Phases of systems mastery - Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master

[Mercurius]

This is a spinoff from this mega-thread, inspired by a conversation between [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION], [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], and others.

It came to me while writing a response to innerdude and pemerton that there are different phases with regards to "rules mastery" and different games and editions have different learning curves. This gave me the idea to apply the old crafts guild model to systems mastery, with four relatively distinct phases:

Novice - This is the phase between first exposure to the game and basic proficiency. Rules are opaque.
Apprentice - Someone who has basic proficiency and is working towards deeper understanding.
Journeyman - Someone with a high degree of, or "true," proficiency in the game.
Master - Beyond just a high level of proficiency, the master phase implies the ability to really "fly with it" - to innovate, use the rules in creative ways, perhaps even ways not explicated in the rulebook. To the Master the rules are not just easy and relatively transparent, they are second-nature.

We could apply this basic structure to just about any activity. To some degree the dynamics are the same, but I would argue that different activities - and different editions of D&D - require different amounts of time within each phase, adjustable by natural aptitude and time dedication.

Now while an activity (including D&D) can be enjoyed within any phase, it doesn't really "fly" until you get to Journeyman - which means not only do you have the basic proficiency and orientation of the Apprentice, but you have a higher degree of proficiency that allows you to operate autonomously within the context of the activity.

To put this into a concrete example that we can all relate with, let's apply this to bicycle riding. The Novice phase is becoming acquainted with the bike itself - sitting on it and balancing, using training wheels to get a sense of what it feels like. When one is able to ride without training wheels, Apprentice phase begins. One might be wobbly and fall off, but basic proficiency has been attained. One becomes a journeyman when one feels quite proficient - can ride without falling off frequently, can start doing little tricks like riding with one or no hands, doing basic "wheelies," etc. Mastery is a high degree of proficiency in which the bicycle has become an extension of the rider's body.

With bicycle riding, the Novice phase is usually quite long, but once you become an Apprentice you move through it quite quickly and become a Journeyman, a stage in which most bicycle riders never leave.

Or we could look at musical instruments and how each require different amounts of time in different phases, even if the end result - Mastery - is similar. For instance, the Novice phase is longer with, say, a saxophone then it is with a hand drum, although Mastery of the hand drum is no "lesser" than that of saxophone.

Which brings me (back) to D&D. I think one of the biggest problems with 4E, in light of the above structure, is that while the Novice phase is similar to all forms of D&D - learning the d20 mechanic, the basics of play and how to navigate the character sheet - the Apprentice phase is quite long - it takes awhile to get to true proficiency. You either need a strong tactical mind and/or a lot of time - and it has to be frequent time. In the game I ran for a few years, we played either every two weeks or once a month, and sometimes missed sessions. For the first year or more each session felt like "two steps forward, one back" - or even three forward, two back. After three plus years, most of us had attained Journeyman status, but one player in particular was still struggling in the Apprentice phase (and the most proficient player, who was also quite choleric, would get exceedingly frustrated because the "Apprentice player" would stall up every combat, unsure what power to use no matter how I tried to encourage him to plan ahead).

Related but not synonymous with these phases is a scale which I will dub Rules Opacity-Transparency Spectrum (ROTS). By "opaque" I mean the rules are solid and impossible to ignore within the game experience. By "transparent" I mean just about invisible to the play experience, or so well known that they flow naturally and easily. They don't get in the way of immersion.

Due to the nature of 4E, in particular the reliance on the battlemat and the AEDU power structure, full transparency of the rules doesn't occur until Mastery has been achieved and for most, myself included, Mastery was never achieved - probably because we didn't play frequently enough.

This, to me, is the problem with 4E - and something they tried to address with Essentials, but went about it in the wrong way. The problem was not as much the ease or difficulty of entry point, that is the length of the Novice phase, but more two-fold:

1) The time it takes to move from basic to true proficiency, that is to move through the Apprentice phase
2) The requirement of full mastery to really get the game to fly

I found that prior editions of D&D didn't require full mastery to "fly." Even 3E, which required more master than 1E and 2E, really only required Journeyman status (although 3E had its own issues with systems mastery, which we're all aware of).

