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

[The-Magic-Sword]

An alternative to what you describe is one in which the character is incompetent but the player is not, and the player has various resources to deploy (luck, fate, allies, retainers, etc) which do the job. The so-called "princess" warlord in 4e is an example of this.

But a lot of RPGers seem not to want that sort of thing. Which means, in a challenge-based game, either following the advice of your second paragraph I've quoted or relying on the GM to provide the plot armour (which has been a popular approach since the mid-80s!).

Another alternative is to give up on challenge-based play, but that takes things in a pretty different direction - eg something like Wuthering Heights or some of the PbtA-ish games.

Yeah I've advocated for that solution a lot too (the princess example), the third is fine, but in my experience it leaves you unsatisfied, it would be perfect for the right group though. You could also abstract all the challenges to really simplified dice rolls, literally deciding who wins a fight on the result of a single 'fight' check and avoiding challenges that ask the players for problem-solving input, just resolving uncertainty in a dramatic narrative arc. KoB would be easy to run very close to that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Another observation is that a big part of what makes the "actor" thing seem not to work with SP is the neo-trad idea of character concept as something you predesign. This creates friction between the world, and the character which wasn't made for it. An actor discovering their character over the course of the game, wouldn't have the same problem-- the character's view of reality is informed by their actual experience of the game world rather than the player imitating tropes from other stories. This is also why we've started to see so much of a preference for 'combat as performance' because the dropping of uncertainty is what enables these preintended narrative arcs to take shape, so players assume that 'roleplaying' demands predefined narrative arcs and a stance where the players are directors framing a scene in a narrative-- trying to 'make it happen' instead of it arising naturally from the circumstances.

But that assumption isn't necessary, your player and character could both be trying to succeed at something, and reacting to events and each other as they unfold and you wouldn't have meaningful issues. The central obstacle is the idea of the incompetent character who nevertheless expects to survive to end of the story as a result of movie-like plot armor. Their overall success becomes detached from their ability to earn victories because a lot of our narrative tropes frame stories that way, and people emulate the bad decisions, but since those players don't have a writer who has already decided the PCs will survive, the tropes don't execute.

So really, you have to get away from the idea of plot armor to make them compatible, you have to focus the story on skillful people genuinely trying to overcome challenges with their best efforts a relatively rational outlook, even if that is permeated by some drama that everyone agrees to not let them get killed. So I'd hazard that its just a different realm than some roleplayers expect, especially currently, but not one with less story and acting intrinsically (because you can still inhabit that space of a skilled character invested in winning, and create excellent stories through your actions and performance, without those stories being about lucking through your failures constantly.)

I don't disagree with you, but FOR ME at least, the issue would be more that traditional SP only has one sort of challenges. It doesn't reward bold adventurers who skillfully confront their enemies. Other people have touched on this, that there are a lot of other sorts of skill besides the ones that Gygax valued. I mean, partly there's going to also be the "things are not as pure in reality as in a discussion" so maybe you CAN play the skillful tactician. Maybe. It just isn't really guaranteed to work well in classic D&D. Certainly you'd have to know when to show your cards and when to fold...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Even if sports are relatively compatible (hockey and soccer/futbol say), there are still going to be differences that just cannot be bridged. Play one this time. Play the other next time. No big deal. Why can't the individuals themselves be more malleable and compromise (rather than imposing a compromise, and the potential estrangement from the sought experience, of the gameplay at the group level)? Every other past-time besides TTRPGing works this way and that model has survived the collision of different play priorities just fine!

Perhaps because TTRPGs, unlike sports and dramatically moreso than card games, are pure abstractions and thus contain no parts that cannot in principle be modified or combined? I mean, if we look at other forms of pleasurable activity, particularly ones where the rules and content are abstract even if the experience or process is not, you totally do see people combining stuff, constantly. Fusion cuisine. Music that blends styles together, or re-interprets a classic of one genre in the style of another (like electro-swing covers, an example I personally like). Genre mashups. Some of that is just because people like the distinct parts and want to bring them together. But it's definitely also sometimes the result of disparate interests meeting in the middle and finding something that satisfies all involved--some bands develop their distinctive style from precisely that.

