RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point

[Lanefan]

Undoubtedly, but D&D (nor even AD&D) presented any solid rules for how to do that. I mean, there are 'heuristics' effectively like spell ranges and AoEs, but if you read the 1e DMG combat chapter, there's NO SUCH THING as a specific 'square' or 'hex' in which a specific character is to be found!

Well, there is, but it takes some interpretation and combining of different bits and pieces.

The 1e DMG talks of facing, and of how much space a character "occupies", and so forth; but leaves things like moving through an occupied area largely up to the DM.

There are no rules for moving from one place to another (albeit there's a movement rate, and you can extrapolate some 'rules' from concepts like the poorly explained idea of being 'engaged'). So, I believe you can play 1e or 2e AD&D on a grid and utilize the ranges and such that are provided, but a LOT of what in a game like 3e, or 4e would be regulated by the rules, is simply up in the air and decided by the GM, grid/map or no grid/map.

We've been playing it using grid and minis since before I started (1982), using judgment calls when it comes to who can fit and-or move where but using move speed to determine how far people can go and the position/facing of the minis to determine who is where at any given time. We've never made it anywhere near as formalized as 3-4-5e have it, though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, there is, but it takes some interpretation and combining of different bits and pieces.

The 1e DMG talks of facing, and of how much space a character "occupies", and so forth; but leaves things like moving through an occupied area largely up to the DM.

We've been playing it using grid and minis since before I started (1982), using judgment calls when it comes to who can fit and-or move where but using move speed to determine how far people can go and the position/facing of the minis to determine who is where at any given time. We've never made it anywhere near as formalized as 3-4-5e have it, though.

Oh, we ALWAYS played, from at least 1977 onward, roughly, on a battlemat or something similar. I can remember playing in the dorms at college around 1983 and finding it weird and irritating that there was no feasible way to set up properly and thus being forced to just keep track of where stuff was in our heads.

My point is, AD&D doesn't seem to actually have any codified rules for playing on a grid. It has descriptions of things that use areas and distances, but how all that is intended to fit together is not spelled out at all, not even a little bit. The single example of combat in AD&D 1e core rules specifically disavows the notion that melee combatants are located in specific places, etc. and there ARE rules which seem to state there's just a sort of 'blob' of 'melee area' where everyone is kind of mixed together in a non-specific way. Yet a couple pages later you get discussions of shields being directional and diagrams of grids with notations on them. Its not really a coherent set of combat rules AT ALL. You can basically make up any sort of melee combat procedure you want and not be outside of something 'rulesish'.

Its not until 3e that there's actually a pretty coherent combat system that describes where you are, how you got there, how you move around, and the specific factors involved.

 

[Emberashh]

"If it's not in the book, it's not in the game" is not a maxim worth adhering too when discussing oD&D in particular. Those three brown booklets were incomplete, and there were many ideas Arneson and Gygax are on record mentioning as being missing, unintended, or otherwise noting how incomplete they are. Many of the people who bought and used those books filled in the gaps themselves because the game failed to actually work as a coherent system. Furthermore, it is a proto-RPG, the first of its kind, and the maxims that govern RPGs today were still being formed back then. Trying to base any maxim off of oD&D is bad practice.

That is all tangential to the point being made. Incomplete or not, what was sold in those books is what a person has to go on unless they've already been onboarded by an external oral tradition, and what was in those books was not an RPG by any modern standard.

And that is okay. There is zero cause here to get defensive over that statement.

As said, people really need to examine why this is making them uncomfortable, because it shouldn't be at all.

 

[Shardstone]

That is all tangential to the point being made. Incomplete or not, what was sold in those books is what a person has to go on unless they've already been onboarded by an external oral tradition, and what was in those books was not an RPG by any modern standard.

And that is okay. There is zero cause here to get defensive over that statement.

As said, people really need to examine why this is making them uncomfortable, because it shouldn't be at all.

