D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[mixmastashizz]

How does this square with the way a lot of old-school adventures are presented? Because, frankly, a lot of them look like"door-kicking hack and slash" to me, from the outside looking in. Especially if the adventure is quite linear.

I think when talking modules its important to be specific to which ones youre thinking of.

There's a difference between Dragonlance and I6, T1 and B2, and the Caverns of Thracia and other JG products in expectations for modules. Not to mention the modules that were explicitly tournament modules which have their own constraints and assumptions based on the format and original context.

Just as there are people who claimed to never play the way the primer suggests, it didnt come from nowhere, and there are people who really did play that way from the start that informed Finchs work. Both can exist and be true.

 

[overgeeked]

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).

This is one of the keys to running a world that feels like it’s living and breathing. Many referees who run open-world sandboxes do this. But it absolutely should be more widespread.

 

[bloodtide]

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.

I can't really speak to what you have or have not seen.

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.

I have no idea how you "read" that.

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 do count things such as Paying Attention something players must do in my game. I don't put up with the players that endlessly good around and play on their phone. A lot of DMs do, you can see tons of games where the player do so for the whole game. The same way I don't put up with players that don't know the rules. And again there are plenty of other games where such a person would be told "just roll the d20, we will take care of what happens."

And cruel is subjective. The vast majority of RPGs, even more so a lot of 5E games, play it safe to say the least. Things like no character death or very much of any hardships the players don't like. In my game as an Old School type game, things like character death are common. Even such things like a PC falling in a deep river, being unable to swim and drowning. This type of thing is rare or more likely unheard of in many other games.

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.

Those are some high numbers.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

I have no idea how you "read" that.

Let's look at the post. Maybe I can demonstrate how tone works, based on how I read your post, seen below.

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"

Warning, this is parody meant to show how the tone might land to readers. How it landed to me, at least. It's only for demonstration so we clear up the confusion.

Spoiler: Parody

Sometimes we frame our debates as if we are talking to children, giving them a little snapshot of time before they knew better. A time before they were wise to the ways of the world. Before they knew a fraction, a small fraction, of what we do.

And we yammer on about how their creations, their creative works, their very ideas, all fit into these cute little buckets. Like little toys in a little toy box. Little trinkets of amusement. Little caricatures for their little fantasies.

Yes for twenty years, everyone of those creations was so simple. So easy to understand. So easy to organize into stacks of little blocks. All of those silly little voices from that time before time. All of those silly ideas from time long ago. All of them can be stacked neatly. Block by block by block. In a toy box.

Yet, today. Today and today only. Or for some more enlightened, everyday. We have ideas far more grandiose, far more thoughtful and deep. Because we are enlightened, and they are all mindless robots playing mindless characters chasing the endless drudgery of simplistic combat.

But I'm not enlightened, so Ill just go back to my cave and play my strong guy. Because I know no better.

I exaggerated a bit, but I hope that helps clarify how someone could read it that way. Tone and phrasing are everything.

 

[Umbran]

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.

Tell me that you missed my mentioning how you provide mechanical support so that isn't an issue, without telling me that you missed it...

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.

How many individuals do you get to present to your players in a session that are getting more than a mere brushing of their surface?

I've seen folks around here lament how one major trend in TV fiction these days - the slip to having a focused 10 or so episodes per season instead of the 22+ we used to get - leaves us without the "filler" episodes in which much of the character examination and development of our favorite shows often happened.

Well, many modern GMs have much the same issue. Back half a lifetime ago, I had groups playing 5+ hour sessions every week. Now I'm down to more like three hours every couple of weeks - on the order of a quarter of the time at the table that I used to. I don't have opportunity to present dozens of deeply conceptualized NPCs to demonstrate how varied people in the world actually are. I need my players to carry that in their heads without my having to explicitly show it to them.

But, I already mentioned all of that, too, albeit in shorter form, but it doesn't seem to have made an impact.

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

Who is this "we"? I am pretty sure that I have never expressed that, "the beautiful thing about D&D is that the GM has awesome, unlimited power..." or anything much similar. I'm pretty sure I'm solidly and frequently expressed as being far more collaboratively-minded than that. Sorry.

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.

Which I offer to my players on a regular basis. Thank you very much.

 

[Umbran]

From experience: "seem" is unnecessary. That is, in fact, exactly what Bloodtide believes..

Mod Note:
I am... somewhat boggled.

