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

[clearstream]

Well, that's good, because I'm not discussing quality of storytelling either! I'm talking about deftly (or not) navigating the decision points involved between advocating for your character on the one hand and holding on loosely enough to not try to impose story but let it develop through the engagement of the fiction by all participants and mechanical outputs on the other. To know when to leverage mechanical component x to influence story in a certain way and when not. (This in addition to the more classically identifiable SP elements like resource management, character build, and so on.) There may be more art to this than science, but to say that the term skill can be applied in gaming context only to the latter.... One can be a skillful artist or an unskilled engineer or vice versa.

From the masses of posts in this and other threads, it seems like "skilled play" is more about success navigating the game-world, than character stories or themes. I'm absolutely not saying one is more skillful than the other, only that one doesn't seem like part of "skilled play" so to claim skill in that area might not affect the argument at hand.

@Manbearcat has reiterated examples in an attempt to express why DW is skilled. One might see though, that this doesn't help see why it is not "skilled": posters end up talking past one another. Or at least, that's how some of the above exchanges read to me.

 

[pemerton]

@Manbearcat

I agree that Gygaxian skilled play doesn't care about theme/genre, beyond the most superficial level of tropes. That's why I really think paladins don't make sense in AD&D! (And probably not druids or monks either.)

My comparison to engineering is meant to be more than superficial. To use language borrowed from Max Weber, "skilled play" abandons all sentiment, and rests upon a ruthless technical efficiency in the application of the resources available. Switching gears to Mark Twain, it's the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

 

[clearstream]

@Manbearcat

I agree that Gygaxian skilled play doesn't care about theme/genre, beyond the most superficial level of tropes. That's why I really think paladins don't make sense in AD&D! (And probably not druids or monks either.)

My comparison to engineering is meant to be more than superficial. To use language borrowed from Max Weber, "skilled play" abandons all sentiment, and rests upon a ruthless technical efficiency in the application of the resources available. Switching gears to Mark Twain, it's the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

I have arrived at a similar point in my thinking (by as you know a massively different route!) I'll attempt an example (I'm sure nowhere near as vivid as @Manbearcat's!) This restates an example from another thread.

The party need to persuade the fey queen to allow them through the perilous gate. Curiously, their bard has in her backstory a commitment to telling the truth. As it happens, in this specific instance there is a truth that if learned by the queen will harm any chance of persuasion: a lie is necessitated.

• In "skilled play" the bard simply lies. She describes how she persuades the queen in-the-fiction. She doesn't skip steps. What the DM is concerned for is a credible act of persuasion from the player. The DM doesn't care if that outright ignores the character's backstory... at least not in terms of marking down the axes of skill the mode is concerned with.
• In skilful 5e play, the rogue helps the bard - giving advantage - while the diviner bestows a low roll to the queen for her insight. Thus the bard's Charisma (Persuasion) check (hers is highest in the party) is more likely to succeed. The players can just tell the DM the outcome they want and the mechanics they use.
• In skilful DW play - as I understand it from the sourcebooks and what has been written about it - the bard must say how she navigates her commitment to telling the truth. Perhaps the DM has created a thorny situation for the party in which it is an established fact that the queen will only listen to the bard. The conflict is obvious and hopefully will play out engagingly.

Now I think 5e in fact guides to a higher bar, in that a DM is expected to respond to what players describe their characters doing, with anything from forbidding a check to obviating one. An example might be that the Queen loves silver, and the party cleric being a silversmith crafts a lovely trinket for her: a DM might call for some sort of tool use related check, and change things accordingly. However, I think 5e doesn't expressly mark players down for failing to do that.

 

[Manbearcat]

From the masses of posts in this and other threads, it seems like "skilled play" is more about success navigating the game-world, than character stories or themes. I'm absolutely not saying one is more skillful than the other, only that one doesn't seem like part of "skilled play" so to claim skill in that area might not affect the argument at hand.

@Manbearcat has reiterated examples in an attempt to express why DW is skilled. One might see though, that this doesn't help see why it is not "skilled": posters end up talking past one another. Or at least, that's how some of the above exchanges read to me.

@Manbearcat

I agree that Gygaxian skilled play doesn't care about theme/genre, beyond the most superficial level of tropes. That's why I really think paladins don't make sense in AD&D! (And probably not druids or monks either.)

My comparison to engineering is meant to be more than superficial. To use language borrowed from Max Weber, "skilled play" abandons all sentiment, and rests upon a ruthless technical efficiency in the application of the resources available. Switching gears to Mark Twain, it's the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Ok, my present course is clearly not moving any units, so I'm going to try a different tack (building upon my most recent post).

