D&D General Story Now, Skilled Play, and Elephants

[clearstream]

(b) be steeped in setting tourism of some variety (particularly if they are attached to a particular setting, its tropes, its NPCs - eg FR)...
...Rudderless design fundamentally aids this play paradigm.

My word, now this is fighting talk! My tastes are immersionist. Your comment made me feel a little like you picture we immersionists gladly swilling from the trough of inferior game design. Certainly we cannot be said to have tastes worth elevating. Right?

Bah! I think my tastes are perfectly valid, elevated, and demanding. Few indeed are the game materials that support it. Griffin Mountain for RQ would be one shining example. Masks of Nyarlathotep for CoC also.

The Forge calls these player archetypes "Participationists" and the play "Participationism." Its one of the Forges best offerings in my opinion. And my sense is that the gaming world at large is a vast majority of these players. Consequently, it appears that "aversion to Force (and resultant subversion of the competitive integrity of the throughline of the gamestate)" is not a factor in a game "being very widely embraced and enjoyed!"

Another possibility is that the big-tent games make room for players to enter with their preferred agenda? Or near enough that the compromises in order to join a thriving community feels worthwhile. Maybe that was what I was trying to say to @Campbell earlier: people are able to moderate their demands so as to enjoy one another's company in play, even if they come with different agendas. The spotlight can move about the tent.

That's certainly what I find with my regular gaming groups. Player A is all about RP, player B is more interested in G, but they enjoy playing together. I sometimes see player B tremendously enjoying player A's RP. A homogeneity-thesis* guides us to look for fellows like ourselves. A heterogeneity-thesis* guides us to see value and delight in our differences.

EDIT So if you can set aside the snobbery, then perhaps you end up agreeing with the way I put it?



*NB: I don't mean to refer to any pre-existing theses with these labels, they're just for the sake of this discussion... to get across an idea.

 

[clearstream]

At which point every professional author, actor, director, and other form of professional story-teller slowly turn, and give anyone saying that the hairy eyeball. Any time you require human discretionary input to achieve a desired result, there can be skill in providing that input. What that skill looks like will depend on the process and input required, but a person can be skilled at it.

I would agree with that, but please don't let my words tar @Ovinomancer. I might well have misstated or oversimplified their views. For one thing, they might only be speaking in the sense of gamist skill.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Amen to this. And it isn't really a dig at the authors - in the early days of RPGs... it was early. There was no established experience of how to do this well to draw upon.

That's true, but also not the reason (or not the sole reason) for the confluence of written and unwritten rules (or, as some might say, rules and norms) in early D&D.

D&D came from a very insular, small, and most importantly ... hobbyist community (wargaming, adult who still gamed). There was a lot of collaboration, borrowing, and DIY involved. Early D&D (and RPGs in general) assumed a base level of knowledge and familiarity.

In a way, we can compare this to the "rules" in a cookbook. If you are not familiar with cooking at all, some cookbooks can seem intimidating or like they're skipping necessary steps. What does it mean to "boil water." How do you know if butter is browned? When it says to saute the vegetables, what does that mean? And so on. Most cookbooks assume some level of basic cooking knowledge (luckily, we have the internet now to answer most of those questions).

It was the same with early TTRPGs. They were games written by an intense group of hobbyists, originally for an other hobbyists, with the assumption that you would both be able to understand the background of this material, but that you would also be altering the rules as needed (DIY).

The irony is that the complaints some people had later (and the infamous "Dungeons and Beavers" column by Gygax) was not because of any need for actual rules standardization was desired in the overall community- far from it. Instead, if you contrast what was said earlier (with the explicit statements that the rules were not the end-all, be-all!) and the evolution of TSR along with the lawsuits, you see that the so-called rules standardization was simply about ensuring all the money stayed with TSR. It wasn't that there was something magical about RAW; instead, it was about keeping tables from making their own rules, and more importantly, keeping 3PP from devising rules that people would buy.

It's not the story of game design. It's the story of capitalism.

 

[Umbran]

I would agree with that, but please don't let my words tar @Ovinomancer. I might well have misstated or oversimplified their views. For one thing, they might only be speaking in the sense of gamist skill.

There's a reason I said "anyone saying that". I'm addressing the idea, not the person.

 

[Umbran]

It was the same with early TTRPGs. They were games written by an intense group of hobbyists, originally for an other hobbyists, with the assumption that you would both be able to understand the background of this material, but that you would also be altering the rules as needed (DIY).

So, I agree wholeheartedly with your description. But I still classify this as not knowing how to write such a text - this is at the very basis of not knowing what ought to be in the book when considering broader publication.

What does it mean to "boil water." How do you know if butter is browned? When it says to saute the vegetables, what does that mean? And so on. Most cookbooks assume some level of basic cooking knowledge (luckily, we have the internet now to answer most of those questions).

Cooking is a great analogy, especially because we can compare and contrast various cooking instructions. There's a lot of cooking instruction out there that is bad. Remember, just because it is in a published book, doesn't mean it is a good example. There's a large body of work out there written without even testing the recipe to see if it produces the desired results! Martha Stewart cookbooks, for example, have been notorious for this.