All of this, in my opinion, points to the importance of a two-tier (at least) bifurcation of "basic" and "advanced" games. A simple, core rule set that is complete in and of itself, and modular options that can bring greater complexity and detail for those that want it.

I would suggest that a simple game is not necessarily easier to "master" than a complex game. But the key difference is implied in the 2nd point above - the requirement of a game to achieve mastery to be fully transparent, to really fly. This is a problem that arises in all fields at high levels. There are jazz musicians, for instance, that have attained such a high degree of mastery and have little interest in bringing it "down to earth," so to speak. Steve Coleman comes to mind, or late John Coltrane. Compare that to, say, the best of James Brown - music that required a high degree of technical proficiency from the players, but that was accessible to all.

In my opinion the ideal is the two-tier basic core with advanced options - it really is the best of both worlds. I think Mearls & Company are in agreement with this, although whether they can pull it off remains to be seen.

 

[Dungeoneer]

That's an interesting way to categorize familiarity with the game. If you need a concrete example for 'Apprentice', I'd say it's when the player knows to pick up their D20 when they're about to roll an attack or a check.

I've taken several groups through 4e and haven't seen the problems you have. Generally, within about three sessions the players 'get it'.

I did have one player in my first group that struggled. He was an old school player who had lapsed for a decade or two. He generally wasn't paying close attention at the table. He always tried to do a 'melee basic attack' for everything, at first out of ignorance and later just to annoy the rest of us.

I also don't agree that you need to be a 'master' for the game to work. I'd say I have mastery level, as you would describe it (the rules are transparent to me, and I can extrapolate them to new situations on the fly). None of my players do. But they really don't need it. Unless you are running your own game, system mastery has little advantage. And even then you can certainly run the game without it.

I have noticed that AEDU tends to trip up players of older editions, but seems second nature to new players.

 

[Mercurius]

That's an interesting way to categorize familiarity with the game. If you need a concrete example for 'Apprentice', I'd say it's when the player knows to pick up their D20 when they're about to roll an attack or a check.

I've taken several groups through 4e and haven't seen the problems you have. Generally, within about three sessions the players 'get it'.

I did have one player in my first group that struggled. He was an old school player who had lapsed for a decade or two. He generally wasn't paying close attention at the table. He always tried to do a 'melee basic attack' for everything, at first out of ignorance and later just to annoy the rest of us.

I also don't agree that you need to be a 'master' for the game to work. I'd say I have mastery level, as you would describe it (the rules are transparent to me, and I can extrapolate them to new situations on the fly). None of my players do. But they really don't need it. Unless you are running your own game, system mastery has little advantage. And even then you can certainly run the game without it.

I have noticed that AEDU tends to trip up players of older editions, but seems second nature to new players.

Just to clarify with regards to the bold section, I agree with you - I'm not talking about for the game to "work" but for it to really fly. And I think you're right, that mastery by the DM is more important than for the player's. The DM should be a master, or at least a very accomplished journeyman, and the players should be accomplished apprentices to journeymen.

But here's the thing. A journeyman can run a game, but they might not be able to "do anything" with it, and with 4E it seems to me that full transparency is only accomplished with mastery.

With "old school" D&D (basically TSR), mastery wasn't required to attain transparency (or at least we could say that mastery was easier to attain, if we equate full transparency with mastery - which I don't necessarily, because a games can differ with their degree of inherent opacity-transparency, while master speaks of the players themselves). For any game to come alive without the rules being an obstacle between the players and their characters, and the rule mechanics and theater of mind, some degree of mastery is required, but for the reasons I described I think it is harder with 4E than any previous edition of D&D.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Rules opaqueness/consistency and personality can determine how quickly you advance.

I found 2e's rules opaqueness/consistency really slowed down my understanding of the game. I once ran a short campaign where I didn't even understand the saving throw rules. (Or initiative. Or surprise... Pretty much anything that didn't involve a d20 or damage dice except saving throws.) Not actually owning the rulebook at the time made things worse (didn't have a high school job). I learned more 3e and 4e in one year than six years of 2e.