In any game you have a conceptual maximum permissible number of moves that are constrained by the ruleset. Taxonomically speaking, this is the "top of the food chain" (this would be Kingdom in Biology). In some games, the opening move and any subsequent move thereafter will encompass a staggering number of possible moves. in other games, the opener and any subsequent move thereafter is winnowed due to opening gamestate conditions and evolving gamestate conditions.

At its most primordial level, playing skillfully is sorting through possible permutations of the move-space (whether its the opening move or a subsequent move) such that the outputs of your decision-point (your "move made") yield a gamestate that places you closer to a Win Condition than the inverse. Further still, you can play more or less skillfully here. To just put numbers to it for illustration, you have a Win Condition at value 30 and you have the following "move values"; -2, 4, 13. It will absolutely be clear upon honest and informed reflection of the play that the move equaling 13 units would have been profoundly better move than the move equaling 4 units and both would have been considerably better than the -2 gaffe (which moved you closer to a Loss Condition).

So, before I go any further, I'd like to ask a question (and get an answer) and make a proposition (and get an answer):

1) Do we at least agree with the above conception of skilled play? If not, can I get some clarification on disagreement?

2) Further, there is a well-known phenomena in games called "handicapping." Handicapping (for those who don't know) is when you do the "I'll fight you with one arm tied behind my back" phenomena. This is done for one of two purposes (though in the end, both are borne out...I'm merely speaking about why the impetus for handicapping exists):

a) To level the playing field in a situation where one competitor is clearly more capable than another.

b) To allow a competitor to express their extreme competency/capability/skillfulness in an endeavor because (i) artificially contracting a participant's move-space makes play more demanding for them and (ii) ,resultantly, it artificially (or actually depending upon how the handicapping is done) moves them closer to their Loss Con and farther from their Win Con than they would be without the handicapping.

---

So can I get an answer about these two things please?

Agree? If there is disagreement, please clarify.

<anyone else who wants to chime in on this is more than welcome>

Please and thank you!

@clearstream , I'll address your real or hypothetical play excerpt above after you review what I've written above and have responded (there are issues with your understanding of how Dungeon World would resolve such a conflict both as a player and as a GM...but I don't want to do a hypothetical post-mortem until we're on the same page on the above).

 

[Voadam]

The party need to persuade the fey queen to allow them through the perilous gate. Curiously, their bard has in her backstory a commitment to telling the truth. As it happens, in this specific instance there is a truth that if learned by the queen will harm any chance of persuasion: a lie is necessitated.

• In "skilled play" the bard simply lies. She describes how she persuades the queen in-the-fiction. She doesn't skip steps. What the DM is concerned for is a credible act of persuasion from the player. The DM doesn't care if that outright ignores the character's backstory... at least not in terms of marking down the axes of skill the mode is concerned with.
• In skilful 5e play, the rogue helps the bard - giving advantage - while the diviner bestows a low roll to the queen for her insight. Thus the bard's Charisma (Persuasion) check (hers is highest in the party) is more likely to succeed. The players can just tell the DM the outcome they want and the mechanics they use.

I conceive of skilled play as the player considering the situation and figuring out a solution rather than the mechanics of the character so in B/X OSR this might be mechanically a charisma check for mechanics versus first person roleplaying it out for skilled play. Both modes can be done in 5e.

Whether the bard lies seems orthogonal in both GSP or skilled mechanics usage. The player could try to persuade by being truthful and avoiding the failure truth, or lie, in both skilled play or mechanics focus. It is certainly possible to avoid certain issues and still be truthful in your persuasion. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novel series has an organization magically bound not to lie who are famous for this.

In mechanics focus avoiding the truth may make it tougher, perhaps negating advantage from the rogue or perhaps not. In skilled play the player has to be more tactical and careful in their phrasing and the issues they raise to persuade the queen and in how they react if sensitive areas they wish to avoid come up obliquely or directly. This may be tougher for the player and the DM can complicate this by how the Queen is played.

So you can roleplay your character and engage in skilled play here, it may be a little more difficult but that can be part of the fun.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You seem to be treating as equivalent (i) players can shape the fiction so as to bind the GM and (ii) players can engage in skilled play.