Or perhaps it's because, unlike literally any of the above things, committing to an RPG campaign is a pretty big deal? You're talking about doing the same thing on a (semi-)regular schedule. This isn't "we'll play golf next week, George, this week we're playing basketball." It's "we'll play richly-detailed, self-consistent characters next year, George, this year we're playing SP." There's a hell of a lot more reason to advocate for getting at least some of the things you value most, because you may be waiting for a very long time if you don't--or you may get (unintentionally) excluded. I've been running the same game for over three years now (with the occasional off week or break). If I had had a friend to whom I'd said, "Hey man, this is a narrative-focused game, we'll play something SP-focused next time," I think they would be understandably upset that they'd waited three years with no sign of a new game happening.

Going back to the other issue: I still don't get how this isn't "about SP" @pemerton. It just seems like common sense to me that, if you have a friend you think might not be on board but that you would like to be on board, you'd think about what can be done. That's thinking about SP, what makes it tick, what parts of it are "optional" vs "mandatory," what the rationale was behind including certain elements, etc. Thinking about the "why" of SP, and if possible, taking that knowledge and making it more accessible to those who wouldn't necessarily mesh well with it. And it seems to me pretty likely that in any given group of 3-5 players, having someone among them not be totally absolutely 110% committed to SP seems...reasonably probable?

I mean, it's not like Actor is the only player archetype unlikely to be enthused by this style. Hardcore simulationists--and I know for an absolute fact there are such players on this very forum--are likely to find certain elements of SP distasteful, since SP wears its gamist leanings on its sleeve. Are those elements absolutely required, or optional? Can they be altered or replaced with something that fulfills the same rationale, but which would be palatable for those who really need to feel like there's a "real world" being run without bias or artificiality? If these elements are not optional and cannot be meaningfully altered, you've found clear lines where you can tell your simulationist (or actor) friends, "This is how this game works, it's what we're here for. If that isn't for you, we wish you good gaming elsewhere. If you can stomach that, great, we can have a good game together."

This just....seems like the thing to do when you're wanting to work with your friends to achieve the group's common interests (everyone enjoying the shared activity to some extent, everyone getting to see the things they like). Even if you don't have a suspicion that one or more people in the group might not be immediately 100% on board, you think about the ways that what your offering may or may not fit your specific group, and how you can make it fit better. No game is perfect, no style is perfect. Plumbing the depths of what makes that style tick, what it NEEDS vs what it just often has, etc. just....seems like the thing to do if you want to get the most enjoyment out of the things you choose to run.

This blog seems to have given the phrase some recent oomph: Six Cultures of Play

It's a reference to play that, on the player side, emphasises characterisation and perhaps character arcs in a way preconceived by the player, and on the GM side emphasises curation of the fiction to create room for the players' various characters to shine.

It's weird reading through that post, because, uh....from what I can tell, this makes 4e a classic-culture game: one concerned with game balance, constructing "fair" challenges, making the process of play itself entertaining and engaging. The focus, of course, is on the battlemap rather than the overworld, but otherwise that's the only "culture of play" that really fits. (Consider the number of pro-4e DMs who cite that 4e means they don't have to "pull punches" when throwing stuff at their players.) There are certain "storygame" elements as well, e.g. having mechanics that are themselves the story for a class or race, but otherwise that style is a bit outside 4e's scope. Yet, if I were a betting man, I would absolutely bet real actual money that most "classic culture" players would be apoplectic at the suggestion that 4e is a continuation of, or participant in, their culture of play. (I am not a betting man, so I won't. But that sounds like a bet that you can't lose.)

 

[clearstream]

What's being called Gygaxian skilled play depends on a Gygaxian dungeon environment. There was a shared goal in Gygaxian play - overcome the Dungeon. Tactics and Strategies that would allow one to better achieve that goal were skilled play and it just so happened that the best way to overcome the Dungeon was to not typically rely on combat or ability checks as their chance of failure and the consequences for those failures were very high.

