Improvisation vs "code-breaking" in D&D

[N'raac]

Yes, but the point is your assertion that highly tactical players always treat their PCs as disposable bits (and therefore somehow less "real" than angstgame PCs)that they're unattached to and not invested in is totally wrong.

The "perfect tactic every time and no personality" player and the "power or death - throw the dice lemming character" player are two examples of the "character is but a pawn" mentality I find weakens the game, not commonly found in combination. That doesn't mean good tactics and good role playing are polar opposites. It does mean that determining one's actions consistently based solely on what gives the best mechanical bonus, rather than based on the character himself, is poor role playing, and boring to boot, in my view.

It looks like you are saying one cannot have a personality without being angsty.

You are the one who brought "angst" in. When I said "actually having a personality, rather than being a cipher geared solely around the best mechanical bonuses", you decided that meant an angsty character. "A feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general" is hardly the only personality that can cause one to select less than optimal choices. A simple respect for life, or bias against certain types of creatures, can cause similar decisions. Impatience, prejudices, pride, overconfidence, underconfidence, fears, empathy - plenty of things can drive suboptimal tactical decisions.

Most of the internet isn't rational.

Well, we have agreement on something, at least.

I don't know why you're doing this, other than you're own experiences have been limited and it compels you to make hyperbolic statements in order to exaggerate a personal preference for games like AW into something that sounds more profound and objective than it actually is.

Thank you for telling me my personal preference for a game I have never read or played. I might have lived my entire life not knowing that I clearly preferred a game I`ve never even seen. [Oh, wait, looking it up someone on another board just linked in a kickstarter for a game using that engine. I see nothing in my quick perusal that suggests angst as a core mechanic or requirement, but I`ll assume you know more about it than I - you could not know less.]¸ Pretty sure I have seen the mechanics before, too.

It can`t be a game, can it? It clearly requires improvising!

I never did that or anything like it.

Not sure what you are claiming you never did anything like, but OK.

 

[Campbell]

If I, as GM, was the only one feeling the pain, I'd agree with you. Certainly, continuous improvement and adjustment is a thing a GM should shoot for.

But, no matter how much theory I talk here, I'm ultimately a fairly practical and service-oriented GM. I don't want a table of six players to have a lousy night because I can't find another way to learn from my mistakes.

We're probably going to have to agree to disagree here. This is a big part of the reason why I prefer disciplined scene framed play with a robust set of tools and why I largely have given up on preparing adventures. There's simply too much dependence between the various parts. If I frame a boring scene, that's just a small part of play and we can move on.

Part of this come down to who I am as a person. In the moment without the guidance of my principles I'm not really all that capable of determining what the best path forward is. I'm simply too emotionally invested in the fiction and the game, and I wouldn't have it any other way. When we're down in the thick of the game, I don't like knowing exactly what's going to happen anymore than the players. That's where the fun is.

I'm absolutely an active participant when I run games. I tend to think of the meat of play like an experienced veteran sparring with a novice fighter. The novice is totally trying to win, but the veteran is trying to get the novice to react. He's trying to challenge the novice, give him a fighting chance without giving any easy breaks. Without discipline and principled fighting the veteran would knock the novice's block off because of the power disparity between them and because it is still very much a fight.

Quick Note: Before we move on let me clarify that I'm not attempting to say anything about my players' skill level here. I'm commenting on the power disparity. GMs have an entire world at their disposal and players just have their characters. When GMing I'm very much throwing metaphorical jabs and some stronger punches at my players and I expect them to raise to punch back in ways I wouldn't see coming. I need to pull my punches, but I'm still fighting. I'm not really talking about combat here - just the fiction and play space. With disciplined GMing and the right games I totally get to eat a bit of my cake.

Part of the reason I'm so adamant that we can play games we get compelling drama out of is that I've seen it happen. I've experienced it almost constantly. We aren't like telling stories though. It just happens through principled play.

There's also the bit where we don't always want what emerges from play to be the sort of thing we would do if left to our own devices. I mean that's why I like a lot of different games. I want radically different experiences. Part of surrendering yourself over to the game a little bit is getting unexpected drama and game play.

