Failing Forward

[pemerton]

Old RPGs like D&D and World of Darkness are haunted by the spectre of the dictatorial GM, railroading his or her players through a pre-scripted nightmare of deprotagonisation and being deaf to player feedback and complaints, often excommunicating those who dare to question their decisions or authority.

<snip>

The advice in rulebooks tended to be terrible and seemed to be predicated on a flawless infallible and long suffering referee dragging his or her unruly teenage players through RPG boot camp.

I think that 2nd ed AD&D is a high watermark for this (or low watermark, depending on how one wants to frame the metaphor).

From p 18 of the PHB:

Suppose you decide to name your character "Rath" and you rolled the following ability scores for him:

STR 8
DEX 14
CON 13
INT 13
WIS 7
CHA 6

Rath has strengths and weaknesses, but it up to you to interpret what the numbers mean . . .

Obviously, Rath's ability scores . . . are not the greatest in the world. Yet it is possible to turn these "disappointing" stats into a character who is both interesting and fun to play. Too often players become obsessed with "good" stats. . . .

In truth, Rath's survivability has a lot less to do with his ability scores that with your desire to role-play him. If you give up on him, of course he won't survive! But if you take an interest in the character and role-play him well, then even a character with the lowest possible scores can present a fun, challenging and all-around exciting time. Does he have a Charisma of 5? Why? Maybe he's got an ugly scar. His table manners could be atrocious. He might mean well but always manage to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. He could be bluntly honest to the point of rudeness . . . His Dexterity is 3? Why? Is he naturally clumsy or blind as a bat?

Don't give up on a character just because he [sic] has a low score. Instead view it as an opportunity to role-play, to create a unique and entertaining personality in the game. Not only will you have fun creating that personality, but other players and the DM will have fun reacting to him.​

To me, this is wrong in so many ways it's hard to set them all out.

First, we have the mandatory attack upon players who want good stats - as if there is something objectionable about players wanting to impact the shared fiction via action resolution (which is what stat bonuses let you do).

Following on from that, we have a depiction of "role-playing" which is entirely about the players passively providing colour ("My guy is rude", "My guy burps at the table", "My guy has a quirky accent and wears a funny hat") rather than the players actually providing goals for play and driving the narrative of the game.

There is a different manifestation of the same perspective on the players' role when the only success-condition flagged for play is that one's character survives. There is nothing to suggest that Rath's player might establish other goals for Rath in play, and try to achieve them by engaging the game's system.

And then there is the complete disregard of system in the suggested colouring of stats. For instance, if a character with DEX 3 is "blind as a bat", why does s/he not suffer a penalty to finding secret doors, or to climbing (neither of these mechanics is linked, in the rule book, to DEX).

In one of his reviews of so-called "fantasy heartbreakers", Ron Edwards made the following observation:

The key assumption throughout all these games is that if a gaming experience is to be intelligent (and all Fantasy Heartbreakers make this claim), then the most players can be relied upon to provide is kind of the "Id" of play - strategizing, killing, and conniving throughout the session. They are the raw energy, the driving "go," and the GM's role is to say, "You just scrap, strive, and kill, and I'll show ya, with this book, how it's all a brilliant evocative fantasy."

It's not Illusionism - there's no illusion at all, just movement across the landscape and the willingness to fight as the baseline player things to do. At worst, the players are apparently slathering kill-counters using simple alignment systems to set the bar for a given group . . . sometimes, they are encouraged to give characters "personality" like "hates fish" or "likes fancy clothes"; and most of the time, they're just absent from the text, "Player who? Character who?" . . . The Explorative, imaginative pleasure experienced by a player - and most importantly, communicated among players - simply doesn't factor into play at all, even in the more Simulationist Fantasy Heartbreakers, which are universally centered on Setting.

