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

[FrogReaver]

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 think skilled play in all forms is about achieving a goal. I think the focus on improvised, diegetic actions is somewhat a response to 3e and 4e D&D having less room for those kinds of actions to be successful (obviously some peoples experiences may differ). What you are terming MSP I don't think has ever actually existed. Instead that's really about trying to reinsert more skilled play that relies on improvised, diegetic actions into ttrpgs.

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).

There's much more to it than that. Just one criticism - Bayesian implies certain independent style challenges and D&D is far from independent challenges. What you do in previous challenges impacts what happens in future challenges. What counts as a solution can vary from one DM to another (to such a degree that learning how your DM actually DM's is a large portion of skilled play).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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).

I suspect, having a lot of experience with decision-support algorithms and automated decision-making, that any attempt to construct a fairly general set of 'rules' which would potentially allow for a wide variety of player actions will consistently result in scenarios which fall not to skill 'as intended' but to exploits of the weaknesses of those systems. This is how people normally beat 'AI' in things like video games, they learn that the computer has some quirk and you can win by some trick. Now, maybe sufficient randomization, and playing through scenarios that you only run once (IE because they are generated dynamically and you can't 'save point' and go back) will obviate some of those problems, but FUNDAMENTALLY AIs are FAR too 'shallow' to act as good DMs. They simply don't understand what they're doing. They can generate actions that are 'expected', but they don't embody any depth of understanding of the material they are reacting to or generating.

I do think we could really examine all the different ways that 'skill' can work. Which elements in SP are essential or what variations could be applied to make a variety of 'skill games' or to incorporate elements of player skill into games with other agendas. I think the topic has been touched on some, but also that we all have a lot more thoughts.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think skilled play in all forms is about achieving a goal. I think the focus on improvised, diegetic actions is somewhat a response to 3e and 4e D&D having less room for those kinds of actions to be successful (obviously some peoples experiences may differ). What you are terming MSP I don't think has ever actually existed. Instead that's really about trying to reinsert more skilled play that relies on improvised, diegetic actions into ttrpgs.

Meh, I don't think so. I mean, there's plenty of, nothing BUT, 'diagetic actions' in a game like Dungeon World, yet 'MSP' proponents generally abhor this type of game, or at least don't consider it to have much connection with skilled play. So clearly it isn't 'action stemming from fiction or character' which is the primary goal, or at least there are other substantial elements to that agenda.

Frankly, not meaning to put down anyone's preferences, but I think analyses of SP (GSP/MSP, whatever) come off to me as post-hoc justifications. SP exists in that there is a tradition with specific conventions, and many of the elements logically support each other, but I'm not convinced there is any deep agenda beyond "play in this style we are familiar with and like." That is perfectly sufficient, but asking for an analytical understanding of it is like asking for an analytical understanding of US Army field drill. It is done the way it is done because it has always been done that way, end of answer (a translation of a New Kingdom Egyptian drill cadence goes "left! left! left, right, left!" with the EXACT SAME CADENCE, it is 4,000 years of unchanged tradition).

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Meh, I don't think so. I mean, there's plenty of, nothing BUT, 'diagetic actions' in a game like Dungeon World, yet 'MSP' proponents generally abhor this type of game, or at least don't consider it to have much connection with skilled play. So clearly it isn't 'action stemming from fiction or character' which is the primary goal, or at least there are other substantial elements to that agenda.

Frankly, not meaning to put down anyone's preferences, but I think analyses of SP (GSP/MSP, whatever) come off to me as post-hoc justifications. SP exists in that there is a tradition with specific conventions, and many of the elements logically support each other, but I'm not convinced there is any deep agenda beyond "play in this style we are familiar with and like." That is perfectly sufficient, but asking for an analytical understanding of it is like asking for an analytical understanding of US Army field drill. It is done the way it is done because it has always been done that way, end of answer (a translation of a New Kingdom Egyptian drill cadence goes "left! left! left, right, left!" with the EXACT SAME CADENCE, it is 4,000 years of unchanged tradition).

From whence does the authority of these people come from on the matter, as opposed to say, me, or those who disagree, have we been cast as an exterior force?

Perhaps even more importantly, is an objective lack of SP the only, or even most likely reason they might abhor a game like Dungeon World? There are probably a lot of other considerations at play.

 

[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.

I certainly agree with your last sentence, and have posted much the same time two or three times recently.