 

[Campbell]

[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION],

I totally get the value of breaking things down into their component parts. I think it's just being done at the micro level by individual designers in individual games. There's less overt criticism, but you definitely see elements of it in people like Vincent Baker calling for people to look at their games as games. What I was trying to bring home was that we've gotten a lot better at describing the sort of play we are after.

 

[howandwhy99]

Plus, "mass cultural conformity"? Have you somewhere presented a citation that there's some significant number of folks actually majoring in "game studies", and that they are *all* in this purported narrative-first form? Or did you just pull it up out of nowhere?

Gaming and game culture has existed for millenia. That culture is being erased in favor of a fundamentalist one based upon narratives as an inevitability. Games are real, of course. Not fiction or non-fictions at all. The source of a puzzle or game is irrelevant to it being a pattern people can attempt to game or puzzle out. Read references online on what Game Studies is and how Game Theory "has nothing whatsoever to do with games". Again, as if. Storytelling has nothing to do with games. Pattern recognition and actions taken to achieve objectives within a game pattern are the historical basis for what all games are. Or at least were, before the narrative disinformation revolution.

Edwards switched from GNS to Big Model. While BM does include several aspects of GNS, it also tosses out several aspects of the earlier theory, in favor of new ideas. In making that switch, there's an admission that GNS was not, "Teh Troof!" as he had effectively asserted for years prior to that.

GNS at least had to pay incoherent lipservice to the culture it was seeking to overturn in their revolution. One they more than they are willing to erase from memory. It's a response to a previous, honest, but uncomprehending flawed theory called GDS before it. No one is "changing their mind" here. Big Model is the dogma.

Every time you are told that "game" doesn't mean what you assert, you reject it, and you insert your own very narrow definition. I don't see how you can consider that an "honest canvasing of their use", when you reject any use but your own.

Any honest person rejects the usurpation of one culture by another. The community having a "revolution" by a few rewriting falsely the language of others to conform them to the previous true believers' certainties.

Have you considered that your own understanding of history may be a tad limited or inaccurate? Or that they have no understanding of why they are needed because we have learned in years past that they aren't, in fact, strictly *needed*?

That most everyone responding is largely devoid of historical understanding of games seems obvious. Of course my understanding has limits. But rationalizing history to fit storytelling beliefs doesn't mean millions of people didn't hold beliefs 180 degrees different. We *need* modules to play D&D. It can't be done without them. We *need* a map behind the screen for players to play. We *need* those screens to hide that map and other secret information to be parceled out as the game progresses. We *need* games to play before we can play them.

From my own experience, and from the rather cogent testimony of others (Celebrim, for example) it seems pretty obvious to me that RPGs have always been multi-faceted, rather than single-faceted as you present. The Forge didn't actually generate anything new - everything in GNS theory existed well before Edwards came on the scene. And The Forge didn't even get all of it!

So, no "pretending", but there's way more to the RPG story than what you present. Sorry.

I am not dogmatic as to what framework I (or anyone) uses to look at the facets of games. In fact, I strongly advise that you consider that analysis of games is akin to the Blind Men and the Elephant.

People have tried to understand what D&D was and how to play it from the beginning. That's true of any game. But the Forge promoted intentional myopia towards games in an agenda-driven,"all encompassing theory". People found god there in dogma and sought to convert others. That games can be (mis)treated as collaborative storytelling isn't under debate.

Games aren't fictions.

Hyperbole. Save "genocide" for when people actually die, please and thank you.

Or, do you just want to go ahead and Godwin the thread already, to get it over with?

You're a mod, man. Think of what you're asking posters to do before asking questions like that.

I'm using that term appropriately exactly as it was defined.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The revisionist history in the community makes me wonder some times. Sure, back in the day, gamers weren't on the internet, or even a BBS, and weren't 'connected' like today. But it's not like we were completely un-connected, you had The Dragon, and 'zines and the like, you went to conventions. There was a community and it did have norms and stereotypes and expectations.

