Improvisation vs "code-breaking" in D&D

[Campbell]

I really wish we would stop talking about D&D as if it were one game, rather than the many games with the same name it is. Playing Gygaxian AD&D dungeon bashing is a fundamentally different experience than a 2nd Edition Planescape game, which is also a fundamentally different game from scene framed 4e play. I feel like it helps immensely to be specific. For instance, I like the first and the last of those although I feel like Mentzer's BD&D is the better game for dungeon bashing.

Also, can we stop playing the word game? Playing around with definitions and the like does little too get to the heart of the matter.

 

[pemerton]

"This assumption about all gaming ever is accurate because it holds for all gaming I've been present during and all anecdotes about games I choose to believe" is not real scientific.

Sure.

I'm not sure who this is aimed at. If there are Rolemaster players out there who thinks that Edwards doesn't get them, no one is stopping them posting. But here is one relevant bit of data. Edwards says says

The causal sequence of task resolution in Simulationist play must be linear in time. . . . The few exceptions have always been accompanied by explanatory text, sometimes apologetic and sometimes blase. . . . [An] example is rolling for initiative, which has generated hours of painful argument about what in the world it represents in-game, at the moment of the roll relative to in-game time.​

A quick mental count tells me that RM has half-a-dozen published initiative systems, mabye more. All trying to deal with the relationship between mechanical action economy and ingame causal processes. And GMing Rolemaster (where I used my own homebrew initiative variant!), one of the recurring issues that causes breakdown in the correlation between mechanical outcomes and fictional positioning is the initiative and action economy system. (Burning Wheel is very process sim in its detailed melee mechanics, and it uses an interesting technique of simultaneous declaration plus second-by-second time-tracking to handle the initiative issue. There are some similar systems in print for Rolemaster, but BW via its declaration rules and its armour rules solves some issues that confront the RM version.)

I also think that Edwards is very clear about the key features of action resolution systems that depart from sim. He writes:

Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things:

* Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. . . .

* Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion.

* More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.​

That was written in mid-2003, and already captures everything that was ever said in all the debates around "dissociated" mechanics. And does so in a way that doesn't take a stand on whether the features Edwards' describes are aesthetically desirable or not - he just points them out as features of some RPGs that tend to be well-suited to certain approaches to play. And clearly, given what he'd already written about sim play, aren't well-suited to other approaches to play.

Again, maybe there are all these 4e players out there who think that what Edwards says there is a radical misdescription of their game. No one is stopping them posting.

No theory of human aesthetic experience is going to resonate as true with everyone. My test for any critic - and Edwards's essays are criticism - is whether what they write resonates with me, and provides me with new insights that help me make better sense of my experience. Edwards does that.

The problem with Forge theory isn't the theory so much (it's wrong but so are lots of others)--it's the tradition of really unrigorous anti-debate it spawned in the clique around it.

I've never met or interacted with Ron Edwards, or Vincent Baker, or Paul Czege, or Clinton R Nixon, or Luke Crane, or . . .

I only know them from their writings which, as I said above, I use as GM advice. They've served as better advice, to me, than nearly anything else I've read. (Ch 8 of Tom Moldvay's Basic, and Robin Laws in his various HeroWars/Quest books, are the only things that come close.)

The Forge was born in a very particular environment. There was a community of indie game designers that were deeply deeply unsatisfied with the role playing games of the 1990's. When Vampire came out it took the tabletop role playing game culture by storm. It basically defined the new normal. Metaplot, illusionism, and GMs telling their players a story became what tabletop role playing games were about. Shadowrun, Deadlands, Lengend of the 5 Rings, Planescape, Ravenloft, You Name It - they were all basically trying to out Vampire Vampire. Role playing not roll playing was the clarion call of RPGdom.

It's with that particular environment in mind that The Essays should be read. The Forge was a movement to produce games that were games, but still covered much of the same ground. The purpose of The Essays was to provide a basis of discussion for designing new games, and they had a particular audience. They were biased as hell, but they really weren't meant for general consumption.

I never played Vampire more than a few times. I played quite a bit of AD&D 2nd ed (almost always as my "second" game, back in university days when I had a lot of spare time), and a lot of those people did play Vampire.

