Dismissing Pun Pun as one degenerate case fails to think through what is going on in 3rd and 5th edition charop. System mastery in those two games allows construction of mechanically stronger characters. The intended game balance as laid out in the DMG, e.g. as guided by CR, entails that those characters will defeat encounters with ease that ought to be matched for their level. The tweak is for the DM to adjust encounters although often what happens is that the optimised character joins a group of unoptimised characters so that route isn't open.
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It is old news that more skill in the area of charop in 3rd and 5th edition lead to needing less skill during play (given a group is following the written principles of the game).
When you refer to CR and to
defeating encounters with ease are you referring to combat encounters? What about (say) Tomb of Horrors, which (notoriously) contains very little combat?
More generally, it may be that very little 3E or 5e play involves
engaging the fiction as opposed to playing a miniature skirmish game. But once we get to those episodes of 3E and 5e play that do involve playing the fiction, what role does character build play? And - more importantly given your claim - how does that affect the skill of play in the moment? My experience in playing AD&D is that many (not all, but many) players who are better at building mechanically effective characters (which in AD&D mostly concerns spell load-out) are also better at engaging the fiction when that is necessary, including by "creative" spellcasting. This experience of mine doesn't support the claim that the display of skill in one arena of play makes it unnecessary to, or is at odds with, displaying skill in another arena of play.
Each time you have asked for examples, you have quibbled the examples. And often not on the terms that the example was requested for. For example with the force example, the quibble was that it felt like it was teaching. We were not debating teaching, we were debating if force could be used in any way positively.
Your example in Burning Wheel is a different case.
Re force: You had posted (#285) that
A GM could certainly use force unskillfully which would very likely mean it was dissatisfying to players and limited their opportunities to play skillfully. On the other hand, a GM could use force skillfully to elevate the challenges and open up opportunities for players to play skillfully.
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I am saying that any DM decision is open to being skillful or unskillful, elevating or deflating to player skill.
This appeared to me to be a claim that a GM, by using force (eg by disregarding dice rolls or manipulating the hitherto unrevealed fiction) in a moment of play could enhance the degree of skill in that same moment of play.
But then you gave an example of using force to blunt the consequences of a player's declared and mostly-resolved action so that they might (i) learn about consequences and (ii) do better next time. Which is what I described as
teaching.
Do you have an example that actually cashes out the claim you made that I have just quoted? Ie of the use of force in the moment of play to enhance the skillfulness of play in that moment? The only answer I can construct from your posts is that you treat all GM narration as the use of force. But perhaps I haven't drawn all the inferences that your posts support, or perhaps I have misunderstood your claim?
Re Pun Pun, you posted (#333) that
For RPGs with strong character mechanics, such as 5e, we have the peculiar problem that the more skill a player has in one area of the game, the less they will likely need in another.
Now I don't know exactly what you mean by
strong character mechanics but I assume that 4e D&D and Burning Wheel would both count as examples, whereas presumably Prince Valiant and Cthulhu Dark wouldn't. I don't know about The Green Knight or Dungeon World, though I would think at least the latter might be on the "strong" side. It's not remotely obvious to me why Burning Wheel would be a "different case" from
RPGs with strong character mechanics. It's presumably an example of such an RPG; that's why I mentioned it.
And my experience with BW, and also with 4e D&D and DW, make me doubt your claim (of course
likely blunts the force of the generalisation, but if you're confining it to 3E and 5e D&D than why not just say so?).
Hence I asked (#372) "Are these conjectures based on actual play experience? Are you able to give examples that illustrate what you have in mind?" And you replied with Pun Pun, which is not an actual play example and doesn't (as far as I can tell) illustrate any general tendency for skill in RPGs with strong character mechanics to be zero sum either in when it is called for or when it is demonstrated. And even confined to 3E D&D, the fact of Pun Pun doesn't show that there is not the need to demonstrate skill in leveraging the fiction when other builds are being used.
So the reason I quibble with your examples is that they don't seem to address the concrete claims I take you to be making. This is further complicated, for me, because those concrete claims are mixed with other claims that I struggle to understand.
Perhaps I am reading your posts too literally? I don't know. In reply to my post (# 401) that mentioned "RPGing in which
playing with skill is a (or the) major preoccupation of the game?" you replied:
I like this approach. I would modify to say that it is impossible that playing with skill can be what is demonstrably happening for reasons you note (self-reporting), but that it is very possible to be preoccupied with playing in the way we call skillful (us being the group, and the wider community for whom the concepts and reports resonate).
Where some posts have most failed for me has been in claiming the high ground. I feel forced to resist your original framing not out of sheer pettiness, but because I read posts that seem to take it that if they are "playing with skill" then they know what skill is and is not, and can go on to dismiss what other groups call skillful.
Your "modification" rests on an apparent misreading of what I posted. I posted about RPGing in which
playing with skill is a major preoccupation of the game. This would be a RPG in which (in this respect) play more closely resembles (say) chess than it does (say) snakes-&-ladders. I didn't say, nor conjecture, nor posit, anything about whether or not anyone is actually playing with skill (demonstrably or otherwise): I'm referring to what play demands of players, not what they may or may not offer up in response to that demand.
If you are denying that I can tell whether or not
I, as a RPGer, am or am not concerned with skill, I simply disagree. I can tell when I am having to engage in the sort of skilled play that Gygax advocated (attention to gear and spell loadouts; careful manipulation of the fiction especially in respect of architecture; etc); likewise I can tell when I am playing a game that lets me ignore that sort of thing and just focus on inhabiting my character. This is just the same as I can tell the difference between playing bridge or five hundred, between chess and snakes-&-ladders, etc. And I didn't need Elo to invent his model of chess rankings to work out that chess is a skilled play game whereas snakes-&-ladders is not!
