, let the players declare actions, resolve the actions, and then determine the new situation. If you don't like the resulting gameplay, then the place to go is rewriting/tuning the actions.

I used to get pegged a lot as an extreme simulation guy, but that's a cart before the horse thing. Simulation is just a likely result of writing sufficiently clear and useful rules/actions, and will generally give way to genre consideration/player expectation when you need to write rules they'll be leveraging regularly.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Pedantic

Player Agency (amount, kind) is a different question altogether. Right now we're examining (what I have taken as) your claim it is not necessary for players to index the imagined space before they declare an action. That was why I wrote out the post the way I did; to examine that issue.

If we were talking about Player Agency, I would have written the post quite differently and broken out the back-and-forth of conversation + the action/conflict resolution mechanics involved + considerations in play (thematic, tactical, strategic, resource management, risk assessment, advancement, etc) + the consequence-space that the GM is putting forth (of which the players will be dealing with contingent upon their charted course of action). But all those things aren't necessary when we're just examining the bolded claim above.

And for what its worth, even without playing with you I do peg you as an extreme simulation guy! I think I've got a pretty solid grip on the cognitive space you're working within (both when you play and in these conversations) because its a widely held one, a widely expressed one, and I've certainly run games for players similarly positioned quite a bit! Also, unrelated, I don't agree with your assessment of simulation as an input and output and constraint upon play. Its a lot deeper than that (one seminal component is a particular type of GM mental modeling and extrapolation of setting and situation with players working to suss out that GM's mental model and extrapolations and "solve it"). I also disagree with you about Player Agency in conflict resolution (either Dogs or 4e D&D), but, again...another matter entirely! For now, lets examine the bolded claim above.