I think this is a serious problem for fantasy role-playing design. It's very, very hard to break out of D&D Fantasy assumptions for many people, and the first step, I think, is to generate the idea that protagonism . . . can mean more than energy and ego.​

The D&D assumptions that Edwards refers to have their roots more in 1st than 2nd ed AD&D - but the difference beween Edwards's characterisation and the passage from the 2nd ed PHB that I quoted is simply that the 2nd ed passage is trying to beat even the "id" out of the players - so all they are is "personality", with even the id of play generated by the GM. The beating out of the "id" is reinforced by the Combat chapter. This is the second-longest chapter in the book, after the chapter on classes and not counting the spell appendices; but it begins with an admonition that

As important as fighting is to the AD&D game, it isn't the be-all and end-all of play. It's just one way for characters to deal with situations. If characters could do nothing but fight, the game would quickly get boring - every encounter would be the same. Because there is more to the game than fighting, we'll cover much more than simple hack-and-slash combat in this chapter.​

(Reviewing the chapter, that last line is mostly an empty promise - unless it is meant to refer to the rules for unarmed combat, or the fact that the chapter also includes the rules for saving throws and turning undead. Though the example of play on p 93 does manage to reintroduce a bit of "id" by way of "personality", in the following line of the example: "Harry (playing Rath, a dwarf who hates orcs): "Orcs? - CHARGE!")

There is nothing to suggest that the way characters deal with "situations" might be shaped by goals that the players bring to the table; or that the relationship between the "situation" and those goals might mean that two fights are very different experiences in play, even if the base mechanics used to resolve them are the same.

In Part 3 of his Interactive Toolkit essays, Christopher Kubasik makes the following point:

Characters drive the narrative of all stories. However, many people mistake character for characterization.

Characterization is the look of a character, the description of his voice, the quirks of habit. Characterization creates the concrete detail of a character through the use of sensory detail and exposition. By "seeing" how a character looks, how he picks up his wine glass, by knowing he has a love of fine tobacco, the character becomes concrete to our imagination, even while remaining nothing more than black ink upon a white page.

But a person thus described is not a character. A character must do.

Character is action. That's a rule of thumb for plays and movies, and is valid as well for roleplaying games and story entertainments. This means that the best way to reveal your character is not through on an esoteric monologue about pipe and tobacco delivered by your character, but through your character's actions.

But what actions? Not every action is true to a character; it is not enough to haphazardly do things in the name of action. Instead, actions must grow from the roots of Goals. A characterization imbued with a Goal that leads to action is a character.​

I think that recognising this, and then integrating it into the system and the play of an RPG (whether formally or informally) is key to the move from "old" to "new" RPGs.

 

[Maxperson]

Old RPGs like D&D and World of Darkness are haunted by the spectre of the dictatorial GM, railroading his or her players through a pre-scripted nightmare of deprotagonisation and being deaf to player feedback and complaints, often excommunicating those who dare to question their decisions or authority.

As is every other RPG ever created. The dictatorial DM is something that happens to all RPGs equally. It's a personal flaw, not a system flaw that causes dictatorial DMing and railroading.

I reject your biased mischaracterization of those systems.

 

[Nytmare]

As is every other RPG ever created. The dictatorial DM is something that happens to all RPGs equally. It's a personal flaw, not a system flaw that causes dictatorial DMing and railroading.

I think that it maybe has less to do with it being something that happens to "all RPGs equally" right now and more about that style of DMing being the encouraged and expected way to play by so many of the early systems that existed, once upon a time.

 

[ExploderWizard]

From p 18 of the PHB:

Suppose you decide to name your character "Rath" and you rolled the following ability scores for him:

STR 8
DEX 14
CON 13
INT 13
WIS 7
CHA 6

Rath has strengths and weaknesses, but it up to you to interpret what the numbers mean . . .

Obviously, Rath's ability scores . . . are not the greatest in the world. Yet it is possible to turn these "disappointing" stats into a character who is both interesting and fun to play. Too often players become obsessed with "good" stats. . . .

In truth, Rath's survivability has a lot less to do with his ability scores that with your desire to role-play him. If you give up on him, of course he won't survive! But if you take an interest in the character and role-play him well, then even a character with the lowest possible scores can present a fun, challenging and all-around exciting time. Does he have a Charisma of 5? Why? Maybe he's got an ugly scar. His table manners could be atrocious. He might mean well but always manage to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. He could be bluntly honest to the point of rudeness . . . His Dexterity is 3? Why? Is he naturally clumsy or blind as a bat?

Don't give up on a character just because he [sic] has a low score. Instead view it as an opportunity to role-play, to create a unique and entertaining personality in the game. Not only will you have fun creating that personality, but other players and the DM will have fun reacting to him.​

To me, this is wrong in so many ways it's hard to set them all out.

First, we have the mandatory attack upon players who want good stats - as if there is something objectionable about players wanting to impact the shared fiction via action resolution (which is what stat bonuses let you do).

