D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Maxperson]

First is you stop caring about the “metagame”. There’s just the game.

Second, you telegraph danger ahead of time. Or at the very least, you establish what the likely risk is, the stakes of the roll. You let the player know “okay this sounds like a Stealth roll… what’s at risk here is discovery, so don’t fail!” and then you have them roll. I would likely be a bit more descriptive in the nature of the discovery… but that may not be necessary.

Then they roll, and if they fail, you already know the consequences… so you follow through on that.

Metagaming exists and is antithetical to the kind of game that I enjoy playing and running.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Metagaming exists and is antithetical to the kind of game that I enjoy playing and running.

So?

 

[clearstream]

At least for myself, that's why I don't talk about "process" at all. I talk about purposes, that is, teleology: the thing for which a game was designed. Games, by being designed things, are made for some function. Like laws, rules are inherently teleological, they exist for some purpose. Hence, for any rule or set of rules, we can ask three important questions:

• What is this rule(set) for?
• Does this rule(set) do that?
• Does this rule(set) get players to want to do that?

My "game-(design-)purposes" are all about examining the primary high-level categories which answer that first question in the context of TTRPGing. When you choose to design a game, you declare an answer to the first question. You then iteratively test (alpha testing) until the answer to the second question is "yes". You then test (beta testing) until the answer to the third question is also "yes". Failure to choose good answers for the first question--which is a matter of discernment, individual preference, audience interests, and many other very complex factors--generally results in problems at both of the other two phases. Failure to do sufficient alpha testing almost guarantees the answer to the second question will end up being "no" even if the designers think it should be "yes". Failure to do sufficient beta testing means that the underlying rules will "work", but will be used in ways that break or subvert the purpose of the rules, which...makes them bad rules.

I agree with you that game rules are aimed at uses or purposes. VB contends that the use that should most motivate rules design is

How does it procure that players will add the unwelcome and unwanted to their fiction?​

​

Which speaks to the constitutive effects of rules

What play will the rule give rise to that would not be seen in its absence?​

Considering VB's suggestion that otherwise live negotiation and collaboration will do a better job than formal rules, it seems like a good question to ask

What do players do without the rule? (What patterns or norms for live negotiation and collaboration are going to be followed?)​

Authoring a rule casts doubt on the standing of existing norms. If there is a rule that I can narrate my character flying on Tuesdays, that seems to rule out my narrating my character flying on other days. So another question

What will the rule imply that we should not say?​

Some other core questions that perhaps come up more in commercial design

What problems do players have to solve?​

​

What jobs do players have to do?​

​

How does the design address those in ways players will uniquely value (i.e. why should they prefer this design over others? How is it differentiated?)​

​

All on top of your questions, of course!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Metagaming is something used at many gamist tables. Not all gamist tables would use it, but I've seen it mentioned here as acceptable many times.

Of course, "metagaming" is often in the eye of the beholder.

I've frequently been told that in standard old-school play, "player knowledge" is perfectly acceptable in nearly every instance, even if the character simply should not know that trolls are weak to acid and fire (or whatever example is relevant). I know OSR isn't a monolith and such, but this has come up so many times that I'm reasonably convinced it was standard practice at most tables in the days of yore and remains standard practice at most "old school" tables today.

Further, it's pretty clearly blatant metagaming to have Bob IV, the cousin of the recently-deceased Bob III, just show up imprisoned in the next room of the dungeon, but this was a common behavior at many old-school tables because it meant getting right back into the action without having to do a bunch of (for that player) very tedious waiting.

And that's not even touching on things like a wizard who was named "Melf" because the player literally never wrote more on its top line than "M ELF", as in, a male elf, or that people just used literally their own name spelled backwards (e.g. Snilloc), or anagrammed, or whatever else. Or the near-endless plethora of silly """jokes""" peppered throughout the rules. Or the active "gotcha" game design Gygax would engage in if his players ever got, in his opinion, too comfortable with their SOPs and such, no matter how ridiculous the leaps required (I'm looking at you, Ear Seeker.)

"Metagaming" is so loose, so variable depending on who you talk to and what specific things you look at, that it's extremely difficult, borderline impossible, to have any kind of conversation about it. Things I would consider to be blatant and unacceptable metagaming, you might consider to be perfectly acceptable ordinary gaming, and vice-versa.

Like "realism", it's a word that everyone "knows" what it means...but no one agrees on what it means. Which makes it functionally useless as a tool of communication. Everyone has their own private definition.

 

[clearstream]

I think it is worth mentioning that GNS was NEVER about people, or games, it was about PLAY. Even in that sense its author has since abandoned the notion that classification of specific instances of play is worth much. We'd all probably be better off if we took a broader and less classification-centered approach to these discussions (myself included). People like Baker and others at least spend their effort on 'process' almost entirely. That is just the specifics of "what are we doing" without a lot of labeling.

