D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[loverdrive]

I don't think it makes sense to tie the existence of skill to the measurement of skill. In principle this measurement can be done by running different groups through the same mod with the same GM. Or does the level of subjectivity in GMing make it impossible? I'm not sure how I feel about that, but lean no.

Many things involve skills that can't be measured. That in itself is not a problem or slight against them. But in a context of a game, without a clear measurement of success, what constitutes a "skill" becomes nebulous and "skilled play" becomes meaningless.

If we conceptualize a game of skill as a conversation, where you argue your point, like, "I believe this sequence of moves is optimal!" and your opponent answers, like, "Not if you consider this!", then it becomes pretty clear that it just doesn't work in dnd: the conversation is one-sided — player is the only one who has to actually argue their point, while GM can just crush him like a bug regardless of what he's saying.

Different groups playing with the same GM measures only one thing: their ability to play with that specific GM. A similar thing can be observed in games build for competitive play: my boyfriend is reasonably good at beating me in fighting games because he's playing against me a lot (hey, it's my sacred duty as a woman to replace man's interests with my own) and had time to learn how I play. He also gets absolutely bodied by players that aren't me.

I must stress that a game being skill-based or not isn't a value judgement, but an analysis one. If we don't want to create a game where players can actually play to win, get better, then the lense that we should be using for both the design and the analysis.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

A similar thing can be observed in games build for competitive play: my boyfriend is reasonably good at beating me in fighting games because he's playing against me a lot (hey, it's my sacred duty as a woman to replace man's interests with my own) and had time to learn how I play. He also gets absolutely bodied by players that aren't me.

With love, this seems like the worst possible example unless you absolutely body some of those players who can body him!

Because it potentially supports the opposite point to:

Different groups playing with the same GM measures only one thing: their ability to play with that specific GM.

Which I think is mostly true though I think DMs who are unimaginative/narrow-minded or thick or particularly difficult/ornery will limit player skill regardless of who is playing with them.

Re: fighting games, instead of demonstrating that your BF is good at beating you because he knows you, it suggests there's perhaps just a simple skill hierarchy:

Players that aren't you > your boyfriend > you

Whereas if you could beat some of the players that body him (which I suspect might be the case), then things become more complex.

I think with most competitive games, you have two factors going on:

1) Familiarity with the specific people involved and how they play.

2) Generalized and more independent skill/experience/practice at the game.

Like, when I was a big Street Fighter player in the mid-1990s, I could beat a lot of random people I met - like my brother brings along a friend who thinks he's good at Street Fighter, who I've never met before, and I absolutely smash him - that's because of 2 and me being a teenage jerk. But because of a combination of 1 & 2, my brother could absolutely nail a lid on me with Guile when I'm playing Ken/Ryu, like it's really 50/50, even though with either of us playing other characters, and being less familiar, he'd be behind, because I spent a lot more time on Street Fighter.

I guess we're not saying anything that different, I just wanted to draw out that particular point a bit.

Also to note that I got repeatedly beat at Smash Bros by a 10 year old and a 7 year old recently so I make no claims to actually being good at fighting games lol.

 

[Umbran]

How can there be skilled play if no one is keeping track of who's the best player? Or did I miss something and we have leaderboards, ladders and tournaments? What the hell "skill" even means, sans that, if we cannot say with any degree of certainty that player A is better than player B?

There is no need to conflate, "play that focuses on use of a set of skills" and "players are in competition over which of them is better at those skills".

Indeed, when you get a bunch of people together to play a pickup game of basketball, the main score we are concerned with is between opposing teams, not between players on the same team.

 

[The Firebird]

Many things involve skills that can't be measured. That in itself is not a problem or slight against them. But in a context of a game, without a clear measurement of success, what constitutes a "skill" becomes nebulous and "skilled play" becomes meaningless.

My point was that a measurement can be done in RPGs. It just typically isn't.

If we conceptualize a game of skill as a conversation, where you argue your point, like, "I believe this sequence of moves is optimal!" and your opponent answers, like, "Not if you consider this!", then it becomes pretty clear that it just doesn't work in dnd: the conversation is one-sided — player is the only one who has to actually argue their point, while GM can just crush him like a bug regardless of what he's saying.

The last part gets at a key divide I see in approaches to RPGs. In my games, the GM can't crush the player like a bug regardless, because they are bound by formal and informal rules.

Formal: if an opponent tries to hit, they must attack vs AC.
Informal: if a particular enemy wasn't noted (perhaps privately, in GM facing notes) before the encounter, the GM cannot introduce that enemy to provide a greater challenge.

The informal rules are crucial when thinking about what OSR types mean by skilled play.

They also aren't used in many games with other types of skilled play (e.g., skilled tactical play). I've seen examples, I recall a Colville video, and a Level Up game I was a player in, where boss monsters had actions which brought in additional minions. Not via summons, just like a goblin boss calling two more goblins each round. This would break an informal rule in the games I run--the goblins did not exist before the action was taken. But in a skilled tactical game they provide interesting choices and challenges for the players.

Adding these informal rules makes it at least more feasible for players at different tables to encounter similar challenges. They avoid situations where GM Emily decides the mod is a bit easy and adds three wolves while GM Jerry thinks the puzzles are too hard and drops a hint. If that kind of thing is going on then I think it is harder to compare skill, although you can still check how much help the players got.

 

[nevin]

Spinning this out of the 6E thread because, well it isn't about 6E.

