Games that wildly vary between groups

[Theo R Cwithin]

A gamer's inability to civilly discuss (or refusal to understand!) another gamer's perspective is a flaw in the gamer, not the game.

Not at all. That's reductionist and a bit dogmatic.

It's not a "flaw" in the game, but nor is it (necessarily) a "flaw" in the gamer.

Note the emphasized bits. I'm not knocking people who can't find common ground when talking about gaming. I'm knocking people who can't have a civil discussion when talking gaming.

People expect common experience. When you say you've played baseball or Pinochle or Risk, that sets up an expectation in my head. For 99.9% of games out there, that expectation is going to be almost as good as if we saw the same movie. But when you say "I play D&D" it's more like saying "I play a sport with a ball" than saying "I play basketball." But the human brain is going to treat it like "I play basketball." "I play D&D" sounds very specific and conjures specific contexts in my mind.... but it leaves a lot unsaid. My context and your context are probably vastly different.

I actually agree with you 100%. To my mind, the degree to which two gamers can talk about their respective games depends largely upon the level at which they care to talk about it, which in turn depends largely upon what their respective gaming styles are.

I think gamers who appreciate PC optimization, tactics, houseruling or other "crunchy" aspects of the game will manage to find a common ground fairly easily. At this level, it's basically about the numbers, the part of the game that doesn't change much from table to table. This is akin to Monday morning watercooler talk about Sunday's football game: it's mainly a discussion about rules, the big plays, speculation about next week's games, players' performance, referees bad calls, etc.

A step beyond this are "shared" stories. A lot of people, for example, can talk about certain classic modules, at least to a degree, because so many gamers have slogged through them! In this case, a classic module is sort of like a film everyone has seen-- though their versions were different, there are familiarities.

Finally, it's almost impossible to talk to someone else about the RP side of things. At this level, the discussion turns to the story itself, the part that changes immeasurably from table to table-- even if the same module is on the table! That's the part that a gamer is "emotionally" vested in for his table, and usually utterly uninterested in for any other table. Face it, no one is interested* in hearing about my party's latest exploits and how they took out our campaign's version of Demogorgon and how the dwarf got drunk again, that crazy dwarf!

*exception:[sblock]

[/sblock]

 

[Celebrim]

But when you say "I play D&D" it's more like saying "I play a sport with a ball" than saying "I play basketball." But the human brain is going to treat it like "I play basketball." "I play D&D" sounds very specific and conjures specific contexts in my mind.... but it leaves a lot unsaid. My context and your context are probably vastly different.

"I play D&D" is simply not a very useful frame of reference. But we treat it as if it were, and then do the natural human thing of getting irritable when our expectations get violated. I'm thinking basketball, but if I saw your actual games, I'd be thinking... "Oh! Baseball!"

Hmmm... I'm unsure where to take this because I'm not sure in which way I'd rather be misunderstoood.

It's not just D&D that suffers from this. If I say, "I play M&M.", I'm leaving unsaid more than I say as well. There is probably some common experience to playing M&M, but when you consider the range of CL's to play at from grim and gritty to movers and shakers at the galactic level, and the range of styles to play at from Golden Age Paragons to Iron Age Anti-Heros/Anti-Villains, and whether you are playing Freedom City or a homebrew setting or converting DC/Marvel (or Heroes or The Incredibles) or in space or something more directly 'Earth', and whether you set the story in 'the Past' or the far future (possibly post-apocalyptic), and whether and how the characters advance in power, and so forth you quickly realize that the range of experience is equally broad.

D&D and other PnP games don't fit a pattern that works very, very well everywhere else in life. That is not exactly a problem with the game, but nor is it a fault with the gamer. It's a miscommunication due to the limits of words to convey precise mental states.

The problem is that words don't do this really in any case. It's not a problem confined to RPGs. All of communication is limited in this way, which is why words are so easily misunderstood. You probably mainly notice the problem in the case of D&D. In part I think this is because D&D and other PnP games create a metalanguage for describing events very precisely and so its natural to assume a shared experience... until you start talking about it in detail and you discover that that metalanguage is not nearly as comprehensive as you may have first thought.