But I didn't need Edwards to tell me that railroads and metaplot suck! I already knew that from AD&D 2nd ed experiences: both the first and the last AD&D 2nd ed games I was involved in broke up because of GM's trying to assert control in the face of players who weren't interested in just going along with whatever the GM was narrating. I was never bothered by "roleplaying not rollplaying" because I knew that my Rolemaster (hence dice-heavy) game was more serious from the story/theme point of view than any of the AD&D 2nd ed and Vampire games that I was involved in or new about. And back in the same period when the group I played with had time to go to local conventions, we would win prizes for best team and best individual performances. We never saw any conflict between rolling the dice to find out what happens, and expressing the character of the PC by engaging the ingame situation.

I found the Forge - and, in particular, Edwards's essays - by following some links (probably from a thread either here or on rpg.net) in 2004. The prose was somewhat tortured, and the terminology a bit baroque, but it made sense to me. It helped me clarify some issues that I had with Rolemaster, which I continued to play for another 5 years. Reading the endgame rules in Czege's Nicotine Girls helped me achieve a more indie-style endgame for that campaign, within the RM framework (and far more sentimental than anything that Czege would seem to be interested in).

When the RM campaign finished and I decided I wanted to try a new system, 4e had just come out. Edwards essay from 2003 (quoted earlier in this post) did a much better job than the 4e designers of setting out the workings of that system. Without Edwards, Robin Laws in HeroWars/Quest and Luke Crane in the Burning Wheel books I doubt that I could have run a successful 4e campaign for 6 years and 30 levels.

I'm not offended that other people don't find insight the same places I do. That's normal. People are looking for different things, and come to critical writers with their own experiences and expectations.

But that doesn't mean that I'm going to deny the importance Edwards' essays have had for my own RPGing.

 

[pemerton]

I really wish we would stop talking about D&D as if it were one game

This is why I try to use descriptions like Gygaxian "skilled play", or 4e scene-framing play, or AP-style GM-driven play.

It's not always simple, though, because it's hard to get descriptions that are agreed upon between people who do and don't enjoy a particular sort of play. For instance, most posters on these boards treat sandbox/railroad as a spectrum. Whereas I think that there are approaches to play (eg scene-framing) that aren't located on that notional spectrum. And I also tend to find a lot of sandbox-y play to be rather railroad-y by my standards, because of the relative importance of the GM's conception over that of the players as far as content introduction is concerned.

 

[pemerton]

As I said, you started this thread. We can talk about how D&D was designed. What games are. Why all the elements of D&D came from wargames meant to enable, not disable strategic thinking by players.

I am talking about those things. [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] and I have both quoted extensively from the major treatise by one of those designers - Gyagx's DMG. I have also quoted from a major participant in the early days in the UK - Roger Musson. Your response is to ignore those quotes, or assert that they also display ignorance of what D&D is.

You also have a tendency to state very broad generalisations as if they have very specific meanings, which makes it hard to follow what you are saying.

For instance, because I denied that it has ever been a part of mainstream play for the players to try to work out what the random tables are that the GM is using, you assert that I am denying that D&D involves strategic thinking by players. As if the only form of strategic thinking that a D&D player might engage in would be reasoning backwards from encounters experienced and dungeons mapped to the GM's random tables.

Here is Gygax on the strategic thinking that the players should engage in (PHB pp 107-109 ):

et an objective for the adventure. Whether the purpose is so simple as to discover a flight of stairs to the next lowest unexplored level or so difficult as to find and destroy on altar to an alien god, some firm obiective should be established and then adhered to as strongly as possible. . .

A map is very important because it helps assure that the party will be able to return to the surface. . . .

Avoid unnecessary encounters. This advice usually means the difference between success and failure when it is followed intelligently. Your party has an objective, and wondering monsters are something which stand between them and it. . . .

[/i]Do not be sidetracked.[/i] A good referee will have many ways to distract an expedition, many things to draw attention, but ignore them if at all possible. The mappers must note a11 such things, and another expedition might be in order another day to investigate or destroy something or some monster, but always stay with what was planned if at all possible, and wait for another day to handle the other matters. This not to say that something hanging like a ripe fruit ready to be plucked must be bypassed, but be relatively certain that what appears to be the case actually is. . . .

If the party becomes lost, the objective must immediately be changed to discovery of a way out. If the group becomes low on vital equipment or spells, it should turn back. The same is true if wounds and dead members have seriously weakened the group's strength. . . .

