Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8303769" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.Re force: You had posted (#285) thatThis 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) thatNow 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: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: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.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.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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>: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.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.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 <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Ron Edwards has made the following remark about them</a>: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?</blockquote>

Verification