Baker wrote that

I don't think that the idea of Creative Agendas stands up after all, let alone G, N, and S as its representatives.​

​

We used to think that RPGs were one game. In, like, the 90s or whenever. We would say things like "what is the object of a RPG?" as though all RPGs would have the same one. GNS was a real step forward: "RPGs aren't one game, they're THREE!"​

​

But, of course, RPGs aren't three games either. Every RPG, like every other kind of game, is its own. You can taxonomize them if you want, but then you're constructing artificial categories and cramming games into them, not learning or finding out something true about the games themselves.​

​

...​

​

I was developing the idea of technical agenda as the technical component of creative agenda, and the further I developed it, the more patent it became to me that G, N and S were arbitrary, not reflective of real divisions in actual design or actual play. That while you can, if you want, assign a given instance of gameplay to G, N or S more or less consistently, you do so by asserting false similarities and ignoring some true similarities between other instances of gameplay. GNS is a convenient stand-in for what's actually going on.​

​

When I use the GNS labels, I'm using them in that sense -- as a convenient stand-in for what is going on.

 

[clearstream]

Regarding quantum chefs, consider this move

Tricks of the Trade​

When you pick locks or pockets or disable traps, roll+DEX.​

On a 10+, you do it, no problem.​

On a 7–9, you do it, and GM will roll on the encounter table for this place.​

6 or less, the GM says what happens and you mark XP.​

​

Townhouse Encounter Table​

1. An easily panicked chef​

2. A timid lap dog.​

3. Two savage and loud guard dogs​

​

For the imagined game, principles allow that GM may say that you don't do it on 6 or less and normally says something unwelcome either way. Encounter tables are preexisting and players don't know their contents prior to those being added to the fiction.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I agree with you that game rules are aimed at uses or purposes. VB contends that the use that should most motivate rules design is

How does it procure that players will add the unwelcome and unwanted to their fiction?​

Well, I've already said that I don't entirely agree with that perspective. That is one thing rules can do, yes. But rules also provide definition to what is actively welcome and wanted.

After all, the rules of golf indicate that a high score is bad. The rules of most other games indicate that a high score is good. Neither of these things has anything to do with adding the unwelcome or unwanted to play.

Not that I even agree with Mr. Baker's characterization of "unwelcome" (nor "unwanted") in the first place. At absolute best, I would grant that it is what I might call "zeroth-order" unwelcome/unwanted: that is, something which is undesirable at the layer "closest to the metal", to use a programming analogy, something undesirable at the level of binary numbers. But at many (indeed, probably most) higher orders of abstraction, these things are not only NOT unwelcome/unwanted, they are deeply desired and wanted. E.g., nobody wants to give the opponent penalty shots, but people do want bad behavior punished in warranted ways, and penalty shots are one of those things. Likewise, nobody wants to be thrown in prison, but we do want murder to be punished so people have a good reason to choose not to do it. Etc.

Which speaks to the constitutive effects of rules

I'm not sure what this means--"constitutive effects"?

What play will the rule give rise to that would not be seen in its absence?​

Considering VB's suggestion that otherwise live negotiation and collaboration will do a better job than formal rules, it seems like a good question to ask

I continue to contend that live negotiation and collaboration, while extremely useful and important, are in fact highly augmented by significant design work which has nothing to do with inducing unwanted/unwelcome results, but which does have something to do with play that would or would occur in the absence of those rules.

Case in point: Page 42 (of the 4e DMG). One of the important things that needs to happen if you want players to choose to improvise responses on the regular is...having results that are actually worthwhile, and having chances to achieve those results that are actually reasonable. That's what Page 42 provides. It provides damage calculations that are apt for any given level, and appropriate skill DCs for checks where you don't already know what is needed, and just need something that you know is reasonably challenging for improvisational skill checks that the rules can't possibly hope to have fixed answers for.

In the absence of rules like that--as I have personally seen in both 5e and 3e--you get things which...unfortunately tend to deaden player interest in improvisation. With 5e, it's because that negotiation process often produces inadequate results, again purely in my experience. Every GM has nothing but their gut intuitions to guide them, and I'm sorry to say, but most 5e GMs I've had do not have good gut intuitions for the benefits that improvisational actions should have, nor for the difficulty that improvisational checks should require. (I will note, here, that my current 5e GM is an exception to this pattern on both fronts.) With 3e, conversely, the issue was that with so many things so perfectly nailed down already...most players became pretty quickly convinced that if they hadn't specifically built their character to be very very good at a particular thing, it just wasn't even worth attempting; they'd much more than likely fail, and if they did fail, they'd likely suffer for it, not just facing opportunity cost.

