D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

[Lanefan]

Oh, that false dichotomy again. There's a wide range between your two poles, it's not either-or, they're not mutually exclusive;

Yes they are. As a player, you're either thinking about the rules (even if only partly) or you're not. Thinking about both at once still counts as thinking about the rules and still means you're in the metagame.

There's no middle ground here.

to the extent the rules reflect how the world works, using them is in fact applying your characters abilites, skills and knowledge, and working inside them to accomplish things.

When doing something that has to be abstracted such as fighting a battle or picking a lock or climbing a cliff, I fully agree with this; and yes, it's also unavoidably metagame.

But when freeform roleplaying your character trying to accomplish something socially or even just joshing around with the other characters in the party, there's rarely if ever any need for the metagame of rules to interrupt that process and thus if-when they do, it rather spoils the moment.

 

[hawkeyefan]

According to them they're playing the game much like what they played before they ever started streaming. I don't see much difference between their earliest episodes when it was all just an experiment and later games. At least not outside of con event where they have an audience which would mess with anyone.

Sure, I bet it’s very similar. I mean, I’m sure turning it into a source of evenue has impacted what they do to some extent, but I don’t necessarily think it means they’ve changed everything about the way they play. As has been said, this was already a popular mode of play well before Critical Role.

Anything that the player does that is not done through the words and deeds of the character is to me metacurrency.

Yeah, I’m not sure. I mean, you’ve changed things a bit to read as metacurrency, but I’m sure if we examine that a bit, it would kind of fall apart. There are gray areas that aren’t so easily classified and so on.

I think the idea of a rule or game mechanic being representative of something in the game world is key here, and how that rule represents the thing.

We could give the Rogue class a “Moment of Intuition” ability that allows the player to spend a point to automatically dodge an attack. Some would view that as a metacurrency… but why? It’s representative of the Rogue’s intuitive ability to detect and avoid danger. Plenty of other elements represent these things… Perception, Armor Class, Uncanny Dodge, Danger Sense… and so on.

The player may say “I’m gonna use my Moment of Intuition here to avoid that attack” but the character isn’t doing that… they are simply detecting and avoiding an attack.

Sorry if it came off wrong, there's no right way and even if we have completely different approaches that's perfectly okay. One of the strengths of D&D is that we can have significantly different playstyles. There are other games that take completely different approaches as well of course.

Okay, good… just trying to make sure we’re cool.

I personally think that the approach of D&D allows for a variety of actions in play, but I think that, for the most part, outside of combat, those actions don’t make for the most compelling game.

The Diplomat (good show by the way) is so fun is because we never know who we can really trust, who has ulterior motives. If the ruleset is too transparent we lose some of that. I also don't see a need to have rules beyond the tools we have to recreate that type of feeling. Half the fun is being the protagonist of a story and not knowing what the heck is going on.

But I'll ask the same question I just posed to @Micah Sweet, can you give examples of what kind of rules you want?

Well, if I was making “The Diplomat RPG” and was using 5e as the foundation… I’d change quite a bit. I’d ditch all the classes and would come up with a few that make sense for what I want the game to be about. An Ambassador class, a Station Chief class, a Political Player class… that kind of thing.

Since combat would have almost bo place in this game, I’d scrap AC and most of the combat system. The characters may still be at risk from physical harm from time to time, but I don’t think hit points would be needed. More important would be some kind of character element to serve as a pacing mechanism in social engagements the way hit points serve as pacing mechanisms for combat.

Something to help with the building of tension… to measure the progress of a scene and the characters reaching their goal or not.

Why would the rules of the game be metagame? This is a usage that I persistently fail to understand. The rules of the game seem pretty definitively to be game.

I couldn’t agree more. I do not understand why this stance still has such a foothold in the RPG community.

To me, meta concerns are those truly beyond the game… “it’s almost time to call it a night, I bet the DM wants to get one more fight in, so I’ll just attack these creatures so we can fit the fight in.” Stuff like that.