Some people in my group just don't bother learning beyond the basics. My group finished Kingmaker a year or so ago, in Pathfinder, and by the end I realized several other players didn't know things like the Big Six items. They just sort of assumed that a certain PC will always fail a certain save (and never bought a Cloak of Resistance).

We had only one corebook with us, so no one could just sit down and read it, and even if you did, certain things like the Big Six you won't pick up on. Making matters worse, reading the SRD is just not as good as reading the rulebook, and pretty much no one touched the corebook because they were using Hero Tools or other character builders... even people who could make 3rd edition PCs without electronic assistance (and were usually very familiar with the rules).

When it came to transparency, 4e's biggest failing might have been the Character Builder. For a group I played in through Meetup, half the group were completely new to 4e. One player had a Character Builder sheet for a PC that someone designed for him, a pretty good way of ensuring he wouldn't know the rules. He asked me (the rules guru of the group) to explain how his ranger's attack bonus got so high (it was actually on par) and I got confused too. He didn't know about proficiency bonuses (he hadn't bought a book yet, and the CB did not explain it to a complete newbie) and he was using a khopesh, a weapon I didn't know enough about and wasn't in the Player's Handbook that I had brought specifically to answer questions. I taught two other players how to build a character sheet by hand as well. The khopesh-using ranger player eventually became a DM of the group, only a few months in, which I'm happy about

 

[Storminator]

IMX, the rules seem much more transparent in 4e. We almost never open a rule book at the table, and we never have rules arguments at the table.

In 3.x, the game came to a halt just about every single time a non-damage spell was cast. Someone broke out the rules and we figured out how the spell worked.

Way back in high school we ignored all the 1e rules we didn't like/understand, and for the most part we all agreed which rules those were. But since most things 1e were DM judgement we had elaborate parliamentary procedures for when and how and who could argue different points of the rules.

I'm sure a lot of the change in "rules transparency" is not due to different rules but to different maturities in my gaming friends, but 4e feels the most transparent of the lot.

PS

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=59082]Mercurius[/MENTION] I think there's another factor besides system mastery, and I would call it comfort with rules improvisation. For example, I have not mastered 4e's system (there are plenty of rules I am not on top of since errata or common situations that I forget the rules on); however, I am very comfortable making an improvised ruling that is in the right ballpark and feels right. I think this has to do with the transparency of 4e that [MENTION=305]Storminator[/MENTION] describes; in a less transparent system I would not feel so comfortable making stuff up without system mastery.

As an aside, 4e made character creation far too narrow IMHO; something which started to be reversed in Essentials but should have expanded far beyond combat capability. If you strip out AEDU, it's actually a decent system for old school style play (though the DM does need to understand how to design encounters to run fast). Take away AEDU, design scenes/settings rather than set piece encounters, and incorporate old school flavor, and 4e feels like 1e (albeit with a little less dungeon survival horror )

 

[Balesir]

I and (I think) most of the group I GM for have found 4e quite easy to grok, and I think there are two main reasons - maybe three - for this:

1) The way 4E rules aren't isolated; they fit together into a "model". Take stealth, and cover, for example. The cover rules are quite simple and unambiguous (assuming you are using a battle mat - see below), and stealth flows directly from lines of sight, cover and the Stealth skill vs. Perception rolls. The difference between "can't see her" and "she's hidden" is quite clear in the rules.

2) The extent to which the rules are what's in the rule book is high. Games that rely on GM interpretation and judgement take longer to learn - especially with a new GM - because you have not only to learn the rules but also to learn the GM. What is their model of the game world like? How do the semi-defined abilities your character has actually work in practice? 4E has much less of this than earlier editions.

3) Re. the comment on the battle mat; I guess we are a group that takes somewhat "naturally" to systems like 4E because we have used battle boards/mats/maps since basically forever. That's not to say I/we have never used TotM - I have played Daredevils and Pendragon that way, for sure - but for D&D style games we have always used hex grids/dungeon floorplans/etc.

Speaking just for myself, I generally retain systems and ideas far, far better if I can visualise a model in my head for how the thing works rather than remembering scads of rules. Once I have the model understood, it tends to just "click" - without the model I misremember and get confused all the time. 4E I found a very easy system to build models for; original D&D much less so.