D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[pemerton]

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!

Agreed. It seems like a concession to the sorts of approach that Pulsipher criticises. I think it's interesting in that it shows that Gygax/TSR was aware of this variety of approaches to play as early as 1978.

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.

Interesting point.

I think that there are differences between Gygax's PHB and DMG which reflect developments in his thinking over time - this is (again) consistent with the fact that the hobby was growing and changing quickly from its inception.

The starkest example, in my opinion, is the DMG advice on "living" dungeons that react "logically" to PC incursions. If this advice is applied literally, then the advice in Successful Adventures becomes much less apposite, as that (latter) advice depends on the dungeon being relatively static, such that exploration/scouting will generate knowledge that can then, subsequently, be used to plan a successful raid. If the dungeon environment changes in response to the initial incursion, that makes the raid much harder to plan, and more hostage to the sort of unpredictability that Pulsipher warns against.

 

[Umbran]

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

Eh. Again, it depends what skill.

Yes, the skills connected to long-term resource management are hard to make central to play with shorter, less-frequent sessions.

Skills around, say, dramatic pacing? Shorter sessions are perfect for those.

 

[bloodtide]

Eh. Again, it depends what skill.

Yes, the skills connected to long-term resource management are hard to make central to play with shorter, less-frequent sessions.

Skills around, say, dramatic pacing? Shorter sessions are perfect for those.

True.

After all to teach dramatic pacing can often take a great deal of time.

And the more general skill of "not just playing your character sheet" takes a lot of time.

 

[Umbran]

True.

After all to teach dramatic pacing can often take a great deal of time.

And the more general skill of "not just playing your character sheet" takes a lot of time.

I don't know where you are going with this.

Mastering any skill takes time, sure. But playing with a focus on that skill does not require one attain mastery first.

Or, maybe you misunderstood me previously - I said that it is hard to play with focus on resource management with infrequent short sessions. But that wasn't about learning the skill, it was about applying the skill.

RPG resource management is a thing that matters over the course of extended active game time, over several encounters - if you play short sessions, you'll need several sessions to highlight it, and if those sessions are infrequent, players will tend to lose the detailed context, so that's an awkward focus for the play pattern.

 

[Piperken]

...You can get skilled at making characters. More knowledge, better at learning how to use the system and recognize interactions...
But also you can just learn that from others on forums and the like, online. Reddit Posts. Discord conversations. Ultimately it's not a skill, just knowledge.
The closest things to actual skill with D&D games are Pattern Recognition and Genre Saavy.
Okay. And a little bit of empathy and emotional intelligence... but skilled play? I don't think it exists...

“Skilled play” is a poor term for the play patterns it’s trying to describe, yes, and for a lot more reasons than this. But, there is a lot to be appreciated about play patterns that emphasize in-the-moment

The current set of players I am with are learning these disparate elements. I find similarities to playing in a sport. You learn the sport's rules (e.g. this is the playing field, this is how many members you are allowed to have on your team, etc.) You are taught the modes that place you (and by extension your team if there is one) to have the most opportunities to be successful in a game. And you practice those a lot.

When you are able to put those elements together in a way that works for you in the moment, that is a player that I'd love to have playing with others at my table.

 

[loverdrive]

I just realized the most important question was never brought up.

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?

 

[loverdrive]

Quote from David Sirlin's "Playing to Win"

The derogatory term “scrub” means several different things. One definition is someone (especially a game player) who is not good at something (especially a game). By this definition, we all start out as scrubs, and there is certainly no shame in that. I mean the term differently, though. A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about. A scrub does not play to win.

Now, everyone begins as a poor player—it takes time to learn a game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevents him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. Let’s take a fighting game off of which I’ve made my gaming career: Street Fighter.

In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.

You will not see a classic scrub throw his opponent five times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimizes his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you—that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If you block for fifty seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap. Street Fighter was just one example; I could have picked any competitive game at all.

You know what this description reminds me of?
Don't look up the adventure, that's cheap cheating. Don't use knowledge your character doesn't posses, that's cheap metagaming. Don't make a busted character, that's cheap munchkinism.

A big part of roleplaying culture is those self-imposed asinine rules that give scrubs a way to protect their egos. Until that is rectified, any talks of skill are just navel gazing.

 

[pemerton]

I just realized the most important question was never brought up.

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?

Quote from David Sirlin's "Playing to Win"


You know what this description reminds me of?
Don't look up the adventure, that's cheap cheating. Don't use knowledge your character doesn't posses, that's cheap metagaming. Don't make a busted character, that's cheap munchkinism.

A big part of roleplaying culture is those self-imposed asinine rules that give scrubs a way to protect their egos. Until that is rectified, any talks of skill are just navel gazing.

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

On 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.

As skills get "softer" and less technical I accept there can be more room for disagreement even in local ranking contexts. But "skilled play" is normally focused on reasonably "hard", technical wargaming (or, at least, wargame-esque) skills.

As for self-imposed rules, some are less asinine than others. When playing bridge, for instance, not looking at others' hands is not an asinine rule: part of what it means to have skill at bridge is to be able to infer others' hands from your hand, from the bidding, and from the play; and doing this is part of the fun of playing. In the context of traditional "skilled play", the dungeon map and key are a secret that are meant to be worked out via play, not by just reading the GM's notes.

Not "metagaming", on the other hand, is a different thing because it pushes against technically skilled play: whereas mapping, using detection spells well, and the like are skills that can be deployed (whether well or poorly) to learn the secrets of the dungeon, choosing not to use your knowledge of the nature of the threats that the dungeon poses isn't possible while trying to use your skill to overcome those threats. That's why classic D&D doesn't have any "no metagaming" rule.

Broken builds are different again. To me, they generally seem to be a consequence of PC build rules being designed with the goal of "modelling" characters, and then permitting degenerate combinations. Better-designed build rules, and/or agreements about limits to be observed in PC building (which are similar to points-limits in wargame army building) seem to be the solution here.

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.

 

[The Firebird]

I just realized the most important question was never brought up.

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?

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.

 

[Bae'zel]

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?

While I've definitely encountered players (and GMs) who are competitive (which in itself is kind of absurd in this kind of game), I'd be surprised that anyone perceives player "skill" as a play to win scenario outside of a Tomb of Horrors tournament with a prize for the player who survives with the most treasure.

I've met plenty of players who feel like they're expected to compete against the GM ("hey bro, check out this youtube video on the top 10 ways to mess up your GM's game!") or players who just want to be the best tactician and beat encounters expending the least amount of resources.