Improvisation vs "code-breaking" in D&D

[Maxperson]

pemerton is an advocate of 'no myth' and for the DMing creating content in response to the player's declared goals and actions. In this way, he thinks by improvising in reaction to the players, the DM is prioritizing the players interests and desires for the setting over his own. Ironically, I find pemerton's methods more railroad-y than traditional open sandbox play and much more prone to illusionism (and DM rationalizing his biases), but if we open up that argument between pemerton and myself again we're going to need a new thread.

I tend to fall in-between I think. I have proactive players who set goals, but while I improv a lot, I don't need to improv it all. If they tell me they want to infiltrate the palace as nobles from another land, I go with it. I will also set up other plot hooks, such as the princess plotting to kill the duke she's supposed to marry. If the PCs ask the right questions, they can discover it. If they don't, the plot goes on without them and I don't force it on them. If they discover it they can go with it or ignore it. If they ignore it, it goes on without them.

The DM planning things is not railroading. It's only railroading if the plots are forced on the players in a way that they cannot avoid.

 

[Zak S]

Newton's physics is inaccurate, and is certainly false, yet...

Ron Edwards is no Isaac Newton. He isn't even Robin Laws.

Phrenology isn't Newtonian physics. And games aren't nearly complicated enough to need a "good enough" tier of design and GMing rules.

What does "seems to be really bad" mean here, other than "I don't like it" or "I don't want to play it?"

For Burning Wheel?

1. People who do play it seem to be confused by the system and are always dropping parts of it or ignoring them or having to consult Luke to clarify them.

2. The system, when not hand-sold or supported by the author, isn't very popular on its own. It isn't an ambassador for itself. This isn't bad by itself but it does suggest something's rotten in Denmark.

3. The people who do like it don't tend to be real exciting or interesting people.

4. Huge parts of it are explicitly (explicitly: the author said so) designed to prevent abusive GMing and play practices which should actually be dealt with interpersonally rather than trying to systematize them away. The game has a huge overhead of rules that merely exist because Luke's game group was/is disfunctional and he made rules to route around that rather than dealing with it.

5. Played RAW it plays like the best comedy game ever written.

Now you could say that 1 applies to D&D but definitely not 2 or 3. And all 5 together? That's a thing.

I could be nuts here but everything I've observed suggests BW is exactly as popular as the players are close to Luke Crane and his (massive and dedicated and long-running) personal advocacy for it.

 

[Zak S]

I pointed to two predications above, though, that do match reality.

Edwards correctly predicts that initiative will be a big issue in hard-sim games like Rolemaster and Runequest....

And phrenology predicts people with the biggest heads aren't babies. ALL the predictions made by a theory have to be correct, not some cherry-picked ones.

But if you point out Rolemaster isn't necessarily "sim" in any way you have to turn the car around.

 

[Zak S]

My players are interested in challenges, and also problem solving. I posted an actual play example upthread, where the challenge was "Seal the Abyss" and the problem to be solved was "Within the play space defined by (i) the 4e mechanics and (ii) the current fictional situation, how can I generate enough bonuses on my d20 roll to have a decent chance of making 41 starting with a base +20?"

The relationship between challenges and problem solving, and sandboxing or non-sandboxing, is orthogonal as far as I can see.

Incorrect:

Puzzle-solving requires constraints and as we've said before different contraints feeling too heavy are what makes for railroading.

But I don't think it's hard to see the issue. Having the GM mention all his/her giant frogs 3 miles to the west sucks up time, attention and energy at the table. And that time, attention and energy is not being devoted to stuff that the players have signalled their interest in.

Depends entirely on whether the GM mentioning giant frogs makes your players interested or not. My players tend to be into the stuff I make up. But it's not for everyone.

 

[Maxperson]

I think we're working from different vocabularies. That's why this thread might be useful rather than perhaps a "calling out"?

What you are quoting is strategic advice for the players. It's like reading a strategy guide for Chess or any other wargame. It's isn't rules, but helpful insight for playing the game more capably.

1. As he is saying, Players set their objectives in D&D, not the DM. The DM must not change anything regardless of these decisions.

2. Recording what you learn (mapping) is generally useful in any game so heavily focused on memory, D&D a code breaking game, but not a requirement of play.

3. Avoiding encounters is only one goal. Seeking out encounters, even specific creatures is a large part of D&D too. Both require players to decipher the maze they are in based on all sorts of factors the DM is using. Population density. Environmentally-preferred habitats by creatures. % in lair vs. out wandering. Etc. This is directly the players "trying to work out what system of dungeon generation the GM is using".

