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

[Snarf Zagyg]

I had forgotten how prescriptive the 1e PhB is by RAW. It feels like it is going to invite the player to do some non-mechanical creation... "and possibly give some family background (and name a next of kin as heir to the possessions of the character if he or she should meet an untimely death) to personify the character." The DMG total power over secondary skills (if used) to the DM and that the age was explicitly random.



Does 1e even have ability check suggested like B/X does?

:-/ We were doing a boatload more adding of stuff than we thought!

And B/X and 2e were a lot different by RAW from 1e on the actually running the game parts than I remembered.

One thing that is helpful to remember is that this is very context-specific, which isn't apparent looking back.

OD&D (as in the original books) is unplayable unless you both have a firm background in the hobby as well as other supplements and knowledge. The very first issue of the Strategic Review includes advice about how basic combat is supposed to work in D&D. It was very much a hobbyist's game, with both assumed knowledge and assumed tinkering.

OD&D -> Holmes -> AD&D. 1e is effectively Gygax's standardization of OD&D. It is both "complete" and "incomplete" simultaneously, in that it provides the seemingly-schizophrenic advice to follow these rules, and make it your own. The reason for these contradictions is fairly simple; Gygax the hobbyist understood how the game would be and should be played, while Gygax the businessman was concerned about competitors muscling in on his territory. Anyway, you really couldn't run 1e by RAW, nor was there much of an assumption that you were going to. It was still a hobbyist product. It a player wanted to do something interesting, then they could!

Meanwhile, you have the separate and distinct B/X (Moldvay/Cook) which could not assume that prior knowledge. However, for legal reasons, B/X also had similarities going back to OD&D. So the new Basic line was compatible with the old Advanced line. But because knowledge could not be assumed, Moldvay and Cook had to include rules for the DM for adjudication, even simple ones like the one you excerpted.

But the vast numbers of new players didn't know all of this. So there was a mishmash of the various rules and rulesets.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A group of us six of us with a combined 180+ years of playing experience across dozens of RPGs and play styles played 1e a few years back, and getting treasure and beating monsters were side points at best. We were out to save the world with each of us having a personal goal as well (I did avenge my Father, and got to surprise the DM by having another character sacrifice me for wisdom because it seemed like what Odin would want). Were we not sitting down to play 1e? Were we playing it wrong? (We certainly worked a large number of things out very differently than 4e skill challenges would have). Is it B/X or 1e that makes people play a certain way, or is it what they all talk about in session 0 and all being on the same page? My most recent playing as a 5e game (with a bit less experience, but still over 20+ years each on average) felt a lot more like a classic dungeon crawl.

Right, but what was 1e doing for you there? I mean, as a game and in terms of the intent of how it would be played, its default agendas, its process, rules, etc.? 1e characters, for example, are pretty fragile (even a 5th level fighter has only about 25 hit points, which 3 orcs could relieve you of in one round of combat, or a 30' fall could kill you, etc.), failing a save will off you a LOT. Its hard to play a game of character drama given that (I have run low-lethality 1e games, but you do have to restrict the type of elements which appear in the game with any regularity). Nobody can say anyone is 'playing wrong', but at the same time if you ran that game using Burning Wheel it would be easier and more reliable at running that sort of game. Those are the kinds of things we normally talk about, not who is 'right' or 'wrong' in how they play.

I would say the same thing vis-a-vis 5e. Given its lack of turn-based exploration rules, the ease of getting light and other necessities, the lower criticality of injury and general ability of characters to withstand damage, etc. Is it the ideal game for a dungeon crawl, or will D&D 1e, which has all that stuff and more, provide that experience more conveniently and reliably? Why? These are the things most of us discuss in this sort of thread.

If 1e can be played boatload of character driving, I'm not sure why 5e can't? Is it that there aren't rules to do it? Is it that most of the settings don't? Did VtM allow for a lot of intense character-driving?)

I never played VtM, but my understanding is a large part of the rules, a central part, involves the psychological/spiritual effects of vampirism on the PCs. I would call those rules related to characterization and thus to 'role play' generally. Another major element has to do with the various clans, or whatever they ended up calling them, and how they interrelate, which is setting and RP I would say.

