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Games People Play: Looking at the Gaming Aspects of D&D
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<blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8988432" data-attributes="member: 70468"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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).</p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>We had a situation when I was running <a href="https://necroticgnome.com/products/halls-of-the-blood-king" target="_blank"><em>Halls of the Blood King</em></a> (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 <em>do</em>.” <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="😑" title="Expressionless face :expressionless:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f611.png" data-shortname=":expressionless:" /></p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="kenada, post: 8988432, member: 70468"] 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). 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 [URL='https://necroticgnome.com/products/halls-of-the-blood-king'][I]Halls of the Blood King[/I][/URL] (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 [I]do[/I].” 😑 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. [/QUOTE]
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