4. "A good referee will have many ways to distract an expedition, many things to draw attention, but ignore them if at all possible." (Gygax) - This doesn't mean the GM is actively improvising actions in competition with the players (though it is known Gary would do things like that). It means the map will be filled with game challenges, but new discoveries on it can be as much a source of distraction as interest. Succeed at what you have prepared yourself to succeed at. I.e. Stay Focused, as general play advice.

5. Gaming the maze is exactly why delving is what D&D players do. They run from encounters, they take short trips into dungeons as they need to cover all the needs their characters have to survive and succeed. Getting lost, even on a grassy plain, can be days or weeks of difficulty and use up all sorts of hard won wealth. (Hell, with OS you could die in a big enough field even with no wandering encounters)

6. If you have an easy success, peek around. All information the DM is giving is treasure. (They are revealing what is possible within the system even in world design alone).

Everything the DM does to create that map is rule following. Everything the DM is allowed to tell the players is from that map. The system is the game. It is an algorithm that results in a function map in which the playable pattern is inherent. Everything the players do to game the game as a design is deciphering those repeating patterns the DM uses to generate a design. (And in so many, many ways, how the proverbial "dungeon" is stocked)

Players are playing a massive grand strategy system that enables results in many minor skirmishes, treasure finds, magic explorations, dialogues, and chances for, well, outright robbery. That's because it isn't a simulation of "everything" anyone could ever think of, but solely systems covering everything relevant to the roles (class) players are expected to play. Their improvement through play of the game is directly related to their game score, per role, and thereby level. This is why Munchkins are people who showed up at a game with a 9th level character without no working understanding of the game. They didn't play that character in a game which led them to increasing their own game mastery of it. They just showed up at another gaming group claiming the character was legitimate. (That no campaign should use the same system wasn't en vogue then I believe, given the proclamation of the official "real D&D" AD&D rules to allow tournament and cross group play. I don't believe that is functionally possible.)

Quite frankly, I don't see how any of the advice you listed could in any way be considered credible in an entirely improvised game that had no underlying design for players to game. What are you seeing in those points?

I don't see how they wouldn't be credible in an improvised game. In an improvised game players can set their own objectives, map the dungeon, avoid encounters, leave to rest, and so on. All of his advice can be used in games that are more story driven.

 

[Maxperson]

My "advocacy" isn't in the form of you should do this but more some people do this. Particularly during some of the discussions around 4e, it was common to see posts explaining why 4e is not an RPG that took for granted approaches to RPGing (including that the GM sets all the backstory and fiction-to-mechanics correlation in advance) that aren't universal.

My game isn't fully "no myth". Eg in my BW game we are using the Greyhawk maps; in my 4e game we use the default 4e backstory (Dawn War etc) plus the regional map from the module Night's Dark Terror. The non-mythiness is more in the details of backstory (town details, NPC and PC backstories, etc).

I don't fully follow Celebrim's comment about "the DM rationalising his biases", but in my case my players know my biases pretty well. That's why they tend to build PCs who are oriented towards engaging with supernatural threats like undead and demons. That said, system makes a difference here. My BW game has much more human politics than my 4e one, because BW has better mechanics than 4e for handling relatively mundane social conflict.

Okay. That clears things up a bit. I do have to say I have the same weakness as you when it comes to encounters. I've actually had to focus and remember to use other things than undead and demons this campaign that we just started.

Anyway, tying this back to railroading: in his AP thread, [MENTION=6673408]Zak[/MENTION]S defined "railroading" along the lines of "the constraints on play become a problem". The constraint on play introduced by typical sand-boxing is that the players have to engaged the content the GM has pre-written for them. For me that's a problem.

This lost me again. By definition a sandbox game doesn't have those constraints. The DM may have lots of content all over the place, but the players are free to engage or ignore it as they see fit and if they want, go into areas not yet developed by the DM. That's why there is so much improv in a sandbox game.

Why is it that you think players are forced to engage DM content in sandbox games?

 

[howandwhy99]

I don't see how they wouldn't be credible in an improvised game. In an improvised game players can set their own objectives, map the dungeon, avoid encounters, leave to rest, and so on. All of his advice can be used in games that are more story driven.

In D&D the players are capable of gaming the system. Their decisions go directly to it, even if at all points they are unsure what what choices are immediately available. They are always working on suppositions, but they are seeking to discern the code as much as game it.