This was RE: Trad and NeoTrad I think. Is that because Trad and NeoTrad are usually dungeon crawls or railroads? Or is it because Trad and NeoTrad wouldn't have the characters do what they would do if they were characters and instead try to optimize things? (I need to remember that lots of people didn't actually play the Trad or NeoTrad way back in the 80s and stop thinking the label necessarily applied to my groups).

Well, yes, but more because what you DO and ENCOUNTER in the game is pretty much up to the GM! They build a world, frame all the scenes in it, decide what happens when you take an action (success or failure, both up to them, as is if you roll dice, etc.). If the players have any input at all beyond class/race/equipment, and possibly the order of their ability scores, it is only things like background which the DM grants them a pass to invent, and may demand to approve or disapprove. Gygax gives an example of a PC being allowed to draw a map of the hex his castle is being built in, that kind of thing. There's no principle or process of play that provides for player input to the content or direction of the game, beyond which direction their PCs head in, etc.

It sure felt like heroic fantasy when the party was steeling F-14s from the air base we got to via time travel back in 1983 or so... Ok, maybe we weren't even close to anything in the actual rules that time. :-/

LOL

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Glad to see it's got the ones I mentioned - water polo and international rules football - in the list.

@EzekielRaiden: water polo is a pretty standard/popular sport as far as I can tell (more obscure than basketball, but not more obscure than lacrosse - which could be argued to be a hybrid of hockey and "let's use these wacky sticks to play catch"). I don't think international rules is played outside of the international matches I mentioned upthread that are also described on the Wikipedia page.

I hate to disappoint you, but lacrosse isn't a hybrid of anything. It is literally a Native American game which was adopted by European settlers. It is pretty popular in New England (at least in Vermont, I think also other nearby states) where there are regular high school and even college-level leagues. Field Hockey is similar to lacrosse, but derived from an entirely different source, which just goes to show you that the 'phylogeny' of various sports is not easy to discern. I suspect that several of these 'field games' have heavily borrowed rules concepts. I mean, basketball, football, hockey (all types), lacrosse, etc. all share similar concepts of goals, goal keepers, offensive 'center' and 'wing' players, out of bounds handling rules, etc. Games like rugby and American football have diverged heavily from that model, but if you go back far enough they look more and more similar too.

 

[Voadam]

In some ways, therefore, I see it as a bit like daily resource management in 4e. Or making a check in Burning Wheel. If you get it wrong you mightn't get the fiction that you wanted, but you don't lose the game. Which I think is a clear contrast with - say - White Plume Mountain.

I think some people make out/remember/think of 1e as more extreme on lethality than it was.

There are 1e things where failure can be death/lose the game (green slime and rot grubs come to mind). There are save or die things that come down to luck. They are not omnipresent. There are plenty of success = great, failure = a hit with some consequences but not death or loss of the game entirely.

1e White Plume Mountain starts off with a Sphinx riddle. Figure it out and you get past the sphinx no problem. Fail to solve it and you don't lose the game, you have to fight the sphinx which will generally take some resources but should be something characters of the module's level can handle.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If this is true, then we have answered the original question without any need for my (apparently faulty) "there are no hybrid sports" argument. That is, the reason people try to combine TTRPGs together is, quite simply, that most TTRPGs are remarkably similar things. Combining them together is both easy and, oftentimes, fairly natural.

Assuming people agree with this sentiment (and they might not), this implies that TTRPG merging is common for exactly the same reason that hybrid sports are (apparently) a thing: people with divergent-but-not-incompatible interests trying to do a thing together. Which is exactly the situation I've described several times, a GM trying to include their actor (or a simulationist, or whatever) friend in a game because they don't want to leave that person out.

Yeah, I don't know that we are in disagreement really. I was just clarifying the whole 'hybrid' thing.

I would absolutely consider "love" an abstraction: while it is quite common to discuss specific instances of "love," we very frequently speak of it in terms shorn of context and without specific individual examples. "He'd had a bad breakup, but after a grieving period, he went out to find love again." That's "love" in a clearly abstract sense. Or, despite the definition being EXTREMELY specific and useful, 1st Corinthians 13 is very specifically about "love" in an abstract sense, not tied to any specific relationship between individuals but describing the general character of "love" wherever it appears:

We are not given, "In <specific trying situation,> love <does patient act.>" We are given, "Love is patient." That is, clearly and explicitly, an abstracted quality--patience--that reflects the pattern of behavior called "love." (Or Charity, if you want to be old school on this one.)