Maybe there are folks only speculating about what things were like back then, or who were in groups that were genuinely isolated or terribly avante-garde, or who got a really nice set of rose-colored glasses for their mid-life crises, or view their past experiences in light of their current theories about the hobby.

IDK. I can't explain it.

 

[pemerton]

Gygax advocates nuance in using procedures for content generation, but is pretty strongly anti-fudging in action resolution. At most he's ok with the occasional PC left for dead rather than slain outright, as something the GM can just decide.

Knocking a PC unconscious instead of killing the PC is fudging combat.

Yes an no. The relevant passage is on p 110 of Gygax's DMG (emphasis added):

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done.​

I have bolded of the final clause because I think it is key. The GM is not fudging the combat in terms of who wins and who loses. Within the context of the combat resolution itself, there is no fudging. What the GM is doing is changing the consequence of losing the combat, from PC death to reasonably severe penalty to the PC.

The most important thing, from the point of view of the "skilled play" which Gygax advocates, is that the GM is not changing the balance between failure and success - it's just that the failure is being ameliorated from death (= wish or Raise Dead) to unconsciousness or maiming (= Cure Blindness, Regeneration or something similar).

 

[pemerton]

"Skilled play"? "code breaking"
Do you believe in either of those things or just like air quoting?

<snip>

In what fever dream are predetermined random tables unavoidably necessary in order to collaboratively invent a story? And yet they have been for D&D for decades. Because storytelling isn't gaming.

For me this is another non sequitur moment.

What makes you think that I am talking about collaboratively inventing a story? I have never said that that is what I do when I play D&D. You are projecting that onto me. Read [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s posts to see the sort of play that is what I aim for (though as I said upthread I think my game is probably flabbier than [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s).

And of course I believe there is such a think as Gygaxian "skilled play" - the quotes are used because it is a term of art, and the skill involved is rather distinct (and doesn't exhaust the sorts of skills that a player might bring to RPGing). Though personally I'm not very good at it as a GM or player. (I lack the patience.)

But none of this has any bearing on whether the goal of play is for the players to reconstruct, by extrapolation from their play experiences, the GM's random tables. As I have said, and as other posters in this thread have agreed, that has never been a goal of mainstream D&D play. Gygax nowhere talks about it in his DMG. Look at his comments on NPC random tables, for instance (p 100):

It is often highly desirable, if not absolutely necessary, to have well developed non-player characters (NPCs). In order to easily develop these personae, the tables below are offered for consideration. Note that the various facts and traits are given in a sequence which allows the character to develop itself - with judicial help from the DM. Thus, Alignment, Appearance, Possessions, and then General Tendencies are given. The first three will, of necessity, modify the fourth, and the latter will similarly greatly modify the other traits.

The personae of special NPCs should be selected . . . . Other NPCs can be developed randomly, or by a combination of random and considered selection.​

Notice that, just as with dungeon design, Gygax expects the GM to use a mix of random selection and choice - with random selection mostly being for ease of generation for unimportant NPCs.

I'm not sure what you think "special NPCs" means, by the way, but it is pretty clear to me that it means NPCs that are important to the backstory of the dungeon, in the sort of fashion that Roger Musson talks about.

The process I am telling you, the process of actual game playing and D&D, requires all the published products D&D resulted in for decades:

<snip>

I don't think you want to pay D&D. I don't think you want to play games. You've been convinced that narratives are what you want by narrative absolutists. Please stop perpetuating the myth stories are game, play or D&D.

You've been playing D&D since 1985, yes? In that case, I've been playing for 3 years more than you (1982). I think I have a pretty good idea of whether or not I want to play D&D, or any other role playing game.

Sometime I use maps. Sometimes not. My players occasionally draw maps, but not very often. In my Burning Wheel campaign, for instance, I just lay out my GH maps on the table and we all look at them, to work out where the players are, and where they might want to go to. This may not be the sort of game you want to play, but it is a game in the sense of an amusement or pastime. It involves dice, and character sheets, and pretty intricate action resolution mechanics.

