D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

Multiple play styles co-existed, and were perceived to co-exist, in the 70s and 80s. In Part I of his series "D&D Campaigns" published in White Dwarf #1 (June/July 1977), Lew Pulsipher (@lewpuls) notes that "D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel." Pulsipher prefers the former style, which emphasises "player skill", considering the latter to be mostly "boring and inferior".

In Pulsipher's account of novel-style play that he seems to have experienced in California, referees "make up more than half of what happens" while "the player is a passive receptor, with little control over what happens." However in a "skill-oriented campaign" the referee "should not make up anything important after an adventure has begun." Players must be able to make decisions "which significantly alter the course of an adventure".

The one thing about old school games that is true of all tables is that everyone's table will be different than everyone else's.

 

[overgeeked]

Basically, the 'player skill' focused OSR mentality (as popularized by Matt Finch's Primer written in 2008) is a fairly recent invention.

We must be time travelers then as we’ve played D&D in almost exactly that style since at least 1984. The group of older kids I played with had been playing that way for years prior to me joining.

The original 1970s-80s game/adventure designers did not really intend their games to be played in that specific way. So lots of old school adventures have designs that go against what the OSR touts as good design. Many of them are railroads, combat grindfests, or otherwise at odds with that modern ethos.

Yep. That’s why they were almost never run at all or changed thoroughly before being run.

 

[bloodtide]

If "skilled play" is just another way of saying "clever players" that is fine, but I don't think it is a particularly rare or special thing, then.

It might be useful to have a little snap shot of The Time Before Time:

There were three basic Heroes that were popular in the 70s and 80s:

*The Strong Guy: Conan, The Hulk, He-Man, fighters and the vast majority of characters played by Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the like.
*The Power Guy: Tron Man, Batman, Jedi, Wizards. Characters with a sheet of abilities(with new ones added occasionally) they can use
*MacGyver: The Everyman who is smart and clever and uses whatever they can find on hand to solve problems

And you can see this in the popular ways to play a D&D Character:
*The all combat character that simply wants to do near endless combat.
*Spellcasters with a player just playing off their character sheet

And

*Well, if a player wanted to do anything other then have a fighting character or a spellcaster with a list of things they can do......well, Old School characters really, really only a little more then just blank pieces of paper. Maybe a couple abilities. No skills, no feats, no archtypes, and very few rules for anything anyway.

So, you can see that third type of hero....one that is not too popular today.....the "Skilled Gamer"

 

[Reynard]

It might be useful to have a little snap shot of The Time Before Time:

There were three basic Heroes that were popular in the 70s and 80s:

*The Strong Guy: Conan, The Hulk, He-Man, fighters and the vast majority of characters played by Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the like.
*The Power Guy: Tron Man, Batman, Jedi, Wizards. Characters with a sheet of abilities(with new ones added occasionally) they can use
*MacGyver: The Everyman who is smart and clever and uses whatever they can find on hand to solve problems

And you can see this in the popular ways to play a D&D Character:
*The all combat character that simply wants to do near endless combat.
*Spellcasters with a player just playing off their character sheet

And

*Well, if a player wanted to do anything other then have a fighting character or a spellcaster with a list of things they can do......well, Old School characters really, really only a little more then just blank pieces of paper. Maybe a couple abilities. No skills, no feats, no archtypes, and very few rules for anything anyway.

So, you can see that third type of hero....one that is not too popular today.....the "Skilled Gamer"

Honestly, your patronizing tone is tiresome. You seem to think you are the only one who knows how the game is meant to be played, and all things would be perfect if only those tiresome players would do as they're told.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think the issue we are considering is more complex than this.

One element at hand is that we are playing a game, and that game effectively give results the players desire, or don't desire, based on choices. But, that game is also set within a fiction, and the game does not, by any means, depict the entirety of that fiction.

GM and players combined, then, have some challenges - how do we remain true to the overall fiction while also playing the game well? The game is built around exciting conflicts, the time at table largely spend resoling those exciting conflicts, and we only have so much time to play. If I only have a few hours every few weeks to play, I have to maximize the value of those sessions.

And, let's face it, NPCs and monsters who are basically nice folks do not intrinsically generate exciting conflicts. So, the GM isn't really incentivized to spend much time on nice folks. That leads to the players not being incentivized to treat figures in game as basically nice folks - to do so is sub-optimal in a game-play sense.

There are some solutions: The players can just bite the bullet and sometimes be at a disadvantage. The GM can include a modicum of stuff that's less exciting, to establish that players shouldn't be sociopaths...

On the game-design side, you can reward the players for some behavior. Many flaw systems are of the from, "You get a bennie if this flaw makes some difficulty for the characters." You can treat PCs like they have a "heroic behavior" flaw, such that they get a bennie if they treat something they see as basically a nice person, and that turns out to be a bad choice.

This last allows the GM to largely hold to keeping with most NPCs and monsters being right bastards, while still having the PCs act like there are good people out there in the fiction that might just happen to be here in-session.

Given the kinds of negative consequences that come from treating bad people as if they were "nice" people, I'm not so sure about that last bit.

