D&D General Has the meaning of "roleplaying" changed since 1e?

[Mannahnin]

So metagaming, role playing and so on exist in a spectrum. At a certain point certain knowledge about what your PC acts on becomes metagaming, initiative doesn't cross that line for me. Using the capabilities of a PC alone does not qualify as role playing to me any more than knowing what a Sherman tank's capabilities in a war game means you're role playing a tank.

I think we're much more on the same page here. Metagaming and roleplaying are flexible terms with more than one meaning, and whole range of types on a spectrum.

Re: Metagaming, different types and manifestations:
For me, reading aloud from the monster manual during a session would be unacceptable and I would forbid it.

Reading it privately to yourself would be a little annoying and I would discourage it.

Using fire on a troll because you're an experienced player would be completely fine; I would assume that characters could logically have heard of this weakness, and I'd give the trolls a different weakness if I wanted the players & characters to fumble to figure out the gimmick.

Thinking about the initiative order and planning your actions accordingly would be good play and I would be a bit disappointed or even annoyed if players DIDN'T do it, because it would slow down the game and make things run less smoothly.

 

[Umbran]

Fair enough I suppose. I don't consider Pawn Stance or "Avatar" play to be role playing. It's certainly playing the game. But, it's not recognizably role playing. Like I said earlier, I barely consider AD&D to be an RPG by today's standards. Which, I suppose, explains a lot about why I seem to not be able to get my point across.

Yep. Looks like you've got a hefty case of OneTrueWayism brewing there.

 

[Maxperson]

Even the Basic set tells you exactly, under the heading "what is role playing ?", on the very first page of the rule book, which definition was in use at the time, and it includes playacting, sorry: "That means that you will be like an actor, imagining that you are someone else, and pretending to be that character. You won’t need a stage, though, and you won’t need costumes or scripts. You only need to imagine."

So once more, it is very precise since the very beginnings of the game, and specified by the game designers as the intent of the game.

The PHB pg. 185 says,

"Roleplaying is, literally, the act of playing out a role."

The first portion states what roleplaying is. "...playing out a role." That's all it takes. The section then gets more involved and tries to teach the roleplay that you describe, but you don't need to engage in that to be roleplaying. As it says at the very beginning, as long as you are playing a role, you are roleplaying. And that level of RP is satisfied as soon as you make a fighter and enter the game world to adventure.

 

[Oofta]

To my read (which is much the same today as when I first read that passage as a teenager, though I have much more knowledge and perspective now), it's obviously both a joke and a statement of sincere intent as part of the play style Gary was endorsing, which is adversarial in many parts of the DMG. That a player transgressing on knowledge he's not supposed to have has committed an offense against the game, the group, and the DM's authority and deserves punishment. It's meant with good humor, and of course he didn't mean kill the player, but I don't think he meant it to be entirely ironic, no.

Gygax had a lot of, shall we say, interesting ideas. He shares his opinion on how he thinks the game should be run but also stresses that it is just his opinion and that you should make the game your own.

But it's such a tiny, tiny percentage of the overall text. Aside from a few snide comments and there, there is nothing that explicitly comes out and pushes a DM vs PC adversarial relationship to me. He warns about letting PCs become too powerful too soon and that part of the fun of having a long term campaign is the players being challenged which to me is good advice. Saying that because .02% of the DMG makes jokes about killing off PCs or players makes the game all about DM vs PC is pushing it to me.

 

[Mannahnin]

Pawn Stance and Avatar play certainly don't involve a lot of characterization, but IME it's almost always a spectrum. New players sometimes go full self-insert for character motivations, but others, especially ones who love fantasy fiction, immediately embody a character different from themselves.*

Some games and styles call for different forms of it.

When I'm playing an OSR game, say OSE on a pickup games Discord server I'm a member of, in open-table sessions where we might have 6-10 players in a given session but not all the same ones from week to week, doing a ton of in-depth character play would be out of place. I can certainly do SOME characterization and make my character distinct and interesting, but most of the play will be more Gygaxian Skilled Play, focused on player skill and problem solving and leveraging our character abilities as best we can.

