Is the Burning Wheel "how to play" advice useful for D&D?

[Libramarian]

Hmm, that's really interesting. I don't know if I'd ever thought of "classic" D&D as having those mediating forces in place. In this area, class "levels" are the same kind of thing; as a player you know you're "Level 4," and thus capable of rising up to meet certain challenges. In GURPS, there's no indication, on the surface, how the GM is going to present any given encounter. You simply don't have those obvious clues. (Wow, my mind is really spinning on this, pemerton. You may have highlighted something that may be a cause for my general dislike of GURPS.)

Classic D&D has rules to objectively determine what monsters are seen on what dungeon level and how much treasure is found on what dungeon level and with what monsters (although generating treasure by Treasure Type is so random that it might as well be up to DM whim IMO), but not rules or guidelines for matching encounter difficulty directly with character level -- that's an important distinction for me. (If the players take an elevator down to level X at level 1, it's their own fault).

 

[pemerton]

If the players take an elevator down to level X at level 1, it's their own fault.

Libramarian, I enjoyed your two posts which both made sense to me, and just wanted to ask a bit more about this: at what point do you think it gets unfair in classic D&D (eg the elevator is supersilent, the basement room is visually indistinguishable from top floor room, the whole thing is warded against scrying, etc)? I don't feel that the classic D&D advice always made clear how far the GM is expected/permitted to push this sort of stuff.

 

[pemerton]

pemerton has observed that the foreword in Moldvay's Basic D&D is weirdly dissonant with how the game actually plays. This is true, but I didn't even notice that

For me, it is what I wanted from the game, what attracted me to it! (Both on player and GM side.) It wasn't until I started GMing Oriental Adventures a few years later that I started to work out how I could do something a bit more like it - and it still took a lot of trial and error after that to achieve it at all reliably.

 

[Nytmare]

Ron Edwards had this description of the classic D&D PC (put forward in a discussion of fantasy heartbreakers), as well as some views about play problems that can come up - I know that some people find it pejorative, but I'm curious about what you think:

Am I the only gamer who reads a Forge-speak article and can't understand a single word of it? Is there a Forge Rosetta Stone out there somewhere?

 

[Celebrim]

Am I the only gamer who reads a Forge-speak article and can't understand a single word of it? Is there a Forge Rosetta Stone out there somewhere?

Well, yes, and no. There are some pretty good articles explaining things from say the stand point of Ron Edwards that will give you a base for understanding how he uses the terms. There is something of a dictionary out there somewhere.

The problem is, not everyone agrees or uses the terms in exactly the same way.

 

[Celebrim]

pemerton has observed that the foreword in Moldvay's Basic D&D is weirdly dissonant with how the game actually plays. This is true...

Well, it certainly can be true. I started D&D at age 8, and was DMing for friends by age 12. All my early games certainly didn't produce the play described in the forward to Basic D&D. They played pretty much how you expect, and indeed it was rather some time before they even played as thoughtfully and interestingly as the description of play in the 1e AD&D DMG (which is fairly accurate in its description, and interestingly more accurate at times than the 'rules' in that same text). However, right around age 12 or so, I encounterred an older DM who was willing to run a game for us 'kids' and I was blown away by the fact that he, using the same rules set I was using, achieved games that DID play like the foreward description just by changing up how he narrated the game and what it accepted as a valid proposition from the players. It was a revelation. I was like, "Wait... now its got BACON. Even better! I've got to figure out how he does this. This is the way I want to play."

 

[TwoSix]

Am I the only gamer who reads a Forge-speak article and can't understand a single word of it? Is there a Forge Rosetta Stone out there somewhere?

It takes some time. I read a lot of Forge stuff 7 or 8 years back, but I didn't really grok it until I read a lot of the pre-4e release threads, where I saw enough examples to really make sense of it.

 

[Celebrim]

I'd pretty much made this decision already, but thanks for reinforcing my decision to never play a narritivist game - assuming this is a pretty good description of it. ...As for the general discussion - I'm going to throw in another idea - Immersionism.

