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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Even if you shift it to some other power structure, you are drawing from the same well as the all powerful human referee. And if you put constraints on the GM, you are just constraining that, you are still relying on human referee, but you have simply limited what the human referee can do. If you use random tables, the point is, like rules, they are only as good as teh tables themselves. It takes human judgement to go beyond those things and make play boundless

I'm simply pointing out that there are ways that work which are not Dave's ways, and the underlying point was that I was impressed by the open ended nature of the game, not especially by Dave's implementation. Although I certainly wasn't aware, then, that there were other options.

 

[Micah Sweet]

IMHO it was replaced by WotC with a unified 3e design precisely because it had become unmanageable. 2e had reached a point of, essentially, collapse. Anything you attempted to add or change had to deal with 1000s of other elements. Or else just punt. For non-player-facing stuff punting is OK, but late era 2e is so bad you cannot really create a PC unless you sit down with the GM and hash out how everything works together on your sheet, what variant subsystems exist, etc.

Contrast with 4e which has at least as much material as 2e, yet 'just works' and could be expanded upon almost limitlessly and still work.

And I would argue that, through keywords and adherence to/establishment of thematic coherence, it can do everything 2e can do, but better. And note, I'm not addressing aesthetics like whether you like the classes or the balance of hit points to damage in combat, or even any arguments about the specific rules, like SCs. All that could be different and the same advantages realized.

So I have to reject your thesis.

4e doesn't have nearly the amount of material 2e has. 10 years of regularly released product, a dozen campaign settings and their updates and supplements, and a continuous monthly magazine pumping out content the whole time. How does 4e compare to that?

 

[Lanefan]

It's just common sense.

If a player can't do something in the rules because the DM has made a setting decision, the player has less agency. Full stop.

In a standard 5e game, I can make a PC that is a tiefling. If the DM says his sandbox game only has 4 races (human, elf, orc, and dragonborn), then I as a player can't make a tiefling PC. I, as a player, have less agency.

You have less agency over the setting, but if setting is the DM's purview anyway and species-playable is a function of setting then that's an agency you never had in the first place.

What matters is, once you've rolled up your human or elf or orc, how much agency you have when it comes to actually playing it. "No evil characters" hammers agency far harder than does "No tieflings" because it sets arbitrary limits on how I can play my character in the setting, and to me that loss of agency is a very bad thing in itself.

That loss of agency is not a good or bad thing, in and of itself. There are plenty of games that are improved by DM curation of setting to provide a more focused experience. But the restriction of player agency is an objective description of the state of play.

 

[zakael19]

Man, that's a really solid blog. Made me appreciate arguments for high-prep pregen play (i.e. "blorb" play) more than 6000+ posts here did.

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve cited her repeatedly a couple hundred pages ago trying to understand how and why, because thats what she’s focused on in a really digestible way. We do This so That…

 

[Lanefan]

I think the sticking point is "the world around them is doing stuff". I think that's really a critical difference between the orientations of play.

What the "world around them is doing stuff" means, from my perspective (and from reading various sandbox games oriented books, like Kevin Crawford's X without Number series), is this.

The GM has created a model of a setting. This model is mostly mental, but often supported by physical notes and tools (campaign wikis, encounter tables, gazetteers, maps, etc.). This model is generally focused on important factions, nations, NPCs, etc.

The living world GM is taking this model and then running an objective (although there are differences in opinion in how much objectivity is possible) SimCity/Paradox strategy style set of mental heuristics, possibly supplemented by physical tools, to determine what these various factions and NPCs are doing, how they're interacting, and crucially, what impact the PC actions will have on these interactions and how these interactions will possibly impact the fictional space the PCs currently inhabit.

What this means at the table is that this process will result in new encounters or scenes, and critically these encounters/scenes are NOT generated as a direct result of PC's desires or actions. They can of course be an indirect result, but they are not being generated as directly pursuant/focused on PC goals.

They are the needs of the setting to invoke its own agency on the shared narrative. Because if the setting doesn't have its own demonstrated agency, then how else do you demonstrate at the table that the world is really living and operating under its own heuristics?

I fail to see a problem with any of this, provided that the PCs can by their actions cause halfway-logical downstream changes to events that would have happened differently had the PCs not intervened.

If the PCs do nothing, the world is going to keep on keeping on. If the PCs do things, whether related to their goals or not, the rest of the world that they're not interacting with is going to keep on keeping on. The PCs are not the world, nor does the world revolve around them (unlike play at the table, which does).

 

[hawkeyefan]

That’s where the issue lies,your approach places everything into what I would call the second category: metagame agency Meta Agency. In doing so, it ends up being more limited than mine.