What do players do without the rule? (What patterns or norms for live negotiation and collaboration are going to be followed?)​

Authoring a rule casts doubt on the standing of existing norms. If there is a rule that I can narrate my character flying on Tuesdays, that seems to rule out my narrating my character flying on other days. So another question

Does it? I don't agree with that at all. SOMETIMES it does. But if you design the rules in the right ways, it should not.

A rule like what you describe says nothing about what you can narrate on any day except Tuesday. On Tuesdays, you can narrate that way--it is officially confirmed. It's a logical fallacy to conclude that, simply because you phrased it in that way, you therefore cannot narrate your character as flying on any other day, or that anyone other than you is expressly forbidden on any other day.

This is one reason, among many, why I don't care for rules that set a baseline of bad performance, which one can only claw out of by significant investment. I instead prefer rules that set a baseline of acceptable competence, which one can then grow beyond. I also prefer extensible framework rules--rules which apply a common structure to many situations--rather than trying to tackle the genuinely insurmountable task of creating a single, discrete rule for the infinitude of tasks one might conceivably attempt.

What will the rule imply that we should not say?​

Some other core questions that perhaps come up more in commercial design

What problems do players have to solve?​

​

What jobs do players have to do?​

​

How does the design address those in ways players will uniquely value (i.e. why should they prefer this design over others? How is it differentiated?)​

​

All on top of your questions, of course!

These are all questions to ask once you have the rules. They're part of the testing process. Generally, the alpha process, since this is all about developing the elements so that there is enough game to actually play, and it won't just collapse on itself when you look at it from juuuust the wrong direction.

In other words, these questions--including the ones above that I responded to--are one or more steps less abstracted than the questions I asked. The questions I asked were at the highest tier of abstraction while still being useful, where we are looking at something--either a single rule, or a set of rules--in the broadest possible way without collapsing it down to an uninformative "Does it work?" question. In this sense, design is a pyramidal structure. "What should I do?" is the absolute highest-abstraction question, and thus mostly useless because it lacks enough information, enough context. The three questions I asked are immediately below it, having enough context to divide the space into domains (rather than canvassing the entire space with a single over-broad question). Your questions are varying levels of abstraction below that, mostly concerned with the answers to the second of my questions, "Does the rule(set) actually do this?"

Please don't get me wrong here; I'm not saying your questions aren't worth asking. They very, very much are. But they are fine-detail questions, process questions, things we must work through on the journey to being able to answer "yes" to the question, "Does the rule(set) actually do [what it was made to do]?" It's very important to ask, and answer, most if not all of the questions you've posed here. But that's not really what I was aiming for. I was, very intentionally, aiming for the maximum useful abstraction, separated as far from the details as possible while still having utility and relevance.

 

[Enrahim]

You seem to locate the differences in the interests of the players. (Something others appear to have also implied.)

Supposing that were right, is there no way to recognise a set of rules that would support some set of interests above others? (@Enrahim this question, too.)

At first glance the answer to that question is "obviously there is". Take for instance this piece of a ruleset: A random d100 table for horse color. This rule is of course more useful to support the interest of exploring life in Arthurian Britain than the interest of creating a space opera or the interest in mastering the intricacies of a tactical combat system.

The problem arises if we try to increase the level of abstraction (generality) of our interest statements. For instance while it clearly can support the interest in exploring a specific setting in detail, it also can support the interest of creating a good story (Using the horse colors as inspiration to symbolize dramatic directions, like the owner of a black horse certainly is going to have some skeletons in their closet), and even system mastery (I should check with the other merchant hoping they have a black horse to sell me. Very practical to hide away off the road during night)

It gets even worse if you start increasing the abstraction level on "set of rules", like what interest can a set of random tables support?

This is why I think the forge project of trying to find general patterns relating interest and system was deeply problematic, and I am not surprised this part of the project fell apart. However I am not happy with people being so eager to throw the baby out with the bath water. While the concepts in GNS was clearly created for the purpose of trying to inform settings design; I think the language introduced still could have been useful for other purposes.

For instance we are in the hobby lacking a good non-inflammatory language for trying to express what we want out of a game in order to find a good group or align the expectations of an existing group. I viewed the GDS/GNS theory crafting with great hope that this might produce something of that sorts. I was devastated by seeing the entire train completely derail over the directly inflammatory attempts of associating this with system, in what to me in hindsight mostly look like an attempt at a marketing stunt. Instead we are stuck with the in my view completely dysfunctional combat/exploration/roleplay trio as any attempts at reviving the search for a more functional language is immediately interpreted into the context of this system supremacy nonsense.

 

[Enrahim]

Likewise, I have endeavored to cultivate something adjacent to the Golden Age of Islam and the height of Al Andalus, albeit with a couple of meaningful tweaks (e.g., for established cultural reasons, slavery is a VERY, VERY big no-no)....but it's definitely not trying to simulate the Golden Age of Islam nor Al Andalus.

