D&D 5E The Illusion of Experience Points that Everyone Disbelieves

[Umbran]

FYI, playing a game, even D&D, isn't about expressing a story. There is no "creating a shared fiction" in RPGs.

I think things will go better for you if you step back from the One True Way phrasing just a tad.

For you, there may be no creating shared fiction, and that's fine. But you have no authority to assert that others do not, or cannot, do so.

In fact, I see absolutely no barriers at all to their creating a shared fiction. You can create a shared fiction with a game of chess, if you want! What in the world is prohibiting it when the basic unit in play is a "character"? You thought they were referring to a character on a keyboard, instead of a character as found in fiction, or something?

 

[pemerton]

I do not advocate complete removal of XPs in 5E. I'm just saying, don't push them as the default assumption.

<snip>

Presently, my impression is that XPs are being used at least in part because they are not being questioned.

I really feel that you're at least an edition behind on this particular point. In 4e the use of XPs is questioned, and the DMG explicitly sets out an option for non-XP-based levelling.

 

[howandwhy99]

I like your signature. But I cannot wrap my head around this. I would argue that "creating a shared fiction" is the default, unavoidable outcome.

Telling a story isn't some fundamentalist inevitability. Don't pretend and you won't be telling a story. The objective in games that aren't storygames isn't to tell a story. In fact that's not the objective of most storygames either as objectives in games are achieved. Going for a run is fun and can be what you're after, your objective. But it can be a game when you time it and use a starting line and finish line.

D&D is about gameplay in every action, i.e. codebreaking. You are solving the game of Risk even as you play to the objective in it. Stories may be created after the fact, but excluding everything in existence to simply storytelling, the story now, story only ideology isn't some absolute certainty. And not the point of a game that like D&D that takes hours to prep for and has hundreds of pages of rules and is best supported by DMs who excel at math.

 

[howandwhy99]

I think things will go better for you if you step back from the One True Way phrasing just a tad.

For you, there may be no creating shared fiction, and that's fine. But you have no authority to assert that others do not, or cannot, do so.

Okay, I will tone down the responses. It's hard to understand why a thread calling for D&D to quit being a game, at least by default, has become the norm and game play is considered oddball thinking. IME, storytelling isn't playing a game like making up rules isn't following them. Can people engaging in shared storytelling be an objective for D&D? I think that would be great and one of the aspects of D&D since the beginning, but let's keep measurable objectives for our game included by default too.

 

[Thyrwyn]

Can people engaging in shared storytelling be an objective for D&D? I think that would be great and one of the aspects of D&D since the beginning, but let's keep measurable objectives for our game included by default too.

Measurable objectives are necessary, yes.

Telling a story isn't some fundamentalist inevitability. Don't pretend and you won't be telling a story. The objective in games that aren't storygames isn't to tell a story. In fact that's not the objective of most storygames either as objectives in games are achieved. Going for a run is fun and can be what you're after, your objective. But it can be a game when you time it and use a starting line and finish line.

Not "telling" - creating, there is a difference. Go for a run - with or without clocks, start, and finish lines - and you have created a story. Whether you choose to tell it or not is entirely up to you. When 6 people sit down to play D&D, a story is going to emerge. The math creates the framework on which that story is built. I prefer a game in which the math works without becoming the story. I played a great deal of Advanced Squad Leader in my day - a good example of a game in which the math became the story.

D&D is about gameplay in every action, i.e. codebreaking. You are solving the game of Risk even as you play to the objective in it. Stories may be created after the fact, but excluding everything in existence to simply storytelling, the story now, story only ideology isn't some absolute certainty. And not the point of a game that like D&D that takes hours to prep for and has hundreds of pages of rules and is best supported by DMs who excel at math.

I did not mean to imply that I wanted a game in which everything was excluded for the sake of story. I want a game in which the math allows me to shape the story, rather than one in which the story is dictated by the math. I am currently in a 3.5 group in which the math is the primary creator of the story - the only reason I play is because I like the people I play with and the game is simply an excuse to get together.