On the other hand, if the party gains its set goal and is still quite strong, some other objectives can be established, and pursuit of them can then be followed.​

There is nothing in there about trying to work out what system of dungeon generation the GM is using. And all that advice would be equally sound whether the GM determined everything in the dungeon randomly, or made up all the rooms and their contents quite deliberately, using random determination only for wandering monsters.

You don't want a game? Where players are tested for their own personal abilities? That they themselves must think and discover what is the underlying game design? Well okay. You want an amusing pastime for "telling or retelling imagined events", as you put it. Alright, but why talk about it if you simply disagree? It is not a game and it's only interfering with fixing the RPG hobby.

As I've posted more than once now, I am not looking for an amusing pastime for "telling or retelling imagined events". I am looking for a game which, in virtue of being played, will generate stories - that is to say, will give rise to a telling of imagined events which has a tolerably recognisable dramatic content and structure.

Even Gygax, in the passage I quoted, is referring to imagined as well as real things. The maps he talks about, for instance, are real, but the "alien gods" are imaginary. And the players are meant to think of them in imaginary terms - eg it matters to the play of the game whether an altar is to an "alien god" or an ordinary god, and players are expected to engage with those differences.

Where my preference differs from Gygaxian skilled play is that I am not that interested in the sort of dungeon exploration and strategy that he describes. The rules of the systems I prefer have different purposes.

For reasons I don't understand - maybe you're not familiar with them? - you seem to think that those systems don't involve game play in the sense of testing the player's personal abilities. (Which is what Edwards called "stepping on up". So you seem to agree with him at least on that point.)

Here is a self-quote from an actual play post:

It then came to the drow sorcerer's turn. In an email a few days ago the player had told me that he had a plan to seal off the Abyssal rift created by the tearing of the Demonwebs and the killing of Lolth, that relied upon the second law of thermodynamics. Now was the time for him to explain it. It took quite a while at the table (20 minutes? Maybe more? There was a lot of interjection and discussion). Here is the summary version:

* The second law of thermodynamics tells us that time and entropy are correlated: increases in entropy from moment to moment are indicative of the arrow of time;

* Hence, when entropy reaches its maximum state - and so cannot increase - time has stopped;

* Hence, if an effect that would normally last until the end of the encounter could be turned into an effect of ultimate chaos (entropy), time would stop in respect of the effect and it would not come to an end.​

So far, so good, but how is this helping to seal off the Abyss?

* Earlier in the encounter the sorcerer had created a Cloak of Winter Storm which, using an elemental swapping item, was actually a zone of thunder (larger than normal because created while a Huge primordial) that caused shift 1 sq which, through various feat combos, was actually teleportation;

* If this could be extended in size, and converted into a zone of ultimate entropy instead of just a zone of thunder, then it would not come to an end (for the reasons given above);

* Furthermore, anyone who approached it would slow down (as time came to a stop with the increase in entropy) and, if they hit it, be teleported back 1 square;

* As to how a zone of elemental thunder might be converted into a zone of ultimate entropy, that's what a chaos sorcerer is for - especially as, at that time, the Slaad lord of Entropy, Ygorl, was trapped inside the Crystal of Ebon Flame and so control over entropy was arguably unclaimed by any other entity and hence available to be claimed by the sorcerer PC.​

But couldn't someone who wanted to pass through this entropic barrier just teleport from one side to the other?

* On his turn, the sorcerer therefore spent his move action to stand from prone (I can't now remember why he had started the session prone), and used his minor action to activate his Cloud of Darkness - through which only he can see;

* He then readied his standard action to help the invoker/wizard perform the mighty feat of Arcana that would merge the darkness and the zone into a visually and physically impenetrable entropic field, through which nothing could pass unless able to teleport without needing line of sight.​

Unfortunately, the invoker/wizard wasn't ready to help with this plan, and had doubts about its chaotic aspect. On his turn, he instead rescued the paladin and fighter PCs who had become trapped in the Abyssal rift

<snip>

The drow's turn then came around. He used his move action to fly the Tower up and out of the two zones (darkness and thunder). He then used a minor action to cast Stretch Spell - as written, a range-boosting effect but it seemed fitting, in spirit, to try to extend and compress zones to create a barrier of ultimate, impenetrable entropy. And then he got ready to make his Arcana check as a standard action.

Now INT is pretty much a dump stat for everyone in the party but the invoker/wizard. In the case of the sorcerer it is 12 - so with training and level, he has an Arcana bonus of +20. So when I stated that the DC was 41, it looked a bit challenging. (It was always going to be a Hard check - if any confirmation was needed, the Rules Compendium suggests that manipulating the energies of a magical phenomenon is a Hard Arcana improvisation.)

