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

[pemerton]

When it comes to skilled play, it seems to me that some questions to which existence proofs are relevant include:

1. Is it possible to have RPGing in which playing with skill is a (or the) major preoccupation of the game?

2. If the answer to (1) is yes, is it also possible to have RPGing in which meeting challenges is a (or the) major preoccupation of the game, but skill does not loom especially large?

3. If the answer to (2) is yes, is it also possible to have RPGing in which outcomes in confronting challenges turns more on what the players do in the moment of play than on prior input from players or decision-making by the GM?​

What are some examples of - "prior input from players" and "decision-making by the GM"?

Prior input from player might be the build of the character - so that when challenges are confronted, this is a (perhaps the) significant determinant of how things turn out. My impression is that at least some 5e D&D players in this way. (And not because of any particular skill in PC building, but because of what the participants take to be the connection between choice of class and archetype and the process of action resolution. The notion of "spotlight" I think would be closely relatd to this.)

Some of Classic Traveller play is also like this - and there is very little skill involved in Classic Traveller PC building! For certain sorts of situations (maybe they're not really challenges, but I'll set that to one side - I'm thinking of routine encounters with officials, of routine operation of a starship, and of buying and selling trade goods) it is the skill that is brought to the situation rather than a decision made in the moment of play that determines how things turn out.

Examples of GM decision-making might be deciding what happens next without regard to what the players do in the moment of play. Many TSR and WotC modules advocate this sort of approach.

 

[pemerton]

With the Elo two players who have never met have a prediction as to which of them will win. With RPG, if we took a player from a group and put them in some random other group (I mean really random, chosen from among all groups on Earth) I don't think we will be in position to sync them up the same way: they might have been seen as skillful in their home group, and seem unskillful in this random group.

Referring to charop, say the group they are dropped into are huge charop'ers, and their DM has shifted encounter difficulty to deal with this uber-munchkin-ness. They might flounder with their unoptimised characters and be felt by the group to be a low skill player.

For what it's worth, my experience does not conform with this conjecture.

When I read reports of classic D&D tournament play, for instance, I can see what the skill is that is being expressed and can see how it would be portable. When these players end up in groups of more casual players, what I have seen is either (i) the casual group boots the more hardcore player as "not a good fit", or (ii) the casual group "ups its game" and becomes less casual in approach. But I've never seen an example where the casual group brings the hardcore player into conformity with its notion of skill.

For completeness, I'm talking above about D&D groups.

So I don't think of RPGs broadly like the NFL. Not even like football. More like on the same level as sports or board games. Skills don't transfer from game to game. Mostly the only thing that does is your ability to reason about the fictional space. I think of Apocalypse World or Moldvay B/X (or any game that has a completed design with objectives and play processes detailed) like I do the NFL. Skills will generally transfer pretty well from game to game, although you might benefit from understanding how the ref calls stuff.

Mostly I do not think there's a great way to talk about this stuff in a broad way outside of the context of specific games.

I think that there are big differences between RPGing and competitive team sports. The big one is the absence of head-to-head competition. Even tournament play is more like scoring in gymnastics or diving.

But before Elo was invented and player ratings in commercial sports were invented, people (i) could talk meaningfully about which games required skill and which didn't, and (ii) about what those skills were, and (iii) about which players demonstrated them. Technical rankings of skill piggyback on those prior understandings of what playing skill consists in.

The absence of technical rankings does not preclude talking in meaningful ways about skill in RPGing.

 

[clearstream]

Prior input from player might be the build of the character - so that when challenges are confronted, this is a (perhaps the) significant determinant of how things turn out. My impression is that at least some 5e D&D players in this way. (And not because of any particular skill in PC building, but because of what the participants take to be the connection between choice of class and archetype and the process of action resolution. The notion of "spotlight" I think would be closely relatd to this.)

Some of Classic Traveller play is also like this - and there is very little skill involved in Classic Traveller PC building! For certain sorts of situations (maybe they're not really challenges, but I'll set that to one side - I'm thinking of routine encounters with officials, of routine operation of a starship, and of buying and selling trade goods) it is the skill that is brought to the situation rather than a decision made in the moment of play that determines how things turn out.

Good examples.

As an aside, stochastic effects tend to smudge out skill in small samples. In large enough samples, even a small skill quotient is detectable. It is easy to picture a case with no skill whatsoever: e.g., dice rolling with no modifiers possible and no choice over when and which dice to roll.