I was asking myself - what separates SP from a videogame?

1. One element (there may be others) might be that SP relies on the availability of improvised-action resolution. Players faced with a concrete challenge are expected to be widely inventive in an RPG, but so far most videogames require very specific actions to address each obstacle. That is changing, with games like Valheim offering players far greater ability to inventively deal with challenges. They do that by establishing versatile and consistent world physics and creature behaviour, so that players can leverage what they know in a vast number of ways.

2. Another element could be dungeon variety, although I suspect videogames are overtaking this. The DMG contains guidelines for procedural dungeon generation, trap construction kits, and monster creation. Procedural game worlds are already vast. AI generated game worlds will be vastly varied.

3. Then there is the matter of DM response to player success. The arms race. So far videogames adapt only along fairly simple lines to player ability. Detection of player skill is at a basic level, and response is dialling up a relatively narrow set of parameters. That said, success training AIs to play videogames will amount to producing AIs that can judge player skill, and perhaps adjust challenge far more diversely.

I was also asking myself - is a VTT like Fantasy Grounds the best format for SP? The VTT helps a DM to more consistently enforce equipment limits, encumbrance, many of the process rules, most of the action rules. EDIT However, VTTs can make managing improvised actions - especially those intended to be in-the-fiction - more difficult. For example, in Fantasy Grounds if you want to let a player spend a Hit Die for something that shouldn't heal them, you must process the heal and then remove it. Possibly though, this is just a matter of giving players a few more options for control over what the system enforces. The VTT can - but does not have to - also intrude in roleplay. I believe developers of VTTs have a lot more user experience design to do in future.

 

[pemerton]

It's weird reading through that post, because, uh....from what I can tell, this makes 4e a classic-culture game: one concerned with game balance, constructing "fair" challenges, making the process of play itself entertaining and engaging.

My view is that 4e is what you get when you apply serious design principles - as in Robin Laws or Vincent Baker-level design - to both D&D tropes and the core D&D mechanics (ie class, level, AC, hp, fortune-in-the-middle saving throws).

The resulting game is almost entirely free of the very modest simulationist veneer of AD&D that was given a new, neon coat of paint in 3E; and is a mechanically heavy system for delivering fairly light-hearted but pretty reliable heroic fantasy adventure.

It's not Classic: there is almost no progression of PC power or of challenges (there's a little bit eg invisibility, flight, domination and stun only "come online" as PC level grows). Like HeroWars/Quest it relies on developments in the fiction to measure progression; the PCs change but only someone who thinks "if the numbers are bigger then we're having more fun" would think that there is any mechanical/system development in challenges. That's a fundamental difference from classic D&D, which relates back to posts I've made in reply to @clearstream explaining the significance of spells like Passwall and Teleport that remove whole categories of challenge from the game. 4e has almost none of that.

In a group of players who ignore or fudge the more intricate mechanics, and don't use skill challenges, it could be approached as Trad with a lot of otiose mechanical elements. But played to it strengths I think it's a combo of Story Now and Neo-Trad: like Neo-Trad it has vibrant characters with a lot of control over PC theme and trajectory, but unlike Neo-Trad and like Story Now it doesn't need spotlight balance and in fact the system will get in the way of that and other Neo-Trad GMing techniques.

I still think the best summary of 4e on these boards was posted by @Campbell, years ago now:

4e Classic (4eC) sings with the right group, but requires a high degree of player buy-in to get the results that I want out of it. I tend to view 4eC as a visceral game about violently capable individuals who set out willingly or not to irrevocably enact change in their worlds who end up becoming mythic figures in their own right. This is highly reinforced in the assumed setting of the game with the backdrop of the Dawn War, tales of the fall of civilizations, and highly active Gods, Demon Princes, Primordials, etc. 4eC presents a world on fire in desperate need of heroes. Thematically it strikes the same currents that Greek Myth, the Diablo games, and Exalted does though tied to a more mortal perspective.