There is no such attack. There is simply advice there to point out that having less than optimal stats doesn't have to be the end of the world. If anything it is an attack on players who agree to play a game featuring random generation then cry like a baby when they don't the numbers that they were hoping for.

Desiring great stats is perfectly natural. How you handle not getting them is a test of maturity.

Following on from that, we have a depiction of "role-playing" which is entirely about the players passively providing colour ("My guy is rude", "My guy burps at the table", "My guy has a quirky accent and wears a funny hat") rather than the players actually providing goals for play and driving the narrative of the game.

The narrative of the game is simply life for the character. It goes on until it ends one way or another.

There is a different manifestation of the same perspective on the players' role when the only success-condition flagged for play is that one's character survives. There is nothing to suggest that Rath's player might establish other goals for Rath in play, and try to achieve them by engaging the game's system.

If the player is playing Rath as a character then he or she plays by engaging the setting, not the system. Too much focus on system is really what has made rpgs suck so much. The system is meaningless to Rath. A system which assumes that everything not expressly permitted is disallowed instead of the opposite is a great way to stifle role playing including important goals and objectives of the players. Requiring minimum numerical values to accomplish anything of worth puts a choke collar on creativity and roleplaying opportunity.

" You must be this tall to ride" syndrome has overtaken the hobby. System as the only measure of substance is the standard in most contemporary games.

 

[Balesir]

The narrative of the game is simply life for the character. It goes on until it ends one way or another.

The character doesn't exist except in the imaginations of the players. Nothing is true "for the character", it can be true only for the players. For the players, the narrative is what happens to the characters while they are "on camera". It generally doesn't include many of the tedious but necessary parts of what constitutes a real life (like having a poo or trimming toe nails). To include everything would make the game literally unplayable - it would take a whole (real) day to roleplay a single (imaginary) day. Roleplaying as "a fantasy life" can never work - and even if it did it would be boring - so all roleplaying selects stories to tell that are subsets of those imaginary "lives".

If the player is playing Rath as a character then he or she plays by engaging the setting, not the system. Too much focus on system is really what has made rpgs suck so much. The system is meaningless to Rath. A system which assumes that everything not expressly permitted is disallowed instead of the opposite is a great way to stifle role playing including important goals and objectives of the players. Requiring minimum numerical values to accomplish anything of worth puts a choke collar on creativity and roleplaying opportunity.

" You must be this tall to ride" syndrome has overtaken the hobby. System as the only measure of substance is the standard in most contemporary games.

There is always a system. For everything a character does, there is a system. It might not be written down, and it might not be available for the players to know and understand, but it will be there. And it will limit what the characters can do. Can my character fly? Can she lift that mountain?

If the players are allowed to know what the basis of the system is, and how it works, I think that is a good thing. That way, the system can take the place of what we as conscious creatures create and make use of every instant of our waking lives - a mental model of the world in which we exist.

Lack of a shared and explicit system is beyond simple laziness and I don't think it anywhere near compensates with flexibility for what it destroys by rendering player characters effectively blind, deluded and incompetent in their own environment.

 

[Aenghus]

I think that it maybe has less to do with it being something that happens to "all RPGs equally" right now and more about that style of DMing being the encouraged and expected way to play by so many of the early systems that existed, once upon a time.

Exactly, it's the price of being first, players of the early RPGs had to figure things out piece by piece, and mistakes were part of the learning process. Things can go wrong at any RPG table, but in the early days there was a lack of precedent, good examples of play, internet and clear expectations, and there was no formal way for players to provide feedback. And as I said, a lot of the early advice was terrible or particular to a narrow style of play, excluding all other styles.

 

[pemerton]

Too much focus on system is really what has made rpgs suck so much. The system is meaningless to Rath.

Rath doesn't exist. The players of the game do - and they engage the shared fiction via system.

I've frequently see you appeal to system in other posts in other threads - eg you post about the importance of not fudging dice rolls, or the importance of using wandering monsters to force players to manage their resources properly - so I'm not sure what you mean by too much focus on system.

 

[pemerton]

Lack of a shared and explicit system is beyond simple laziness and I don't think it anywhere near compensates with flexibility for what it destroys by rendering player characters effectively blind, deluded and incompetent in their own environment.

I think it's not a coincidence that D&D has its origins in dungeon play - where being blind and incompetent is verisimilitudinouos - and in army leadership play, where the original (wargaming) players used their prior knowledge of wargaming practices to fill in the environment.