Very simple games create a universe of so few rules (and consequently such great constraints) that its impossible to have very divergent experiences of play. I could create a metalanguage for discussing games of tic-tac-toe which would let us precisely communicate everything about our game experience. However, as games get more non-redundant rules (and consequently though not necessarily generally gain more freedom of play), this ability very quickly goes away. The number of possible game states becomes too large to describe easily, and hense when you try to communicate something about your game state there is always information you are leaving out and the hearer may easily imagine a game state different from the one you are trying to describe. This problem occurs fairly frequently between players at the same table, so that it occurs between tables is hardly unexpected or avoidable.

This is why the bulk of the DMG can never be considered to be much more than general guidelines if the RPG is remain an RPG. The only way to create a truly shared experience is to limit the number of possible game states. When you create a rule rather than a guideline, you vastly simply the game states metarules - the unwritten set of rules for handling a situation not covered by the guidelin. You also as a consequence limit the player/referee freedom and as a consequence limit the game to a smaller set of situations. Do this enough and the necessary ambiguity of an RPG dies and what you are left with is something more akin to a fairly complex boardgame.

Incidently, the experience of 'Basketball' isn't as uniform as all of that either. While the experience of 'Basketball' is more uniform than the experience of 'Football' precisely because its easier to play the game as intended than it is to play 'Football', out in the real world Basketball is not always played 5 on 5, not always played on a full court, or with a regulation backboard, or with a net, nor is it always played at the same competitive level (which changes the experience), or even with a standardized ball. If I say, "I played basketball.", that doesn't tell you nearly as much as you seem to think it does.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Benefit.


Other games:

Hide and seek
Manhunt
Tag

Almost every drinking game

Pool

Games that have "supplements"...I'm talking board games here that have additional components that can be added...and people may choose to add some, none or all.

Just about any game where players can "target" each other...such as Risk. These games are highly different depending on the people you play with and the way they play. For example, my best friend's wife always guns for him in these games, just because she knows it bugs him and it's funny.

 

[Rel]

I don't view this as an issue even remotely limited to gaming.

I'm a scuba diver. As Celebrim says, that's much like saying I play M&M. I might only dive in the Carribean or only off the coast of North Carolina. I might specifically do wreck dives or cave dives or fresh water dives. I might prefer deep dives with short bottom times or I might rather dive in shallow rivers where you can spend a couple hours on one tank of air. There is a vast diversity in the hobby and that's a good thing.

It's true that I might not understand all the jargon that the cave diver guy is throwing around. But his stories will likely be interesting and might even inspire me to try his favored aspect of the hobby. We still have a ton in common simply by virtue of the fact that we find it fun to strap a metal tank to our backs and breathe underwater.

If D&D (and RPG's in general) were not so diverse then I believe that this would be more of a niche hobby than it already is. I still enjoy a good core rules D&D game sometimes. But I'd have burned out on those a LONG time ago if I didn't have other settings, systems and genres to play. I think that the flexibility and diversity of such games is a major benefit to the hobby. Because without them I think a lot of us wouldn't even be involved in it at this point.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Incidently, the experience of 'Basketball' isn't as uniform as all of that either. While the experience of 'Basketball' is more uniform than the experience of 'Football' precisely because its easier to play the game as intended than it is to play 'Football', out in the real world Basketball is not always played 5 on 5, not always played on a full court, or with a regulation backboard, or with a net, nor is it always played at the same competitive level (which changes the experience), or even with a standardized ball. If I say, "I played basketball.", that doesn't tell you nearly as much as you seem to think it does.

It doesn't tell me everything, but it tells me orders of magnitude more than "I played D&D". The definitions are better operationalized. There's a larger social construct supporting pick-up games at the playground than there is around all of D&D. There's a larger social network supporting games of HORSE than there is all of D&D. I am thereby provided a set of questions I can ask to dial in exactly what kind of basketball you played and your answers will contain usable data even within a sentence or two.