Of course to really embrace these aspects players need to be able to shift between awareness of the game's narrative to engaging its combat encounter mini-game while remaining focused on the underlying fiction. 4eC asks a lot out of the players, but I find the relatively unique combination of satisfying my narrative jones while engaging my tactical/strategic mind incredibly refreshing. That being said sometimes I want other things from games.

************************************

I still don't get how this isn't "about SP" @pemerton. It just seems like common sense to me that, if you have a friend you think might not be on board but that you would like to be on board, you'd think about what can be done. That's thinking about SP, what makes it tick, what parts of it are "optional" vs "mandatory," what the rationale was behind including certain elements, etc. Thinking about the "why" of SP, and if possible, taking that knowledge and making it more accessible to those who wouldn't necessarily mesh well with it. And it seems to me pretty likely that in any given group of 3-5 players, having someone among them not be totally absolutely 110% committed to SP seems...reasonably probable?

I mean, it's not like Actor is the only player archetype unlikely to be enthused by this style. Hardcore simulationists--and I know for an absolute fact there are such players on this very forum--are likely to find certain elements of SP distasteful, since SP wears its gamist leanings on its sleeve. Are those elements absolutely required, or optional? Can they be altered or replaced with something that fulfills the same rationale, but which would be palatable for those who really need to feel like there's a "real world" being run without bias or artificiality?

My point is that nothing you say here is distinctive about "skilled play". Any RPG might not be enjoyed by some RPGers - eg why would a hardcore simulationist touch D&D with a 10' pole? They'd play RQ or RM or C&S if they're old-fashion. But does a post or thread about distinctive features of 5e D&D therefore need a reminder that you might want to replace hit points with a proper damage/wound system so the game has a chance of appleaing to all players?

 

[FrogReaver]

I was asking myself - what separates SP from a videogame?

IMO the difference between Gygaxian skilled play and skilled play in an RPG video game is only due to the fact that different games with different goals and different rules and game mechanics are being played.

Attempting Gygaxian Skilled play in a RPG video game would probably be very unskilled play if attempting it was even possible in the rules.

The better question might be what is different about a Gygaxian RPG and what is different about the video game RPG? A starting point might be something about low success and high consequences of codified actions and potentially high success and low consequences of improvised actions.

1. One element (there may be others) might be that SP relies on the availability of improvised-action resolution. Players faced with a concrete challenge are expected to be widely inventive in an RPG, but so far most videogames require very specific actions to address each obstacle. That is changing, with games like Valheim offering players far greater ability to inventively deal with challenges. They do that by establishing versatile and consistent world physics and creature behaviour, so that players can leverage what they know in a vast number of ways.

Gygaxian skilled play was simply skilled play in a game that heavily incentivized not relying on the meachanics to advance toward your goal as using the mechanics usually carried a high risk of failure and high consequence of it. Skilled play in a game not featuring rules that make utilizing the mechanics carry a high risk of failure and high consequence of it will often feature properly utilizing mechanics as a part of skilled play.

I mean consider a game where you can do any improvised action - just the chance of failure and the consequence of failure is high for those improvised actions. Utilizing improvised actions in such a system would certainly not be skilled play. As such it's fairly apparent to me that the whole concept of limiting the definition of 'skilled play' to 'gygaxian skilled play' is really just a previous one true wayism tactic to gain the upper hand in the previous RPG Wars by being able to claim that Gygaxian RPG's are the only ones that offer skilled play. I just don't think a term with that origin is a very helpful lens to discuss RPG's through.

2. Another element could be dungeon variety, although I suspect videogames are overtaking this. The DMG contains guidelines for procedural dungeon generation, trap construction kits, and monster creation. Procedural game worlds are already vast. AI generated game worlds will be vastly varied.

I think DM generated game worlds will still be more varied - as anything derived via AI will still have maximum/minimum parameters that can be set. A DM just has more freedom in that regard.

That said, in practice AI my surpass a great number of DM's in dungeon design. It's the difference in looking at the average DM vs the most creative DM's.

3. Then there is the matter of DM response to player success. The arms race. So far videogames adapt only along fairly simple lines to player ability. Detection of player skill is at a basic level, and response is dialling up a relatively narrow set of parameters. That said, success training AIs to play videogames will amount to producing AIs that can judge player skill, and perhaps adjust challenge far more diversely.

