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

[Mannahnin]

From what I can tell, skilled play means "negotiating with/manipulating/persuading the DM to rule in your favor using lateral thinking/fictional positioning/logical reasoning."

I wouldn't say the point is to manipulate the DM, but to understand and manipulate the shared fiction.

I do think there's a degree to which this process is eased if you are on the same page with the DM about some concepts and physical realities. If you're not, being able to share ideas and negotiate to come to better shared understanding of the fictional space helps get you there. Part of the skill involved is knowing how to ask good questions; and having shared vocabulary with the DM speeds and smooths this process, just as it does for, e.g., dungeon mapping. Part of Skilled Play is communicating with the DM, learning and adapting to how they run things.

Gygaxian Skilled Play as he describes it in the 1E PH, DMG, and various editorials is certainly not exclusive of system mastery. Understanding the rules so that you can make good decisions about what spells and magic items to use, what monsters to engage and avoid, when to retreat or press on based on your resources used so far, is a component of it. In that regard it does involve engaging with the game mechanics, not merely avoiding or circumventing them.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Based on all the above - I might propose SP is play, and it is role-play, and when it plays out as or within rules and mechanics, it is role-play gaming. I like the way it pushes attention toward how well players parse and respond to what is narrated, and explore what the author has in mind (or has recorded). It is respectful to the author. I accept separating "your play" from your materiel, playfully, but not gamefully.

This is definitely an interesting ... take. I say that not to be oppositional, but because it would be contrary to how SP is understood.

Thinking of one of the singular hallmarks of SP. It's not based on character ability, nor on roleplay, but on player ability. In that sense, the player is aware of the game qua game and is deliberately engaging in the fiction of the world as a game.

This is the Bob I - IV example, or, put another way, the issue that many people phrase as the "meta-game" issue. The experience of the player engaging in the game's world is transferred from character to character despite there being no causal mechanism to do so. This makes it distinct from "role-play"

The issue that you seem to have is that you are tightly holding to the idea that those things that the rules do not particularly describe, are not part of any game. I would reject this wholeheartedly!

Ex. 1. "Bluffing, reading people, knowing how much to bet are not part of the game of poker because they cannot be particularly described in mechanics, but are instead socially navigated at the table and depend on the various strengths, weaknesses, and knowledge bases of the players."

Ex. 1. "Choosing when to foul, or when to flop, or the amount of contact to provide in a game of basketball is not part of the game of basketball because it cannot be particularly described in the rules of basketball, but is instead a function of numerous issues, including the strengths of the players, social constructs, and interactions with the referees."

Etc. Games contain all sorts of rules- those that are full-on mechanics, and those that are norms, and those that are in-between, and all of these can change depending on whether you are discussing the game as written or as played. Football (American), for example, has extensive written and codified rules, yet any person will tell you that the rules as written regarding holding are completely different than those as played. Moreover, it is common to note that there will be interactions between players and referees to determine the general level of officiating that will take place in the game.

I could continue, but you get the gist. There are two separate issues with your analysis:

A. SP includes interaction with the ruleset. Many examples of SP (from flaming oil, to casting continual light on a rod and covering it) involve specified interactions with the rules. SP includes using rules in certain ways that are not obvious (there was no "flaming oil" skill, for example) and continuing to use that from character to character.

B. You seem very caught up in the issue of the DM-as-adjudicator. I really don't want to get into this (given that this seems to be a point of contention for some people who prefer various modalities of play), but the multiple ways of making decisions, of adjudication, largely arose out of the common heuristics of the time. Do people think that things like, "Rule of Cool," or "Just say yes," or "Don't roll unless you absolutely need to," or even, "fail forward," sprang forth, fully formed, from the brows of modern game designers? Or were these codifications of practices that already existed?


Arguably, one of the issues with SP (and the decline of it as a primary modality of play) is because of the variability in DMing, which is certainly an issue. As I wrote near the beginning of this thread, in response to another poster who has similar opinions to yours:

At a certain point, you either recognize you are playing a social game that involves other people and that we all live under assumed norms and a social contract or you don't. It's that simple.

The level of trust people have with each other is, in the end, their own call and independent of the system.

This is true whether or not you're playing D&D or Burning Wheel, Star Frontiers or Dogs in the Vineyard. The level of support given to the DM, the nature of the resolution system, the balance of authority within the RAW, and the issue of deference to rules or ad hoc rulings can, and will, change, but the fundamental issue of trust, between and among the players and the referee, will not.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I value threads like yours because they give us the chance to really talk about games as games. Being responsive to the OP is a matter of directly addressing the questions raised.