So, for example, there is a monotheistic religion (but it is highly accepting of gender variation, doesn't demand celibacy, and is generally quite tolerant most of the time), it's a heavily mercantile society, blood and money are powerful forces, there's some decadence especially amongst the nobility of Jinnistan, illicit drugs are an issue, etc. But conversely, the "old" faith hasn't died out (for good reasons, but still), the city's Sultana is of course female and single (with her advisors mostly pushing for a marriage so she has an heir, not because they think she can't rule in her own right), and as noted slavery is a big no-no (some people still practice it, but if you got caught keeping slaves, your reputation would be permanently ruined). Oh, and there are things like a thieves' guild, a secret assassin-cult, and foreign-born merchants becoming prominent in the city without needing to acculturate (beyond learning the local tongue).

I don't hold myself to the limits of any past civilization, and I don't require rigorous justification for why this area is a desert while there is a jungle to the north and temperate forest to the south. Some things in the world might not make total sense if subjected to hard, sharp scrutiny. I strive for consistency and, as I am fond of saying, groundedness, but I'm also going to invoke (or consciously break) genre conventions, and build a world where adventure is a reasonable for some people, and where heroes matter, but so does the action of groups of people working together. The PCs may have earned being legends. Yet even legends depend on their allies and their support networks.

But, that said, when I told the group (more than once) that lately the trade winds have been unnaturally favorable--that is, there is always both wind blowing into the city in one area AND toward the city in another area--that's definitely leaning on the knowledge that that's really abnormal. Likewise, since I have(/had, on hiatus) a player who knows what happens to bodies after death (due to training as a physical anthropologist), the fact that a freshly-discovered body had already undergone livor mortis and rigor mortis indicated that it was hours old, rather than minutes as the most recent sighting of the victim implied--which meant someone had been impersonating the victim after his death, presumably using magic.

So...is it simulationism? Not really, or at least not really trying for it to be simulating anything or getting the players to feel like it's a ticking Swiss watch they can puzzle around with. That doesn't mean groundedness, sensibility, and consistency aren't important to me, because they very much are. I'm just not going to allow a commitment to those things to get in the way of producing a good experience, which may mean (for example) that most captured enemies, if shown mercy, actually do honor their word, even though that's probably not realistic, because doing that is rewarding the behavior I want to see, namely, players treating prisoners with kindness and respect, and not doing it would instead teach the players that mercy is a sucker's game.

It sound more like emulating than simulating. So it is not "daily language" Simluationism. I think the activity of setting up and running this setting qualifies as GDS Simulationism as you say consistency is an important concern to you. What you describe seem to give us no information about if we are talking about forge-area GNS simulationism, as you are mainly describing setting and quite trivial incidences rather than a proper view of actual play in process (in particular situations where there are high stakes for various agendas at play).

And if it is (my interpretation of) 2020 Eero Tuovinen simulationism it seem like it is dependent on what this preperation gives you in play - what motivates you to create this intricate setting? Is it because you are really curious what your players will do in it, and how the conflicts inherent in the setting will play out? Probably Simulationism. If it is that you had this grand vision about a cool setting and the potential stories in it that you really wanted to share with your players, then probably narrativism. If it is that you think this detailed backdrop provide an excellent and rich environement that you cannot wait to see how you and your players can exploit for their characters gain (Like will they manage to climb the ranks to trusted advisors to the sultan? What challenging obstacles can I put in the way of them easily getting the magic ruby?) Then it is likely gammism.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It sound more like emulating than simulating. So it is not "daily language" Simluationism. I think the activity of setting up and running this setting qualifies as GDS Simulationism as you say consistency is an important concern to you. What you describe seem to give us no information about if we are talking about forge-area GNS simulationism, as you are mainly describing setting and quite trivial incidences rather than a proper view of actual play in process (in particular situations where there are high stakes for various agendas at play).

And if it is (my interpretation of) Eero Tuovinen simulationism it seem like it is dependent on what this preperation gives you in play - what motivates you to create this intricate setting? Is it because you are really curious what your players will do in it, and how the conflicts inherent in the setting will play out? Probably Simulationism. If it is that you had this grand vision about a cool setting and the potential stories in it that you really wanted to share with your players, then probably narrativism. If it is that you think this detailed backdrop provide an excellent and rich environement that you cannot wait to see how you and your players can exploit for their characters gain (Like will they manage to climb the ranks to trusted advisors to the sultan? What challenging obstacles can I put in the way of them easily getting the magic ruby?) Then it is likely gammism.

Well...it's not really any of those things.

I want to frame scenes that inspire the players to take action*, in order to find out what that action is, and what reasonable consequences should result from it.

*I originally wrote "dramatic action", but I meant that in the sense of "significant" rather than "like a scripted drama". Leaving it in place would be rather likely to instantly inspire a particular, tedious reply of "AH SEE YOU HAVE A SPECIFIC STORY WRITTEN" except I don't.