D&D General Games People Play: Looking at the Gaming Aspects of D&D

[Pedantic]

so you are saying if the fight against the dragon goes wrong, the party rewinds back to when they entered its lair and tries again?

Yeah, in theory that could be done, but then the DM could also just decide that the dragon hit its head so hard that it falls unconscious as things start to go wrong for the party.

Cheating when you are the only player (CRPG) is easier than if there is a group… the reason it is not being done imo is that you want to simulate ‘reality’ in your TTRPG while rewinding to checkpoints is the very opposite of that

You're mistaking a particular gameplay loop for cheating here. You are supposed to reload and try again when you die in most digital games. Some of them make that loop shorter or longer (Souls-likes vs. Rogue-likes pick different reset points to try challenges again), but it's the actual point that you will fail, come away with knowledge and try again benefitting from that knowledge.

Bullet hell games are a great example; it's sometimes possible to "sight-read" a boss but generally several tries are necessary to learn the possible patterns and to master the inputs necessary to cope with them. The gameplay loop is retrying the same encounter, memorizing various elements of it, and plotting/executing reactions to them.

I agree that isn't generally the gameplay loop in a TTRPG. Instead of a precisely repeated situation, you generally go through a series of analogous encounters/situations. That also occurs in digital games, particularly RPGs, but isn't generally exclusive there. You learn say, how sword inputs work against enemies that don't have many actions, and those skill transfer later against enemies that have a variety of attacks, and use the block mechanics. The gameplay loop involves a combination of retrying specific challenges, and generalizing knowledge from similar challenges, while a TTRPG generally exclusively involves the latter.

 

[kenada]

I definitely agree here. Particularly for monster capabilities, a robust knowledge/monster lore system, that includes signs/information that can be derived before engaging in direct combat and the ability to deduce monster abilities/statistics in combat should be robustly included in the base game.

I’d even go one step further and make it possible to discover information beyond just combat capabilities. One could think of it as extending the idea of “combat as war” to the entire campaign. Obviously, I mentioned BitD as an example of this approach, but I think one could argue that other styles of play (e.g., OSR play and clever solutions to overcome impossible challenges) can also manifest it. It can be done through rules or observed best practices, but what’s important is it’s something you can rely on doing to plan a line of attack (either literally for combat or figuratively for how you want to take down a corrupt official).

Naturally, this won’t work well with all styles of play. One of the things I like about having explicit best practices is it helps communicate how a game is played, so you can avoid mixing things that don’t go well together. For example, some styles of play put a lot of emphasis on dramatic beats and conflicts. An approach where the PCs can solve the problem quickly and discretely (e.g., by blackmailing the corrupt official mentioned above or murdering him in his sleep) causes problems for those games. On the other hand, taking measures to ensure dramatic moments would mess with the style of play described in my first paragraph.

 

[loverdrive]

This put us in a very strong position for the attempt on our target because: it created a distraction for the frontal assault team, it took out a chunk of the target’s high-tier defenses (a tier 5 squad), and it gave the other team easy access to the back of the compound (since it was literally blown wide open). The actual assault wasn’t easy (though I somehow came out of it with very little stress and harm), but I think it would have considerably more dangerous if we hadn’t pushed our strengths and advantages like we did. We had a lot of allies, and those relationships proved very valuable.

I know you’ve said before that you don’t consider Blades as much of a game because you can’t say you’ve gotten better at it (e.g., here), but I’ve played with another group who didn’t push the system like we did in the game we just finished. This group that just finished only had one failed score out of 70 or so, and @Manbearcat definitely didn’t go easy on us. If we had played like that other group, we definitely would have done worse, especially when we punched up at some pretty nasty targets (like when we killed Lord Scurlock or took out a higher tier cult we discovered out in the Deathlands).

In my experience with Blades, a less "skilled" team that chose a more bruteforce approach would probably accomplish the goal anyway, and the difference between an experienced, good Blades player and a noob is the ability to create intriguing fiction first and foremost.