I do agree that it is more complicated. But at least from where I'm standing, the simple solution is for the GM to have people that are more complex than 100% bad or 100% nice. Like:

• People who don't want to do bad things, but they're poor and they (or someone they know) is sick, so in desperation they do bad things
• Groups who have problematic beliefs, but beliefs that can be re-interpreted or understood in new ways that don't cause problems
• People who are living an extremely marginal existence not by their own choice, but because of factors beyond their control, and thus breaking rules or the like in order to survive
• Folks who only fell slowly, but by the time they realized how deep they were in, they couldn't get out
• Folks who can be persuaded to be good for some other, much much lesser cost than the usual costs of "we treated you kindly and you repaid us with horrible violence" etc.

I have used literally all of these in my campaigns. I've also had some people who were genuinely rat bastards, and some people who could've been sympathetic--e.g. they did fall into the above categories--but they didn't go wrong because of being in that category, that just was another motive on top of already being a terrible, terrible person. Like you can have a person who genuinely doesn't feel any remorse and thus derives joy from being a mob enforcer in order to make money to buy the medicine their sick grandmother needs. You can have a person who was born into a wicked family...but who is totally on board, personally, with hurting others and doesn't see any problem with their actions. Etc.

I'm not saying the players and the system can't contribute. I'd even say they should contribute. But the GM bears the lion's share of the responsibility, especially in D&D land, where the system explicitly puts so damn much down to unmitigated GM discretion. If we're going to say that the beautiful thing about D&D is that the GM has awesome, unlimited power to do anything and everything they want, disregarding any rule, ignoring any restriction, should they feel it warranted--then that necessarily comes with the expectation that they take the blame when they use that power poorly rather than effectively. And if we're going to say that the system and even the players need to shoulder some of the responsibility, that necessarily implies that system and players need some actual power to back that up. Placing responsibility--and thus blame for failure--when the person or thing in question has no power to actually implement it, is inherently unfair and illogical.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Honestly, your patronizing tone is tiresome. You seem to think you are the only one who knows how the game is meant to be played, and all things would be perfect if only those tiresome players would do as they're told.

From experience: "seem" is unnecessary. That is, in fact, exactly what Bloodtide believes, and they pride themselves on being "cruel" to their players until only those who behave as you describe remain in the game. It has an extremely low retention rate and an extremely high rate of generating irritated impatient gamers.

I believe, the last time numbers were given, Bloodtide claimed that something like 75% of all GMs are outright bad, and most of the remainder aren't good.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

A very common problem I see is a game with wild, uncontrolled players....and nearly 100% of the time it is a game with a DM that is all "In my game I never kill my Buddy Players PCs". Amazingly, the players just do whatever they want and act like idiots.

And yet I've never seen this. Not once.

Your "Buddy GM" is a fiction you invented to make fun of others. It's extremely tiresome.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Basically, the 'player skill' focused OSR mentality (as popularized by Matt Finch's Primer written in 2008) is a fairly recent invention.

The original 1970s-80s game/adventure designers did not really intend their games to be played in that specific way. So lots of old school adventures have designs that go against what the OSR touts as good design. Many of them are railroads, combat grindfests, or otherwise at odds with that modern ethos.

Good Lord, this makes Mr. Finch's work even more vexing than it already was, and that's saying something. It means that it wasn't just pretentious garbage, it was actually self-congratulatory pretentious garbage the entire time, high on his own supply.

I didn't think it would be possible to learn something that made me dislike the "Primer" any more than I already did, and yet here it is.

 

[Cergorach]

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.

It depends on the puzzle: If it's A fits into B, then there is only one solution to solve the puzzle, but could the group bypass the lock entirely by being creative? Most of our group hate puzzles, particularly the only one solution puzzles with no way to circumvent those puzzles. I'm particularly bad at solving the classic D&D puzzles you find in most adventures and RPG puzzlebooks. My particular set of problem solving skills just don't jive with those kinds of puzzles, but once in a blue moon there's a puzzle that does jive with me and I can solve it really fast. So for me those kinds of puzzles are no fun, I either can't or don't want to solve them or I can solve them real quick.

...in which the GM wants the players to read his mind...

This is an issue we all run into as a DM, not just with classic D&D puzzles. I'm running a campaign where the players need to figure stuff out. But how I was putting out hints was way too subtle for a pnp RPG (that's being played over the Internet), after two sessions, and some discussion we figured out that I would need to hit players over the head a bit with clues for the game to work as intended. And that was from a DM that already knew he had to keep an eye on certain things to adjust during the campaign, like adjusting the pacing (making discoveries more often to keep the overarching storyline going), But even then, as a person you do get blinders on for certain thing. This happens because you've been working on something for a while, certain things just 'rust' into place and making you blind to any complications it brings and/or unwilling to make adjustments.

Having someone on your charriot that whispers to you "We're all here to have fun, not just run through something that you build." really helps IF you're open to change.

 

[Bae'zel]

Some video game RPGs would be a good training module for GM on how to handle consequences of player actions, good and bad.

Examples:

• avoiding a battle with antagonists through socializing (and still getting XP for “defeating” the encounter)
• having NPCs and factions treat the PCs better for positive interactions and doing favors for them (they become allies, give discounts at shops, better rewards etc)
• having past choices coming up later in positive (the villagers here remember how you saved the local farmers from goblins, so they give you discounts and support) and negative ways (the villagers recognize you as the murderhobo “butcher of Hamletville, and fear you; they don’t go out of their way to help you, refuse to give you any reliable info and certainly won’t take your side later unless out of fear or intimidation).
• The merchant remembers the fact that you saved them from the prison cells and kept them alive throughout the rest of the dungeon; they offer you significant discounts and even a few freebies, along with information to help you).