When I'm playing my 4 players & a DM 5E Frostmaiden game where it's always the same players and the DM prefers to cancel a session rather than play without one of us, I know more in depth characterization is called for, and inhabiting and making clear the distinct personality of a given character is expected. When my very goodly wizard died I made a roguish hexblade who would never be mistaken for that wizard, in how he talks, his rationales for actions, or his abilities (even though I did take Ritual Caster to let him cover a few of the missing wizard capabilities the party now lacked).

--------------------------
(*And it's always been that way! Look at how Lee Gold and her crew in Los Angeles were writing about their characters in '75 or '76. The two big streams of players Peterson talks about in The Elusive Shift (and in Playing at the World) are the wargamers and the sci-fi/fantasy fans. And the folks coming into it primarily from a background in fandom almost inevitably started getting their characters "involved in death feuds and love affairs", as Sandy Peterson and friends called out as "Real Roleplayers" going back to '83, though that was just one example of a conversation which had been going for years already.)

Real Men, Real Rôle-Players, Loonies and Munchkins

www.firedrake.org

Player Relationships (REAL MEN, REAL RÔLE-PLAYERS, LOONIES AND MUNCHKINS)​

With Real Men:​

Real Men: think they're brothers in arms.
Real Rôle-players: hide behind them.
Loonies: harass them with stupid suggestions.
Munchkins: say "I'm a Real Man, too!"

With Real Rôle-players:​

Real Men: protect them, on the off chance they may come up with something useful.
Real Rôle-players: sigh with relief to know they're not alone, and then get their characters involved in love affairs and death feuds.
Loonies: harass them with stupid suggestions.
Munchkins: say "I'm a Real Rôle-player, too!"

With Loonies:​

Real Men: ignore them.
Real Rôle-players: sometimes harass them back by taking a stupid suggestion and making it work.
Loonies: declare a pie fight at 20 paces... and cheat.
Munchkins: try to imitate the jokes, and fall flat.

With Munchkins:​

Real Men: attack them on sight.
Real Rôle-players: trick them into being cannon fodder.
Loonies: make reasonable-sounding suggestions that will get the Munchkin killed in an amusing way.
Munchkins: query, "What's a Munchkin?"

 

[Oofta]

One thing that is fairly clear is that what role playing or metagaming even is when it comes to details has no objective definition. So it's easy to read a post and say that because someone defines it as "X" for them, they are defining it as "X" for everyone.

I don't think role playing is inherently good or bad. In my experience role playing in AL games is pretty limited because of time constraints and the nature of random groups. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy AL now and then. On the other hand I don't think someone that runs their PC entirely as a set of stats and abilities is role playing the PC.

But that's just, like an opinion, man. Same as where "understanding the game structure" becomes metagaming (as well as whether it's good or bad) is in the eye of the beholder.

 

[Mannahnin]

Gygax had a lot of, shall we say, interesting ideas. He shares his opinion on how he thinks the game should be run but also stresses that it is just his opinion and that you should make the game your own.

But it's such a tiny, tiny percentage of the overall text. Aside from a few snide comments and there, there is nothing that explicitly comes out and pushes a DM vs PC adversarial relationship to me. He warns about letting PCs become too powerful too soon and that part of the fun of having a long term campaign is the players being challenged which to me is good advice. Saying that because .02% of the DMG makes jokes about killing off PCs or players makes the game all about DM vs PC is pushing it to me.

No one in this thread has said that the game is all about DM vs. PC.

It's a lot more than .02% of the DMG, though. There's tons of advice in there about making the game hard on your players. Whether in hiring henchmen, trading for spells with NPC casters (this section is BRUTAL!), making treasure hard to identify and transport, taxing the hell out of characters and having local nobles outright confiscate wealth, making magic items difficult and expensive (and sometimes dangerous!) to identify, making it hard and dangerous to listen at doors, emphasizing the disadvantages as hard as possible if they want to play a monster PC, etc. Or dungeons with teleporters and other tricks meant to frustrate the person mapping... Or how about the section on Wishes, and twisting them?

I'm not saying Gary really ran a super adversarial game, and in other parts of the DMG he outright endorses fudging dice (in the section on random encounters, for example) to keep the game more fun if the players are making good choices and happen to get "screwed" by bad luck.