You've expressed vexation about point that I'm really not making. It is clear to me that you are introducing a jargon term in the OP, and that "skilled" in that label is not identical to being skilled. So (responsive also to @Fanaelialae) in my posts addressing that, I am not conflating the two, I'm unpacking the distinction. Really just expanding on what you said in your follow up post on the first page. My fault might have been reiterating the point unnecessarily.

However, on "fundamental confusion" I am being sincere. Here I am challenging the very idea of "skilled play". If "skilled play" separates player skill at navigating the game world out from other skills such as in using game materiel, then it is founded on something that I don't think can happen in a game. From your poker example - and in many of the posts above - there is the concept of making materiel as inconsequential as possible, right? We don't want this is to be a matter of shifting skill to second-guessing your DM, so if it is not that then I think it raises the natural question - can game world, game rules, metagame knowledge, and game materiel really be separated!?

I have no fear that the intent of this thread is one-true-way-ism, and I do not misunderstand that "skilled play" doesn't address those other skills, rather I moot it is fundamentally mistaken to suppose that there can be the separation required by the construct. EDIT And in saying that, I question what claims are implied by the construct? This thread's raison d'etre, right?!

Well, I am still quite a few pages back, but I thought this was where I put in my plug You cannot really HAVE 'skilled play' in the sense of what Gygax claimed of it. There are too many unspecified 'free' variables in play in the environment. How slick are the walls at this point where the thief wants to climb? 1e DMG simply makes a blanket statement that "all dungeon walls are damp unless otherwise specified" (paraphrasing, I don't recall the exact words, but that is the gist of it). What DM actually knows if the walls of any given part of the dungeon are dry, damp, wet, slimy, etc? Sure you can go with that default, but what REALLY is happening is a choice. The GM has to decide to allow or disallow a good chance of success on this climb. This is fundamentally story control. I'm only using a single SMALL example, but imagine how many similar choices the GM makes as the party marches down a corridor poking with their 10' poles as they go. My point is that the 'fiction' in terms of what is written down is ALWAYS TOO WEAK to be determinate of the action. How far does the sound of that poking go? Conveniently it might wake up the next room, or conveniently not, all at the whim of the GM, and there's not really a subsystem for most of these things.

This is why so many people talk about 'playing the GM', but in essence everything is that, or else it is simply obeying genre convention, D&D game convention, or table convention. When you add 'crunchiness' in the way most classic D&D 'skilled play' aficionados mean (3.x style or 5e style) what you get is kind of a mess. Greyhawk has already taken D&D as far, in raw conceptual terms, in that direction as it is ever capable of going, which is just painting dice rolls over top of the mess that is "the GM is just telling you what is in the dungeon key, its all objective." Whether this crunch stifles creativity or not is kind of moot, the fundamental equation remains, you apply whatever tools you have to either the existing fiction or the source of the fiction and play the DM.

The point is, you can only really fundamentally change things by altering the roles at the table. Actually I think that where Gygax kind of 'went wrong' was not in how he ran his D&D game, but in how he EXPLAINED it. The game he was running, IMHO, was a lot more like Story Now, any fiction was honored, but its creation was on the basis of some principles that included a LOT MORE gamism than is given credit. There was no 'simulating' anything, nor objectively 'testing' anything. It was all about putting pressure on the players. He was playing to keep them on the edges of their seats and thwacking them on the back of the hand, metaphorically, if they didn't pay close attention at every second. Sure, a lot of the puzzles were thought out ahead of time and written in his notes, but that was simply efficiency and organization, so that he could prep ahead, not some creation of sacrosanct 'puzzle reality' to test against, because that 'reality' is far too thin to really stand up to clever players. It is just a framework to build the fiction on during play, and the real principles of play are thus the unspoken ones that AD&D 1e never reveals except now and then when it lifts the veil on what the DM's motives are.

So, I would submit that a game like Dungeon World is not as different from what Gygax did at his table as some people would like to think. Much closer in fact, it is just explicit about it and makes it transparent. Obviously it also in the process codifies it in rules/agenda/etc. so that it is pretty reproduceable and you can systematically build on it. This is a direction where we can build. Doing things the 'Greyhawk Way' won't really produce conceptually more sound games.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right. This is what I was trying to get at with my discussion of how some key parts of 3E's skill system seem to be about evading the fiction, by way of reframing, rather than actually engaging with it.