"There's more mountain to the east, so I bet the dungeon expands that way. We just haven't found it. Plus all those stupid bat-like creatures keep coming from that way and they seem to have hundreds of them. Either there's a hidden lair, a passage off this level, or something else I'm not thinking of."
---- None of that is "talking about the fiction"

In a story-focused game, IME all Gary's advice wouldn't be advice for playing a game. I'm asking how others can hold that to be true though. At best, maybe it's suggestions for what kind of narrative we should create today on a blank page. It isn't talking about how to excel or at least not lose at playing the game system. For the large part, the storytelling rules are about finding who gets to tell the story next or how they may tell it. There's been a lot of interesting design in how that can done, but the "fiction" and the system are separate. They aren't considered the same thing.

 

[pemerton]

Ron Edwards is no Isaac Newton. He isn't even Robin Laws.

Of course not - obviously so for Newton!

Burning Wheel?

1. People who do play it seem to be confused by the system and are always dropping parts of it or ignoring them or having to consult Luke to clarify them.

2. The system, when not hand-sold or supported by the author, isn't very popular on its own. It isn't an ambassador for itself. This isn't bad by itself but it does suggest something's rotten in Denmark.

3. The people who do like it don't tend to be real exciting or interesting people.

4. Huge parts of it are explicitly (explicitly: the author said so) designed to prevent abusive GMing and play practices which should actually be dealt with interpersonally rather than trying to systematize them away. The game has a huge overhead of rules that merely exist because Luke's game group was/is disfunctional and he made rules to route around that rather than dealing with it.

5. Played RAW it plays like the best comedy game ever written.

Now you could say that 1 applies to D&D but definitely not 2 or 3. And all 5 together? That's a thing.

I could be nuts here but everything I've observed suggests BW is exactly as popular as the players are close to Luke Crane and his (massive and dedicated and long-running) personal advocacy for it.

I don't know how I heard of BW - maybe from Dan Davenport's review on rpg.net, but maybe I read that after I bought it? I remember that I bought it (revised ed) from my local RPG shop because I'd heard of it, it sounded interesting, and it was relatively cheap. (Maybe $40 - Australian dollars - for two books.)

Anyway, the tagline for that review is "If you've ever wanted to combine the powerful emotions and epic grandeur of Lord of the Rings with the brutally detailed combat of RuneQuest, then boy, do I have the game for you!" That's a reasonable fit for me and my group.

On your points:

(1) The systems are meant to be optional/flexible. I think in this respect your comparison to D&D is apt.

(2) The popularity of the system with others isn't a big deal for me - I ran Rolemaster for 20 years, after all, and that is now a system that I think has very little following.

(3) You might well find me an unexciting or uninteresting person. I suspect so would Vincent Baker and Paul Czege, for that matter. I don't know that anyone finds me very exciting. The main people who tend to find me interesting are fellow academics, or non-academics who are interested in political/social/philosophical ideas.

(4) I haven't experienced this yet, unless you mean the rules for Beliefs and Instincts, or maybe the Trait Vote - in which case I haven't found it a "huge overhead". The biggest overhead in the system, as I experience it, is in the advancement rules, which are a bit like RQ's but with more bookkeeping. To date, the payoff in comparison to RQ is that the advancement rules mean that players don't always have an incentive to make their dice pool as big as it could be - which deals with a whole lot of issues that arise when there is no incentive for the players not to maximise their dice.

(5) I haven't encountered this yet either. I find in play that it is very gritty, especially in comparison to 4e. Maybe there's something that I'm missing?

(6) I've never met Luke Crane or interacted with him (unless he posts anonymously).

But if you point out Rolemaster isn't necessarily "sim" in any way you have to turn the car around.

Have you played very much Rolemaster?

RM can be played in a manner that Edwards would call "vanilla narrativism". I know, because I've done it. For 20 years. It's also incredibly heavy sim. (What Edwards would call "purist for system".) These sim elements can cause issues when running the game in what Edwards would call "vanilla narrativist" style. I know that too, because I've experienced it. Reading Edwards actually helped me sort it out.

The fact that Edwards thinks a game can't be both S + N is not important to me (maybe he would label the sort of game I played "vanilla narrativist with a heavy exploratory chassis" - I don't know, and it's also not really that important to me). What was helpful to me was that the tensions he identified between some of the tendencies of the system and some of the things my group was doing with it are real, and his discussion of those tensions helped me manage and resolve some of them in play.

ALL the predictions made by a theory have to be correct, not some cherry-picked ones.

On that measure every social theory ever produced is worthless. I think it's the wrong standard. It's even the wrong standard for mathematical physics - a system might produce false predictions, because there is some phenomenon present that the system doesn't account for, yet otherwise be broadly sound.