So he started looking around for bonuses. As a chaos mage, he asked whether he could burn healing surges for a bonus on the roll - giving of his very essence. I thought that sounded reasonable, and so allowed 4 surges for +8. Unfortunately he had only 2 surges left, so the other half of the bonus had to come from taking damage equal to his bloodied value - which was OK, as he was currently unbloodied.

He scraped another +2 from somewhere (I can't remember now), brining the roll needed down to 11. The dice was rolled - and came up 18! So he succeeded in converting his zones of darkness and thunder into a compressed, extended, physically and visually impenetrable entropic barrier, in which time doesn't pass (and hence the effects don't end), sealing off the Abyss at its 66th layer.

The unfortunate side effect, as was clarified between me (as GM) and the player before the action was declared, was that - as the effects never end - so he can never recharge his Cloak of Darkness encounter power or his Cloak of the Winter Storm daily.

A modest price to pay for cementing the defeat of Lolth and sealing off the bottom of the Abyss from the rest of creation.

How is that not a game? There is a rules structure. There is dice rolling to find out what happens (so in that respect it resembles gambling). There is the making of decisions by a player so as to change the probabilities, and those decisions include elements of resource management (in this case, trading of healing surges for bonuses). The player is also having to think about, and within the context of, the fiction - which is the same sort of game-playing as is involved in my daughter setting up her imaginary cake shop. For instance, the player has had to come up with an in-fiction rationale for how he can pull off the stunt that he wants to pull off. This belongs to that time-honoured D&D category of "the creative use of spells".

You say that I'm interfering with the fixing of the RPG hobby. I think what I've quoted shows that I'm pretty squarely part of the RPG hobby!

 

[Zak S]

And does so in a way that doesn't take a stand on whether the features Edwards' describes are aesthetically desirable or not - he just points them out as features of some RPGs that tend to be well-suited to certain approaches to play. And clearly, given what he'd already written about sim play, aren't well-suited to other approaches to play.

The problem isn't anything he says about "Gamist""Sim" or "Nar" play. It's that these categories are arbitrary and insufficient to cover the field. Like dividing all animals into "Cats" "Pigs and hedgehogs" and "Slippery animals".

Lots of cat enthusiasts have got a lot out of GNS and, previously, the 3fold model, but the fact remains it's not much of a theory. It's a very partial list of observations of what some kinds of gamers do sometimes (especially the kinds of gamers who liked the essays).

So it offers a poor view of reality and TONS of the theory, criticism and game assumptions that came out of it was an impediment to anybody who wasn't a cat enthusiast.

My test for any critic - and Edwards's essays are criticism - is whether what they write resonates with me, and provides me with new insights that help me make better sense of my experience. Edwards does that.

This is what EVERY FAN says about Forge theory when you point out it happens to be wrong. This solipsistic and non-reality-based legacy of conversation is why people hate Forge "theory". People say stuff that is provably untrue, then when you call them on it they go "Well I'm like, allowed to have an opinion, man"

If you make an assertion like Ron does, for example:

"You can't serve two GNS goals simultaneously in the same instance of play" and then watch AP vids and find out, wait, no, you can TOTALLY do that and people do it all the time. (And Ron has personally been unable to explain any criteria to judge this by which it isn't true.)

Then you have an inaccurate sociological theory. Objectively.

And instead of doing what Vincent Baker did and going "Ok, it's 2015, GNS helped me but it was wrong" people cling to it or ideas that only make sense if you assume it.

And the rest of us still have to see these goofball categories that nobody can thoroughly defend or define in the middle of conversations we're having where we actually try to (and do) get real game stuff done. And there's still postForgies running around who trust and believe each other more than anyone else because they once believed in a now-known-to-be crackpot theory together while instead that experience should have humbled them and made them realize they didn't have all the answers.

 

[pemerton]

People say stuff that is provably untrue

What do you think I'm saying in this thread that is provably untrue?

then when you call them on it they go "Well I'm like, allowed to have an opinion, man"

What do you think you're "calling me on"? Upthread you called a view I expressed baffling. I replied with an explanation, and you ignored that reply.

So it's quite unclear to me what your problem is with my posts in this thread.