I'm not so sure. Player skill is usually pretty inconsistent from one challenge to the next. It's also not always driven simply by success vs this one challenge. It's a really complex problem that we would need to understand far more about humans than we do before an AI would be able to 'solve' that problem.

I was also asking myself - is a VTT like Fantasy Grounds the best format for SP? The VTT helps a DM to more consistently enforce equipment limits, encumbrance, many of the process rules, most of the action rules. EDIT However, VTTs can make managing improvised actions - especially those intended to be in-the-fiction - more difficult. For example, in Fantasy Grounds if you want to let a player spend a Hit Die for something that shouldn't heal them, you must process the heal and then remove it. Possibly though, this is just a matter of giving players a few more options for control over what the system enforces. The VTT can - but does not have to - also intrude in roleplay. I believe developers of VTTs have a lot more user experience design to do in future.

From my experience the most rules heavy systems are the ones the DM rules roleplay improv actions have the worst chances of success and come with the worst consequences. One might say abjucation becomes to a large extent about asking the questions: 'does an ability that allows players to do this exist' and 'did this player forgo that ability for another'? VTT's are great for those kinds of systems - but I'd question whether it's the VTT getting in the way or just the system itself?

 

[Campbell]

For me personally the entire point of a Skilled Play (of the fiction) priority is that playing skillfully is necessary for meaningful progress, rewarded, and especially socially valued. The fun of those Play of the Game moments is that they matter, both to the outcome but especially to the participants. That when I go above and beyond to pull something off everyone at the table gets excited.

I'm not a fan of solo fun in group activities. What makes games great (in my opinion of course) is the fun we get to have together. If we're trying to do different things and valuing different sorts of play then play becomes this exhausting exercise of always trying to read the room, never feeling sure about your footing. At that point we're not really playing a game at all.

The same can be said for me personally in either more story or character oriented sorts of play. I'm not interested in getting to that emotional more immersive place if I'm the only one there. I'm also not very interested in playing out personal story arcs if no one else at the table is interested. That sort of self interested play holds zero draw for me.

I do agree that commitment to games is an issue. My solution tends to be not to commit to playing a single game. Have games in rotation, 3 month play cycles, multiple ongoing games within the same group. Not having one set GM running a game of an indefinite duration where participation is required to be in the peer group is like a big deal.

 

[Campbell]

@pemerton

I love 4e dearly and believe it can be played skillfully, but I don't see it primarily as a game oriented around player skill. In many ways compared to Classic D&D 4e flattens the skill curve. I think 4e is more oriented towards emergent storytelling. It cares deeply about the story of the individual classes, metaphysical conflicts, and most importantly the story of the current fight or skill challenge. It cares far more about big dramatic moments than it cares about testing the players' mettle. As you progress it escalates the stakes narratively, but not really the difficulty of player decision making.

 

[clearstream]

Gygaxian skilled play was simply skilled play in a game that heavily incentivized not relying on the meachanics to advance toward your goal as using the mechanics usually carried a high risk of failure and high consequence of it. Skilled play in a game not featuring rules that make utilizing the mechanics carry a high risk of failure and high consequence of it will often feature properly utilizing mechanics as a part of skilled play.

I mean consider a game where you can do any improvised action - just the chance of failure and the consequence of failure is high for those improvised actions. Utilizing improvised actions in such a system would certainly not be skilled play. As such it's fairly apparent to me that the whole concept of limiting the definition of 'skilled play' to 'gygaxian skilled play' is really just a previous one true wayism tactic to gain the upper hand in the previous RPG Wars by being able to claim that Gygaxian RPG's are the only ones that offer skilled play. I just don't think a term with that origin is a very helpful lens to discuss RPG's through.

I am presently accepting SP as a label, notwithstanding that I share your concerns for its possible hazards.