I have not been "convinced that narratives are what I want by narrative absolutists"! That's absurd. I started playing D&D because I enjoyed fantasy tropes, and fanatasy stories, and wanted to play a game that would allow me to partake of them. (Just as the foreword to Moldvay Basic promises.) Oriental Adventures - a D&D book published in the mid-80s - really showed me the way to get what I wanted. (Which was not the "skilled play" of Gygax or Moldvay.)

And I am not perpetuating any myth that stories are games. For a start, games are activities that take place in the real world whereas stories are tellings or retellings of imagined events. But some games generate stories. Sometimes as a byproduct, sometimes by design. I prefer the latter. Which isn't the same thing as "collaboratively inventing stories". Luke Crane has designed a game which will, by design, generate stories without the need for collaborative invention. (He's a clever guy, though he built on the designs of others.)

 

[Manbearcat]

[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION],

I totally get the value of breaking things down into their component parts. I think it's just being done at the micro level by individual designers in individual games. There's less overt criticism, but you definitely see elements of it in people like Vincent Baker calling for people to look at their games as games. What I was trying to bring home was that we've gotten a lot better at describing the sort of play we are after.

No I got you. I was mostly just using your post as a springboard to respond generally to the "revise the history of RPGs to remove/discount the Forge's influence on theory and analysis" theme I've seen in the gaming community (definitely on these boards) or by specific commenters.

Were the Simulationist essays incomplete or unfair? I have an opinion (for when I put my sim GM hat on for Classic Traveller), but I'll leave it to ardent process-sim folks as an uncertain number of them have strong opinions on the subject.

Was the moderation heavy-handed? Edwards had severe disdain for threadcrapping, coat-racking, or topic drift and inserted himself rather prolifically when this occurred. There are a lot of forums I've followed, or engaged with, over the years where the moderation approach is similar. They tend to have pretty focused, technical discourse.

And the "brain-damaged" stuff? I do have an opinion on this. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" is a pretty well established cultural meme for a reason. With considerable time, practice, and emotional investment, it is an inevitability that mental frameworks ossify, cognitive biases develop and regiment behavior (eg "put on blinders"), and muscle memory causes a subject to resort to prior fundamentals in times of acute stress. This is a very real, very uniform aspect of human cognition. We are all subject to this and manage our own battles with it. Unlearning a tenured paradigm (whether it be martial, mental, or emotional) and learning and applying a new one in its stead is extraordinarily difficult.

Something as "simple" (eg lacking a certain quality of emotional investment/backing) as a golf swing or sleep behavior is amazingly difficult to unlearn and retool. And it runs both ways regarding TTRPGs (eg not just the inability to run games alternative to D&D). Folks who grew up solely on White Wolf games (without exposure to D&D) would have a difficult time internalizing the GMing principles and techniques inherent to running a pure D&D Basic dungeon crawl. Same thing goes for folks who only ran Story Now engines like Dogs and then were forced to run a game like Classic Traveller.

Instead of recognizing that utterly obvious reality, people freak out about brain-damaged (certainly detractors because it was a very expedient way to brand their hated enemy as a monster!). The Forge existed. It wasn't some weird revolution attempting to infect the cultural bloodstream of TTRPGs with a Story Now pathogen. Edwards was just some dude on the internet, not a GNS bogeyman imposing a YOU WILL ONLY RUN NARRATIVE GAMES OR YOU WILL FACE THE WRATH OF OUR GNS JACKBOOTS directive. Follks explored and analyzed past and present systems, techniques, play priorities and posited some alternative approaches. Done. Oh and I guess they stirred up the natives something fierce in the doing.

 

[Zak S]

The "perfect tactic every time and no personality" player

Yeah but we aren't discussing this kind of player.

We're discussing "best tactic the player could think of every time plus personality" player. which you seem to keep forgetting.

 

[Umbran]

That culture is being erased in favor of a fundamentalist one based upon narratives as an inevitability.