I don't think I agree. The former - ie (i) - is true of Prince Valiant and Burning Wheel. Neither of those systems grants the GM unbridled framing and reframing authority by looping soft moves ad nauseum nor the means to soft move the game into whatever gamestate they feel is best served by their will at the moment. In both of them players can exercise significant control over the gamestate. For instance, in my Prince Valiant game the PCs defeated but didn't kill some Huns, converted them to Christianity, and then recruited them to be the light cavalry auxiliary of their warband. This additional force has then been very helpful in subsequent battles as they have crossed Anatolia and travelled to Cyprus.

There is little resource use or optimisation in Prince Valiant, but some - eg one of the players expended a Storyteller Certificate at a key moment to defeat a "dragon" (a giant crocodile), and this depended on him being able to confront it in the water which he was able to do because he had previously made decisions to build up his athletic ability (via the Agility skill) in anticipation of just this sort of thing. The PCs being dragon slayers ensured their welcome reception by the Emperor at Constantinople, which was important for them gaining permission to cross Anatolia on their crusade.

But I don't see that it is very helpful to characterise this as "skilled play". I think it's good play, in the sense that it is engaged with the fiction and with the system and (at least for the participants) produces fun RPGing. I don't know what Greg Stafford would think of it, but I assume it falls at least broadly within the bounds of what he envisaged Prince Valiant play should look like. But to me it looks nothing like Gygaxian play or any sort of descendant of it. For instance, notions of "risk" and "reward" are doing basically no work. Yes, the players make decisions that earn their PCs Fame and hence enable them to improve their PCs, but while not quite the same as the XP pacing mechanism in 4e it comes pretty close - it's hard for me to imagine non-degenerate Prince Valiant play which won't earn Fame, because (p 31) "Fame is the cumulative measure of a character’s actions . . . accumulated by performing deeds, both in combat and in peaceful endeavor" and non-degenerate Prince Valiant play consists in the performance of deeds either in combat or peaceful endeavour!

Dungeon World has more moving parts than Prince Valiant. And I can see how there is cleverness in players using these to establish binding fiction. But I'm not seeing the risk/reward dynamic and how that feeds into the basic play experience. In Gygaxian play, if I play poorly my PC will die; and if I play too cautiously (eg never opening any doors for fear of what might be behind them) I will earn no XP and my PC will not advance, and I'll be stuck in a situation of boring play where nothing happens. I think the "gig gud" phrase may already have been used in this thread - and it has a truth about it in the Gygaxian context, in that if I don't git gud then play will just suck.

But is this true in DW? I don't think it's true in Prince Valiant. I don't think it's true in BW (I love playing BW and I haven't git gud - my PC's skills have not advanced much, and my comparison here is my GM who is the spreadsheet optimiser I mentioned upthread who, when he plays BW, has his PC's skills and stats climbing at a pretty steady clip). My reading and limited experience of DW play makes me wonder whether it's true there as it is in classic D&D.

I think DW/PbtA, and probably FitD games, may be played in more and less aggressive fashion. At least that is what I'm hearing. In the game where I've played or ran there have been intense dramatic periods where the players were seizing the story in their hands and really trying to alter its trajectory. There were also other points where maybe they were taking on some sort of adversity, but it wasn't necessarily a situation where they were so much trying to change things as just to use their resources to get them through to the end of it.

The way @Manbearcat heavily emphasizes bonds and alignment, and other elements of 'character ethos and values' in terms of every little action they take? I mean, the game definitely encourages that to an extent, but I think we've been less granular about it. I mean, sure, the fighter has some choice between different bonds or whatever, but at some point he's going to act on ALL of them in some fashion. So, the scene he described earlier in the thread, that is certainly a natural evolution of the game towards a climax, but it seems like an unusually fraught moment.

It is like any game system, there are people who emphasize different aspects in different ways in their play. I was a player in a DW game which was basically very much a classic dungeon crawl. Obviously the game dynamics aren't like classic D&D, but we still spent our time expending torches, wending our way down into deeper levels of the underground maze, sniffing out treasure, avoiding terrible nasties, and solving puzzles. Tension would build as we'd, for example, trigger a shifting corridor and be unable to find the way out, while our torches began to burn down below the point of no return. One of the PCs got poisoned once, and the way out would take too long to carry them back to the entrance before they died, could one PC race ahead and get help in time? Was he going to risk his neck for that stupid hobbit? I mean, in the end its the same sort of considerations Manbearcat is talking about, but maybe a bit different style of play. AFAICT what we were doing seemed well within the envisaged paradigm of a DW game.

 

[clearstream]

I conceive of skilled play as the player considering the situation and figuring out a solution rather than the mechanics of the character so in B/X OSR this might be mechanically a charisma check for mechanics versus first person roleplaying it out for skilled play. Both modes can be done in 5e.