My man, it doesn't matter if it's ok or not, I'm not getting defensive, I'm saying its a pointless categorization. It is the proto-RPG. It legitimately required exterior knowledge in order to use. They didn't sell those books intending on having a complete game in them, but intending for people with exterior knowledge to complete them. Ignoring this context just to say that, by themselves they aren't complete RPGs, is literally doing nothing. No one cares if you think they aren't RPGs because you ignore the context in which they exist, because at the end of the day, taking things out of their cultural and societal context when it clearly relies upon it is not worthwhile analysis. You defining it as anything else other than an RPG not only requires us to ignore the spirit and nature of oD&D, but it also doesn't add anything to the conversation, help us see anything in a different light, etc. It's like saying "Hey, by our standards today, goose feathers aren't technically pens?" ...And somehow this analogy still ends up adding more to my understanding of the world then pretending like there is anything worthwhile in talking about contextless oD&D.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Edit: I think I get it now.

Sorry if that came across as harping on it. I'm just always a little startled when people don't realize how many, in some cases really heavy, rules-intensive wargames there were back in the day. It was much more common than it is these days, far as I can tell (of course I'm not involved in non-computer wargames anymore, so I could be full of it).

 

[Thomas Shey]

"If it's not in the book, it's not in the game" is not a maxim worth adhering too when discussing oD&D in particular. Those three brown booklets were incomplete, and there were many ideas Arneson and Gygax are on record mentioning as being missing, unintended, or otherwise noting how incomplete they are. Many of the people who bought and used those books filled in the gaps themselves because the game failed to actually work as a coherent system. Furthermore, it is a proto-RPG, the first of its kind, and the maxims that govern RPGs today were still being formed back then. Trying to base any maxim off of oD&D is bad practice.

The term I've used for OD&D is "schematic"; in some ways its more of an outline of a game than a game (but see my comment about coming in from chit-and-hex wargaming for my perspective on this even now).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Oh, I agree. The difference in degree of imagination, however, between map-minis-terrain and full-on theatre of the mind is fairly large.

Moving your mini over to the door while others move their minis to cover you isn't quite the same as imagining the whole scene; and different players (and GMs) are more comfortable with different points along this line.

As I've noted, it also turns pretty greatly on how good a spatial imagination and memory you have. Mine isn't very good, for example, so I tend to use a digital battleboard even on games that don't care greatly about things like range and cover.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, the game just wasn't intended to be about advancement. Characters don't get supernaturally tough, etc. You CAN get more powerful, by amassing money, influence, ships, weapons, etc.

I don't think "Get better at being a pilot" would have made anyone supernaturally tough, especially if they had a diminishing returns in how it happened. I think it had more to do with the sense of how any advancement would have to match up with how little skill you tended to get in one of those four-year tours.

 

[kenada]

But even so, I am providing only screen grabs of relevant sections. It is textbook, and there's entire chapters here that Im basically paraphrasing or otherwise neglecting to cover. Reading the whole book (and treating it as textbook and doing the exercises it recommends) provides a much clearer picture than reading screen grabs basically out of context.

I ended up picking up a copy tonight on Apple Books. I’m pretty busy with my nixpkgs work right now, so I don’t know when I’ll have time to really dig into it, but it’s been helpful for understanding things like what all those different symbols mean in the diagrams. (I moved this up top to help contextualize the rest of my response.)

The Intent section covers it, and as related, what you're reading are examples of the pattern in practice, specifically the factually most common form it takes. They are not an exhaustive listing of every form the pattern can take.

If we step out of that specific one for a moment, lets take a look at another:

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This is relatively straightforward (energy here is just an abstract Resource of some kind that acts as currency for a given Action), and it can take a lot of different forms, but this is the mechanic that makes Action economies in TTRPGs work well. In PF2E, the multi-attack penalty is such a mechanism.

In a narrative game, there's typically some kind of enforced dramatic turn that directly results from actions (success with a cost in PBTA, for example). That too is a stopping mechanism.

And the list goes on. Most games have tons of different variants of these all over the place for obvious reasons, and when one "cheats", most of the time they're basically just turning all of these mechanisms off.

