D&D General In defence of Grognardism

[Sacrosanct]

When the rules say your character is trash at an activity, players weaseled around the rules to avoid using them. Refer to all those eloquent and brilliant 1st edition characters with bad Int and Cha scores. "Skilled play" at it's finest.

As someone who played 1e in 1981 all the way to 2012 as my preferred edition (and still do occasionally) with hundreds of players, I have not seen this. Can you cite some references to this? IME, if you had a character with a low INT and didn't role-play it that way, it was called out by both DM and players. What is your experience playing 1e in the 70s and 80s?

 

[Nefermandias]

I call it pandering to the GM, but that doesnt have the air of superiority. It's certainly part of early play's tendency towards metagaming/ DM manipulation, because actually using the rules for task resolution was frequently sort of a death sentence (10% chance to disarm traps anyone?).

When the rules say your character is trash at an activity, players weaseled around the rules to avoid using them. Refer to all those eloquent and brilliant 1st edition characters with bad Int and Cha scores. "Skilled play" at it's finest.

This post shows a profound lack of understanding on the subject. Carefully considering your surroundings and coming up with clever solutions to any given situation is 100% the way old school D&D was supposed to be played.

Heck, EGG himself has said so in several occasions.

Just keep in mind that Rob Kuntz managed to survive the Tomb of Horrors whilst playing as a Fighter. It's pretty obvious that traps was expected to be engaged by means of skillfully manipulating the fiction, not just rolling a dice and hoping for a 10% success chance.

 

[GuyBoy]

This is a tricky issue relating abilities such as INT and CHA to “skilled play”, whether in the 70s and 80s or more recently. WIS might have the same problem.
Being “trash at an activity” such as fighting or pick-pocketing is pretty easy for the DM to adjudicate. You have a small chance to succeed and a dice roll determines the outcome. Much the same applies to the physical skills, so “skilled play” can’t really get round this. It doesn’t matter if I’m a big rugby player myself; my 8 strength bard can’t lift the portcullis, so I’d better use “skilled play” to find another way out PDQ.
The non-physical skills are a bit trickier. Let’s take INT. I have played characters with low INT. I try hard to play them with that in mind, but I am a reasonably bright bloke academically, so this can create a roleplaying dichotomy when I can work things out that my low INT character can’t. Is it “skilled play” to potentially die by roleplaying his 7 INT or do I “weasel”?
Similar situations arise with CHA and WIS.

In a slightly different vein, I seem to remember Gygax stressing the need for skilled play in Tomb of Horrors. Seems to me that you had no chance of surviving without skilled play ( and not too great a chance even with it)

 

[Bedrockgames]

It's clearly not so easy to understand the intended meaning. Else I wouldn't regularly see these disagreements about how "there are other kinds of skilled play" crop up whenever "skilled play" gets mentioned. You don't see similar objections to "crit" or "fumble", despite these terms being widely understood.

IMO, it's a poorly chosen term. Alas, as I said, that ship has almost certainly sailed.

Personally I see that more as trying to control the language of a play style to win a play style debate

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

This post shows a profound lack of understanding on the subject. Carefully considering your surroundings and coming up with clever solutions to any given situation is 100% the way old school D&D was supposed to be played.

Heck, EGG himself has said so in several occasions.

Just keep in mind that Rob Kuntz managed to survive the Tomb of Horrors whilst playing as a Fighter. It's pretty obvious that traps was expected to be engaged by means of skillfully manipulating the fiction, not just rolling a dice and hoping for a 10% success chance.

So grognards are now trying to lay claim on clever tactics too? This gets better and better!

"Skillfully manipulating the fiction" is just another term for metagaming and DM pandering. Which old skool DM's love, because it gives them all the power.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The semantic loading of a term exists whether intended or not. And bluntly, I think its optimistic to think some of the people who started using that term didn't intend it just exactly that way; I've been in a few too many discussions where people clearly think of more modern games as easy mode that requires no thought to accept that no one intended "Skilled Play" not to imply that other styles weren't.

Personally I am not worried about how much skill is involved in other styles of play. I don't even worry about how much skill involved in skilled play. To me it is just a useful term that describes the style clearly, and has gained a lot of traction so that when you say it, people know what you mean (even the folks in this thread who are objecting to it, appear to understand what is meant by the term). Honestly I think the hardest style I've ever played was trying to power game during 3E, both because the system and the methods for building a powerful character were pretty intricate and because it required a tremendous amount of system mastery. Skilled play in the old school sense isn't hard as much as it requires focus and attention to detail. The think you are being challenged by is the stuff going on in the game. You aren't contending with the math of the system (which I would say is a harder task). But what I find frustrating in these discussions is there is a term people who come out of the style use, and it is how we communicate what we are talking about. But I find pretty consistently that people who are opposed to said style, have this tendency to go after our vocabulary so that we can't even communicate what we mean by the end of the conversation. It is like having the words taken out of your mouth. And to be clear, I am not a pure "skilled play" GM or player. I play and enjoy lots of styles. This is just one style among many I enjoy and I find this language is important to understanding it.