Examples of GM decision-making might be deciding what happens next without regard to what the players do in the moment of play. Many TSR and WotC modules advocate this sort of approach.

I feel sure that I have seen module text of this ilk, albeit I'm trying to recollect a specific example. Would module text advising to take characters hostages rather than killing them outright count?

We're picturing here a set (all possible DM decisions) of which a subset might be (only decisions having regard to what players did). Both sets are logically infinite. What this sort of abstraction (let's call it, for me it is making more concrete) suggests is that quibbling will be around what counts as "having regard to what players did". There isn't a way to know the contents of the subset unless we have a filter in common.

Which indicates to me that you probably need to say something about what counts as "having regard to what players did". One case is that you have a written rule or principle - say printed in a module - that reads "disregard what players do: do X instead". One reason that is done is to deal with a common problem where the designers of finite content needed to ensure that whatever players do, they are gated through to the next piece of content. There are no doubt other motives - I'm not sure we need to discuss them.

The more interesting situation is where we lack such written rule or principle, and the DM is free to make any decision. That is where it needs to be fleshed out what counts as "having regard to what players did". This is one of those cases where everyone will say it is completely obvious, but somehow not be able to really define it. I'm not ruling out a definition, and am even open to a soft definition: I'm interested in what that is though?

 

[pemerton]

Pun Pun in absolute isolation, perhaps not. But Pun Pun in context? Yeah, I kind of think it does demonstrate a (degenerate) instance of a big part of 3e-era skilled play for a variety of reasons:

• Optimization in 3e, with few exceptions, is almost purely self-focused. Buffing one ally < buffing yourself; in-combat healing < dealing damage; teamwork with the potential for payoff < personal effort with direct payoff. I once lamented that 3e optimization was an exercise in each individual player maximizing their personal contribution to the exclusion of party play...and had several expert 3e optimizers chime in with agreement. Pun Pun demonstrates a (degenerate) side of this through personal nigh-infinite numbers loops that do nothing to benefit allies.
• Expert knowledge of several highly disparate sections of the rules is, at least according to some of 3e's designers, an intentional expectation of "learning to properly play 3e." Pun Pun in particular requires a diverse array of things: Divine Minions, Savage Species options, prestige classes, and Monster Manual entries, just to name a few. This is a well-known aspect of 3e skilled play: the degree to which you have working knowledge of the numerous options available directly correlates to the power you can wield if you so choose.
• The expectation, in 3e, that the rules will be followed more-or-less as written unless there's a good justification for doing so. Though I think people often play up how dramatic the difference is between prior editions and 3e, there is something to the notion that, when people played 3e, they expected that the rules as written (particularly the player-facing ones) were in some sense part of the social contract, and thus could not be changed without a reasonable rationale first.

Yes, Pun Pun is degenerate. But it is degenerate in order to highlight some of these characteristics that appear in 3e skilled play, much as the Tomb of Horrors is a degenerate demonstration of certain characteristics of older-school play (incredibly high lethality, "puzzle" monsters, difficult-to-foresee but very dangerous traps, the struggle between player-made SOPs and DMs wanting to induce difficult choices, etc.) By throwing these characteristics into sharp relief, without any of the typical mitigating elements present, both things communicate something about the context in which they appeared, even though neither truly represents its associated style.

I don't disagree with any of your dot points. I just don't think that those features that Pun Pun illustrates are evidence that a carefully built 3e era character and a casually built one started out notably different in capability, and that difference only snowballed with time as the accumulated feats, equipment choices, and other character options set in. Which is the post I was replying to.

 

[clearstream]

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?

This is where Pun Pun is so ideal. Pun Pun wins ToH without effort. There is literally nothing in ToH that can serve up difficulty to Pun Pun.

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.

Whatever it is called, it worked to "open up opportunities for players to play skillfully", which is my exact claim.

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?

Can you address the general claim that force applied to random encounter rolls offers such benign examples, first?

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.

4e has balanced character mechanics, and never got so far into splatbooks as 3rd ed. It is possible to charop in 4e. It isn't possible to charop to the same point. Burning Wheel is the same. I'm not sure charop is even a thing in BW. Some skills are more useful than others so I guess picking those skills helps, but this is highly dependent on what the campaign stresses. 5th ed allows for high charop, still falling short of 3rd charop.