The book itself, for reference, references Warcraft III's (the RTS) lumber harvesting mechanics as well as the board game Power Grid, where the price of fuel acts as a stopping mechanism to prevent leading players from snowballing.

There do seem to be diverse examples. Playing-style reinforcement includes a few other examples past the part you cited. There’s Oblivion, which is obvious considering that using a skill directly contributes to getting better at it. There’s also Civilization III, which is less obvious (since you’re not directly playing an avatar). In Civ3’s case, the buildings you build feeds back into the strategy you choose.

So with all that said, it should follow then that we can look a given pattern, like playstyle reinforcement, and realize that it can apply as a generalized pattern that describes the overall mechanics of many different kinds of games, as well as different mechanics within the same game.

I would be careful about generalizing too much. The value in a design pattern is in its offering a (purportedly good) solution to a problem. If you push it too far, it starts to break down. In the case of playing-style reinforcement, it’s the feedback loop into your chosen strategy that seems to be important.

That is actually a completely fair point; Id have to actually set up and run ODND myself to verify, but that doesn't seem to be too farfetched a hypothesis.

Shooting holes in my own hypothetical, the issue I see with it is the feedback loop is very weak. I perform my action (listening at the door), but the outcome may end up completely divorced from what I intended. We could still lose the fight inside even with surprise. I think the connection needs to be more direct, so the player can see the benefit the action has to their chosen strategy.

And Id also grant that how the pattern listing was set up in the book is wanting, which I still think makes sense given the audience the book is aimed at. Most video game people aren't going to care about the specifics we've been chewing on unless they're among the ones trying to build emergent storytelling systems. Like, Id wager the Shadow of Mordor devs had this pattern in mind, even if they don't specifically use this methodology to guide their mechanic design.

There’s probably an opportunity to develop patterns specific to tabletop RPGs. I don’t know how much use people would get out of them though. I feel about it similarly to other RPG theory in that it’s something I might use as a sanity check after the fact, but I don’t find a lot of value in it as a starting point. What I find works well is taking an idea, and just running a game with it.

I mentioned in another thread trying to run everything like it’s PvP. It sounded like a really cool idea in theory, inspired by this article by Jon Peterson on a particular classic style where players played both sides. It seemed like a good solution to the conflict of interest issue I mentioned in post #54. Nope. Felt like crap. I’m glad I found that one out quickly, so I wouldn’t waste any more time to it.

As far as the Undertale example goes, as Im not familiar with the game, Id ask if playing a Pacifist style results in feedback from the game. I would assume the game is harder playing that way, and that in of itself is feedback, but from your posts it seems as though the game responds to Pacifism more directly than that, for good or bad, and if it does, then it is reinforcing that playstyle. It may be positive or negative reinforcement, but that doesn't necessarily matter to the pattern.

The feedback you get in the game is that monsters become your friends. The pacifist route is self-imposed until you get to a point of no return, which then takes you to a new area that reveals a lot about what has been happening. The feedback loop seems very weak. It’s not really helping your strategy. The fact that it’s harder, and there’s always the temptation to use the easy solution, seems more like using static friction for thematic reinforcement (using the player’s own will as the resource to drain rather than one in the game itself).

 

[Aldarc]

It seemed dismissive of D&D as an rpg. As if to put it in a separate class of games. When it isn’t as simple as that. It absolutely was a role playing game. They called it a war game because lots of games like it were called war games and they didn’t have another useful term.

It’s not like they rejected calling it a role playing game. The term didn’t exist, as far as I know.

This is commonly the case in the development of new genres. The term "Sword & Sorcery" didn't exist in the time of Robert Howard's Conan, which is regularly considered a benchmark for the genre. It was a term coined much later as part of an exchange between Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber in their desire to distinguish their work and Conan's from the sort of fantasy written by Tolkien and Lewis. Likewise, there are many video/computer games in the early generations of their given genre that never would have identified according to that genre (e.g., Metroidvania, Survival, etc.), precisely as per above: the terminology didn't exist yet!