Spending a player resource? That’s playing the game.

Because, and @Oofta already hit this upthread, if you're thinking as a player using rules rather than as your character in the situation you've veered into the metagame.

Thus, if I'm in-character thinking up ways of how best to persuade the Duke to finance our risky venture into the wilds, that's "game". But if I'm instead (or even side-along) thinking something like "I need to score six influence points on this guy before his finance minister scores three against me", that's meta all the way and is going to (almost for sure negatively) affect how I inhabit and roleplay my character.

Why? Your character certainly knows he needs to make strong arguments or otherwise exert influence to get what he wants, and he knows that the finance minister, already having the duke’s trust, won’t have to work as hard to convince the duke.

These are known things and the mechanics represent them.

But this doesn't mean that the player actually persuaded anyone to let him take her life! It's all just pretend. Someone who is not actually moved or persuaded is making decisions about whether an imaginary person is moved or persuaded. There are many ways to structure and guide that sort of decision-making procedure, and "I think it makes sense that this rather thinly-described person would be moved or persuaded by that" is one of them, but not the only one.

Yeah… the idea that discussing the fictional events of an RPG is the same as negotiating a peace treaty between nations is bonkers. I’t be like saying that the physical act of rolling a die is the same as swinging a sword… I mean, they’re both physical actions and require a hand and a tool interacting…

 

[Aldarc]

As someone whose primary interests are narrative games and OSR style play, I totally agree that I prefer games that are focused on achieving desired play styles and principles.

Everyone knows you can't like more than one type of game or even multiple games. You have to choose one and stay in that lane, and that lane is how you will be labeled on this forum.

This is yet a further matter on which the D&D alignment rules offer no assistance.

I don't regard it as a criticism of the alignment rules that they offer no assistance for social/political/moral circumstances that depart from a very particular set of assumptions: those are just the assumptions that the game is based on. I do get a bit frustrated by proponents of D&D alignment who try and maintain that the rules have some sort of coherence or applicability beyond those assumptions, as if they could provide some universal framework for characterising personalities and political/moral commitments.

This is one reason why I would prefer Alignment in terms of the character actively aligning themselves with cosmic forces and their assorted interests. It moves Alignment from MBTI to factions with hooks!

yes, there is some part of it you cannot really avoid, like the combat strategy part you mentioned, but if it all comes down to player skill, why even have stats like Intelligence and Charisma and skills based on them...

And to be fair, there are a number of games out there that dispose of these sorts of abilities, particularly in the Odd-like family of NuSR games. But ironically, I would also wager that most of these games are far less interested in roleplay as exercises in community theater than what Lanefan would prefer.

 

[Oofta]

Oh, that false dichotomy again. There's a wide range between your two poles, it's not either-or, they're not mutually exclusive; to the extent the rules reflect how the world works, using them is in fact applying your characters abilites, skills and knowledge, and working inside them to accomplish things.

I can "role play" a robber baron while playing Monopoly. There are, of course a wide range between the two poles, there also ways that games and the rules they contain push you towards one pole or another. I can guarantee that in D&D 4E games where the DM relied almost solely on strictly enforced skill challenges for everything between combats that the RP at the table felt pretty pointless for me and the people I played with.

 

[Oofta]

The emergence of RPGing from out of wargaming is pretty fundamental to how the genre has been received, and has developed. The work on RPG design that led to games like Prince Valiant, Maelstrom Storytelling, Hero Wars/Quest, Apocalypse World is all about taking some of the formal characteristics of a wargame (eg numerical ratings of attributes, a very tight correlation between game elements and in-fiction elements, etc) but adapting them to allow a radically different sort of game play. (Vampire, I think, illustrates an aspiration at the radically different game play that has failed to undertake the necessary development and adaptation.)

