D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[Manbearcat]

Thank you, this is the sort of detailed analysis I'm interested in. For D&D I would say the switching has been there, but isn't at all formalized, and the approaches people have developed are ad-hoc and, as you've said, difficult to pull off. To use @Manbearcat's language, there is conflict at the (many) points of contact?


I agree that Torchbearer is transparent, but I can't say that the whole thing works for me. I am constantly aware of the tension of the Grind conflicting with my understanding of how time passes, to give just one example, and at certain moments in our sessions I have felt them actively clash. What I do find interesting and engaging is how, for example, belief/creed/traits/etc. feed into the more Gamist mechanics.


For 4e I can see some of this. My play experience was limited to the one campaign though, in which combats generally did feel like "ablating Team Monster HP to 0". So boring. But outside of combats it was a blast.

Would you care to discuss how Stonetop manages its particular combo?

Sounds like you’re bumping up against some of Torchbearer’s Gamist trappings with some of your own Process Sim proclivities!

I would say that the best way to resolve the torch thing in a wilderness crawl (which has been the overwhelming bulk of our Turns thus far) would be to (a) just consider the time elided due to the size of a lot of the Turns and (b) imagine Jasper, Jakob, Awanye et al dousing and rekindling their torches/burning and saving their fuel as the moon waxes or is obscured by clouds. We’re only zooming in on chunky moments of play (what a Turn is), so in those moments the flames have been rekindled offscreen!

As far as Stonetop goes, we’ve got a thread here with a lot of stuff in it early (though it hasn’t been updated recently). Feel free to go check it out and ask questions about whatever you find interesting and I/we’ll answer!

You know everyone playing except Sara. If you want to watch a session, we’re resolving @Ovinomancer and @hawkeyefan ’s expedition this Thursday. Universally, except the first session after Summer Settled Across the Land (a game move), the 4 players have split up to pursue various Opportunities or resolve Threats.

 

[clearstream]

Nah, I'd rather not draw the modhammer. You and I will never see eye-to-eye on this question, I guarantee you that.

In fact, let's turn that around. 3rd edition and its descendants (like PF1e) were wildly popular. One of the most popular editions ever, in fact. Popular enough to become part of the cultural zeitgeist well beyond just D&D, e.g. the use of "Took a Level in Badass," a trope name that drew on the 3rd edition concept of à la carte multiclassing.

It's also a completely broken, deeply, deeply flawed system. One that two different companies had to straight-up admit to their players that it was too broken to keep iterating on, the second of which had literally made their fortune by trying to keep iterating on it.

How does your theory explain that?

3e is a game you could break if you wanted to, and on the other hand it was rich and functional. It's the version that brought us back to D&D because it did so much, so well.

I can enumerate every fault of 3e for you in precise detail, and yet as a game it worked. That might be because in truth each table - even if playing for years - instantiates only a small part of the total game-space. They're self-selective, and much that is theoretically broken is not at issue because it is up to each group to instantiate the game they want to play.

Does CoDzilla matter? Only if your players need to compete. Theoretical overshadowing is readily negated by behaviour at the table.

 

[clearstream]

All I say to that, is that it is worth considering what sort of experience the likely users of the product will have when they use it in a way they want to use it. If they walk away from that experience with positive feeling, then the product is doing something right. "I had fun" means a lot and shouldn't be dismissed.

That is an insight treating game as tool helps one to have. By seeing that game play is a two-step process, where game-tool is used to fabricate a mechanism that produces play, one sees that interpretations and decisions made in employing the game-tool are decisive on the game played.

This confound accounts for much disagreement and confusion.

 

[soviet]

3e is a game you could break if you wanted to, and on the other hand it was rich and functional. It's the version that brought us back to D&D because it did so much, so well.

I can enumerate every fault of 3e for you in precise detail, and yet as a game it worked. That might be because in truth each table - even if playing for years - instantiates only a small part of the total game-space. They're self-selective, and much that is theoretically broken is not at issue because it is up to each group to instantiate the game they want to play.

Does CoDzilla matter? Only if your players need to compete. Theoretical overshadowing is readily negated by behaviour at the table.

It did not work. I played it for the entire life of the edition (both 3.0 and 3.5), having transplanted our existing 2e campaign across wholesale. I think we entered 3.X at level 8 or so and left it at level 12 or so (we advance very slowly).

The game was so overly complex that we were constantly referring to the books to look up rules. The game was so restrictive that we stopped performing stunts in combat because without the appropriate feat it was always better to just attack. The handling time was so long that we stopped describing our attacks so much because we needed to fit more in. The game was so broken that different characters (remember, converted from a previous edition so not a result of optimisation) were wildly less effective than others; I distinctly remember considering giving my fighter the Leadership feat so that I could have a pet wizard and thus contribute to the game again.

Then why did we play it? We played it because it was the then in-print version of the game and thus being supported by new stuff. We have moved from 2e to 2.5 to 3e to 3.5 to 4e to 5e on the same schedule as the publishers. Yes I'm a theory guy and a forum guy, but the rest of my group aren't, and neither is my GM really.

Being first to market and thus the visible embodiment of the genre, and being the biggest in-print game and thus the subject of ongoing support, are much weightier factors for most people than the quality of the game design.

 

[clearstream]

I fundamentally never really got what you were supposed to DO with 3e, it just played like a game that was BORKED, though honestly I have only played 3.5 and even then not a lot. It seems like a very confused 'design'. Like they focused on certain specific stuff, and removed a lot of crazy crufty nonsense that 2e had in it, but there's NO GLOBAL VISION at all. Like the designers really didn't have a clear idea what they were doing...