(There is a very modest increase with level - in that the PC sheet gets harder to read and harder to play well - but that's pretty modest in the overall scheme of player-skill oriented RPGing.)

I think that, compared to (say) Prince Valiant or even B/X at least until you get to high-ish level MUs with complex spelll loadouts, 4e D&D does require a certain minimal investment of technical competence. We used to see this in threads complaining about "casual RPGers" who just want to be able to make a basic attack and don't want to have to engage with all the stuff on their sheets.

I also think 4e can be played with more or less of that technical skill both individually and as a group, especially in the context of combat resolution. And there is definitely scope to show off cleverness in doing that - I'm thinking, eg, of a time the invoker/wizard player in our game pulled out an intricate combo of familiar activation, limited-use abilities from various places, rerolls, etc to try and blast a cowering dragon out from its place of shelter beneath the PCs' flying tower. (It didn't work because all his dice came up very low despite about 3 rerolls.)

I also think it's a game where (contra some critics) fictional positioning matters to resolution.

But I agree with you that it's not very much like what Gygax et al were doing back in the mid-to-late 70s. And it's certainly not a game where you work out the play in such a way as to find yourself hosed time after time when you start, only to master things such that suddenly you're winning at every turn and the GM really has to amp things up to put pressure on you at all.

 

[pemerton]

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.)

I think there is more to it than what you've described here. @Campbell has noted one aspect of that in his post upthread about 4e: in 4e the space of decision-making and challenge doesn't fundamentally change over the course of play; whereas exactly that sort of change was fundamental to Gygax's conception of the game.

Now as I've already posted in this thread, I happen to think that Gygax's approach breaks down quite a bit once the game starts being published on a mass-basis, so that new players don't get to experience the evolutionary and developmental process themselves but begin by consuming Gygax et al's fully developed results of that process. But that is a problem with publishing that TSR never really solved which doesn't undermine the basic point about what it is that constitutes Gygaxian skilled play

From whence does the authority of these people come from on the matter, as opposed to say, me, or those who disagree, have we been cast as an exterior force?

Perhaps even more importantly, is an objective lack of SP the only, or even most likely reason they might abhor a game like Dungeon World? There are probably a lot of other considerations at play.

A fundamental tenet of player-side moves in DW (or AW) is that if you do it, you do it. And the moves are resolved via a roll that - as a deliberate feature of mechanical design - is kept within certain bounds of probability for its resolution. (4e D&D aspire to the same sort of design, though uses more convoluted methods to get there.)

Straight away that marks out the absence of Gygaxian skilled play. You can't reduce the odds of failure to zero. And partly for that reason, the system provides no incentive at all to play in such a way as to minimise complications. Rather, it's designed to ensure that complications arise at nearly every turn!

You can see the same point emerging in the "fair trap" thread. In the sort of game where the Gelatinous-Cube-in-a-pit-under-a-Damocles's-block would figure, if the block actually drops and Cube actually sprays everywhere the players are losing. Whereas in a game like DW or for that matter 4e, it is taken as a given that those sorts of fantastic scenes are part-and-parcel of play and the game infrastructure is set up to ensure that they occur.

(I feel I need to emphasis that this is not a criticism of DW or 4e D&D, either of which I would cheerfully play in preference to serious Gygaxian dungeon-crawling.)

 

[ClaytonCross]

Right, so we did touch on all (I think) of these considerations. I think the many years formed consensus is that some people LIKE exercising their personal cleverness in thinking through and describing exactly what their characters do in dangerous and exciting situations, and others find it more enjoyable to imagine the story of being that person and want to let mechanical aspects of the game handle exactly how it is they get in the window or whatever.

Even in the former case abstraction and stochastic methods are usually resorted to (dice) in order to deal with issues like combat where the outcome cannot be ascertained by logic and nobody is competent to really describe the techniques (lock picking and such often follow the same logic when it comes to execution vs deploying the technique). So, no games of which I'm aware are 'pure skill', not even early D&D c1974.

And then we get into the various ways in which the process implicit in classic D&D narrows its applicability and various trends that have come about as answers (often with mixed success) to some of the issues, how DM dependent Skilled Play is, etc. etc. etc.

