D&D General On Skilled Play: D&D as a Game

[AbdulAlhazred]

First, name one thing I'm asking for permission to do in those statements. Second, while the DM has the power to say no I can't do any of that, I have also been strident in declaring that doing so would be a violation of the social contract, so the DM simply will never do that.

There is nothing there which asks a question or permission. Nothing. I'm simply being thorough in my declarations to him about what I am doing to search. Why leave it to a roll when I don't have to?

You don't see how 'search the room' and 'convince the king' are basically the same as 'kill the orc'? The former two, for whatever reasons you despise the use of a check for, but if you tried to tell the GM the exact moves you used to kill the orc, he'd laugh at you and call for an attack roll. Its nothing but convention really. These are all contests of skill, you vs someone hiding something, you vs 'the evil counselor', or 'you vs the orc'. Convention, just convention, no principle separates them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Agreed. I used to run a homebrew dice-less RPG. Rules were thin - one page - but felt like enough to call it a game.


In the example above, the majority of written rules were in-fiction rules. There were written process rules listing the elements of a character. I think there were one or two tacit - but consistent - process rules about the flow of play.

I've argued that there is a chink in the wall: SP does not necessarily conflict with engaging with the game mechanics. One possible motivation for this is to update the concept. RPG rules have advanced over time - they've become more sophisticated, flexible, resilient, and streamlined. To me, one benefit of thinking about SP today is to apply it in a more sophisticated way. I believe the route to that is to allow that one can be properly doing SP while engaging with all the mechanics. That's the "nettle" I talk about. (I may be mistaking the arguments, but I sense a reluctance to accept that SP can mean SP of all the rules and not solely the fiction. In part because were it only the fiction, then it could not be what we call role-play gaming.)

I think it is a cogent argument, yes. I agree that analysis can produce potentially useful insights for future game design. Thinking through the evolution of check mechanics is giving me a bit clearer thoughts on how various games actually differ, structurally. I'm not sure that has lead me to any profound conclusions on game design or GMing, but its all grist for the mill.

 

[Maxperson]

You don't see how 'search the room' and 'convince the king' are basically the same as 'kill the orc'?

Sure, but that's not what I said, so those don't apply. I gave very specific examples of how I was dismantling and searching the dresser. There is no chance of failure to perform those actions unless a monster or something wanders in on me. @EzekielRaiden is saying that if I tell the DM I pull a drawer out of the dresser, I'm asking permission to do so. I'm not. I'm making a declaration that the DM will narrate as having happened unless he wants to violate the social contract.

The former two, for whatever reasons you despise the use of a check for, but if you tried to tell the GM the exact moves you used to kill the orc, he'd laugh at you and call for an attack roll. Its nothing but convention really.

I have no idea where you got this from. We're discussing skilled play vs. non-skilled play(despite skill being present for both). Searching the room with a simple search check is non-skilled play. There is no player skill involved with the check. Detailing how you search the room to minimize or completely remove the chance for failure is skilled play. The player's knowledge and ability to interact with the environment is being used. That's all I'm saying.

For the record, I'm fine with checks AND with skilled play. Both are useful tools and there's a time and place for everything. For example, if I'm in a room where I as a player think that there is near 0 chance of anything really valuable being hidden, I'm not going to waste my time and the time of everyone else at the table detailing out how I search the room. I'll just tell the DM I search the room and move on after the roll(if any). If I think there's a good chance of something being hidden in the room, THEN I will start cutting open mattresses, pulling out drawers, etc.

 

[Krachek]

This isn't true in many RPGs. In versions of D&D, it's false for 4e in many if not most circumstances.

To repost myself on this point:

In the Advanced DnD DM guide, page 111, Yes you can.

« In many situations it is correct and fun to have the players dice such things as melee hits or saving throws. However, it is your right to control the dice at any time and to roll dice for the players. You might wish ta do this to keep them from knowing some specific fact. You also might wish to give them an edge in finding a particular clue, e.g. a secret door that leads to a complex of monsters and treasures that will be especially entertaining. You do have every right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur. In making such a decision you should never seriously harm the party or a non-player characterwith your actions. »

in fourth edition DMG page 15. yes you can
« Rolling behind the screen let’s you fudge if you want. »

in 3.5 DMG you can also fudge. Page 19
« Just as important an issue, however, is whether the players real- ize that you bend the rules. Even if you decide that sometimes it’s
okay to fudge a little to let the characters survive so the game can continue, don’t let the players in on this decision. It’s important to the game that they believe their characters are always in danger. »

Advanced, 3.5, 4, 5 the DM can legally fudge dice, even Gygax allow it!