If improv theatre aficionados had invented something like RPGing back in the early 1970s, what would it have looked like? Maybe something closer to A Penny for My Thoughts? Which I personally don't consider a RPG at all, because it has no action resolution.

This is connected to the wargaming origins - it's an individual avatar version of training your squad/battalion/whatever from raw recruits to elite guards. Separating that idea of advancement from the narrow military focus is clever design. Linking it, in a narrative sense, to things like the actual story of Ged's growth from apprentice to wizard (in the Earthsea books), or the implied story of Conan's growth from wandering thief to warband leader to self-proclaimed king (in REH's Conan stories) is also clever design.

The fact that the actual play of D&D - especially in its classic form - doesn't actually produce fiction that resembles either Earthsea or REH Conan, and yet this does not seem to have hurt the game's popularity, is a curious thing to me. It suggests that, at least for many player, trappings of fiction matter more than the deeper content of fiction.

Social interaction is not being done "for real", though. No one is actually persuading anyone of anything. To take an extreme example, so as to clearly illustrate the point: the 3E module Bastion of Broken Souls includes, as part of its set-up, an angel who is a "living key" to a gate - that is, the gate can only be opened by killing the angel. Now the module itself has some good ideas but terrible follow through, and in this particular case it tells the GM that the only way to open the gate is for the PCs to kill the angel in combat. But when I adapted the module into a Rolemaster campaign, I ignored the bad advice. And one of the PCs in my game reasoned with the angel, explained to her what was at stake and why it was essential to open the gate, and as a result the angel willingly permitted the PC to kill her.

But this doesn't mean that the player actually persuaded anyone to let him take her life! It's all just pretend. Someone who is not actually moved or persuaded is making decisions about whether an imaginary person is moved or persuaded. There are many ways to structure and guide that sort of decision-making procedure, and "I think it makes sense that this rather thinly-described person would be moved or persuaded by that" is one of them, but not the only one.

Well, yes, if you have rules that don't produce the outcome you are hoping for, they will be bad rules. Vincent Baker makes that point nicely here:

your rules impose a structured causality upon your game's fiction. If they were a good match in design, then in play the game works the way you meant it to. If they were a bad match in design, then in play the game doesn't work how you intended. Bold barbarian warriors maximize their armor and when they go into battle it's a matter of grinding ablation, not decisive action; your grim & gritty noir detective has to carry an assault rifle because a .38 won't kill a dude; the team of morning-cartoon superheroes bicker, bean-count their resources, and wind up working for the highest bidder.​

If you want players to portray and inhabit vibrant characters, and your "influence points" rule is producing a tactical obsession with managing and hoarding points, then your rule is a bad one! That doesn't show, however, that it is impossible to have any other system of rules for structuring and guiding how someone decides that an imaginary person is moved or persuaded, beyond the ones suggested by @Lanefan.

You may look at what Baker wrote as the final word on something, I don't. Then again, I'm just expressing my own personal opinion on this, I'm not attempting to make this a master's degree in ludology. IMHO a game does not have to have a specific goal in order to be successful or fun. It can just provide a framework for a game with multiple implementation possibilities along with being open to custom house rules. How that framework is utilized is largely up to the people playing, hence the topic of this thread. My preferred style is heavy RP between combats.

By this measure, D&D combat is metagame - when I resolve a fight in AD&D I'm not thinking about parrying and thrusting and dodging and maiming and the like; I'm thinking about how I need to score N more hit points of damage before my own hit points get ablated.

These are not the only possible components of a non-combat resolution system.

Nah. Combat is almost a different game than the rest of our session because we need fairly detailed structure to have tactical combat. While we can layer RP on top of combat (and often do) we also accept that we are layering RP on top of that combat resolution system. It's kind of like eating a chocolate chip cookie. I accept that the chips are different from the dough, that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the two together.