As of D&D, the thing I'm talking about is this weird self-contradictory idea that players are

• Supposed to learn how enemies work
• Not supposed to look up enemies stats
• Not supposed to acknowledge their knowledge of enemies stats if they already know (e.g. if they're a GM themselves)

in completely ludicrous cases, things are taken even further, where players are supposed to anti-metagame and actively avoid attacking trolls with fire.

The way I see it, the real game starts once everyone knows the rules and can act with intentionality. Fighting games really start when you know framedata by heart, Dark Souls really starts when you know all the movesets, strategy games really start when you know build orders and common strategies, chess really start when... Before that point, it's just floundering in the kiddy pool.


The same goes for individual adventures: knowledge enables intent. If you don't know what you'll face, charop is dead simple: you just build the best possible character, pick universally useful options and forgo situational ones. Having access to information enables more situational builds that would be suicidal in any other circumstances.

This lack of knowledge then has to be compensated through design, both at the system and adventure level. Enemies can't shutdown a particular class; GM has to distribute magic weapons and invent challenges for the PCs (I'm sure that there are better examples, but if you don't take Keen Mind, GM would let you take notes or will remind you stuff anyway).

 

[Pedantic]

I’d even go one step further and make it possible to discover information beyond just combat capabilities. One could think of it as extending the idea of “combat as war” to the entire campaign. Obviously, I mentioned BitD as an example of this approach, but I think one could argue that other styles of play (e.g., OSR play and clever solutions to overcome impossible challenges) can also manifest it. It can be done through rules or observed best practices, but what’s important is it’s something you can rely on doing to plan a line of attack (either literally for combat or figuratively for how you want to take down a corrupt official).

Oh yeah, in fact, this is a primary reason I'm so stringently against reducing stat blocks to a model of combat capabilities. It's important that all information about a given NPC/creature that has mechanical impact be modeled, so it can be derived from such systems. Obviously this isn't perfect (and breaks down almost immediately in the face of the ever-intractable social system problem) but it's a necessary first step.

 

[loverdrive]

Sure there is. You can rewind to the exact point you wanted and make a different choice and see what happens. Just like with saves on computer RPGs. It's just that, for some reason, nobody ever seems to do it.

There's a pretty hard cap on how far away you can rewind, and the human element makes, well, actual replaying beyond the last scene if not impossible, at least improbable.

If I go for a second walkthrough of Fallout, the game itself doesn't change. I can see with my eyes how different is playing a smart talkative character from playing an INT 3 Barbarian (and if I'm, say, speedrunning it, I can theorize and test which option would yield better results at my execution skill level).

Playing even a pre-made adventure again even with the same character isn't actually playing the same adventure. It's playing a new adventure with the same premise.

 

[mamba]

You're mistaking a particular gameplay loop for cheating here. You are supposed to reload and try again when you die in most digital games.

I disagree with the ‘most’ part. You can do it in most, but only Dark Souls like games and bullet hell type games expect you to imo

Some of them make that loop shorter or longer (Souls-likes vs. Rogue-likes pick different reset points to try challenges again), but it's the actual point that you will fail, come away with knowledge and try again benefitting from that knowledge.

no, they do not disallow it, but that is to not annoy the customers who fail / are accustomed to being able to reload, not because it is part of the design beyond that

I agree that isn't generally the gameplay loop in a TTRPG.

or CRPGs or strategy games, or racing games, … but yes, the important point it is not the design of TTRPGs, so saying it can be done, is a bit weird, which was my point

 

[kenada]

In my experience with Blades, a less "skilled" team that chose a more bruteforce approach would probably accomplish the goal anyway, and the difference between an experienced, good Blades player and a noob is the ability to create intriguing fiction first and foremost.

I’m skeptical. Scores have fallout. Two successful but different approaches should generate different fallout, which will be better or worse depending on what happened. That’s going to affect the board state (faction standing/clocks, rep, coins, etc) differently depending on what the fallout is, so I think that’s more than just a generator of intriguing fiction.