Sure, but part of what I am saying here is that if a player who "find it more enjoyable to imagine the story of being that person" but the GM wants to force their "cleverness" it sometimes sometimes happens by the GM ignoring character sheets. Not always of course. When it does happen the GM usually invokes "for the story" willing to sacrifice player agency for it. This results in them bein g story tellers instead of GMs. Its basically the number one reason that players start complaining about being railroaded. I am not saying its 100% bad 100% of the time, only that GMs have to be careful just as much as Players when it comes to metagaming ... and that meta gaming buy players can push the GM to meta game while metagaming by the GM can push players to metagame both in an attempt to mitigate type of play they don't what.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

From whence does the authority of these people come from on the matter, as opposed to say, me, or those who disagree, have we been cast as an exterior force?

Perhaps even more importantly, is an objective lack of SP the only, or even most likely reason they might abhor a game like Dungeon World? There are probably a lot of other considerations at play.

Well, are we really wanting to touch the tar-baby? It is going to stick to you and you will never get that stuff off you.

I mean, people have opinions, and they have preferences. These are facts. It is fact that we all disagree to various degrees and in various ways as to what is or is not 'why we do this', etc. I am happy with doing analysis because I think it leads to better game design and better play. However, I cannot see where 'authority' comes into it. The only exterior force is the mass of opinion that may dictate what sorts of games get published, played, by whom, when, etc.

IMHO the reason why certain types of game are 'abhorred' (and this is probably too strong a word, though now and then it may not seem so) is simply that some people don't want to play that way. They have said so, and I believe them. I have this feeling that a lot of people, if they were not driven by a desire to stick with tradition, might choose to try some games like DW, look at their characteristics in a way I find more objective/analytical, and conclude they are fun, play them, etc. However, I'm not the game cops, and I assume my own ideas are at least partly a result of my own bias too. So here we are. Friendly discussion and debate can be fun, though we all now and then get a little too insistent on our own ideas.

Anyway, all these discussions do factor into how I choose to play in terms of explicating what the reasons for things are, and what might be tried, who might enjoy what changes in play, etc. Over the years discussion has illuminated a number of points for me.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

My point is more that im not sure their dislike or definitions ought to drive analysis.

Some gamers are very much as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof when it comes to their games and it would be sad if we couldn't break down this idea of Skilled Play to track its developmemt to its modern incarnation of character optimization, and combat encounter tactics.

Understanding them as a product of "Skilled Play" and ongoing efforts to solve problems within that design space, feels pivotal to the overall discussion.

 

[FrogReaver]

Meh, I don't think so. I mean, there's plenty of, nothing BUT, 'diagetic actions' in a game like Dungeon World, yet 'MSP' proponents generally abhor this type of game, or at least don't consider it to have much connection with skilled play. So clearly it isn't 'action stemming from fiction or character' which is the primary goal, or at least there are other substantial elements to that agenda.

I don't know dungeon world enough to say for certain, but I'm fairly sure there are underlying mechanics for your actions and whether they succeed or fail. While the game has quite a bit of fictional exposition - it's not necessarily fictional exposition that can be acted upon in ways to nearly guarantee success. If so then those diegetic actions in dungeon world fail the 'skilled play' part of my description. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Frankly, not meaning to put down anyone's preferences, but I think analyses of SP (GSP/MSP, whatever) come off to me as post-hoc justifications. SP exists in that there is a tradition with specific conventions, and many of the elements logically support each other, but I'm not convinced there is any deep agenda beyond "play in this style we are familiar with and like." That is perfectly sufficient, but asking for an analytical understanding of it is like asking for an analytical understanding of US Army field drill. It is done the way it is done because it has always been done that way, end of answer (a translation of a New Kingdom Egyptian drill cadence goes "left! left! left, right, left!" with the EXACT SAME CADENCE, it is 4,000 years of unchanged tradition).

Part of the problem I keep coming back to is the attempt to separate 'skilled play' as something generic apart from any particular game. I don't think that is correct. Skilled play as a detailed non-generic concept very much depends on the game context that it's being spoken of. That's why trying to play certain RPG's via what's being termed 'skilled play' here may actually result in very unskilled play for those games.

That is: the game system and player goals are prerequisites before we can actually talk about skilled play. It's why I keep saying that talking about 'gygaxian skilled play' doesn't make alot of sense outside a 'gygaxian game'. Whereas it does make some sense to talk about what elements of 'gygaxian skilled play' are also present in the skilled play of other games.