That's different from relying heavily on rules for social interaction. Or, rather, if we relied as heavily on rules for social interaction then it dramatically reduces RP and character immersion. We do still have the option to fall back on rules in the form of skill checks for noncombat situations and it happens fairly often in my games with calls for everything from athletics to survival checks. But that, to me is not metagame currency, it's a simplified way of representing the character's capabilities to overcome specific obstacles.

To me, something resource external to character abilities that I could use to force an outcome is a metagame currency. For example if a character is dealing with a diplomat they may try to convince the diplomat to help them. When I DM I will take into account the diplomat's disposition towards the group and decide on a charisma based check. The DC of that check can depend on many factors including past relationship with the PCs, the diplomat's goals, what the diplomat's political backer's disposition is towards whatever faction the PCs are supporting, what the PCs say and so on. At that point I adjust target DC based on all those factors and can result automatic success, failure, or an attempt at deception on the part of the diplomat. Chance of success or failure is largely determined by in world considerations and PC capabilities to present a convincing argument.

A metagame currency would be one that the players can spend to force or influence the decision point in their favor, or that the GM could spend to influence the outcome in a different direction. To me, and again I don't know or particularly care about forge terminology, those are clearly two different approaches. There's minor overlap of course, because in D&D we have simple codified capabilities of the character's reflected by ability scores and proficiencies but they are not at all the same thing.

So here's a rule for social resolution: when you, as your character, make an impassioned plea to a NPC, and there is no established in-fiction reason why the NPC is implacably opposed to what you want, then - if you spend an influence point - the NPC does as you requeset.

I don't think that's a very good rule - as in, I'm doubtful that it will produce compelling fiction and vibrant characters in play (although perhaps I'm wrong even about that, as the "no established in-fiction reason" clause motivates players to warm up to their impassioned pleas by trying to suss out how a NPC stands on various issues, and maybe that will produce some compelling fiction and vibrant characters; it would need testing to find out). But it doesn't involve the player engaging with anything other than the words and deads of their PCs, and so would not involve "metacurrency" in @Oofta's sense.

But it would be a resolution system that, like D&D's combat resolution system, permits a declared action to be resolved without the causal process that actually produces that outcome in the fiction being established in the course of resolution. To elaborate: when a character/creature/monster is dropped to zero hp (or fails a death save, or whatever) in D&D we know they are dead, but we don't know - in the fiction - how they were killed. Blood loss? Run through the heart? Decapitation? The rules don't tell us.

And in my imagined resolution system, we would know that the NPC was persuaded by the PC's impassioned plea, but we wouldn't know exactly how or why they were so moved.

I've been directly and indirectly observing RPGers whose principal and preferred game is D&D for a long time. My sense is that many of them are not very interested in the technical game aspects of play.

In the old days, for instance, when spell load out was an important thing, they were not very interested in the wargame-y/planning/tactical aspect of choosing spells, working out when to cast them, etc. That stuff was grist to the mill for RPGers of a wargame-y or even more generally game playing bent; but not very important to players who mainly wanted to imagine their PC getting up to hijinks. On multiple occasions in the 1990s I surprised, sometimes delighted, sometimes shocked these sorts of D&D players by showing what was possible, within the formal AD&D PC build framework, when it came to building and playing a mechanically effective character.

I think this is one reason why many D&D players did not like 4e D&D very much: it's not a game that lends itself to imagining my PC getting up to hijinks without having to engage with the technical components of the game. Like many contemporary "indie"-esque RPGs, 4e tried to tightly integrate the technical components of the game with the imaginative elements of play.

5e D&D, on the other hand, considerably relaxes that outside of the combat domain. (For some reason - I conjecture that it is due to the received skirmish wargame legacy of RPGing - it is widely accepted that combat will be a hijinks-free domain that is resolved via application of technical rules.) The players can imagine their PCs getting up to hijinks, with the GM using a combination of responsiveness to PC-build-elements-as-descriptors (in 5e D&D speak, this is described thus: "if a character has a high enough bonus that the DM thinks the results of the declared action are not uncertain, then the GM is not required to call for a roll") and sheer fiat to make the game move along.