For example, if we hadn’t protected our relationship with the Blue Coats in prior scores, then we wouldn’t have had that resource available to deploy in the last one. While the scores where we did that did result in nice fiction (such as when we killed Lord Scurlock), it also had practical game benefits (maintaining the +3 ally, acquiring a new claim, etc).

As of D&D, the thing I'm talking about is this weird self-contradictory idea that players are

• Supposed to learn how enemies work
• Not supposed to look up enemies stats
• Not supposed to acknowledge their knowledge of enemies stats if they already know (e.g. if they're a GM themselves)

in completely ludicrous cases, things are taken even further, where players are supposed to anti-metagame and actively avoid attacking trolls with fire.

The way I see it, the real game starts once everyone knows the rules and can act with intentionality. Fighting games really start when you know framedata by heart, Dark Souls really starts when you know all the movesets, strategy games really start when you know build orders and common strategies, chess really start when... Before that point, it's just floundering in the kiddy pool.

This is what I’m trying to get at with my comments regarding information gathering. If information isn’t going to be public knowledge, then it needs to be discoverable, and discoveries must be protected from gotchas. Establishing that trolls are vulnerable to fire shouldn’t mean trolls disappear from the game or are replaced by monsters that are actually healed by it. If you can’t reason about the situation, it’s not possible to formulate a plan of attack or find a path to victory.

Otherwise, I agree regarding the cultural expectations. D&D is a game, but we’re not supposed to treat it as a game. While it’s nice that it can support different styles of play, they’re not all treated or regarded equally. The aversion to metagaming is especially pernicious because it can lead to absolutely silly results even if your priorities are other than the gaming aspect.

We had a situation when I was running Halls of the Blood King (a site-based adventure without a prescribed plot) where the party was looking for a particular item, were almost 100% sure they found it, but the thing it was inside was locked. They had a thief character who could pick it, but one of the players worried they were “metagaming” since they hadn’t found the key. I was like: “You have a thief in the party. Picking locks is not ‘metagaming’ when it’s what thieves do.”

The same goes for individual adventures: knowledge enables intent. If you don't know what you'll face, charop is dead simple: you just build the best possible character, pick universally useful options and forgo situational ones. Having access to information enables more situational builds that would be suicidal in any other circumstances.

This lack of knowledge then has to be compensated through design, both at the system and adventure level. Enemies can't shutdown a particular class; GM has to distribute magic weapons and invent challenges for the PCs (I'm sure that there are better examples, but if you don't take Keen Mind, GM would let you take notes or will remind you stuff anyway).

I’m willing to accept the possibility that PCs will encounter things that are not tuned to their abilities, so they might encounter monsters that can’t be defeated straightforwardly, but there needs to be robust structures for managing those situations.

 

[Clint_L]

All activities produce stories, that is just a natural byproduct of events happening in a sequential order.

Yesterday, I played Team Fortress, I flirted with this girl playing Soldier, and then I popped kritz on her and she bathed me in the blood of the enemy team. Story! Or, in-universe: yesterday, a group of 12 mercenaries hired by Builders League United took control of a gravel processing plant in the New Mexico desert with minimal casualties, soldier Jane Doe (callsign "♡Diana♡") and known war criminal Fritz Ludwig (callsign "Alice can't hit pipes") earned commendation medals from the corporation. Story!

OK, I know I'm being cheeky. But in, say, Warhammer, people been writing, uhm, literary (?) battle reports where unit movements and shootouts are woven into narrative since before my ma even decided she wanted a kid, but calling Warhammer a storytelling game would be lunacy.

D&D isn't a storytelling game because it provides no tools and no incentive to engage with Shared Imaginary Space through the lens of storytelling, and the rules themselves don't act as such a lens either.