Luke Crane has an intriguing comment that I think bears on this at least obliquely, in his blog about running Moldvay Basic:

I'm nervous about the transition to the wilderness style of adventure, since the beautiful economy of Moldvay's basic rules are rapidly undermined by the poorly implemented ideas of the Expert set.​

He doesn't elaborate, but extrapolation is possible from some of the things he says in praise of Moldvay, such as:

This slim red volume emerged before us as a brilliant piece of game design that not only changed our world with it's own bright light, but looking from the vantage of 1981, I can see that this game changed THE world. This world of dark dungeons and savage encounters slowly crept out into ours, from hobby shops to basements, to computer labs and movie screens.​

I'm inclined to link this back to my own comments, upthread, on survival as the measure of success, and on the players as little more than the id of play (if that): the notion of the RPG as showing us the "life" of the character, yet that life being so shallow, and characterised by such little emotional or even basic cognitive engagement with the world in which the character lives, produces a bizarre experience in which the GM's view of that world and that life becomes almost everything.

REH's Conan stories are meant to be an inspiration for D&D. But if one looks at the mechanics of the Expert set, or the similar mechanics of 1st ed AD&D, the play experience will almost never replicate anything like Conan. There is no device for the player recollecting facts as Conan does; for deliberately or by coincidence encountering past friends and enemies, as Conan does; for foreshadowing a character's destiny, as happens in the Conan stories; etc.

Another way of thinking about "fail forward", then, is that it is a way of avoiding this phenomenon in which the whole world is reduced to "dark dungeons and savage encounters" but without even the pacing and rational economy of the dungeon environment.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Rath doesn't exist. The players of the game do - and they engage the shared fiction via system.

I've frequently see you appeal to system in other posts in other threads - eg you post about the importance of not fudging dice rolls, or the importance of using wandering monsters to force players to manage their resources properly - so I'm not sure what you mean by too much focus on system.

My meaning is that in more complex systems with rules for just about everything the players tend to focus on what the characters are able to accomplish mechanically, to the point of fixation instead of what is happening in the setting. The system moves to the forefront instead of being in the background.

 

[Balesir]

My meaning is that in more complex systems with rules for just about everything the players tend to focus on what the characters are able to accomplish mechanically, to the point of fixation instead of what is happening in the setting. The system moves to the forefront instead of being in the background.

I think I sympathise with the general phenomenon you are talking about, but I see a major problem with the way you put it. "The setting" does not exist. It is entirely imaginary. This is actually a fairly close analogy to the way we see, hear, smell, taste and touch in the real world (and the reason I sometimes put that "real" in quotes).

The world as we perceive it does not really exist. There is no such thing as "colour", most of what we perceive as solid (and liquid) is actually empty space and, when we "touch" things none of our matter is actually in contact with the actual matter of the thing we perceive ourselves as touching.

Everything that we see and hear, etc., is actually constructed in our heads from diverse sensory signals generated by our sensory organs. The world as we see it is not what is really there, it is a model of what is there created by our brains so that we are capable of quickly comprehending what is really there. Without this model, we would be lost - incapable of functioning from day to day. The case of Michael May (lost his sight at age 3, became a successful businessman and downhill skiier while blind, had sight returned by a novel medical procedure at age 46 and subsequently struggled with recognition and 3D perception) illustrates this quite well.

In a roleplaying game, the game system fills the role of this model. It tells us how to interpret the "sensory" information we receive about the game in a way that is comprehensible and usable. If the system is held exclusively by the GM rather than shared with the players, then the only way the players have to make sense of the game world is to guess what the GM is thinking. Some players can do this moderately well, some can't. None can do it consistently. Some find an alternative in using social manipulation to shape the GM's vision of the game world to better fit their own, or even just to give advantage to their character.

In my experience, "outside the box thinking" can take three forms:

1) Correctly guessing the system that the GM is using to adjudicate some aspect of the world for which the system is not shared (and using this to advantage)

2) Coming up with an idea that the GM likes (or presenting it in such a way that the GM is entertained by it) and finding success through the GM forming or altering the system by which the idea is resolved such that it gives advantage

3) Finding a new way to use the shared system of the game such as to give advantage

The first of these I find facile in play - at best it becomes "20 questions", at worst it's pure guessing game. The second I find frankly distasteful, as it privileges manipulativeness and cliquishness. The last actually requires that there be a shared system, not that one is absent.