"You can't serve two GNS goals simultaneously in the same instance of play" and then watch AP vids and find out, wait, no, you can TOTALLY do that and people do it all the time. (And Ron has personally been unable to explain any criteria to judge this by which it isn't true.)

Then you have an inaccurate sociological theory. Objectively.

And instead of doing what Vincent Baker did and going "Ok, it's 2015, GNS helped me but it was wrong" people cling to it or ideas that only make sense if you assume it.

What do you think I'm clinging to? Where have I said anything in this thread about pursuing two GNS goals simultaneously in the same instance of play? It's not something I have a view on or care very much about.

That said, I don't think it would be a very big technical challenge to define "pursuing goals" and "same instance of play" to make it true by definition. There are at least two devices that Edwards uses to facilitate this: (i) because the GNS analysis takes as a premise that all play involves exploration, and so any time anyone points to simultaneously being both (say) S + G the retort can be made that it's just exploration-heavy G; (ii) because he emphasises the "predominant" or "overall" goal of play, if I point (say) to the episode of play I quoted upthread, where the player is trying to make clever bonus-creating moves so as to realise the dramatic goal of sealing the Abyss and say that looks like it might be both G + N, Edwards can retort that only one (perhaps N, perhaps G) is the predominant goal of play.

This is partly why I didn't describe it as a sociological theory in my post. I described it as criticism.

game assumptions that came out of it was an impediment to anybody who wasn't a cat enthusiast.

<snip>

And the rest of us still have to see these goofball categories that nobody can thoroughly defend or define in the middle of conversations we're having where we actually try to (and do) get real game stuff done. And there's still postForgies running around who trust and believe each other more than anyone else because they once believed in a now-known-to-be crackpot theory together while instead that experience should have humbled them and made them realize they didn't have all the answers.

I'm sorry that my thread and posts are getting in the way of you doing real work, and that the games I'm playing at the moment (BW, 4e) are impeding your RPGing. I just thought I was a guy posting on a D&D board having fun running a couple of campaigns.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The problem isn't anything he says about "Gamist""Sim" or "Nar" play. It's that these categories are arbitrary and insufficient to cover the field. Like dividing all animals into "Cats" "Pigs and hedgehogs" and "Slippery animals".

Lots of cat enthusiasts have got a lot out of GNS and, previously, the 3fold model, but the fact remains it's not much of a theory. It's a very partial list of observations of what some kinds of gamers do sometimes (especially the kinds of gamers who liked the essays).

We agree absolutely here.

The point, however, and why GNS is still used by people like [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and the Big Model is more or less irrelevant is that GNS had focussing power and could let people communicate. It's wrong, and it's deeply flawed (including claiming that incoherence is automatically wrong - people aren't pure). GNS had a number of smart things to say about narrativism, some smart things to say about gamism to the people in that community (i.e. those in the WW subculture who looked down on D&D in the late 90s/early 00s but found that WW games did not suit what they wanted out of them) and its discussion of simulationism is ... bad.

Which means that GNS was a useful tool in a number of cases that claimed to be much more than it was. And there are few other theories that have done that.

The Big Model on the other hand more or less sank like a stone because although GNS was wrong, it was in places clarifying (like a set of lenses focussed on a certain point). The Big Model is not even wrong. It predicts precisely nothing except "Different people do things different ways". (Well, yes. It's true. But it steps back from how and why). The only use of it is as a pallette cleanser after GNS.

The problem is that no one has produced a better model that's widely known than the Forge's.

 

[Maxperson]

I also tend to find a lot of sandbox-y play to be rather railroad-y by my standards, because of the relative importance of the GM's conception over that of the players as far as content introduction is concerned.

That I'm really curious about. Would you explain that further?

 

[Bleys Icefalcon]

Whereas storytelling is a different culture altogether. That you blindly deny any and all evidence tot he contrary that D&D is a game, not collaborative storytelling means there's nothing left for us to share.

OK, I am going to jump in again. Guys, it's not either/or, not if it's done right. It's BOTH - the best games/campaigns/groups that I have ever been a part of for greater than 30 years now is when it IS a game and it IS collaborative storytelling - at the same time.

 

[Maxperson]

OK, I am going to jump in again. Guys, it's not either/or, not if it's done right. It's BOTH - the best games/campaigns/groups that I have ever been a part of for greater than 30 years now is when it IS a game and it IS collaborative storytelling - at the same time.

Bingo. This is what I think pretty much everyone but Howandwhy gets and has been saying.