The best storytelling game I know of is probably Daniil Shipaev's MUJIK IS DEAD. It directly provides prompts for situations (like "Falling in love" or "Money problems"), and the players purposefully weave a tragic story of suffering and misery. One player takes on the role of the titular Mujik (translated: rough, tough, "real" man), the others are playing as his destructive drives. At the start of each scene, a random prompt is chosen and Mujik describes the situation, the other players tell what they think should happen next, they all roll dice and the winner narrates the outcome.

The story isn't just a byproduct of the gameplay, it is the gameplay. The dice are rolled not to determine success or failure, but to decide who has narrative authority.

A more mainstream example would be Fate, where

1. The players can directly declare facts using Fate points (like "I'm a *Seasoned Explorer, so of course I find a secret passage here, hidden behind a loose brick wall") and gain Fate points if the fact is detrimental (like "I'm a *Wanted Fugitive, so of course our contact will recognize my face").
2. Storytelling concepts, like genre, tone, tropes can be codified directly into aspects, and leveraged in the same way. Your game being an *Amateur neo-noir webseries, or your character being a *Designated Love Interest are all part of the mechanics, and players can and should leverage them.
3. Most importantly, players have an option to back out of pretty much any situation, so they can safely raise stakes and create trouble.

An example of a game where rules act as a storytelling lens would be Horror Movie World (or Dread that you've mentioned upthread): the rules are specifically designed to replicate slasher flicks, where a colorful cast gets picked off one by one, being competent is the easiest way to die, all that.

Mujik Is Dead is incredibly focused and I can imagine that it would produce extremely intense game sessions. As a writing teacher, my first thought was that it is very imaginatively constraining - there is an implicit (actually fairly explicit) narrative expected, with the outcome obviously predetermined by the title, but the major story beats are also fairly inevitable (that is sort of the thematic point). Thematically, this is a game intended to have narrow appeal. The game is designed for one-off play, which makes sense as this does not seem like an experience that players would want to repeat on the regular.

These are not criticisms; it seems to me obvious that these are all very intentional choices by the game designer, who has their own powerful authorial vision and wishes to see it executed during gameplay - it is almost an authorship by proxy situation, which I find fascinating, so that even though all players have a say in the storytelling, the designer retains a powerful role. I think you could only play this game with an extremely copacetic group of players, consent would be very important, and everyone would probably want to have a drink afterwards.

Okay, so D&D is obviously not that.

Since we are both familiar with Dread, I will say what I like about that game, hopefully leading us back to the topic of D&D, because this is a D&D sub-forum and it seems only polite. Again, I emphasize that I am trying to share my own ideas and learn from others, and underlying premise is that "good" and "bad," with regards to art, are always contextual statements.

I use Dread in my creative writing class specifically because it helps young writers better understand the importance of building dramatic tension. As their decisions make the "Tower of Dread" (it's just a Jenga tower) more unstable, their character's choices become more and more important, and this does a great job of replicating the emotional tension found in a good thriller or horror movie, which is the intent. There is a central author, a game master, who prepares the story set-up and acts as the more or less omniscient narrator, which is similar to D&D. Players, as in D&D, narrate what their characters do, and the Tower replaces dice as the chance mechanism, but with an added skill element (this is significant; it turns out I am terrible at pulling Jenga blocks).

What I love about Dread is that it is an intuitive game, so that it take virtually no time to start playing, and the Tower of Dread acts as an obvious visual metaphor so that everyone understands immediately what the stakes are. The fact that there is a central narrative authority gives the game focus and makes it much easier for players to participate without needing to assume a lot of storytelling responsibility. This immediately widens the appeal of the game, but it also reinforces power structures that could be problematic. The game is a fast, fun way to get players involved in shared storytelling in a limited way. Students love it.

Narratively, D&D and Dread are basically the same. So D&D takes that basic structure of a paternalistic game master and then overlays a complicated rules structure. Because it is still a an improvisational storytelling game, the rules are never going to comprehensively cover every possible situation in a detailed simulation kind of way, but they go a lot further than "pull a block to see if you succeed."