But adversarial play DEFINITELY didn't start with 3rd edition, or from my perspective become much worse than in that regard it had been in any prior edition. 70s D&D had plenty of examples, and Gary certainly wrote enough stuff for folks to feel encouraged by him in that style.

 

[Oofta]

No one in this thread has said that the game is all about DM vs. PC.

It's a lot more than .02% of the DMG, though. There's tons of advice in there about making the game hard on your players. Whether in hiring henchmen, trading for spells with NPC casters, making treasure hard to identify and transport, taxing the hell out of characters and having local nobles outright confiscate wealth, making magic items difficult and expensive (and sometimes dangerous!) to identify, making it hard and dangerous to listen at doors, emphasizing the disadvantages as hard as possible if they want to play a monster PC, etc. Or dungeons with teleporters and other tricks meant to frustrate the person mapping...

I'm not saying Gary really ran a super adversarial game, and in other parts of the DMG he outright endorses fudging dice (in the section on random encounters, for example) to keep the game more fun if the players are making good choices and happen to get "screwed" by bad luck.

But adversarial play DEFINITELY didn't start with 3rd edition, or from my perspective become much worse than in that regard it had been in any prior edition. 70s D&D had plenty of examples, and Gary certainly wrote enough stuff for folks to feel encouraged by him in that style.

But again, this is really open to interpretation. Did Gygax want to make some things difficult? Sure. Like (random bit that I scanned) his advice on how to handle invisibility. He's explaining that being invisible doesn't make the PC completely undetectable and that there are downsides to invisibility.

Is that adversarial? Not to me. It's just saying that you should put reasonable limitations on the PCs because if the game is too easy, if the PCs are too powerful, they won't feel challenged. There is no objective definition of "adversarial DMing".

On the other hand, Tomb of Horrors was absolutely all about player skilled play. Back in the day we just didn't run our games that way, nor did we feel that the DMG told us to run games that way even though it gave advice on how you could. Maybe it was just because we rotated DMs and knew that there would be an arms race of deadly dungeons if we did.

There have always been, and still are, adversarial DMs. There's nothing wrong with that. There have always been, and still are, games that are more about story and assuming the role of an individual in a fantastic world who's class and abilities are secondary to who the character is. Just because a DM puts obstacles in the way of PCs that they must overcome does not make that DM adversarial. In my opinion, of course.

 

[Mannahnin]

Yeah, I think we're more on the same page.

People would talk about how Tomb of Horrors is a terrible adventure, but for its purpose, as a tournament module for players to test their cleverness and caution against and show that they were personally skilled and quick-witted, not merely the owners of high-level characters who could solve any problem using their character sheet, it works pretty great. If you go into it with the right mindset and using it for the purpose it's intended for, it can be a lot of fun.

Adversarial D&D was definitely a style which emerged from the 70s, and it makes more sense in a more pawn-stance style game. Where individual characters aren't essential to an overarching plot, and the expectation is that they could die at any time, and the game would go on with the player just rolling up another one, taking over a henchman, or maybe the party finding a Wish or something to resurrect them. OD&D could be very much be a game of "can the players outwit the DM's fiendish traps and tricks?"

But even by AD&D you can see Gary simultaneously trying to support that style AND talk about heroic characters (the section about Saving Throws is such a classic).

And fundamentally, D&D CAN'T be a truly adversarial game like a wargame. As DM I always have infinite dragons.

But I think there really is a style (which used to be more common) of an adversarial attitude- "can't trust the players, don't give them an inch, screw them over if they're getting too big for their britches, be proud of the ones you kill, metagaming is always a way to cheat". Horror stories of DMs like this pervaded fan culture through the 80s into the 90s, though I think they were always relatively rare and exaggerated. But they were influential enough that 3E was designed to empower players and standardize rules more. And Lyxen's experience was that this made some players feel entitled to give pushback and guff to DMs in a new form of adversarial attitude.

 

[Lyxen]

Yes, when I'm an actor playing a wizard on a stage, I will be fufilling a role in that story assigned to the wizard. I don't have to do any actual acting

Then, you won't be playing your role like an actor. Sorry. And even the worst hollywood actors (which, of course, you have to take as example to show how far you are willing to go), doesn't come on stage just standing there and saying "I am a wizard". sigh