"I mostly played on my high school team" provides an order of magnitude more precision than "I played mostly 2e". "I love to play pick-up games at Reddit Park" provides vastly more information than "I prefer low magic games." "I was starting point guard" gives 1000x more information than "I prefer to play wizards and sorcerors."

The basketball quotes give me a lot of information because we're drawing on a huge amount of cultural shared knowledge. The D&D quotes give me almost none. One person's 2e is entirely different from another's. One person's "low magic" is another person's monty haul.

EDIT:
In general, I'm not disagreeing much with anyone. I don't think this is limited to gaming. Any niche activity suffers from this to one degree or another. I run into it constantly in research circles, too.

I do think we're extra bad at codifying our jargon, though. I have literally seen "low magic" campaigns where everyone was running around with talking artifacts and flying carpets. When you're scuba diving or mountain climbing, codifying your jargon gets more important because a miscommunication could kill a real person rather than an imaginary avatar. Miscommunications in D&D are able to be so common because the stakes are so low.

 

[Hussar]

It might help to change the comparison. Instead of comparing RPG's to other games, with which RPG's certainly share a number of traits, why not compare to the other activity that RPG's share many traits with - theater. RPG as highly regimented improv theater isn't all that bad of a descriptor IMO, and it's certainly how I tend to approach RPG's.

Trying to get a "common" framework in theater is extremely difficult. "I was in a play" doesn't tell you all that much. Until you start being very specific about what play, where, how much improvization occured, etc. you can't really talk about the play you were in.

The problem with RPG discussions comes when people presume that their experience is universal. I'm certainly guilty of this from time to time, and I think everyone is. We tend not to think too much about why our games look like they do, we just assume that that's how its done, because that's how everyoen we play with does it.

The problem gets exacerbated to a great degree when people presume that other people who have different experiences, do so because they fail to understand the rules, fail to grasp something about the system, or have included elements that do not belong in the game.

How many "Adding ______ to D&D is bad" threads are there out there for example? For some people, they presume that D&D is a specific kind of fiction and the inclusion of anything outside of that is a bad influence. They could be right, but, the problem comes when they start from the position that they are objectively right.

As another example, I remember talking about the CR/EL rules for 3e and many people claiming that they could regularly defeat EL+4 or +5 encounters. It took a while, but, eventually we nailed out a few reasons why this was happening - high character stats, very good coordination between the players, using primarily classed humanoids as opponents being three that come to mind.

If people are willing to explain how they arrived at a certain point and are willing to accept that others might not arrive at the same point, everyone's happy.

 

[Bullgrit]

The problem with RPG discussions comes when people presume that their experience is universal. I'm certainly guilty of this from time to time, and I think everyone is. We tend not to think too much about why our games look like they do, we just assume that that's how its done, because that's how everyoen we play with does it.

The problem gets exacerbated to a great degree when people presume that other people who have different experiences, do so because they fail to understand the rules, fail to grasp something about the system, or have included elements that do not belong in the game.

Worth quoting. (Can't give you xp yet.)

Bullgrit

 

[Hussar]

Probably one of the best examples of why we share so few common experiences:

From What's the Most Over the Top D&D Campaign you've ever been in?

/snippage for very funny anecdotes.

Not an over-the-top anecdote perhaps, but... still. Nearly thirty years later, "You killed it, you keep it!" remains the battle cry of our gaming circle when a PC dies. Three of us from that group still game together after all these years (Somethingorother-the-Dwarf is one of them, as it so happens).

But not (happily) the player of the Noldor Elf. He left our gaming circle loooooong ago.

((Bold mine))

Think about that. Here's three gamers who have been playing together longer than a large number of gamers have been ALIVE. How could someone who's been playing for, say, four or five years, possibly have any similar experiences as Steel Wind?

So, yeah, as I said before, the dynamics of the group will easily have as much impact on experiences as the actual game mechanics.