You can discuss ANYTHING in the abstract. I can say "Cars have engines." This is clearly an abstract statement about cars, a GENERALIZATION. So, I could think of this as a statement about the Platonic car, it has an engine . Generalization is a form of abstraction, or a process by which abstraction is achieved perhaps (and again, you can use generalization as both a noun and a verb, so yay English!).

Ironically, we seem to have a clash of definitions here. That is, as a verb, "to abstract" has the idea of "removing" properties from things as its primary sense, and the sense of considering an idea alone without specific implementations or instances is distinctly secondary. But as a noun, "abstraction" primarily refers to "the act of considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances" (per Dictionary.com), while the "take away stuff" sense is secondary.

In one sense, TTRPG rules are absolutely abstractions: they literally exist as general qualities and characteristics apart from concrete realities, because you use those rules in order to generate "concrete realities" (for a given definition of "concrete"), aka statblocks, character sheets, items, spells, etc. In the other, they are not abstracted, in that there is nothing being "removed" from them--indeed, they are your foundation, which you them build out from.

I don't think 'take away stuff' is at all secondary. Abstraction, the process of generalizing things, IS a process of removal of differences. The whole ART is that of understanding which differences are trivial and which are not, and which characteristics in common are particularly salient. I don't think TTRPG rules are abstractions. Some of them (for a loose reading of 'rules') may be 'templates' (IE a character sheet is a template which you instantiate, creating an instance of a character, I'll note this is almost exactly software engineering parlance!).

This is a genuinely interesting comparison, but I feel you are excessively broadening the software development use of "abstraction" to apply everywhere else.

OK, I am not dying on any hills here today, but as I stated above, I think that your favored definition of abstraction is not fundamentally different from mine. They both partake of the idea of 'instantiation' and generalization. Love can be described in abstract terms, but it only exists to the degree that it is instantiated in particular examples (OK, don't get carried away on the metaphysical dimensions of that, if you happen to be a Platonist then we will have to at least agree that it isn't worth talking about things which are never instantiated, since we can know nothing about them, even Plato must agree here...).

Well, part of my thesis is that we have at least one answer to "what am I trying to accomplish?" right off the bat: I am trying to bring all my invited together in a TTRPG experience they can all enjoy. Because of that inherent goal before any previous considerations, THAT is why you would think about adding wandering monsters to a game, or spells, or whatever else--because you think that, by doing so, you might ameliorate the group's overall play-enjoyment without compromising the pre-existing enjoyment of specific players.

I would say you may be skipping a step. That is, maybe your players are so fixated on certain instantiations of particulars of a mode of play that they cannot abide its absence (IE wandering monsters), but at least if I am designing a game I certainly would not start with "there will be wandering monsters, or else it isn't fun." I'd start with the idea of test against an environment with player skill as a paramount principle of play, and then maybe I work my way to Wandering Monsters as a solution to some issue (IE Dave or Gary must have introduced them as a driver to get players to stop camping or something similar).

I can--on occasion, with reluctance--get a good idea out quickly.

Good??!!! Hoooo boy! We're in deep water now

IMO, the player-facing agendas are found in the inherent moves of each class, especially the alignment moves, and to a lesser extent the common moves everyone makes use of. The very existence of a move called "Undertake a Perilous Journey" implies that players have an interest in travel--some of it dangerous. Likewise, alignment moves specifically incline the player toward certain behavioral attitudes, rewarding them for fulfilling those behaviors. It's somewhat softer than a direct, explicit "YOU PLAY THIS TO DO X," but these things and their names/phrases communicate something to the player.


Well, actually, I'm pretty sure there is some kind of shopkeeper Compendium Class out there. It could happen. You just wouldn't be the medieval equivalent of a 9-to-5 office worker. You're more like the player character of Recettear: yes, you run a shop, but you go adventuring off-hours to find the stuff you sell to people.