For instance, classic electromagnetism predicts that atoms can't exist with a nucleus of positively charged particles, because the particles would repel one another. In fact, it turns out that that prediction is wrong, because there is another force at work - the strong nuclear force - that was not know to the theorists of classical electromagnetism. That doesn't make their theory worthless. It doesn't even make it wrong.

In the field of sociology, Durkheim makes predictions about the relationship between law and widely distributed attitudes that are, in general, false. At a minimum, he doesn't account for colonial/post-colonial contexts in which laws are parachuted in by an external authority. His theory of technocratic law-making is also poorly developed. Still, I think most people who live in industrial economies who want to understand some of the basic dynamics (political, economic, social) of the societies they live in could do a lot worse than read Durkheim.

 

[pemerton]

I tend to fall in-between I think. I have proactive players who set goals, but while I improv a lot, I don't need to improv it all. If they tell me they want to infiltrate the palace as nobles from another land, I go with it. I will also set up other plot hooks, such as the princess plotting to kill the duke she's supposed to marry. If the PCs ask the right questions, they can discover it. If they don't, the plot goes on without them and I don't force it on them. If they discover it they can go with it or ignore it. If they ignore it, it goes on without them.

The DM planning things is not railroading. It's only railroading if the plots are forced on the players in a way that they cannot avoid.

What you describe is the sort of approach to GMing that I generally try to avoid. Eg I don't work out stuff that "goes on without the players" which they can discover if their PCs ask the right questions.

That's just the sort of thing that I said, upthread, is too railroad-y for my tastes (my approac is that, if the PCs "ask the right questions", then in response I'll work out some stuff that is happening.). Of course tastes differ.

The constraint on play introduced by typical sand-boxing is that the players have to engaged the content the GM has pre-written for them.

By definition a sandbox game doesn't have those constraints. The DM may have lots of content all over the place, but the players are free to engage or ignore it as they see fit and if they want, go into areas not yet developed by the DM. That's why there is so much improv in a sandbox game.

Why is it that you think players are forced to engage DM content in sandbox games?

In a typical sandbox game, if the players don't engage the GM's content then there is no game. The GM might generate a lot of content all over the place, but the players aren't free to engage none of it yet still be playing the game.

That said, at a certain point the sandbox you describe could bleed into a type of "no myth" play. If, in fact, all the content the GM is generating is improvised in response to hooks and signals provided by the player, then that's not the sort of thing I find railroad-y. But I don't think that's what is typically meant by "sandbox", either.

Puzzle-solving requires constraints and as we've said before different contraints feeling too heavy are what makes for railroading.

In my post to which you replied I used the phrase "problem solving". Are you treating "puzzle-solving" and "problem-solving" as synonyms?

As I said, I think that sandboxing and problem-solving are basically orthogonal. Most problem-solving in RPGs is either mechanical/technical, or involves interacting with the fiction. I don't see that sandboxing has any special connection to the presence or absence of mechanical/technical problem solving. Nor does it have any special connection to interacting with the fiction, does it? Sandboxing is a method for generating fiction, but not for adjudicating interactions with it when it acts as a constraint within which problems are solved.

 

[Zak S]

Of course not - obviously so for Newton!

Point is Edwards theories are irrelevant dross, not Newtonian "useful approximations"

I don't know how I heard of BW - maybe from...

If you'd like to insist Burning Wheel's not a hilariously bad game, I'm not gonna argue with you. I laid out my case. It seems monstrously ill-conceived on all levels to me and Luke Crane's own tales of how disfunctional his game group powerfully indicate that GNS appealed to him because he was trying to find a way around the obvious conclusion that he had a lot of jerks in his game group by blaming the system.

Have you played very much Rolemaster?

Yup.

The thing about RM is, like many systems Ron called "simulationist" is that they simply are systems with a lot of detail.

The simulatory detail is there to provide a wider range of tactical ("gamist") options and so that actions taken in pursuit of these goals have legible narrative effects--not just for its own sake. This 3-way interaction is something Forgies never got. The elephant has a weight (sim) so we know if it's a good tactic to drop it on the villain (game) and what you'll have to do to lift it onto him (story).

What was helpful to me was that the tensions he identified between some of the tendencies of the system and some of the things my group was doing with it are real, and his discussion of those tensions helped me manage and resolve some of them in play.

"Phrenology helped me learn to use a ruler".

There are way smarter, faster, more accessible ways to talk about games which are connected to WAY FEWER TOXIC PRACTICES AND PEOPLE than GNS. Use them instead.