Anyway -- much is often made of "player skill" and "OSR" and how modern games are just button mashing. I don't really buy this as a generational divide: I think people in the 70s could rely on their character sheets, and I think people now can get creative.

What I do think is that the degree to which a game (and by game, I mean the thing happening at a particular table, not an edition) can be about "player skill" is entirely a function of the GM's willingness to present his "puzzles" in good faith. unfortunately, in my experience, what you actually get more often than not is a GM-May-I? situation in which the GM wants the players to read his mind and speak the precise words, rather than coming up with a novel solution.

What are your thoughts on "player skill" based games and the GMs that run them? How do you do it well, regardless of whether the rules are OSR or modern? What system tools can actually make it more fun and better? How do you GM this kind of game without falling in to the trap of asking your players to read your mind?

Well player "skill" in An RPG is just rules mastery and extreme min maxing. Not really skill. Just putting the Lego's together to achieve what DM hadn't considered. When GM starts planning games to ou think 6 players then an escalation 8nsues that all but insures that the game will lose all fun factor. Mainly because it's way too easy in such a game for GM to become the Adversary instead of the arbiter of rules and situations. So I say just don't feed the rules lawyers and min maxers. It rarely goes anywhere enjoyable for everyone.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well player "skill" in An RPG is just rules mastery and extreme min maxing.

I get that you just jumped in without reading the thread and we all do that sometimes, but I politely suggest you read the thread, because this is simply not true and not even really what's being discussed.

 

[Reynard]

Well player "skill" in An RPG is just rules mastery and extreme min maxing. Not really skill. Just putting the Lego's together to achieve what DM hadn't considered. When GM starts planning games to ou think 6 players then an escalation 8nsues that all but insures that the game will lose all fun factor. Mainly because it's way too easy in such a game for GM to become the Adversary instead of the arbiter of rules and situations. So I say just don't feed the rules lawyers and min maxers. It rarely goes anywhere enjoyable for everyone.

Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite of what player skill means in the context of most discussions about it.

 

[payn]

Well player "skill" in An RPG is just rules mastery and extreme min maxing. Not really skill. Just putting the Lego's together to achieve what DM hadn't considered. When GM starts planning games to ou think 6 players then an escalation 8nsues that all but insures that the game will lose all fun factor. Mainly because it's way too easy in such a game for GM to become the Adversary instead of the arbiter of rules and situations. So I say just don't feed the rules lawyers and min maxers. It rarely goes anywhere enjoyable for everyone.

Edit; ninja’d

 

[loverdrive]

With love, this seems like the worst possible example unless you absolutely body some of those players who can body him!

Ah, right, I think I got distracted when writing, or maybe short-circuited. He wins against me fairly regularly, but loses hard to people who lose hard to me.

Often we agree, but on this occasion we don't.

Hiiii! Missed you!

n the issue of ranking: there can be a "known best player" without an official leaderboard. In my main university RPG group, everyone knew which player was the best at deploying the Rolemaster spell rules; he was also (subsequent to attaining this recognition) an Australia-Asia-Pacific championship-level MtG player (I can't remember exactly which tournaments he competed in and won, but he was pretty serious and pretty good). In my current group, everyone knows which player is the best at character optimisation; unsurprisingly, he did postgraduate study in optimisation theory, when we played Rolemaster had various spreadsheets and pivot tables that let him make statistically optimal allocations of attack and defence bonuses, and he has made a very nice living (with a very nice house in a very nice suburb) working in the financial services sector.

I think there's a big difference between being good at some part of the game, and being good at the game as a whole.

And even then, sure, you can have a very clear best player and a very clear worst player, but what about everyone in between? I'm not sure if it's possible to have a journey of improvement in the game when you don't have a way to measure it.

I mean, the idea of winning a MtG tournament by tearing up a Chaos Orb is, in a sense, clever - but I think it's also recognised by everyone as pretty degenerate. Choosing not to play like that isn't asinine.

I wouldn't say that's a self-imposed rule, given how it must be against the rules, if not the game itself, then at least the tournament.

"Self-imposed rules" in a sense that they don't actually exist in the game and no one is going to enforce them. They are about honor, not the game.

Before Elder Scrolls: Legends, a TCG I used to play, shutdown, I played a thematically coherent tribal deck of House Redoran when I wanted to feel smug even if I lose — after all, I'm playing an enlightened lore-accurate deck, and my opponent is a sweaty try hard! That was a self-imposed rule, and that is very akin to very much "skilled play" proponents often being concerned with verisimilitude and/or realism.

I will agree that looking up the adventure was a bad example (although, it can be argued that if it's trivial to look up the adventure, GM should do a better job of concealing it /j)

As a tangent, there's a traditional russian card game, Durak, where it's explicitly allowed to cheat in any way, because it's presumed to be the opponent's job to be vigilant for trickery. That actually sounds like an interesting approach to skilled play in RPGs.

 

[loverdrive]

There is no need to conflate, "play that focuses on use of a set of skills" and "players are in competition over which of them is better at those skills".

Indeed, when you get a bunch of people together to play a pickup game of basketball, the main score we are concerned with is between opposing teams, not between players on the same team.

Sure, but there is another team in basketball. There's no Team Monsters in D&D, so you can only feasibly compare players to each other.

I guess parties can be compared, but that becomes a logistical nightmare.

And without a clear definition of what victory means (be it beating another team, or setting a new high score, or getting faster time), playing to win, playing hard and on a peak of your skill becomes a muddy endeavor