I hesitate to default to "it just means be a good player," as that has some unfortunate implications (e.g., that for other games, "skilled play" is unrelated to being a good player...or worse) and is distinctly uninformative. That said, many of Dungeon World's rules really ARE focused on producing "good play," making "be a good player/DM" a more inherent and natural result of following the rules, so there is some merit to speaking of it this way.

I guess what I'd say is, "Dungeon World skilled play" is play where you live out the character as who they are, where they are. That's why (for example) people are supposed to always use character names, not player names. "Skilled play" involves keeping your head deep in the fiction, and knowing ways to leverage, expand upon, or push forward that fiction, while staying true to the tone and style of your group's game. E.g., my game is high on intrigue and low on grit, full of "learn about the ancient past" and mostly devoid of logistics-heavy stuff, serious in terms of storyline and morals but lighthearted in terms of humor/silliness and non-zero-sum results. Other games will differ, and part of "DW-SP" is learning, internalizing, and applying your table's tone+style effectively.

E.g., in a much more gritty (bordering on World of Dungeons) game, the party bard taking on his great-grandmother's succubus powers would have been a Start of Darkness moment, a terrible deed done for noble reasons. Or the time that the party helped some escaped girallons--the consequences of unleashing dangerous, fairly intelligent wild animals would be significant. But because this is a lighthearted game, the bard was doing a noble thing, allowing his great-grandmother to die as a mortal and eventually reunite with her human husband in the afterlife (presumably; nobody knows for sure how the afterlife works). And helping those girallons escape just meant they would, eventually, make their way back to the northern jungles they came from, avoiding settled areas because settled areas = people who might try to capture them again.

For games where a given character's story is central, being a good player does mean keeping yourself grounded in that--and DW is good at encouraging this. But I would be careful about just calling that "be a good player"...in the abstract. (Boom, tied it all together! hah)

Yeah, all the little elements of DW basically add up to player agenda. It isn't something that you get beat over the head with, like DM agenda. I mean, it is supposed to be up to the players basically what they want the story to be about, so they need some leeway. As a story ABOUT the characters, DW certainly does want character focus. I have always found this to be the most difficult part for me, as I came up in RPGs during a time when 'pawn stance' was pretty much how it was done.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I definitely agree with this. I do think we should keep the "Gygaxian" appended to "Skilled Play" for when we talk specifically about that skillset and its impact on play.



This I don't agree with and, quite honestly, @AbdulAlhazred 's commentary on this subject has me completely bewildered as to what is happening at his table to have him push his chips "all in" on this position (a position I can't find the least bit substantive evidence for in the text and certainly not in my running of the game).

I mentioned upthread how sensitive the trajectory of play is to the 7-9 result (by design). Consequently, managing the move-space prior to a move such that you can winnow the potential consequences/costs/fallout before declaring an act is a huge part of playing skillfully. Then managing the decision-points (including answering GM questions) inherent to Costs and Complications is a huge part of playing skillfully. Skill in manipulating/managing this game of Spinning Plates (which includes martialing and managing limited resources to curtail certain fallout and to open up the move-space for your PC or Team PC broadly) is a huge part of play.

How resource management plays into this is no "small potatoes:"

* Do you spend your dwindling Adventuring Gear to open up the move-space (to make a move that otherwise wouldn't be available to you) or amplify a presently available move in a snowballing scenario here...or save it for a future scenario where the stakes are increased (which may not emerge)?

* Do you spend your Bag of Books to augment your Spout Lore move in a snowballing scenario where you need at least something interesting if not something both interesting and useful to change the trajectory of the conflict?

* Spend your lone Healing Potion to get rid of a pressing Debility that is haranguing your "big guns" moves or save it for when you desperately need the 10 HP NOW in a later situation (or vice versa)?

* If you're a Paladin swearing an oath on an Ancient Blue Dragon Slaying quest and you have 2 Boons and one of them is invulnerability to x, do you make that x Dragon Fear, Lightning, or Toothy Maw?

* If you're a Wizard and you have an absolutely crucial Protective Counterspell move you're making to save an allied PC or Cohort...what spell do you stake?...and what about the decisions prior to that in managing 7-9 complications - accepting Danger vs -1 ongoing Spellcasting vs Losing the Spell which will winnow you're already, certainly compared to Classic D&D, small pool of spells available for subsequent moves and for Counterspelling?