For similar reasons, I don't agree with your sceptical claim here:
Skill can't be known to loom large, only that the play satisfies the group and makes them feel like they exercised skill.
Of course people can overestimate (or underestimate) how well they played a game, but I think most of the time they can tell whether or not they were being called upon to exercise skill.
What I've been attempting to do is go beyond what amounts to statements about what is found satisfying to a group.
Whose statements do you have in mind? And which ones?
For instance, when I say that the play of classic D&D is fundamentally different from the play of Burning Wheel - with my evidence base being the game texts, the commentary of the designers found both in and beyond those texts, my own play experience, other's play experience, and the broader cultures of play associated with each - I don't take myself to be making a statement about
what is found satisfying to a group.
One of the clearest skill constructs we have in gaming is the Elo. This has been emulated by Microsoft's TrueSkill and in other games such as League of Legends MMR.
I don't know the Elo other than what I've just read on Wikipedia. It seems to be a way of generating a ranking based on comparisons of performances in two-player competitive games. I don't quite see what bearing this sort of measure has on RPGing. Even classic tournament play doesn't seem to me to generate the sorts of pairwise comparisons that would be needed to implement a ranking of this sort.
It also doesn't tell us what skill consists in. And it takes as a premise that playing the game well requires skill. Quoting from
Wikipedia:
Elo's central assumption was that the chess performance of each player in each game is a normally distributed random variable. Although a player might perform significantly better or worse from one game to the next, Elo assumed that the mean value of the performances of any given player changes only slowly over time. Elo thought of a player's true skill as the mean of that player's performance random variable.
It's not so much the mathematical demonstration, as the concrete construct and reducing of confounds around task modelling, task difficulty, and small group self-perceptions. When posters in this thread and others like it speak about skill, I feel at best they can be speaking about what their small group has experienced (in this context, less than a thousand is small).
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I find that other posters are speaking ambiguously and making it impossible to discuss real differences. However, I am happy to revert to discussing experiences and preferences. One can learn from sharing those. One cannot make claims to be saying anything concrete about skill, however. Well, that is a little harsh: one can make guesses and speculate as to factors (e.g. ingenuity) and say what factors one values, but one cannot say that one self-reported example was any more skillful than any other - even in cases where the other sounds on surface less skillful
The only basis on which Elo's assumptions about chess rests is the widespread intuition that chess is a game of skill, in which the more skilful player will typically beat the less skilful one, and that any given victory is probably a demonstration of greater skill on that occasion. (Unless you treat him as offering a stipulative definition of skill. But there are many reasons to think that he isn't; and chess players engage in all the sorts of activities one associates with skill-based pastimes: they practice, they get coaching, they study the successes and failures of other players, etc.)
In the context of RPGing, if a single person A asserts that on
this occasion of RPG play, skill was demanded of them, and on this other occasion it was not, why is that not a reliable intuition? Particularly if they can articulate their experience by reference to received markers of skill in RPGing - having regard to win/loss conditions, having regard to how that fiction might arise and what factors leading to or away from it the player sought to manipulate, etc.
I don't understand on what other basis you intend to make claims about the role of skill in RPGing. What conjectures are you hoping to establish, or disprove? What tasks are you intending to model? I am still having real trouble making sense of these elements of your posts.
I have played and/or DMd - Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel, RuneQuest, D&D (all editions), HeroQuest, Earthdawn, Shadowrun, Bushido, Empire of the Petal Throne, Land of the Rising Sun, Chivalry and Sorcery, Ars Magica, Traveller, Aftermath, Paranoia, GURPS, Savage Worlds, a diceless game of my own invention (influential in my small part of the world), Amber, Rifts, Champions, two or three games of friends' invention. We've probably one-session'd some others that I don't recall.
Thanks for this list. Does this mean that you haven't played or GMed D&D?
I've bolded two of the games you mentioned, because
Ron Edwards has made the following remark about them:
From
Maelstrom (Hubris Games, 1994, author is Christian Aldridge):
Literal vs. Conceptual
A good way to run the Hubris Engine is to use "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. ... focus on the intent behind the scene and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character. ... If the players enjoy the challenge of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the narrative flow and enjoyment of the game.
The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the character's abilities ... Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.
. . .
I can think of no better text to explain the vast difference between playing the games
RuneQuest and
HeroQuest.
There is a lot going on both in the passage quoted from
Maelstrom Storytelling and in the short remark that Edwards himself makes. But one consequence of the differences is that, in RQ, it makes sense - once the difficulty of the jump across the chasm is established by the GM - to try and identify advantages that will give a bonus on the relevant check and hence decrease the chance of failing. Conversely, in HeroQuest (and especially HeroQuest Revised) the player is not expected to try and manipulate the difficulties of tasks, which are set by the GM essentially by reference to pacing considerations. That's not to say one doesn't leverage the fiction, but to other ends - like establishing what is at stake and what the consequences - not in win/lose terms, but in purely fictional terms - will be. (Maelstrom itself uses various mechanical devices within its scene resolution system to handle this.)
Those differences in how the game plays have fundamental implications, in my view, for how one thinks about them from the perspective of "skilled play". For instance, I can just about conceive running Tomb of Horrors using RQ rather than AD&D as the basic mechanical framework (and I have in fact toyed with this using Rolemaster). But the idea of running ToH using HeroQuest seems to me like it makes no sense at all.
I wonder if you agree?