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?).

In my post #375 I said - "The crispest example is charop in 3rd edition." and I went on to give such an example from 3rd edition. Perhaps the crispest example that exists, period. So I rather feel that I did say so.

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.

I feel this is true, and would just like to exclude a way in which it could (but I'm assuming isn't here) taken. A player can say something informative about factors of skill. They might say for example that they are good at spell efficiency in 5e. There are two things that they cannot say -

1. their degree or strength of skill, because they may feel they have strong skill after being consistently confronted with tasks that are difficult, but beatable, at their skill level.... but that tells us nothing about where they sit among all players; most games are constructed to have beatable tasks, and most players are working with a small, local, subjective data set
2. that they have a complete picture of factors of skill (in any context, including their own) or can exclude factors that might count as skillful (in any context, but more often in regard to contexts other than their own)

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.​

Yes, that is exactly what I meant when I stated Elo was silent on the factors of skill.

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.)

Skill in games is generally defined as a prediction of success against a task of known type and difficulty. Yes, there are confounds - I discussed those including practice effect. What I meant when I talked about statements in relation to this is that posters are using the word skill in a different way here. Less concrete. That is okay, we just need to appreciate that fact.

Thanks for this list. Does this mean that you haven't played or GMed D&D?

I literally included "D&D (all editions)" in my list.

I will respond to your further thoughts separately as they are interesting and maybe we will find common ground. I don't think you necessarily need to respond to my above: I wanted most to draw attention to where we are passing one another like ships in the night. To be fair, I have no doubt done the same to you.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't disagree with any of your dot points. I just don't think that those features that Pun Pun illustrates are evidence that a carefully built 3e era character and a casually built one started out notably different in capability, and that difference only snowballed with time as the accumulated feats, equipment choices, and other character options set in. Which is the post I was replying to.

I mean, I don't really see why Pun Pun isn't an example of a "carefully-built character," one that exploits content across the whole of 3rd Edition (both non-superseded 3e content and 3.5e content) aka "snowballed" from "accumulated...options," in order to completely transcend any mathematical limits the game might try to impose aka "notably different in capability."

Yes, it's what people would call TO--theoretical optimization--that would almost never see the light of play. Yes, it's as much a criticism of the faults of the 3e engine as it is a demonstration of optimization power. But it's still proof that a very cleverly built character, with just a few levels, can become an utter math-destroying monster, while a casually-built one is quite likely to not even keep up with the game's expectations past level 6.

Now, I admit, to fully make that comparison you need the other side of things. Say, a Fighter who takes Toughness and has a high stat of 16 (in Charisma, because the player wants to play an experienced war hero who's led troops before), wielding a dagger and a buckler in order to take advantage of hidden weapons. And said Fighter never looks at books beyond the PHB because "that's too much work, it would take away the fun." Etc. It's really, really easy to make a character that has a perfectly reasonable and thematic concept that, if applied "casually" in 3.x rules, will just suck.

Thing is, even if the vast majority of high-optimization players don't play Pun Pun, they do play things like Spell-to-Power Erudites, Planar Shepherd Druids, Sublime Chord gishes, Ruby Knight Windicators, etc. Heck, even just Artificer or Archivist can be incredibly potent in the hands of a skilled optimizer with access to all legal books (and, ideally, Dragon mag content as well, but most DMs forbid that). And anybody who plays a Monk or Fighter who primarily focuses on flavor, even if they heed basic character-building tips, won't be able to keep up.

 

[pemerton]

I mean, I don't really see why Pun Pun isn't an example of a "carefully-built character,"

Because Pun Pun is not built for play and is not intended for play.

Yes, it's what people would call TO--theoretical optimization--that would almost never see the light of play. Yes, it's as much a criticism of the faults of the 3e engine as it is a demonstration of optimization power. But it's still proof that a very cleverly built character, with just a few levels, can become an utter math-destroying monster, while a casually-built one is quite likely to not even keep up with the game's expectations past level 6.