I will repeat, in different words (and large letters, in case somehow it is getting missed): CITE PLEASE.

You have asserted this happening, but have offered no evidence, much less proof. The mere existence of a school curriculum you do not like does not equate to what you're suggesting here.

Read references online

No. You are making the assertion. You provide the proof. Stop trying to shift the burden of researching and proving your own points onto others, please.

This is why I said earlier that you sound like a conspiracy theorist. You are using all the techniques seen in conspiracy theory. If the thing exists as you say, you should be able to direct us at concrete evidence for it. Rant and rail all you want, your position is not sound without *evidence*. Assertion is inadequate.

No one is "changing their mind" here. Big Model is the dogma.

Sure they did change their minds. They had GNS. Now, they have Big Model. They are related, but not the same - that means there was change. There was thus a change in minds.

Any honest person rejects the usurpation of one culture by another.

Arguments of the form, "If you do not agree with me you are mentally or morally flawed," have little to no place in polite discussion.

That being said, what you say here is historically very much untrue. Typically, the ones being usurped reject it. The usurpers are generally all for the usurpation! Generally, most people not within either of those groups don't give much of a hoot. All are quite honest. They simply have different cares and concerns.

Moreover, if your entire culture requires that everyone within it and outside it adhere to one very specific definition, and the culture dies without that definition... it isn't much of a culture. Healthy robust cultures exist regardless of definitions - like Pluto, which exists as a physical object whether or not we call it a planet. It is a weak, fragile culture that cannot survive a change of definitions. I would have to question whether such a thing really counts as a "culture" at all.

That most everyone responding is largely devoid of historical understanding of games seems obvious.

That seems an odd statement, given that Celebrim has given a very clear and cogent history of the games in question that very much defies your categorization.

People have tried to understand what D&D was and how to play it from the beginning. That's true of any game. But the Forge promoted intentional myopia towards games in an agenda-driven,"all encompassing theory".

Except the Forge was not "all narrative, all the time". The Forge allows that gamism is an entirely fair agenda. It even advocates making sure you focus on a particular agenda. Game for sake of game is fine. Game for sake of simulation is fine. Game for sake of narrative is fine. After the Forge came up with this, some folks found that narrative was under-served in game culture. Chess, backgammon, dominoes, and pretty much every other game produced before the 1970s serves the game agenda. Some folks merely decided to build some things that served other agendas.

They embraced the power of "and". You do not. I think most of us fail to see how this makes *them* myopic.

You're a mod, man. Think of what you're asking posters to do before asking questions like that.

I am not asking you to do anything. I'm asking if you *want* to do something - I am asking if that thought, that analogy, is in your head. If it was, it would be nice if you got to it sooner, rather than later.

I'm using that term appropriately exactly as it was defined.

Do not quote wikipedia pages that do not really support you. Specifically in the section, "In Practice":

"It involves the eradication and destruction of cultural artifacts, such as books, artworks, and structures, and the suppression of cultural activities that do not conform to the destroyer's notion of what is appropriate."

This is *NOT* occurring. There is no destruction of cultural artifacts - nobody is out there burning chessboards, or copies of Hoyle's. Producing new cultural artifacts that are not chess or Hoyle's does not constitute destruction. There is no suppression of cultural activities - nobody is busing into board game gamedays shouting, "Stop! Stop! This must all stop! There is not enough *STORY* in the room!", and nobody is stopping my boardgame-designing friend from designing and publishing games that are all about tactical placement of pieces, and not about any narrative. Teaching new ideas, and playing new kinds of games, does not constitute suppression of the old ones.

If your form of games aren't attractive, that's not an act of destruction on the part of those who make ones that are attractive.

You have a culture? If you want it to survive, it is up to you to propagate it. Failure of others to do that work for you does not constitute usurpation. Thus, people teaching "game studies" that you don't agree with is not cultural genocide, by the definition you yourself present. So, please stop using the hyperbolic term.

Not that you've even actually established that "game culture" as you describe it is actually declining. Again: CITE PLEASE. Your assertion is not sufficient.