* And if you're Defending as a Fighter or a Paladin, managing your Hold is hugely consequential on play.

* And if you're a Druid, managing your Hold for moves is also hugely consequential on play.

* And if I have a Messy Complication that will cost me my Scale Armor or an ongoing Debility in my primary attribute...which do I choose?

* And if I spend Coin on Adventuring Gear and Ammo, or if I spend Coin on this Wizard Ritual to enchant my shield, I now can't hire this Guide or this Porter or this Man-at-Arms.

* And if I'm surrounded by 4 bad guys and I get a 10+ on Hack and Slash, do I take the extra +1d6 damage to eat the counterattack (HPs as a resource here) so I can get 1d10 and +1d6 on a big cleaving attack on each of them to potentially take them all out (is the risk vs the reward)?

* And which question do I ask in my 7-9 Discern Realities (where I get 1 Hold and +1 forward when acting on the answers) to best ensure I open up the movespace for me or my team and then amplify that movespace with the +1 forward.

* How do you spend your Choose 2/1 on Perilous Journey moves/roles (eg, if you're a Scout do you preemptively spend it to get the jump on a Danger that may or may not manifest as a result of the downstream Navigate move?)?


I can go on and on and on with the cognitive overhead management that is extremely consequential in constraining GM Complication/Cost framing, opening up your own or your team's move-space, and managing the array of Complications/Costs that come at you when the "Spinning Plates" aspect of play goes full-throated (which includes martialing resources or managing limited resources with considerations for now, downstream, risk/reward, stakes and sunk cost).

No argument here, those are all things that players might DO/considerations they might deal with in order to control what happens in the next scene, and consequently where things go. OTOH those are not what DW really seems to be ABOUT. I mean, it isn't about "getting to decide what happens next" it is about seeing what happens next. So, for example, I wouldn't see much point in playing a DW character in a way that was contrary to the PC's established personality/values in order to achieve some 'hold' or preserve a bit of gear so you can use it in the next scene. I mean, perhaps that might be the crux of a 'hard choice' within the game, but as just an ordinary practice that you would consider 'skilled' I wouldn't think of that as falling within DW's definition of 'skill', because the game seems so much ABOUT the characters and what story emerges from who they are, rather than emerging from how they optimize their inventory! So, to me, 'skill' is playing in character well. All those other things are there to potentially put pressure on that.

I think also that most of the people I've run games for/played with are OLD! I mean people who started playing RPGs in the 1970's, or early 80's at most. We tend to approach games in a fairly "been there, done that" kind of way, I guess. I mean, when I was playing my 5e dwarf wizard I was trying to build an empire/domain. I just decided that was what this PC wanted to do (he had his reasons based on his background). This is pretty routine though, did it back in '83, might do it again in a year or two, who knows? So, yeah, the character maybe is pretty gung-ho, but I'm just finding out whatever happens. If the DM says "Oh, look I have this thing over here we can run." that's good. Whatever. I don't have to create a whole bunch of space in the narrative for my PC to decide to do that or something else. In DW, we do the thing. If there's a front that has a doom related to 'the steading', well gosh there we go! I didn't need to carve out some narrative space to decide what I was going to do, its on a plate right there, in front of me.

Maybe this is just me. I'm not a fiercely competitive player, certainly not at this point after 40 years and more of playing RPGs.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I had forgotten how prescriptive the 1e PhB is by RAW. It feels like it is going to invite the player to do some non-mechanical creation... "and possibly give some family background (and name a next of kin as heir to the possessions of the character if he or she should meet an untimely death) to personify the character." The DMG total power over secondary skills (if used) to the DM and that the age was explicitly random.

MOST of that we would have considered to be 'guidance' or just plain "Gary's way of doing it." vs being any sort of actual 'rule'. If a player said "My elf is 146 years old" nobody would start throwing DMGs at them. Now, if they made every single PC some specific optimum age (because there are aging rules and haste is a thing) THEN the DM has that age chart to throw at them.

Does 1e even have ability check suggested like B/X does?
View attachment 137634

:-/ We were doing a boatload more adding of stuff than we thought!

And B/X and 2e were a lot different by RAW from 1e on the actually running the game parts than I remembered.