Whether the bard lies seems orthogonal in both GSP or skilled mechanics usage. The player could try to persuade by being truthful and avoiding the failure truth, or lie, in both skilled play or mechanics focus. It is certainly possible to avoid certain issues and still be truthful in your persuasion. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novel series has an organization magically bound not to lie who are famous for this.

In mechanics focus avoiding the truth may make it tougher, perhaps negating advantage from the rogue or perhaps not. In skilled play the player has to be more tactical and careful in their phrasing and the issues they raise to persuade the queen and in how they react if sensitive areas they wish to avoid come up obliquely or directly. This may be tougher for the player and the DM can complicate this by how the Queen is played.

So you can roleplay your character and engage in skilled play here, it may be a little more difficult but that can be part of the fun.

From what you write I think you get my point though, right? That although you can roleplay your character and engage in "skilled play", "skilled play" doesn't care if you roleplay your character. That is orthogonal to it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And the envisaged function of next of kin is not to seed adventure possibilities, but to handle transition of winnings to a new player position!

It was just acknowledging an validating a known 'trick' that players wanted to use in order to salvage SOMETHING from the loss of a character, "Oh, his brother Joe shows up, he wants the sword! He's a fighter too." I assume Gary, for the same reason he didn't make his friends start over at level 1 every time, thought that was a fine enough idea and put his imprimatur on it.

Not to the best of my knowledge (until the proficiencies in the DSG and WSG supplements). Though I suspect their use was fairly common, influenced by the Moldvay advice.

Yeah, I don't know of it being in the rules. I don't even recall a module where its use is suggested. However, I think even before Moldvay, it was a known technique. OTOH had it been really something Dave or Gary thought of right off, before rolling all sorts of various dice and consulting ability score tables, then stuff like BBLG and reaction checks and all that would probably have been based on it. Someone thought of it, not at the very start, but sometime in the first couple of years of the game's history. Whom that was may well be lost forever to time at this point.

 

[Cadence]

It was just acknowledging an validating a known 'trick' that players wanted to use in order to salvage SOMETHING from the loss of a character, "Oh, his brother Joe shows up, he wants the sword! He's a fighter too." I assume Gary, for the same reason he didn't make his friends start over at level 1 every time, thought that was a fine enough idea and put his imprimatur on it.

Yeah, I don't know of it being in the rules. I don't even recall a module where its use is suggested. However, I think even before Moldvay, it was a known technique. OTOH had it been really something Dave or Gary thought of right off, before rolling all sorts of various dice and consulting ability score tables, then stuff like BBLG and reaction checks and all that would probably have been based on it. Someone thought of it, not at the very start, but sometime in the first couple of years of the game's history. Whom that was may well be lost forever to time at this point.

Wow, one of the old ability check recommendations from Dragon is... wow.

Ability Checks—From the Worst Mechanic in Role-Playing Game History to a Foundation Of D&D

Dungeons & Dragons makes ability checks a key part of play, but these checks took years to enter the game. How did ability checks advance from house rule, to optional rule, to a foundation of f…

dmdavid.com

There's also a link about life before them and Gygax suggesting used percentile dice and a reasonable chance in the DMG.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't find it very helpful to label this "skilled play". I'm not 100% sure I can articulate why, but my tentative starting point would be because it's something that is better helped by being inclined towards literature rather than engineering.

I am thinking more of your analysis of BW where you say you can 'play it with skill' and optimize how your PC works and probably get your preferred result on more checks. OTOH BW is fun regardless and you don't 'fail' if you don't play it that way. DW is pretty much the same IMHO. You can certainly do things like think "well, if at this juncture I Discern Realities then if I get a good result I'll be able to apply some Hold later on" and I guess knowing to do that and doing it strategically is a 'skill', the game is not going to be 'worse' if you don't do these kinds of things.

In my own DW play, I've done some clever things. I usually would think of that maybe if we'd delved the dungeon and found some super dangerous sounding area, or a map to some fabled lost treasure with a dire warning attached. OK, lets GIRD FOR BATTLE! Break out every possible source of modifiers there are, starting in the tavern we're planning out this sucker, we're going to BEAT THE DRAGON! But on a constant basis? I mean, some sort of stuff is always happening, there's never a moment when trouble isn't brewing in DW, that's the whole nature of the game. I guess you could spend every bit of your time as a player trying to think if NOW is the moment to try to gin up another point of equipment, or whatever. I haven't really tried to play that way. I don't see that it specifically creates a better game. It may be 'skilled', but that is not the point of DW.