D&D General RPG Theory and D&D...and that WotC Survey

[Professor Murder]

Understanding oneself is important and hard, but I think you've reversed some things here -- a framework can help with self understanding. It's the extremely rare individual that can divine thier own thinking without such tools and then articulate one. Most of that work is done by sharing and curiosity and discussion with peers. Which I'd certainly however come to better understand my own preferences and also, on topic, evaluate a rule set to see how it both is supposed to work and how it supports, or doesn't, my preferences. And I can articulate this very clearly to peers that have done similar work.

While I agree, it is also my experience that people can fall into the trap of obsessing about how to develop the framework instead of applying the framework in a practical setting. But then again, one person's obsessing is another's focus. I just tune out when people theorycraft on problems to the exclusion of actually addressing them.

 

[Parmandur]

In light of the...somewhat heated discussion about whether D&D is gamist and if so how, I've been digging a little into the history of RPG theory leading to the rise & fall of the GNS (Gamism/Narrativism/Simulationism) model, since I missed out on that drama when it happened. My exposure to GNS theory had been limited to Edwards's original articles on the topic, which I didn't find that problematic taken on their own (although they were very compact and assumed some experience with particular games). However, reading about the context of the theory's creation, and more importantly, how it was promulgated and "elaborated", gave me much insight into its reputations and the different ways different people react to it today.

And yet people continue to use the three principal terms of GNS theory, tacitly accepting the premise of a three-way split, but often without having read those original articles, or with different definitions and applications, in spite of the precedent Edwards established—or perhaps "appropriated" would be a better term, since he himself took the earlier Threefold Model's terms and redefined them (and redefined them further as his stance became more and more contentious). GNS may have died, according to some, but its embalmed corpse lingers on the Web and its ghost in the minds of those who've read about it. All that's to say that basic GNS terminology is now very loaded, and use of those terms more likely than not results in Huge Misunderstandings and arguments, largely split between those who are not versed in GNS theory and those who are (to whatever degree). For better or worse, undead though it be, GNS theory is basically what we have to work with.

Or is it? That history I linked above made reference to a survey WotC themselves did about types of gaming. It took some further digging to find a working (archive!) link, and it seems that survey has very nearly vanished from gamer memory. But it was a thing, and I have to wonder what influence those survey results had on the development of D&D and possibly the industry at large. Did WotC also forget about it? Did they actually use it for particular editions of D&D? Or did they just put this together and then bin it all? More relevant to those discussing theory, does it give you any new insights into designing, running, or playing D&D, or any other RPG, today? What do you think of it? (I have a few thoughts already but will save them for later, it's really late.)

There are other models/theories out there, of course, and feel free to discuss them here too if you like. But I'm mildly fascinated at this near-lost bit of RPG history.

You know, I had heard of this survey, but I had not seen this profile breakdown. This is brilliant, and explains a lot about the past twenty years of D&D design history 3E and 4E were Thinkers-Ascendent systems, that left the other playstyles a bit high and dry, and with 5E they finally began designing for that central position.

Much more useful than the hot garbage GNS mumbo-jumbo.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't think that's a coincidence. While I doubt Peterson intended for it to be that way, I came away from The Elusive Shift feeling rather depressed, since what I took from the book was that the RPG community has not only been struggling to define the various permutations of our hobby, but has largely failed at promulgating what ground has been broken, leading to the same contentious back-and-forths to be repeated across decades as we all flail about for terms and definitions for things we can intuit and perceive but only barely articulate.

That just sounds like the human condition overall.

 

[overgeeked]

Some of the relevant video game stuff is over in this old thread.

D&D General - Saving Players From Themselves

In discussing how challenging the game is or should be and player behavior, @Mordhau shared a couple of links. Players optimize the fun out of games. Reading the article and watching the video brought several things together in a weird kind of "aha!" and "well duh!" moment. The TL;DR...

www.enworld.org

And this video about the topic.


There’s a lot more and a lot more useful stuff in video game theory and design than there is in RPGs. There’s another article about player styles and enjoyment I have floating around but I don’t have the link handy.

ETA: Here’s the link. It’s an article about video game design with the academic source at the bottom.

Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics(MDA): game design theory behind games

Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics (MDA): The MDA It is considered to be the bridge between the game development and the game design.

gamedevelopertips.com

 

[LordEntrails]

The reason you can't define the essence, is the essence is different for everyone, and constantly shifting. It's not just hard to discuss, its impossible to discuss. The solution is don't try to talk about the essence, just focus on specifics.

True, but their can be value in stilling trying to discuss and understand the essence of something. Not everyone has "grokked" themselves or the essence yet and discussing it can help them figure it out. Or perhaps it might be someone like me that has been playing with the elephants trunk for decades and has grokked it, but then I read a blog, post, or played with different people who play with the leg and now I'm trying to grok the leg.

 

[Lanefan]

I find it rather ridiculous the claim from the end of the article that bias has been removed. The questions entirely focused on game structures that are like D&D, with some pretty hefty assumptions built in.

Seeing as it's a survey about D&D done by a company attenpting at the time to redesign D&D, I think it's fair to allow them to assume a D&D-like structure.

Not to mention participation bias.

Or data manipulation.

For example, all survey responses from people over a certain age (35, I think) were tossed*; meaning most of those who had started in the early days had no voice in the data.

This makes the results and conclusions drawn from the survey, in my view anyway, highly suspect.

* - this is noted in Dancey's report, a copy of which @Morrus has booting around somewhere in here. EDIT stored under the "Features" dropdown at the top of this or any page, it's the second option.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Seeing as it's a survey about D&D done by a company attenpting at the time to redesign D&D, I think it's fair to allow them to assume a D&D-like structure.

Sure, but that's hardly bias free.

 

[Reynard]

Weirdly, the younger video game industry is just trucking along with all kinds of models and theories about the whats and whys. People who are knowledgeable and educated in game theory and design are working on it. And they have gobs and gobs of data. It’ll be far easier to simply use their models and theories and apply them to RPGs.

The video game industry absolutely is not younger than tabletop RPGs. Pong was mass marketed in 1972 but the first electronic games were developed in the 1950s. By the early 1960s university systems were being regularly used for games. When D&D arrived in 1974 it was so quickly picked up and adapted to computer gaming (again, largely at universities) because the infrastructure and appetite was already there.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think there’s an interesting idea here in using the wargame concept of strategy vs. tactics as an analogy for the interplay between long-term narrative vs. immediate character interaction. But as a model of RPG theory, I think it’s pretty severely lacking, and even as a breakdown of D&D player demographics it’s rather weak.

 

[Umbran]

Which just shows what a waste of time it is to try and define the indefinable essence of a thing. If we can intuit it, we don't need to define it, we can just do it.

Mod Note:
If you don't find the discussion valuable, that's fine - you can exit the thread. But this amounts to telling people they shouldn't talk about stuff that interests them, which is not cool.

Let them talk about what they want to talk about, dude.