You just nailed it. The problem (well one of the problems) I have with Ron Edwards is precisely the problem he is fond of using as a blanket term for what he sees as 'badwrongfun' - incoherence. I don't find there to be any incoherence (necessarily) in many of the things he does, but for someone who is all about "We should be making games that are richer more mature experiences" his designs tend to just utterly blow away the very things that have in my experience made for the very things he says he's trying to achieve. You want to RP as a rich, engaging, thoughtful, mature, and satisfying story, then why the heck are you asking me to engage in the game precisely in the moment I want to be most immersed at such a metagame level? It's never been obvious to me at all that the best way to create a focus on say 'social conflict' or character growth was to create detailed tactical systems for arbitrating those things in great detail. At some point, you want the rules to just recede into the background, not continually push themselves forward. In my experience, 'social conflict' and 'martial combat' are served well by almost the exact opposite things. Porting the mechanics of a wargame into your thespian agenda is a recipe for disaster in the same way that porting the mechanics of a theater game into your tactical wargame is a recipe for disaster. The same group can play wargames and theater games using radically different approaches as they feel the scene demands without 'incoherence'. But there is something fundementally incoherent about trying to make them mechanically the same, not because you can't or because you can't make a game out of it - but because often the players have totally different goals they are trying to achieve.

Again, there is a fundmental mistake well known in game design of mistaking mechanics for the aesthetics of play.

 

[Celebrim]

Can't XP you, Celebrim, but this is a great post, even though I might quibble a tiny bit with the last sentence. Only because I think most of us choose a system because we already know in our heads how we're going to prepare to play said system, and how we're thinking about how it will be played.

Yes, that's absolutely true. But it's not actually a quibble. It's essential to understanding what I mean by what I said and unpacking its full depth.

You propose GURPS as an example. But, suppose your main interaction with GURPS was through GURPS Supers, and the GM of that game primarily played GURPS from the stand point of a high melodrama game digging into lots of X-Men style soap opera relationships with relatively little dangerous conflict (relying on player optimization Super advantages with their low point cost relative to power to render you virtually immune to most things built without), and then used GURPS potential for deep tactical crunch to really showcase the violent resolution of conflict in an emotional, dramatic, climatic manner. Additionally, suppose the GM dealt with GURPS brutal realism by having an unstated but enforced 'obscure death' rule possibly built through careful construction of setting (either before, or during play), and NPCs in the game sufficiently powerful to intervene in death and resurrect fallen heroes (common tropes in comics, and arguably versimiltude to setting). Instead of building scenarios in detail, this GM tends to create very detailed NPCs and improvs play following player lead - that is, if the players go down to the police station, even if he hadn't prepared for it, there is a clue there of some sort that advances the story. Everything he is doing is 'by the rules'. This is GURPS as a rules light game, digging into the game deeply only when you really need it, rarely rolling the dice, and with a long term commitment to character and story.

Now another player comes from GURPS having primarily played it as a Horror/Survival game. Maybe it was a game centered around surviving a zombie apocalypse, with lots of straight out of a third person shooter tactical crunch, really heavy resource tracking, and leveraging GURPS potential as rules as physics. Character death tends to be high, and the story might actually revolve around an every changing community - a military unit, a village, with no ability to track a single PC long term. The DM also prepares for this game with large highly detailed maps of the surrounding area, and doesn't improvise. This is totally different game using the same rules set. And arguably, GURPS is so silent on how to play GURPS and so sparce on examples of play precisely because it assumes that people will just find ways to play and have fun as long as you provide them mechanics (I don't fully agree, but that's what I think is going on).

Two players from these different backgrounds might be shocked to see the other table in play and there different approaches to creating the game.

I recently was sent by pemerton to read the Burning THACO pdf, and although it didn't achieve what I wanted to see achieved (a module for No Myth play), it was rather interesting in that it largely proved an assertion I had once made, namely, that if you prepared to play by creating a dungeon map, stocking it with monsters and treasures, and then your players came to the table with the expectation that the game was about killing things and taking their stuff, that pretty much every system would or at least could be played like 'conventional D&D'. In fact, very little rules adaptation would be needed I think to BW to really feel like a D&D clone if you set the rest of the ecosystem to model all the non-rules portions of D&D's usual ecosystem. And vica versa. Just off the top of my head, just changing the simultaneous secret declaration to one action at a time (rather than 3 at a time) and doing some things to model Basic D&D's order of play would get you really darn close. The rest, like bookkeeping time and the sort of propositions/outcome cycles expected of D&D, is just something BW doesn't expect to happen and maybe advises against, but which doesn't really forbid and which a pdf like Burning THACO could be seen as inadvertantly blessing because of its ultimate silence on so many important topics.

 

[innerdude]

Hmm that's interesting Celebrim. You bring up two excellent contrasts in campaign assumptions that would radically change player expectations. Yet I've also heard it joked in several forums, "GURPS is great at running any genre you want, as long as you want it to play like GURPS."

Going back to pemerton's original post, the question seems to be, just how much mechanical support must be present for an RPG to most readily optimize its core "play style assumptions"? Is it enough to simply add advice like Burning Wheel's to a game like D&D and expect a change in player approach, or does the system need to back it up with real mechanical impetus?