Disconnect Between Designer's Intent and Player Intepretation

[Old Fezziwig]

Really, the meaning of the text is, at the end of the day, it's meaning as absorbed by the reader, rather than its author's intent.

As a recovering English literature graduate student, I could not possibly be more thrilled to see this discussion here. . But at the end of the day, aren't RPG manuals instruction manuals? If the authors fail to convey their meaning, then that is a failure on their part.

 

[Celebrim]

As a recovering English literature graduate student, I could not possibly be more thrilled to see this discussion here. . But at the end of the day, aren't RPG manuals instruction manuals? If the authors fail to convey their meaning, then that is a failure on their part.

Speaking honestly, there are many otherwise well written instruction manuals that failed because of my inattentiveness, and not because the author didn't include the necessary steps. For example, if I'm making a chocolate cake and the instruction clearly say to add a cup of water to the batter, if I fail to do that it's probably my fault if the cake doesn't turn out as moist as the creator intended. Which isn't to say that instruction manuals or RPGs are always clear, but it is to say that the reader has some requirements as well and not all failures are on the part of the writer.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Speaking honestly, there are many otherwise well written instruction manuals that failed because of my inattentiveness, and not because the author didn't include the necessary steps. For example, if I'm making a chocolate cake and the instruction clearly say to add a cup of water to the batter, if I fail to do that it's probably my fault if the cake doesn't turn out as moist as the creator intended. Which isn't to say that instruction manuals or RPGs are always clear, but it is to say that the reader has some requirements as well and not all failures are on the part of the writer.

That's fair, though I'd argue that it really depends on who your audience is. If you're pitching your cookbook at experienced bakers, you can probably talk around the edges of the instructions, trusting them to fill in the gaps. But your readers need to have some expertise to know what gaps they should be filling and how.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, I was taking it as a premise for my response that we care about conformity to genre.

The issue is that I think you need to recognize there are a lot of people who want some conformity to genre, but not necessarily the degree of stylization to strongly encourage that. That there's more than one set of concerns in play, and the compromises to have those was considered acceptable.


The example I usual give is Champions. Champions is not a superhero game that tries to go hard-in on making sure all the beats of the superhero genre are followed for a number of different reasons including gamist concerns, its age, and others. But contrary to what some people will try to claim, it doesn't ignore genre conventions completely, either (elements of the damage system lean into that fairly hard, which can actually be an issue when the system is being used for other genres).

So a Champions game is going to produce results that look pretty well like a superhero fiction when zoomed out, but it may not always look like one when zoomed in or examined in detail, because of the compromise in design. And that's not an error if you want those elements.

But because those elements are present, you don't get salty about the fact sometimes design elements will produce results you may not have wanted because you were serving multiple masters; you either accept it or fix them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

They literally shoot at the monster in the Dunwich Horror don’t they? And Cthulhu is rammed with a ship. I think people underestimate how much Lovecraft had people successfully fight monsters in his stories.

There's also some military action in Shadow Over Innsmouth as I recall. But of course you'll note we are mentioning three out of many stories, and in most stories the people involved are simply people who wouldn't think of a violent solution or would be unlikely to be successful at it if they did. And notably, the ship ramming with Cthulhu had an extremely transient effect (which is why I note this is really only an effective response with the lower end opponents).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Someone should make a thread to discuss that kind of thing.

One of the problems with that discussion is how much you want the game to put its thumb on the genre scale is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. I don't want a game to ignore the genre for which its designed, but I'm not usually wanting it to hem it in too tightly either, which some people very much do want.

Its just that its an area where you really need to look at what you incentivize. You don't necessarily need to heavily incentivize every play element you want, but if you incentivize things you don't want, that's on you.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not of need; in at least a few (HōL comes to min, as does KAMB, Ninja Burger, and the original edition of Og) they're deconstructions. Intentionally reinforcing anti-genre play for its value as humor...

See my comments later regarding this; I doubt the designers of HoL were expecting a different play-pattern than they got, though. And I don't consider that trivial.

Rein‧Hagen may have utterly missed his intent, but the design is no failure - it turned out to be one of the most popular anti-hero RPGs...

I think you have to say a wrench that isn't very good at turning things is a failure of design even if it turns out to be pretty good at pounding nails.

Essentially, "Monsters R Us" as camp rather than serious drama. Rein‧Hagen's intent is irrelevant to play; only the group's intent vs the emergent behavior is important. It's one of the more successful designs, in fact...

But its not successful as a design, because that's not what it was designed for.

Games are not fiction, where what the person experiencing them gets out of them are all that matters; they're (at least also) tools for a purpose, and even if they serve a different purpose well, if they don't serve the one intended they're a failure of design.

 

[Thomas Shey]

D&D has always been focused around fighters, clerics, rogues/thieves, and wizards. The main systemic difference role-wise was that the designers recognized that you need to fill these roles, and making sure that other classes could do so as well, instead of falling in between the roles and breaking the Ron Swanson rule by half-assing two things. As part of this system change, Defender classes were given the ability to manage "aggro", albeit via punisher mechanics ("You're free to do X, but I'll hurt you if you do") instead of aggro lists like in WoW.

There was also a more specific change with the fighter and ranger, where the ranger became more purely martial and took most of the heavy damage/Dex-based/archery stuff from the fighter, and the fighter became more defined as specifically a Defender.

Yeah. I kind of found a number of things in 4e too formalized in ways I found unpleasant, but it wasn't so much taking things D&D hadn't had before but formalizing things it had had from early on (which some MMOs had formalized earlier, but they didn't pick them out of the air; they were visible in D&D from at least late OD&D).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Speaking honestly, there are many otherwise well written instruction manuals that failed because of my inattentiveness, and not because the author didn't include the necessary steps. For example, if I'm making a chocolate cake and the instruction clearly say to add a cup of water to the batter, if I fail to do that it's probably my fault if the cake doesn't turn out as moist as the creator intended. Which isn't to say that instruction manuals or RPGs are always clear, but it is to say that the reader has some requirements as well and not all failures are on the part of the writer.

That's true, but when a lot, maybe the majority of users have a similar failure, I think blaming it on the user is point that arrow in the wrong direction.

 

[Celebrim]

That's true, but when a lot, maybe the majority of users have a similar failure, I think blaming it on the user is point that arrow in the wrong direction.

We don't seem to have a disagreement.