Disconnect Between Designer's Intent and Player Intepretation

[payn]

I think Dungeons & Dragon's alignment probably deserves to be mentioned here. Simply on the ground that nobody has been able to figure out what the designers intent might have been in over 40 years.

Outside 3E palladin, Ive never had any issues with it.

 

[Yora]

I didn't say anything about issues, and neither does this topic.

Just saying that nobody can figure out what the intend seems to be.

 

[payn]

I didn't say anything about issues, and neither does this topic.

Just saying that nobody can figure out what the intend seems to be.

That sounds like an issue, one that agree many folks have. I guess the "nobody" take is what I'm disagreeing with.

 

[dragoner]

I think Dungeons & Dragon's alignment probably deserves to be mentioned here. Simply on the ground that nobody has been able to figure out what the designers intent might have been in over 40 years.

It is religious, based off medieval cosmology, like Lawful Good is the Roman Church and your alignment language is Latin, where Common is Koine, Greek. It is adaptive though.

 

[Celebrim]

My example is Cthulhu Pulp. Running around killing mythos creatures with shotguns and shrugging it off seems anathema to the cosmic horror genre.

Conversely, I see Cthulhu Pulp as an adaptation to how the game is actually played as opposed to how it was intended to be paid.

This comes back to weapons to me, because if you look at one shots and prepared scenarios the PC's are expected to be armed with derringers, cue sticks, and sharpened fencing foils. But of course, the reality of any campaign is that very quickly the PC's end up armed with 10-gauge shotguns with bayonet lugs, submachine guns, hunting rifles with 10 power scopes, Colt model 1911's, .44 magnum lever action carbines, grenades, dynamite and cans of gasoline. In other words, the players arm themselves like they are facing heavily armored foes that can shrug off light weapons, because that's really what is happening. And the players learn that anything that gets within limb's reach of Lovecraftian horror probably dies horribly, so they arm themselves sufficiently that Lovecraftian horrors notably lacking in missile weapons struggle to get within limb's reach of the party. Anathema or not to the genre, that's how real players react. Anathema or not to the genre, that's what the rules reward. Upping your firearms skill is much more likely to help you survive than upping your anthropology or your Latin, even in most published examples of play. So you might as well run with it and make that part of the game's assumptions.

 

[Umbran]

I think originally the creators wanted players to make characters who were anarchs, you know, fighting against or at least trying to resist having the man breathing down their throats, but in my experience most players wanted to be the people standing on someone else's neck.

That would be difficult to support, given that Anarchs didn't appear as a player option in the core rulebook.

 

[payn]

Conversely, I see Cthulhu Pulp as an adaptation to how the game is actually played as opposed to how it was intended to be paid.

This comes back to weapons to me, because if you look at one shots and prepared scenarios the PC's are expected to be armed with derringers, cue sticks, and sharpened fencing foils. But of course, the reality of any campaign is that very quickly the PC's end up armed with 10-gauge shotguns with bayonet lugs, submachine guns, hunting rifles with 10 power scopes, Colt model 1911's, .44 magnum lever action carbines, grenades, dynamite and cans of gasoline. In other words, the players arm themselves like they are facing heavily armored foes that can shrug off light weapons, because that's really what is happening. And the players learn that anything that gets within limb's reach of Lovecraftian horror probably dies horribly, so they arm themselves sufficiently that Lovecraftian horrors notably lacking in missile weapons struggle to get within limb's reach of the party. Anathema or not to the genre, that's how real players react. Anathema or not to the genre, that's what the rules reward. Upping your firearms skill is much more likely to help you survive than upping your anthropology or your Latin, even in most published examples of play. So you might as well run with it and make that part of the game's assumptions.

I've never ever played CoC this way. Ever. Though, I can totally see the D&D playloop drift making players want to do this.

 

[Celebrim]

I didn't say anything about issues, and neither does this topic.

Just saying that nobody can figure out what the intend seems to be.

I wouldn't put it that way. I think people who are philosophically close to Gygax in their real personal beliefs probably don't struggle much with the concepts that he lays out because they have the same tuition about what "weal", "woe', "law' and "chaos" mean. Certainly lots of people believe that they understand the intent, and in the broad terms are in strong agreement with each other.

The trouble with alignment is that while it doesn't document real world belief, something like alignment exists in the real world and so just as the members of D&D universe don't agree with each other about which alignment is best to have, real world tuitions about the subject matter of alignment disagree and create biases and beliefs about it that are inconsistent with each other. And because Gygax only sketched out alignment broadly, probably because he assumed that the meaning of the words was obvious, this left people massively free to diverge in practice.

As just one example, many people in the real world believe words like "weal" are subjective, and so those people tend to have massive problems with the very concept of alignment and are biased to reject it. But that's very much not the same as being unable to figure out the intent of the rules. That's actually a sign that they do understand the intent, and are rejecting it.

 

[Celebrim]

I've never ever played CoC this way. Ever. Though, I can totally see the D&D playloop drift making players want to do this.

How do you manage to have an extended campaign if you don't do this? And I don't think it's the D&D play loop that causes it, although there are examples of published CoC modules that are effectively D&D dungeons with maps of sprawling underground locations and keyed encounters. I think it's the rules themselves that do it. CoC is written using the simulationist BRP ruleset which intends to model the game universe as a natural procedure of play. As such, the rules don't privilege in response to seeing a ghoul, doing something like, "I roll Occult to destroy it.", which would be perfectly fine in a game where the players can set stakes and declare into existence aspects of the game universe. They do privilege, "I roll Firearms to fire 10 rounds from my Tommy Gun into the moldering horror."

 

[payn]

How do you manage to have an extended campaign if you don't do this? And I don't think it's the D&D play loop that causes it, although there are examples of published CoC modules that are effectively D&D dungeons with maps of sprawling underground locations and keyed encounters. I think it's the rules themselves that do it. CoC is written using the simulationist BRP ruleset which intends to model the game universe as a natural procedure of play. As such, the rules don't privilege in response to seeing a ghoul, doing something like, "I roll Occult to destroy it.", which would be perfectly fine in a game where the players can set stakes and declare into existence aspects of the game universe. They do privilege, "I roll Firearms to fire 10 rounds from my Tommy Gun into the moldering horror."

Dont do extended campaigns as they dont make sense. Characters more likely to go insane (even armed to the teeth) than die from being ripped apart, but even that's still common. The point isn't to go around killing monsters, I've never really gotten that as intent. Its akin to old school D&D where combat is a failed state. You want to avoid it if possible.

Now I think things like Delta Green, Cthuhlu Pulp, Cthulhu Tech, etc.. are designed to give the extended campaign experience, but they move away from base assumptions.

Did I miss the chapter that says folks in the 1920's had easy access to B.A.R. Rifles, sub-machine guns, and grenades?