That aside, having had cause recently to dig into "Skilled Play", I suspect the label is being applied to two different modes of play. One mode is better labelled "Gygaxian Successful Play" (GSP, going forward). GSP is happy to use all of the rules to achieve the ends of the players. Spells like passwall and knock, and Find Traps checks, are by no means verboten to GSP. "Modern Skilled Play" (MSP, hereafter) is more interested in improvised, diegetic actions. A Find Traps check elides the fiction so has less appeal at an MSP table, where the DM is expecting a description of how the trap is searched for by the character in the imagined world. This seems to me foremost a matter of tradition, and the bats and silence discussion is very relevant here.

I'm not so sure. Player skill is usually pretty inconsistent from one challenge to the next. It's also not always driven simply by success vs this one challenge. It's a really complex problem that we would need to understand far more about humans than we do before an AI would be able to 'solve' that problem.

That's not what we find when measuring player skill. Skill does indeed differ between challenges that call upon fundamentally different abilities, but skill is consistent across the same or related abilities. Bayesian algorithms produce good predictions of player skill at simple games even without using an AI-based approach. One up front piece of work is modelling your challenges - correctly identifying which abilities they will be stressing - so one would envision a cluster of AIs with various functions (a challenge-maker, variously skilled challenge-players, a player-ranker).

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I'd go in the opposite direction and interpret the distinction between 'Gygaxian Skilled Play' and 'Skilled Play/MSP' as being somewhat contrived, and at most derived primarily from cultural differences between players-- chiefly in their expectations for where the choices from which they derive problem-solving agency (the marker of 'skill') is located. 'Skilled Play' itself, in my eyes, is simply players being able to solve problems through application of their skillset, whatever that skillset consists of, as a focus of play-- contrasted with play that isn't about problem-solving at all (e.g. games where the emphasis is on telling a story to the extent that problem-solving is in the way of dramatic interactions between characters, and the execution of a story arc.)

This means that describing the procedures one searches the environment with, develops plans to defeat foes, and such in an OSR context is Skilled Play, 4e and Pathfinder 2e style wargaming combat as sport with lots of tactical decisions to make style encounter design is Skilled Play, and that 3.5e and Pathfinder 1e character optimization where problems are solved at character creation through skillfull character design, are all Skilled Play.

The reason to break down the barriers and acknowledge this, is that I don't want to silo the discussion in such a way that these become clear genres with explicit rules dividing them, I'd rather see the techniques used in them blended and synthesized in different ways to create a multitude of permutations of skilled play that have different effects on the game world. Rolls for things like searching a room instead of descriptions of how the room is searched isn't emblematic of another style of game, its a game design solution to the problem of experienced players developing SOP that neutralize the uncertainty their personal skill was meant to resolve-- in other words for experienced players there's no tension in searching a room through the traditional means of describing how you search it, because they're going to run down the list of search methodology they developed years before (or as one user described, literally hand the GM a book, and conduct the procedures in the book manually should the GM refuse to automate).

Since we want that tension and mystery in the game (and want to have times where things aren't found) we can instead disclaim that decision making to character statistics and dice rolls, which in turn allows players to engage their character building skillset to create characters that are better or worse at these activities, ideally while retaining at least some degree of tension-- introducing another avenue of Skilled Play to express itself, albeit one that wasn't a part of the game some people got used to, it also helped to ground the characters in the world, because they're people with actual skillsets, and things they're good and bad at, in this context a character build in later editions of DND is like the sword with which a swordsman expresses their skill, a better character is analogous to better weighting or tougher materials or what have you. Other skills, such as tactical acumen, puzzles, and plans to solve overall problems are more dynamic-- they can't be automated or streamlined in the same way, so they stay an element of personal skill on the part of the player.

This suggests that all of these games are 'Skilled Play' games, and are inter-textual with each other in that context-- simply solving problems that arise in different ways (or not at all) and introducing new forms of skill into that mix of skilled play. They use the same elements, but in different ratios that produce wildly and subtly different experiences, but they all pertain to that core idea of the game being about overcoming challenges to achieve your goals, and a story arising from that in an emergent manner which is the essence of Skilled Play, in my eyes, and necessary for the term to be meaningful at all.