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

You don't see how 'search the room' and 'convince the king' are basically the same as 'kill the orc'? The former two, for whatever reasons you despise the use of a check for, but if you tried to tell the GM the exact moves you used to kill the orc, he'd laugh at you and call for an attack roll. Its nothing but convention really. These are all contests of skill, you vs someone hiding something, you vs 'the evil counselor', or 'you vs the orc'. Convention, just convention, no principle separates them.

Not exactly. Think back to the original use of the Arneson example I had- wasn't D&D. It was the Banana Republic.

Now extrapolate that. If you have a group of people (players) and they are trying to accomplish something, and there is no party, and one person is a referee, then:

1. There are times when characters can convince other characters in the game to do something. It's like the game, Diplomacy. Or like talking to other players. You can influence what the characters do through conversing- either as yourself or in a role.

2. On the other hand, if you acting in a way that is not persuasive or engaging in the fiction, but in a way that is directly opposition toward another player's character, then you need a method of adjudication that is neutral. One way of doing this is through, for example, rolling dice and having a referee interpret the results (this is also classic wargaming).

Move this into the area of TTRPGs, and the distinction becomes simple- the DM (the referee) controls the NPCs (that means 'monsters' too). Attempts to influence NPCs, like PCs, should be made one way. Attempts to directly oppose them (such as by attacking them) are made a different way.

In saying this, I am not saying that this is necessarily the right way to do it.* But it's not just "convention." There is a very sound principle behind that historical difference.

*Other people have provided reasons to not employ that system, such as a desire to be more inclusive of players that do not have the same social skills.

 

[pemerton]

I think there's still simply a quantitative difference. In a 1 minute AD&D melee round we are told by Gary that, to paraphrase, many attacks and counter-attacks are launched, and the attack and damage rolls are described as simply a sort of summary of the whole minute of sword fighting, or perhaps the one significant instant within that minute if you wish. We elide fiction here because, basically we are out of our depth in any attempt to describe it. This also accounts for the argument about "shy people can be diplomats if you have a skill for that." You could equally say "people with no sword-fighting experience can be fighters if you have a skill for that."

So, there ARE two types of actions, something like BB/LG to lift the portcullis, there's no elision there, we get the whole story. Anyone is qualified to imagine exactly how you lift a gate, and understand the challenge at the most elemental level.

<snip>

Very few actions fall into the former 'no elision' category. A lot of those may not even warrant checks, they are ordinary or nearly ordinary actions, and/or things where there's no clear point to adjudicating them as failures, maybe because they are part of some larger task that either succeeds or fails of its own accord (IE I'm pounding in a spike to act as an anchor for climbing down the cliff, we can adjudicate this with the climb check, it doesn't require a separate 'pound in the stake' check.). Obviously MANY actions fall into a category of "we are eliding something that doesn't involve any consequential or interesting fiction" (IE picking a lock, nobody cares about tumblers and pins in a D&D game unless they're an actual locksmith).

<snip>

I think the argument is often oversold. Yeah, there's a few cases like how we adjudicate searching a room where I can see the point. OTOH I assure you that almost any LEO will tell you that there IS DEFINITELY a skill to searching and finding hidden things! They will also assure you that you, civilian, DO NOT know this skill all that well, and while you could describe the actions taken when using it, you can't easily describe the experience factor. Thus you cannot really effectively RP the job of an experienced searcher, not completely.

Again, I assert that this is the case for ALL 'resolution mechanics' in D&D (and games with similar structure). Nobody is willing or able to learn sword fighting, so the game has mechanics that measure sword fighting skill, etc. The question then becomes things like "why do you feel that searching is something everyone knows how to do?" I can assure you most people DO NOT know how to do a proper search! They know as much about that as they do about sword fighting (in either case you can imagine doing it to a degree, and actually do some relatively inefficient version of it).

The debates around the boundaries of SP then become quite easy to understand, because SP is merely a convention. It is "what Gary did" roughly speaking.

I agree with all this. Especially what you say about convention, which (together with the idea of an "ecology" or "evolution" of the dimensions and subject-matter of "skilled play") is what I have been saying for most of this thread!

We all agree - by convention - that sword-fighting does not involve the player extrapolating from the fiction and coming up with a series of feints and manoeuvres that the GM can't but concede kill the Orc! And we all agree about bending bars and lifting gates. And the fact that searching a dungeon room falls on one rather than the other side of the line, as does tapping the floor for pit traps; but persuading a hungry ogre to sit down and have a beer with you rather than eating you either (i) falls on the other side (roll reaction dice) or (ii) depends on solving the puzzle of the ogre (back at the tavern we picked up a rumour that the ogre in this dungeon really likes beer); is all just convention.

Like most conventions it's not arbitrary. In the context of D&D, the domain of skilled play is closely correlated with what is easily and effectively able to be noted on, and then adjudicated by reference to, a map and key.