Is that really about any material difference, or is it only a distinction of quantity and not qualitative? I mean, FUNDAMENTALLY there's no difference, process-wise, in my mind between making a single Diplomacy check to convince the Court of Stars that you should be allowed to open the Terrible Door, vs a whole series of actions by the PCs, including or excluding any skill checks, which leads to the same thing. This is just 'level of detail'. The same core process is at work here. It isn't even that important if you have skills (or something similar) involved or not, it isn't materially different than if the GM said "write 3 paragraphs on why the Terrible Door should be opened now" and then he decides based on how he feels about that essay (and not to say this feeling won't be based on RPing the NPCs and considering whatever he thinks they know about what the situation he's devised is, but it is impossible to know really) VS "make a Diplomacy check". I mean, sure, there's a very real difference in what the player did and thus his experience. In game process terms though, they are pretty much equivalent.

So, all 3e's skill system CAN really do is change the tenor of the game. It isn't going to change the process, which is the same as it ever was in classic D&D. So I don't believe in the systematic differences between say OD&D and 3e in any deep way.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that's perhaps an unfair assessment of the game in some ways. The old editions of D&D were IMO given the most rigorous playtesting of any editions by the in-house staff. So the fact that B/X doesn't have a mechanic to govern I search the room isn't really an accident, it's something that the designers didn't feel the need for. It's not as though we're discussing an edge case here either, searching rooms is a fundamental part of the intended game experience, and one that none of the designers felt needed a mechanic to govern it.

Admittedly, I can't read the designers minds or intentions, and I'm not pretending to, I just think that something that fundamental doesn't just get missed by accident. Call it what I feel likely rather than what I know to be true. Personally, I've never felt the need for search rolls in general, although in the case of BX I'd probably use the secret door mechanic to govern searching for hidden compartments. I wasn't talking specifically about hidden compartments though, just searching in general.

This doesn't really hold water. There's no reason that searching for secret doors couldn't have been just as much a narrative experience where you check around, pull on torch brackets, observe the flow of air (IE using a candle or smoke from a torch), look for scrape marks on the floors, etc. It is a die roll because that was the only way to enact "elves are better at finding secret doors than humans." That is it, THE reason. It is exactly as @pemerton says, a 'quirk of history'. In fact basically almost all of early D&D's classic rules are of this ilk. The fetishism lavished in many OSR circles on the design of pre-AD&D D&D is, IMHO hilarious and silly. I was playing then, I don't know and didn't play with EGG or his friends. Still, I can tell you, there's no there there, the 'design' is throw iron rations at the wall and see what sticks. Period.

 

[Fenris-77]

Doesn't hold water? They thought one thing needed mechanization and the other didn't. Your argument isn't any more complicated than "I think it went differently." Which is fine, but its an opinion, one I don't find convincing, but that's the nature of opinions I suppose.

 

[clearstream]

The issue that you seem to have is that you are tightly holding to the idea that those things that the rules do not particularly describe, are not part of any game. I would reject this wholeheartedly!

Ex. 1. "Bluffing, reading people, knowing how much to bet are not part of the game of poker because they cannot be particularly described in mechanics, but are instead socially navigated at the table and depend on the various strengths, weaknesses, and knowledge bases of the players."

Ex. 1. "Choosing when to foul, or when to flop, or the amount of contact to provide in a game of basketball is not part of the game of basketball because it cannot be particularly described in the rules of basketball, but is instead a function of numerous issues, including the strengths of the players, social constructs, and interactions with the referees."

Etc. Games contain all sorts of rules- those that are full-on mechanics, and those that are norms, and those that are in-between, and all of these can change depending on whether you are discussing the game as written or as played. Football (American), for example, has extensive written and codified rules, yet any person will tell you that the rules as written regarding holding are completely different than those as played. Moreover, it is common to note that there will be interactions between players and referees to determine the general level of officiating that will take place in the game.

I could continue, but you get the gist.

I do indeed, and I feel my response to this was already given. Let's take Ex. 1 - bluffing. That bluffing is meaningful in a gameful sense because it is in the context of the Poker game. The bluffing won't count for much if the hand is not played out... if the game mechanics are not ultimately processed (including such mechanics as folding). One might play at Poker without playing Poker, and that would be playful, but not gameful.