The reason is that RPGs aren’t games in the conventional sense. Game theory has only narrow application to RPGs. What makes tabletop roleplaying distinct is its character-centric play loop: the referee describes the situation, the players describe what their characters do, the referee adjudicates, and then describes the resulting situation. This cycle, pioneered by Dave Arneson in his Blackmoor campaign, is the core of the experience.

Because of this character-centric loop, there's an entire layer of agency in TTRPGs that isn’t present in most other games,specifically, what players can do solely as their characters.

You can see this difference at the very beginning of the hobby. Blackmoor was the first tabletop roleplaying campaign. Dave Arneson demoed it for Gary Gygax, which inspired the creation of OD&D. At the same time, Dave Megarry, inspired by the same Blackmoor dungeons, created Dungeon!, a board game. Both were born from the same source, but one clearly remained a board game while the other created an entirely new type of experience.

Further, it's possible to run a tabletop RPG campaign where players never interact with the rules at all. If the referee is skilled and has solid preparation, they can adjudicate everything using only their notes. It’s not easy,it demands strong communication and a high level of trust at the table, but it can be done. I’ve done it twice in 40 years of refereeing, both times as one-shots. Each felt like a typical TTRPG session using a rules-light system.

I understand you may have objections or questions about this. But ultimately, I think it’s a mistake to view RPGs solely as games. They are their own category, and “game” is only one part of what they are.

So I'll start by saying that I think it is essential to view RPGs as games. They have a structure. Knowing that structure is key to players being able to effectively navigate play.

Aside from that, I think your point about the division you've made in agency would apply if a game only offered what you're calling meta-agency. But the games in question offer both types of agency... character and meta. Which would then seem to imply that any game that only allows one, would allow less agency.

To summarize this in an admittedly pithy way... it seems like you're saying "We choose to have this limitation! Don't say we're limited!"

It is only cheating because an authority said it was cheating. Otherwise, it is something that either side is physically capable of outside of the rules used on the field. And a decision that is made outside of the rules of game being played on the field.

Another is player substitution, which is allowed in American football now but wasn't used to be. The decisions on when to substitute lie outside the rules used on the field, hence a form of metagaming. In Soccer, substitutions were not allowed until 1958.

I'm not going to recognize cheating as a viable form of agency.

And substitutions are absolutely handled by the rules of the game. They can only be done at specific times, and only up to a certain number of times per game.

A better avenue to take in forms of agency outside the game would be something typically called "intangibles" in sports. Mentorship and the like in between games, things like presence and charisma and instruction. These are things that I still see as falling under the overall umbrella of agency, but they are less direct than what a player does during play.

You are doing good, it is alright to be passionate about what you think is important about RPGs.

I'm just trying to make it clear that I enjoy many kinds of games, and that I don't have a problem with anyone else enjoying what they enjoy, or anything of the sort. My motivations have been called into question a few times, so I want to be clear.

 

[AlViking]

Here's how I see it:

Not wanting new ideas in your gaming ... not a problem.
Not wanting new ideas in gaming ... problem.

Has anyone said they care what anyone else plays? I know I don't. I'm perfectly happy with D&D nowadays and I don't need rules novelty to make the game fun.

But if you enjoy dozens of different games? Good for you. I actually kind of miss the old days of experimentation when I had time, opportunity and game design wasn't limited to what sometimes feels like D&D variants and variations on 2 themes.

 

[Lanefan]

Just a personal note: I’ve found through trial and error that the only things necessary to prepare are those that affect how the characters in the player's immediate social circle are roleplayed. However, campaigns are supposed to be fun for the referee, so if making King Lists brings you joy, as it does me, go for it. It probably won’t come up in play much, but it will be a heck of a lot of fun to make.

And if-when it does come up in play you'll sure be glad you made that list!

For my setting I made up a list of all the Emperors the local-to-start realm has had in its almost 1100 years of existence, with about 6-10 words for each describing something about their reign or the realm at the time. Came in damn useful when a character managed to punt himself 650 years back in time; I already knew who the Emperor was and, more importantly, what the general mood of the place was at the time.

 

[hawkeyefan]

And if-when it does come up in play you'll sure be glad you made that list!

For my setting I made up a list of all the Emperors the local-to-start realm has had in its almost 1100 years of existence, with about 6-10 words for each describing something about their reign or the realm at the time. Came in damn useful when a character managed to punt himself 650 years back in time; I already knew who the Emperor was and, more importantly, what the general mood of the place was at the time.

Well, I would expect that you could have just as easily come up with 6 to 10 words on the spot!

There's nothing wrong with having done all that ahead of time... but it's not necessary, and you'd have been just fine if you hadn't.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, I would expect that you could have just as easily come up with 6 to 10 words on the spot!

There's nothing wrong with having done all that ahead of time... but it's not necessary, and you'd have been just fine if you hadn't.

I would say rather that you would have been just fine, because you don't value pre-session prep as much as he does. Your statement says nothing about him.