Expecting these sorts of players to enjoy 4e D&D is like expecting them to enjoy Burning Wheel - it's not going to happen!

 

[Oofta]

This is an empirical conjecture. And all my experience suggests that it is false. I play RPGs with very transparent rules. And yet there can be, and often is, uncertainty about who can be trusted. Good rules for resolving social conflict, integrated with good rules for framing and establishing stakes and consequences, will allow for this sort of thing.

It's not conjecture, it's my opinion and experience. I'm not attempting to write an abstract thesis here, nor am I speaking for anyone but myself. What you have experienced, and your preferences, are going to differ from mine.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Yes they are. As a player, you're either thinking about the rules (even if only partly) or you're not. Thinking about both at once still counts as thinking about the rules and still means you're in the metagame.

There's no middle ground here.

I’d argue that it’s all middle ground. That we are players of a game and all our decisions are made as such, those decisions then produce fiction that is shared by the other participants. It’s both things and we don’t need to try and separate them.

When doing something that has to be abstracted such as fighting a battle or picking a lock or climbing a cliff, I fully agree with this; and yes, it's also unavoidably metagame.

It’s not outside the game. It is the game.

I can "role play" a robber baron while playing Monopoly. There are, of course a wide range between the two poles, there also ways that games and the rules they contain push you towards one pole or another. I can guarantee that in D&D 4E games where the DM relied almost solely on strictly enforced skill challenges for everything between combats that the RP at the table felt pretty pointless for me and the people I played with.

How connected to the game of Monopoly would you say your RP of the robber baron is?

 

[prabe]

Yes they are. As a player, you're either thinking about the rules (even if only partly) or you're not. Thinking about both at once still counts as thinking about the rules and still means you're in the metagame.

There's no middle ground here.

When doing something that has to be abstracted such as fighting a battle or picking a lock or climbing a cliff, I fully agree with this; and yes, it's also unavoidably metagame.

But when freeform roleplaying your character trying to accomplish something socially or even just joshing around with the other characters in the party, there's rarely if ever any need for the metagame of rules to interrupt that process and thus if-when they do, it rather spoils the moment.

There is in fact a world of middle ground, your inability and/or unwillingness to see it notwithstanding. I find that the rules don't spoil the moment/s at all in social situations; in fact, the rules enable moments.

Also, what's with this "metagame of rules" stuff? How can the rules be anything but game?

 

[bloodtide]

Similarly, no matter how high a PC's DEX, if the player can't make sensible decisions about where to move their PC on a battle map, then they will find their PC not being able to get to the right place at the right time!

This is always my big point too. A gamer can say "my character is a combat veteran" or "genius" or "social butterfly" and then just have the character do 'whatever". Unless the gamer is actively playing the character as what they say they are. And this nearly always requires real life knowledge, practice, skill, time and effort.

Yes they are. As a player, you're either thinking about the rules (even if only partly) or you're not. Thinking about both at once still counts as thinking about the rules and still means you're in the metagame.

There's no middle ground here.

Well, maybe not "middle", but there is a third way between Only Mechanical Rules and Only Acting Actions.

The third way is Beyond the Rules; that is to say there is so specific rule or mechanics. Where the gamer can do Role Play Acting and get a Mechanical Rule Alteration.

 

[Oofta]

...



How connected to the game of Monopoly would you say your RP of the robber baron is?

My point is that even if RP makes no difference whatsoever to the outcome of the end result, you can still hypothetically RP. It's just meaningless. For example, strictly following the letter of skill challenges in 4E (which I'm not picking on 4E, it's just more likely to be a commonly understood system), RP made no difference whatsoever. It was the DM telling you what skills were appropriate, telling you the DC and you rolled a die. It could be used to codify play for a huge chunk of the game which led to the virtual elimination of RP in those cases.