Like, you just responded to a post of mine in this thread. You know I'm gonna get a ping from the system, and that I'm highly likely to then come and read the thread...

...and, that's the moment when you choose to make the discussion personal about another poster?

Tactically speaking, not a great move.

If you cannot keep from being personal, maybe go find another discussion, please and thanks.

 

[pemerton]

How does this square with the way a lot of old-school adventures are presented? Because, frankly, a lot of them look like"door-kicking hack and slash" to me, from the outside looking in. Especially if the adventure is quite linear.

What adventure(s) do you have in mind?

 

[pemerton]

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".

Awesome to see you posting! I haven't seen you for ages.

Pulsipher's skilled play is basically the same as what Gygax describes in his PHB, under the label "Successful Adventures": on the player side, the emphasis is on prep, planning and seizing control (as much as can be done) of what things are encountered - by choosing where to go in the dungeon and gathering information before opening doors and trying to take the loot behind them.

(As I posted in this thread about the Pulsipher essay <DMing philosophy, from Lewis Pulsipher>, the two approaches he describes are not exhaustive.)

 

[Doug McCrae]

Awesome to see you posting! I haven't seen you for ages.

Pulsipher's skilled play is basically the same as what Gygax describes in his PHB, under the label "Successful Adventures": on the player side, the emphasis is on prep, planning and seizing control (as much as can be done) of what things are encountered - by choosing where to go in the dungeon and gathering information before opening doors and trying to take the loot behind them.

(As I posted in this thread about the Pulsipher essay <DMing philosophy, from Lewis Pulsipher>, the two approaches he describes are not exhaustive.)

Good to interact with you again, pemerton!

I completely agree that Gygax and Pulsipher are describing the same playing style. There is a small difference of emphasis, I think. When Gygax gives advice to DMs his main concern is to avoid making things too easy for the players whereas Pulsipher warns against arbitrary, unpredictable DM-ing. "If players believe that the referee's decisions are unfair or illogical or that he manipulates them or makes things up… the campaign will not be successful."

I also completely agree with the point you make in this post in the linked thread that, for Pulsipher, a consistent and believable game world serves to support skilled play of the sort he prefers. Challenge-oriented play, D&D "as a game", is, for him, of primary importance.

In the 1e AD&D PHB, there's a paragraph on pg. 8 that serves as a nice summary of the advice in the "Successful Adventures" section on pages 107–109.

Skilled players always make a point of knowing what they are doing, i.e. they have an objective. They co-operate — particularly at lower levels or at higher ones when they must face some particularly stiff challenge — in order to gain their ends. Superior players will not fight everything they meet, for they realize that wit is as good a weapon as the sword or the spell. When weakened by wounds, or nearly out of spells and vital equipment, a clever party will seek to leave the dungeons in order to rearm themselves. (He who runs away lives to fight another day.) When faced with a difficult situation, skilled players will not attempt endless variations on the same theme; when they find the method of problem solving fails to work, they begin to devise other possible solutions. Finally, good players will refrain from pointless argument and needless harassment of the Dungeon Master when such bog the play of the game down into useless talking. Mistakes are possible, but they are better righted through reason and logic, usually at the finish of play for the day.​

There is some other advice given on playing one's character near the start of the 1e PHB that seems at odds with the "skilled play" approach advocated elsewhere and in favour of acting-in-character. In his foreword, Mike Carr describes the players as "actors and actresses" in a "fascinating drama". He advises players to "use your persona to play with a special personality all its own." On pg. 7 of the PHB even Gary Gygax writes that a player will become an "artful thespian". They will interact with other players "not as Jim and Bob and Mary who work at the office together, but as Falstaff the fighter, Angore the cleric, and Filmar, the mistress of magic!" I think it's fair to say that this is Gygax at his least Gygaxian!

 

[bloodtide]

groups playing 5+ hour sessions every week. Now I'm down to more like three hours every couple of weeks - on the order of a quarter of the time at the table that I used to. I don't have opportunity to present dozens of deeply conceptualized NPCs to demonstrate how varied people in the world actually are. I need my players to carry that in their heads without my having to explicitly show it to them.

I find this true for a lot of games too. My game is a hard 5-6 hours, but I see a lot of other games that barley make it 3 hours. And more so that 3 hours is barley 3 hours of game play as there is a lot of socializing, hanging out, goofing around and doing anything except play the game. In general such a game session is just two combats, then everyone has to run.

Skilled play takes time, and there is no way around it.