 

[Sacrosanct]

So grognards are now trying to lay claim on clever tactics too? This gets better and better!

That's not what was claimed at all. No one is claiming that only grognards do that. Only that it was a key factor of the gameplay style. If being part of my group is that you like chocolate ice cream, that doesn't mean I'm saying no one else can like it.

"Skillfully manipulating the fiction" is just another term for metagaming and DM pandering. Which old skool DM's love, because it gives them all the power.

You keep making a ton of pejorative assumptions about the character of DMs and players who like old school games, both here and in other threads (of which you've had mod warnings about). I don't know why you have so much hostility, and insist on using load terms like "weasel" or "pandering" when describing said players, but I'd wish you'd stop.

I ask again, what is your experience playing 1e in the 70s and 80s to have all this knowledge about how the game was/is played? While yes, there were bad DMs back then, there are bad DMs in every edition, and you seem insistent on trying to paint all old school DMs and players as bad. Despite the repeated responses by actual DMs and players of old school games stating otherwise.

 

[transmission89]

So grognards are now trying to lay claim on clever tactics too? This gets better and better!

"Skillfully manipulating the fiction" is just another term for metagaming and DM pandering. Which old skool DM's love, because it gives them all the power.

That chip on your shoulder seems to be weighing heavily on you. No one is laying a claim on clever tactics. They are just trying to explain to you that’s what a big part of the game is.

Skilfully manipulating the fiction means just that. As in most games, there is back and forth between GM and players over narrative control, what happens at this point? The GM sets the scene, then the players “manipulate” or interact with it.

The difference tends to be these days that the modern iterations of the game have more of those interactions codified in rules (predominately in skills) so that you are more likely as a player to lean on those. They are there, why not make use of them?
Where the interaction is not so codified in earlier editions (not entirely absent), it was more on the player to come up with a solution, with little guide, to the current fiction. A more plausible solution would have a better chance of success.

There’s also nothing inherently wrong with giving a DM more power within a game’s framework. Indeed, I love older editions because I feel they give me more power and autonomy to master the game. Certainly, newer iterations provide a stronger framework for new DMs so they are less likely to fall into bad, gotcha DM practices, but even the most robust of rules will not save you from a bad DM.

It might not be your cup of tea, that’s fine, but no claim of objective superiority is being made, you enjoy what you want…

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

As someone who played 1e in 1981 all the way to 2012 as my preferred edition (and still do occasionally) with hundreds of players, I have not seen this. Can you cite some references to this? IME, if you had a character with a low INT and didn't role-play it that way, it was called out by both DM and players. What is your experience playing 1e in the 70s and 80s?

Hah. Man I played since the 80s, went to cons in the 80's and 90's and it was ALL I saw. A bunch of finger wagging neckbeards all playing the exact same character, over and over: the professional adventure solver. They had a strong tendency to engage with the world in the same boring manner, because they'd been trained through Pavlovian response to poke, prod and pixelbitch (so much for fast play huh?). They were just playing themselves with a thin veneer of spellcasting or items spackled over, regardless of what the mental/social stats on their sheet said. Sometimes the character was Axebeard MacAleHammer and the Scottish dial was cranked up 15%, or they were 10% more haughty as "Elfy le Elfbow", but the goal was always "win the adventure". If the rules were in their favor, they use them. If not, they "get creative" and avoid engaging with the rules of the game. Power Metagaming if you will.

I've never seen a grognard knowingly spring a trap or make the wrong decision because that's what their character would do. They don't play interestingly flawed characters. You know the scene in Pan's Labyrinth where the little girl eats the grape from the monsters table and all hell breaks loose? I've never seen an old skooler who would voluntarily make that choice. For all the pontificating about roleplaying, the characters they choose to portray are from a really narrow spectrum.

 

[theCourier]

I've never seen a grognard knowingly spring a trap or make the wrong decision because that's what their character would do. They don't play interestingly flawed characters. You know the scene in Pan's Labyrinth where the little girl eats the grape from the monsters table and all hell breaks loose? I've never seen an old skooler who would voluntarily make that choice. For all the pontificating about roleplaying, the characters they choose to portray are from a really narrow spectrum.

Could it be they're roleplaying seasoned adventurers and wary tomb robbers instead of naive child characters? Nothing wrong in roleplaying as a dungeoneer that'd rather come out of the dungeon with their life than with gold, as long as it gives them a chance to do it again.