The first sentence is true.

even if the vast majority of high-optimization players don't play Pun Pun, they do play things like Spell-to-Power Erudites, Planar Shepherd Druids, Sublime Chord gishes, Ruby Knight Windicators, etc. Heck, even just Artificer or Archivist can be incredibly potent in the hands of a skilled optimizer with access to all legal books (and, ideally, Dragon mag content as well, but most DMs forbid that). And anybody who plays a Monk or Fighter who primarily focuses on flavor, even if they heed basic character-building tips, won't be able to keep up.

This is exactly the sort of evidence I mentioned. Evidence of actual play.

As I posted in reply to @clearstream, I am not unaware of this evidence though I don't have firsthand experience of it and so prefer not to discuss it too much on ENworld due to the needless flamewars that tend to results (hence my comments on AD&D, which I do know from firsthand experience). My comment was not that such evidence does not exist; it's that Pun Pun is not that evidence.

It's a long time since I've looked at Pun Pun, but my recollection is that it depends upon one particular ability that allows conferring any other ability (I just Googled up this version of Pun Pun - Pun-Pun (3.5e Optimized Character Build) - D&D Wiki - and it's the Manipulate Form ability). If that ability is deleted from the list of available abilities then Pun Pun disappears. But the issues with 3E don't disappear.

4e has many of the same features you point to - long, long lists of abilities across multiple legal books and magazines; and complex PC builds. But I don't think it's generally true that fighters and monks won't keep up with spell casters in 4e. I don't think that 4e D&D places a lot of emphasis on playing the fiction in the manner of classic D&D, but to the extent that it does do so, I don't think that skilfully building a 4e PC will mean you don't have to engage the fiction. Skilful building might increase your prospects of success in a skill challenge (higher bonuses and more resources to bring to bear) but you'll still have to declare your actions in relation to the fiction presented by the GM.

I can't comment on whether 5e is more like 3E or 4e.

 

[Guest 85555]

Because Pun Pun is not built for play and is not intended for play.

Pun Pun wasn't something I saw at the table but I did see some crazy builds over the years and plenty of players took those builds seriously (just in terms of breaking the amount of damage characters could do in a single round----espeically so this with highly specialized characters: I seem to recall a knife throwing build a player made who could do like 70 damage). This kind of thing definitely existed in 3E. Now it was always something the GM could stop by enforcing the spirit of the system over the letter, or by at least knowing the system well enough to stop builds that violated the rules in some way (definitely there were lots of builds that broke the rules, even if it wasn't immediately obvious). But I definitely encountered players who thrived on optimization. If everyone was on the same page i thought it was perfectly fine.

 

[Numidius]

Since we are going to take this a step further, let's look at how this works in play.

The player decided he wanted to bluff the guard and said X to the guard. The GM is deciding after knowing what the player is attempting what details he will add to the guard and which of those are ultimately going to determine whether the player succeeds or fails.

Since those details were determined after the player attempted his bluff, the player had no concrete information to base his action declaration on. All the player could do was to try to guess before the action declaration what details the GM will fill in on the fly and ultimately use to determine the guards reaction and then try to frame the action declaration accordingly. That's not the kind of skilled play that OSR is about as I understand it. OSR is about attempting to use the established fiction to have your characters act in ways to guarantee you accomplish your goal. Things like, there's a pit trap we know about on the map, let's get the orcs attention and lure them into it and then shoot our bows at any survivors till the group of orcs is dead. In the bluffing the guards case, there's no fictional details prior to the 'PC bluffing' to base any decision on. So even if we resolve the guard bluff with no skill checks, it still won't be OSR skilled play.

I just don't think that being able to predict the DM's moves makes something OSR skilled play.

I think you are proceeding backwards in your example.
First the players should understand why the guards are not letting people in.
Then maybe find out who/what kind of people would be welcomed in.
Then formulate a plan accordingly and execute it.

Fictional basis is key IMO, as you mentioned upthread.

Conan the barbarian (1982): Conan wants to bluff the guards, disguises himself as a white robed cultist among a multitude, guards let him in.

Simple as that.

Also, @Ovinomancer , is this sidestepping the rules, or skilled play?
In B/X there are no skills, nor Charisma is not exactly supposed to be used for bluffing

 

[pemerton]

@clearstream

I apologise for missing D&D in your list.

I don't understand why you see it as important to rate RPG players in terms of skill. When I see "skilled play" discussed in the RPGing context its in terms of orientations and expectations of play, and the actual processes of decision-making during play. Not normally in terms of "my skill was better than your skill", except in tournament contexts.