 

[Ovinomancer]

TFW your mentions are all about other people using you as a proxy for there own argument instead of addressing your points which either already answer the question being asked or directly refute it. Like where I said that there's absolutely skill in telling stories, and mention examples of such, but say that the goal of telling good stories cuts against skilled play only to be mentioned as someone that thinks that telling stories doesn't involve skill.

@clearstream -- you jump so quickly between word uses that your arguments end up largely as confusing gibberish. Skilled play is not skill, even though they share the word skill. Skill at making baskets is not skilled play in an RPG. The error you're making here is that you're putting telling a story as a goal, noting it takes skill, and then saying that this is skilled play. At no point do you look to see if it matches the given definitions of leveraging the system to achieve player goals within the scope of the game. If I'm just enforcing my story, even skillfully, I'm not leveraging the system to achieve player goals within the scope of the game. Thus, while this is a demonstration of skill, it's not skilled play.

And, for the record, I very much appreciate how stories are told. I'm a student of telling stories in many mediums. It's a craft. I endeavor to do my best and apply my learned skill when I run 5e, because my goal there is usually to deliver an entertaining story. I can, without much hubris, say that I am fairly skilled at doing this well, even at the necessary steps of hiding the Force necessary (or making it fun). I have not problem acknowledging that I am skillful here, but that I am not supporting skilled play in my game. Skilled play is not a catch-all that contains all efforts, it's a specific approach to games that delivers. Other approaches exist, and can also show skill in their application. There's a reason my definition of skilled play does not rely on the word skill at all.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

So, I agree wholeheartedly with your description. But I still classify this as not knowing how to write such a text - this is at the very basis of not knowing what ought to be in the book when considering broader publication.


Cooking is a great analogy, especially because we can compare and contrast various cooking instructions. There's a lot of cooking instruction out there that is bad. Remember, just because it is in a published book, doesn't mean it is a good example. There's a large body of work out there written without even testing the recipe to see if it produces the desired results! Martha Stewart cookbooks, for example, have been notorious for this.

There was a person I once knew (a UI Engineer) who had this poster up, with these incredibly detailed, step-by-step instructions about the process of sharpening a pencil. It was illustrated and had, like, 20 different steps to it.

I always thought it was a hilarious and ironic joke; one day I mentioned my appreciation of it to him, and he told me that I had it all wrong. It wasn't a joke at all. Instead, he had it up so that he was always reminded that even the simplest things in the world that you take for granted always have a number of discrete steps that need to be explained, and that people assume that they don't need to be explained.

Much like the sharpened pencil, there's a point to that, which I'm sure I missed.

 

[Ovinomancer]

RE: skilled play being an agenda

I think this is a chicken-egg situation. Is skilled play detectable in moments of play -- I think yes. Is it detectable holistically -- I think yes. Which causes which? Don't know. Skilled play is an agenda, but I'm not quite willing to say which direction that flows.

 

[Manbearcat]

RE: skilled play being an agenda

I think this is a chicken-egg situation. Is skilled play detectable in moments of play -- I think yes. Is it detectable holistically -- I think yes. Which causes which? Don't know. Skilled play is an agenda, but I'm not quite willing to say which direction that flows.

This is a good post and expresses much of where I sit (your last two posts are there actually).

I think the only amendment I would put for myself personally (and I tried to capture that in one of my posts not long upthread) is that I think its a reinforcing loop that cannot be disentangled (so you could look at it as flowing to and from both things - agenda and moments).

 

[Manbearcat]

My word, now this is fighting talk! My tastes are immersionist. Your comment made me feel a little like you picture we immersionists gladly swilling from the trough of inferior game design. Certainly we cannot be said to have tastes worth elevating. Right?

Bah! I think my tastes are perfectly valid, elevated, and demanding. Few indeed are the game materials that support it. Griffin Mountain for RQ would be one shining example. Masks of Nyarlathotep for CoC also.


Another possibility is that the big-tent games make room for players to enter with their preferred agenda? Or near enough that the compromises in order to join a thriving community feels worthwhile. Maybe that was what I was trying to say to @Campbell earlier: people are able to moderate their demands so as to enjoy one another's company in play, even if they come with different agendas. The spotlight can move about the tent.

That's certainly what I find with my regular gaming groups. Player A is all about RP, player B is more interested in G, but they enjoy playing together. I sometimes see player B tremendously enjoying player A's RP. A homogeneity-thesis* guides us to look for fellows like ourselves. A heterogeneity-thesis* guides us to see value and delight in our differences.

EDIT So if you can set aside the snobbery, then perhaps you end up agreeing with the way I put it?



*NB: I don't mean to refer to any pre-existing theses with these labels, they're just for the sake of this discussion... to get across an idea.

Addressing your top paragraph primarily here:

To be clear, I don't remotely hold the position that your tastes (or the tastes of Participationist players who make up a massive cross-section of TTRPG space) are to be sneered at.

My offering is not and was not pejorative. Like it always is when I offer it, its descriptive, as in:

If I were designing a game to cater to this apex play priority (and/or adjacent play priorities that typically accrete to it), this is how I would design that game.