And like most conventions it's liable to edge cases and complaints of violation of the spirit if not the letter of it. You can see this back in the tournament report about Tomb of Horrors - the author complains that the use of plaster over walls to stop an elf from getting a check to detect concealed doors is unfair. And you can see the point - if the players have to not only map the dungeon but track the composition of its walls, what else do they have to do? Track the colour of everything? (ToH has more than its fair share of this too, though at least there's a poem to give the players a heads-up.) Track the style of fashion worn by every NPC? Track the relative dampness of surfaces? Temperatures? Mineral composition of rocks? Etc, etc. This quickly becomes infeasible for all the reasons you've given.

 

[pemerton]

I still don't see the salient difference between a 10' pole, or some other piece of equipment the party happens to have available, and an unseen servant spell, or some other bit of mojo the party happens to have available, yet multiple people have drawn a clear line in the sand between them (and multiple others have rejected or questioned it).

I don't understand the rejecters, or what principle/concept they are applying.

I am closely following the actual accounts of how to play the game given by Gygax, Pulsipher, Moldvay et al. For them, the difference between spell load-out and gear load-out is simply that these generate different resource constraints (eg the former runs into level-based and spell-book based limits; the latter runs into encumbrance and gold-based limits) and hence create different opportunities for optimisation.

I think @AbdulAlhazred's post over the past few pages really bring out both the scope and limits of "skilled play" as an approach to RPGing. One thing to notice about them is they focus on the process of play - eg what counts as an adequate action declaration?; and how does the GM adjudicate that? - rather than on procedurally irrelevant questions like whether a move in the fiction is "mundane" (poking with a 10' pole) or "magic" (casting a spell).

To elaborate on that last sentence: notice that, in Gygaxian play, what is special about a Wish spell is not that it is magic (that is important flavour/colour for determining when wishes become available, who can grant them, etc; but is basically irrelevant to the process of resolution) but rather that it gives a player (close to) carte blanche to rewrite or add to the fiction without having to engage in the typical procedures of "skilled play".

We can then step back from Wish to other spells to see the extent to which they elide some standard procedure of play: eg Passwall or Dimension Door circumvents (to a degree) the standard skilled play of geography and architecture; Rope Trick or Leomund's Tiny Hut circumvents (to a degree) the standard skilled play of managing the duration of an incursion into a dungeon; Continual Light completely circumvents the skilled play of light sources; etc. This brings us back to Unseen Servant which doesn't circumvent anything at all as far as I can see; nor, as far as I can see, does Transmute Rock to Mud.

I am generally not a cynical person; I just find that the cases people gush about look, from the outside, rather a lot like "manipulating" rather than "strategizing."

I'm not sure which cases you have in mind. I think that inviting a GM to extrapolate from the floor of this cavern has turned into thick, deep, oozy mud to the bugbears who were standing on the floor of the cavern are now slowed by if not stuck in that mud isn't really manipulative. Nor is I'm standing behind the chest as I lift its lid, so the darts that fire from its inside can't get me.

As @AbdulAlhazred and I have said, the range of situations in which this sort of extrapolation of the fiction works is constrained, and depends on a degree of convention to make it work.

 

[pemerton]

I gave very specific examples of how I was dismantling and searching the dresser. There is no chance of failure to perform those actions unless a monster or something wanders in on me.

I don't see how you can say this. I once had a family member who slipped a disk while working with a piece of dresser-sized furniture, and ended up in traction in hospital!

Or what if you just fail to notice a particular join in the furniture, and so treat as one component what is actually two, with a message written on one or both of the hidden touching surfaces? (I once knew of a dresser which had a hidden compartment which, when you opened it up and pulled it out, had a picture of a spider in its web. I'm imagining a variant on that, where the hidden words/image are on a piece of timber joined to another piece of timber with a join so smooth that to superficial inspection it looks like one piece.)

AD&D and B/X have no way of handling the case I mention in the previous paragraph except via a check to notice concealed doors. Even saying I take my axe to it and hack it all up won't do the job, as hacking may damage the surface and hence render the writing illegible.

 

[Mannahnin]

Continual Light completely circumvents the skilled play of light sources; etc.

Tiny nitpick on a great post. CL largely circumvents the resource management aspect of light sources, while introducing a couple of new possible complications. For example, depending on the edition, CL often has a much brighter and wider area than a torch, which can be a downside in some circumstances. For another, if you've replaced your stock of torches with a single rod having CL cast on it, you've now got one valuable implement instead of a bunch of disposable ones. You also may not have an open flame handy if you suddenly need to (e.g.) burn some green slime off someone, or ignite an oil flask thrown on a troll.

All these are elements which will still factor into skilled play employing the changed fictional context of the party's available lighting resources (the new parameters of which are part of the rules)

 

[pemerton]

@Mannahnin, no dissent from any of that!