The result is a kind of hybrid game. Mujik is almost pure story, in some ways quite limited in scope, where everyone is a more or less co-equal storyteller. Dread is also almost pure story, but the narrative agency of all players but one is tightly constrained. D&D is story plus game, where knowledge of the rules plays an extensive role, and the DM has control to a significant degree, though contained by rules and dice roles (to a debatable degree).

One way of looking at this is that D&D doesn't do any of these things particularly well. The reliance on gameplay makes it an unwieldy storytelling device, particularly during combat, which is when it becomes its most game-like. But the reliance on storytelling means that the game rules can seldom perfectly replicate what the players or DM want to be happening. There is some structure, but not enough that any particular situation can be perfectly optimized.

Another way of looking at this is that D&D's potential flaws are actually behind its appeal. It has enough story to give a sense of purpose and continuity to the session, so that players want to keep coming back. They want to continue the story. It has enough gameplay elements so that players can engage in creative problem solving within various tactical and narrative restraints, and can aspire towards improvement if not perfection. Could it not be that D&D's "jack of all trades, master of none" design manages to strike a happy medium? It is, at its heart, a kind of half-assed game, and my conjecture is that Arneson, Gygax and co. kind of caught lightning in a bottle with this sort of game structure, in ways that work really well to trigger more or less addictive reactions in human brains.

Humans love stories (I would argue that humans are stories), and we love to see ourselves, or idealized versions of ourselves, in them. Humans enjoy tangible, measurable improvement. All creatures with brain stems enjoy intermittent rewards. D&D-style games give us a lot of things that poke at our brains in pleasurable ways.

Why is D&D the gorilla in the room, instead of Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu or Pathfinder or one of any number of other games that are, design-wise, more or less the same? I don't think marketing is the answer; D&D has a history of crap marketing. I think it was there first, colonizing brains, and none of those other games are really different enough to overcome that basic fact. I also think it involves themes that are inherently conservative, so the game basically feels safe. A game like Dread is going to have an inherently smaller niche. A game like Mujik significantly more so. And neither of those games, especially the latter, push those same brain buttons.

None of which, in my mind mind, makes any of them good or bad. To me, this becomes very much like an argument about whether or not pop music or big budget blockbusters are good or bad. At a certain point, this just becomes a discussion about politics. Aesthetically speaking, they offer different things. I love playing D&D, but I love a good game of Dread or Fiasco even more. On the other hand, those games don't give me the long term pleasures of a D&D campaign.

 

[niklinna]

There's a pretty hard cap on how far away you can rewind, and the human element makes, well, actual replaying beyond the last scene if not impossible, at least improbable.

Yes this is a major part of "for some reason". Saving the game state is a huge chore for a tabletop game managed by humans. VTT's to my knowledge don't support something like that either. For an individual fight you could do it immediately, but even then I rarely hear that mentioned...outside of situations where people are literally just playing out fight scenarios (harking back to wargames).

If I go for a second walkthrough of Fallout, the game itself doesn't change. I can see with my eyes how different is playing a smart talkative character from playing an INT 3 Barbarian (and if I'm, say, speedrunning it, I can theorize and test which option would yield better results at my execution skill level).

Playing even a pre-made adventure again even with the same character isn't actually playing the same adventure. It's playing a new adventure with the same premise.

Yes, you know what's going to happen outside of the things you yourself changed, so things remain predictable. With a human GM, everything could go completely differently.

 

[niklinna]

We had a situation when I was running Halls of the Blood King (a site-based adventure without a prescribed plot) where the party was looking for a particular item, were almost 100% sure they found it, but the thing it was inside was locked. They had a thief character who could pick it, but one of the players worried they were “metagaming” since they hadn’t found the key. I was like: “You have a thief in the party. Picking locks is not ‘metagaming’ when it’s what thieves do.”

Wow. Just, wow.