2e is just crufty and awkwardly bass akward because it was mandated that it must be 1e compatible to a high degree. So its a weird mishmash of gamist rules and high concept intent, and then mechanically its just bonkers with large amounts of basically unplaytested and unworkable supplementary material and whatnot. I can see how someone THOUGHT 3e was just a deep cleanup of that, wow did they miss the mark!

Clearly though in the 10 years between the design of 3e and 4e WotC did up its game in terms of mastering actual purposeful RPG design. SAGA and 4e both stand head and shoulders above anything they did previously. 4e does have a number of design flaws, but they're pretty tolerable overall, and I think really its problem as a product is purely in terms of people not knowing what to expect, and not really being told what they were getting vs any actual issue with the product at all.

5e DOES learn a lot from 4e in terms of intent, but I just don't like the 2e-ish incoherent design and, frankly it feels strategically like a cul-de-sac of design. There's no direction for it to go in, its what it is and I have this horrible suspicion that as tastes change and evolve 5e and D&D generally really will finally reach obsolescence. Maybe a 5e that was a true successor to 4e would sell less, OTOH there's a heck of a lot of places you can go with that design, it could be explored for 5 more decades.

As a game design, 4e has its origins squarely in 3e Tome of Battle. Which was both a reaction to and made possible by 3e.

 

[clearstream]

It did not work. I played it for the entire life of the edition (both 3.0 and 3.5), having transplanted our existing 2e campaign across wholesale. I think we entered 3.X at level 8 or so and left it at level 12 or so (we advance very slowly).

The game was so overly complex that we were constantly referring to the books to look up rules. The game was so restrictive that we stopped performing stunts in combat because without the appropriate feat it was always better to just attack. The handling time was so long that we stopped describing our attacks so much because we needed to fit more in. The game was so broken that different characters (remember, converted from a previous edition so not a result of optimisation) were wildly less effective than others; I distinctly remember considering giving my fighter the Leadership feat so that I could have a pet wizard and thus contribute to the game again.

Then why did we play it? We played it because it was the then in-print version of the game and thus being supported by new stuff. We have moved from 2e to 2.5 to 3e to 3.5 to 4e to 5e on the same schedule as the publishers. Yes I'm a theory guy and a forum guy, but the rest of my group aren't, and neither is my GM really.

Being first to market and thus the visible embodiment of the genre, and being the biggest in-print game and thus the subject of ongoing support, are much weightier factors for most people than the quality of the game design.

You played it ergo it worked. We're equally aware of the system's problems, but it is the game as played that counts.

 

[pemerton]

imagine Jasper, Jakob, Awanye et al dousing and rekindling their torches/burning and saving their fuel as the moon waxes or is obscured by clouds.

That one seems like especially low-hanging fruit (from the point of view of reconciling exploration-based concerns with the gamist mechanics).

 

[pemerton]

3e is a game you could break if you wanted to, and on the other hand it was rich and functional. It's the version that brought us back to D&D because it did so much, so well.

You played it ergo it worked. We're equally aware of the system's problems, but it is the game as played that counts.

As I posted upthread, I'm sure there are many people who've had a great time playing Rifts or other Palladium RPGs.

4e was the version of D&D that made me interested in what WotC had to offer (whereas I treated 3E purely as an object of curiosity).

I play Classic Traveller, ergo it works.

I'm not sure how any of these propositions relate to the analysis of games. And they certainly don't tell us anything about the relationship between quality and popularity.

 

[soviet]

The history of D&D from late 1e onwards is of a wrench being used as a hammer.

The history of 4e is of the designers straight up giving people a really well-made hammer, only for it to be rejected as not wrench-like enough.

The history of 5e is of the designers giving people a vaguely wrench-shaped hammer accompanied by unclear instructions.

 

[clearstream]

What does making a check in 5e MEAN? I'm playing a character, and I have an intent, something I want to achieve. I think up some sort of action that might take me closer to accomplishing that intent. How much closer will I get if I succeed? How much further will I be from it if I fail? We don't know! My character decides to swim across the lake. How many checks, and of what kind can I expect to have to make in order to get across? There's literally no way of knowing! The GM can ask for all sorts of things, or heck, he can just say "Oh, its easy, your on the other side." Checks thus have no 'valence'. At least in combat its an orc, it has N hit points, and I do X damage if I hit, its pretty clear, but 5e abandoned even the pretext of OOC checks meaning anything at all. They're color, literally. "Oh, OK, you're crossing the lake, you make a swim check, good, you haven't drowned yet!" Clearly if the GM is operating in good faith then success is advantageous in some degree, but good faith is not really enough. I mean, what are my chances of making it across? If I'm asked to pass 1 check at 85% success, that's easy enough, but how about 3, of varying difficulties? And what happens if I fail the swim check, or the survival check, or whatever? Do I just die? Who knows?

Again, this is why I call check 'color', they HINT at something, they kind of bump the GM a bit towards "something nice" or "something nasty" but the 'mechanics' are toothless. This is poison to something like Story Now. In fact its aimed squarely at support of a kind of Illusionism or Participationist play where the GM smiles and tells you what happened every time you do something! If failure doesn't suite him, then he says "oh oh, you're in trouble, make a CON check! Oh, lucky you, you've passed that, you manage to drag out on the other shore, close one!" If success doesn't suite him "Oh, well, its a long swim, roll another swim check. Gosh, you start drowning and sink to the bottom of the lake..." Sigh.

I mean, it does work in a fair number of cases where things are reasonably clear-cut, did you set off the trap or not, that sort of thing, assuming the GM is really disciplined and/or the players really grill the DM every time they make a check and make him describe the full outcome before any dice are thrown at all, ever. Elegant it ain't.

What is the situation? What did you as player describe? What does the system say? What's at stake? DM will then narrate result.

Again, how much have you played 5e, if you have these sorts of questions?