Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9466230" data-attributes="member: 42582">No it didn't.It started with me posting this:I didn't say anything about what does or doesn't make sense. My remark was about the play of the game.  Gygax's PHB and core parts of his DMG set out a style of play, which is coherent, for which the game provides rules for scene-framing, for which the game provides rules for action resolution. And XP for gp is a core element of that game.Remove XP for gp, and that game no longer exists - colloquially, it is broken. Instead of a game with a win-condition known to the players, with a framework that the players can interact with and significantly influence (despite not having total control), what takes its place is a completely different game, in which the GM sets the win conditions, and controls scene-framing as they desire, and controls much of action resolution as they desire.I didn't say anything about validity. I said that XP for gp is fundamental to the game presented by Gygax in the AD&D books. Get rid of it, and you get a completely different game. (More on this below, as well as in my posts upthread.)Yes, I'm aware of that. I started a thread about it, around 10 years ago: <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/dming-philosophy-from-lewis-pulsipher.355801/" target="_blank">DMing philosophy, from Lewis Pulsipher</a>But GM decides is not the game that Gygax helped to design, and that he advocated, even though many RPGers drifted it that way at an early stage, keeping its rules for PC building and its combat resolution rules, but replacing its goal and its framing rules, and supplementing its resolution rules, with GM decides."Scope" is a description of the fiction. I am talking about the game, and the gameplay.As per Gygax's advice to players (that I quoted, in part, upthread), a dungeon map is knowable. The players can - by declaring actions for their PCs that involve moving through the dungeon, listening at its doors, using detection magic, etc - learn its layout, learn what lies behind its doors, etc. They have the reaction rolls, too, to try and collect information or opportunities from dungeon inhabitants. And then they can make plans as to how they engage those prospective encounters. In technical terms (that hadn't been coined when Gygax was writing), the players are able to exercise significant control over what scenes are framed, by making informed decisions about which doors to open. The game has rules to support this - not only the rules for obtaining information, but the rules for evasion of pursuit (which, if the players can get their PCs out of the combat without being hacked down by the free attack in response, tend to give the players a reasonable chance to get away).It is not possible to play a "living, breathing world" in the same way. That is not knowable. The players can't, by declaring simple actions around moving and listening and scrying, obtain the knowledge that will let them exercise considerable influence over scene framing. And that's before we get to the fact that the GM is now not just controlling scene-framing, and action resolution for all the actions for which there is no other system, but also determining what the actual goals for successful play are.For me, there are two issues.One is about acknowledging that not all RPGing is GM decides, and that Gygax presented a game in which the GM did not decide the focus of play. Rather, the game itself provided a focus of play - just as any other game does - and players would then exercise their skill at that play to try and "win", by hauling gp out of dungeons and hence earning XP.The second is that I, personally, think that GM decides makes for bad RPGing, and therefore have an interest in pointing out the first point, ie that there are other possibilities and some of them were foundational in the design and publication and play of D&D.I regard these as almost a worst-of-all-worlds situation: these locations give rise to all the constraints and artificiality of classic D&D dungeons, but without the players having the chance to engage in skilled play, because of the change in the way scene-framing and action resolution and goals of play are understood.</blockquote>

Verification