This is I believe a nettle SP must grasp. Either at some point it reengages with the mechanics, or it falls outside what can formally be called a game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Can you explain the concept, under which it is different?

In the end it has to boil down to GRANULARITY. Here's an example: "My fighter lifts the gate." This is an ATOMIC action, it could invoke a skill check, or simply a comparison to the PC's STR ability score. Either way there's no realistic process by which to break it down into component actions. While this action might not be termed 'skilled' in that it is just an ordinary obvious application of your PC to the fiction, it is in keeping with the 'Skilled Play' definition.

OTOH "Roll your Remove Traps check to see if you can disable the pressure plate which triggers the pit trap" is NOT. It COULD be decomposed into a bunch of smaller specific actions. You could theoretically describe (and in original pre-Greyhawk OD&D would have had to describe) each component step that you took, moving up to the plate without touching it, chipping away a bit of stone next to the edge to make room to insert an iron spike, leveraging spikes carefully from each side of the plate so as to avoid putting torque on it, checking carefully to see if it will still move, etc. etc. etc. This is all elided into the Remove Traps check.

Now, IMHO, there is no real way to say if the later is or is not skilled play. That is we cannot say what the player's motivations and thought process are. This is because we cannot really know, as a player, if the GM really drew out a full engineering plan of this trap down to the last detail to gauge our work against, or if he's just following some conventions and agenda. Thus what have we really elided if we handle it as a thief skill? However, in terms of the classic definition 'Remove Traps' is NOT SKILLED PLAY because it elides some potential fiction.

 

[clearstream]

This is why so many people talk about 'playing the GM', but in essence everything is that, or else it is simply obeying genre convention, D&D game convention, or table convention. When you add 'crunchiness' in the way most classic D&D 'skilled play' aficionados mean (3.x style or 5e style) what you get is kind of a mess. Greyhawk has already taken D&D as far, in raw conceptual terms, in that direction as it is ever capable of going, which is just painting dice rolls over top of the mess that is "the GM is just telling you what is in the dungeon key, its all objective." Whether this crunch stifles creativity or not is kind of moot, the fundamental equation remains, you apply whatever tools you have to either the existing fiction or the source of the fiction and play the DM.

I feel there are exits from that mess. Chiefly when one thinks of RPG mechanics as points of player fiat over the fiction; typically (and in fact desirably) stochastic.

Example - In the Court of Stars our players want permission to open the Terrible Door. They of course role-play the negotiation and that may be enough, but they are able to make a gameful move also. The glamour bard might attempt an enthralling performance and make a Charisma (Persuasion) check. I wouldn't call this SP if there were no connection between their playful actions and their gameful ones, and this is achieved through managing the stochastic nature of the interaction. A DM might set advantage or disadvantage, might grant or deny a roll, and so on.

Being granted permission, they reach the door and must circumvent its traps. The arcane trickster might put mage hand or unseen servant to work here. Through recognising that in order to address game as game, SP must in the end engage with the mechanics, we might give ourselves permission to achieve a more delightful sharing of the narrative.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I do indeed, and I feel my response to this was already given. Let's take Ex. 1 - bluffing. That bluffing is meaningful in a gameful sense because it is in the context of the Poker game. The bluffing won't count for much if the hand is not played out... if the game mechanics are not ultimately processed (including such mechanics as folding). One might play at Poker without playing Poker, and that would be playful, but not gameful.

This is I believe a nettle SP must grasp. Either at some point it reengages with the mechanics, or it falls outside what can formally be called a game.

No, it isn't a "nettle SP must grasp."

There is something very fundamental I try to practice in conversations on the internet; if I am using argumentative logic, and I find that in the end, my desire to argue against something and use logic and make demands of others has resulted in my creation of an absurdity ...

then I have likely made some sort of great mistake along the way. And rather than continue to insist on my own logical propositions that led me to this mistake and demand that others continue to explain things to my own satisfaction, I would be better served looking inward and understanding either (1) why I came to an absurd conclusion; or (2) why I am so invested in my own internet argument that I do not see the absurdity of my conclusion.

This was just as true in the days of usenet as it is today.

If your internal logic has led you to the conclusion that the dominant modality of playing D&D for the first decade of the game ... wasn't a game, then I can't help you any further, and this conversation is counterproductive for both of us. Good luck!