Technically a lot of stuff is different in B/X and 2e, yes. OTOH most player-facing stuff is designed to be pretty much the same. Spells basically work the same, classes are pretty much the same (some details differ, but you could easily play a PC from any of those games in any of the other games, at worst you might have to adjust some minor thing like your AC). A 2e level 5 fighter will hit AC4 with EXACTLY the same dice throw as a 1e level 5 fighter, etc.

OTOH exploration rules are totally different between 1e and 2e (they mostly don't exist at all in 2e, which doesn't define using turns in exploration AT ALL). Combat is so poorly/vaguely described in all editions that it is hard to say if it is actually much different or not. They all have a basically compatible turn/initiative structure and the same core AC/HP roll to attack and then do damage (with the numbers all being pretty much the same). OTOH once you get beyond THAT, it is pretty unclear how things are actually supposed to work. So, you can endlessly debate what the 'differences' are in those areas. Obviously 2e also has a rather different idea of XP and such, and it includes the 'proficiency system' for skills (NWPs) which neither 1e nor any version of Basic really has (added later to 1e).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My understanding of @AbdulAlhazred's point is similar: that if the GM is going to be applying pressure come what may (via framing and/or consequence narration) then players can't use skill to avoid or even really minimise that pressure, which is very different from the notion of "skilled play" at work in the Gygaxian tradition.

I'd be interested in your response to these thoughts, and how you see them bearing (if at all) on your DW example.

Right, the 'perfect Zen dungeon crawl' in a 1e game would be where the PCs literally just perfectly describe bypassing every obstacle, utilizing their various resources in the most optimum manner, and never being under pressure at all (beyond just "we are adventuring, this can be dangerous"). The DW equivalent of such a 'crawl' would NECESSARILY involve the PCs being seriously pressed at every turn, and SHOULD build to a scenario where their fates are 'hanging by a thread'. If it doesn't, I would think the GM is somehow not applying the principles of the game. Given that there is no objective pre-existing 'dungeon' for the DW characters to be measured against (or only a sketchy outline of one) then how else COULD the game go? I guess, hypothetically, the GM could portray the 1e 'zen crawl' experience, but that would be silly and pointless!

 

[Maxperson]

I guess the question would then be, does this sort of play really justify using the same term as 'Gygaxian Skilled Play', as the goal is completely different? I mean, it is clear to me that in a classic D&D game failing to manage your resources correctly will result in some adverse result WRT the players agenda, like they will fail to accumulate treasure, XP, etc. and may even leave their frozen corpses on the side of the mountain, necessitating starting over with new PCs. It is less clear exactly what the failure to manage resources means in DW in general. It certainly exposes the PCs to pressure from the GM from a particular direction, but they will be exposed to some sort of pressure regardless! There is no explicit goal to achieve any particular fictional result either. Character death, successfully mounting the summit, or turning back, all of these are results falling within "Play to See What Happens." Clearly both paradigms require that the result be in doubt. It is less clear that DW requires that the result depend in any way on 'player skill'.

That brings us right back around to "skilled play" being a poor term, yet being the one so commonly used that we are stuck with it. There are many forms of play that are skillful, but there is only one type that is "skilled play." It's confusing.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I hate to disappoint you, but lacrosse isn't a hybrid of anything. It is literally a Native American game which was adopted by European settlers. It is pretty popular in New England (at least in Vermont, I think also other nearby states) where there are regular high school and even college-level leagues.

New England isn't really the sole hotbed anymore; the mid-Atlantic has begun to overtake it. Just this past weekend, Virginia beat Maryland in a thrilling game to hold on to the NCAA crown, and the PLL (premier league lacrosse, the professional league) is starting up.

Lax started with the Native Americans as you correctly note, and (fun facts) 1- this is why Syracuse long had such a strong program (Onondaga), and Jim Brown, more famous as the NFL RB, is considered one of the historically great players, 2- Native Americans field their own team, separate from the US, as a national team to the World Championships (Iroquois Nationals).

While lax used to be more of a prep school thing, it's not in high schools around the country, and has pockets of great popularity from Maine to Florida (eastern seaboard), and has a large number of people that play it in California and Colorado.

Field hockey? Totally different.