 

[howandwhy99]

Not "telling" - creating, there is a difference. Go for a run - with or without clocks, start, and finish lines - and you have created a story. Whether you choose to tell it or not is entirely up to you. When 6 people sit down to play D&D, a story is going to emerge. The math creates the framework on which that story is built. I prefer a game in which the math works without becoming the story. I played a great deal of Advanced Squad Leader in my day - a good example of a game in which the math became the story.

Creating isn't the same as pretending nor is creating necessarily making a story. Stories are not inevitable. Going for a run, existing in any way, doesn't necessarily result in a story. That's confined thinking IMO and not cool to cultures who don't have stories. Don't allow literary theory to become dogma. That's making one area of philosophy into an absolute, a kind of religion. There are many aspects to life and not solely the aspect of narrative. Do not pretend a story and there will not be one. Stories are great. Making an absolutism out of anything, even love for example, ends in royal suckage. Games and puzzles, where the action is all about deciphering to achieve a goal, are substantially different from making up fictions. Deny our differences and we are limiting existence for everyone.

Guess what? Game play is about addressing the math, the patterns we are deciphering in the game. Don't want that to be the point of the activity for you? Great, then you aren't interested in game play. You're interested in... whatever it is else you are doing. For example, sports are games. And while being good at them as a gamer is important almost all of them include coaches who are regarded as better game players than the athletes themselves. Why? Because the athletes are great at the athletics. And there exist sports players who prefer that to the game, but yeah, most enjoy both. They want the game to focus and improve the other.

I did not mean to imply that I wanted a game in which everything was excluded for the sake of story. I want a game in which the math allows me to shape the story, rather than one in which the story is dictated by the math. I am currently in a 3.5 group in which the math is the primary creator of the story - the only reason I play is because I like the people I play with and the game is simply an excuse to get together.

What you want is the objective of the Forge's storygames. Games that are about making a story you and others like and less about actually playing a game. Storygame rules support storytelling. And what little rules there are are gamed for the real point of play: the story. Great storygames do this in such a way that the rules often seem part of the story told rather than rules followed by the players. That's awesome. But that wasn't the objective of RPGs for a good 20-30 years.

D&D Next is going to have a rough time accommodating not just game styles to satisfy different players. Complexity be damned, some players want to game the game world, while others want to take turns creating a shared story/world. Those are two seriously opposed games objectives. Not that those are the only two reasons to play D&D, but these two do not work in concert with each other. The first requires serious effort to create a code behind a screen for players to test their gaming acumen against with more nuance and game play than any Chess game could afford. The other begins as an empty page and is added to at every step with rules designed to support that. Personally I don't see the two existing at the same table as a DM as referee or a DM as story leader has extraordinarily different jobs to do. For instance in one you would never want to improvise (like in Mastermind), while in the other all they may ever do is improvise.

 

[Thyrwyn]

Creating isn't the same as pretending nor is creating necessarily making a story. Stories are not inevitable. Going for a run, existing in any way, doesn't necessarily result in a story. That's confined thinking IMO and not cool to cultures who don't have stories. . .

. . .Aaaannndd you lost me. Our paradigms and definitions are too far apart meaningful discourse, I fear. If by culture you mean anything close to "a collective group of peoples who might be wronged or offended", then I have to admit that I cannot conceive of a "culture" that doesn't have a story or stories. To my understanding culture is defined by its story/stories.

I have enjoyed our conversation.

 

[Cadence]

Guess what? Game play is about addressing the math, the patterns we are deciphering in the game.
<snip>
What you want is the objective of the Forge's storygames. Games that are about making a story you and others like and less about actually playing a game. Storygame rules support storytelling. And what little rules there are are gamed for the real point of play: the story. Great storygames do this in such a way that the rules often seem part of the story told rather than rules followed by the players. That's awesome. But that wasn't the objective of RPGs for a good 20-30 years.

You seem to be attempting to give "game" a more certain definition than I have seen support for elsewhere, and to ascribe less story and more math to "RPGs for a good 20-30 years" than my 33 years of experience meshes with. (I'm open to arguments about "a good 4-7 years" of D&D's life since I only have 2nd hand evidence about that time period and no original sources in my collection.)

Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game is a step out of the ordinary. Each adventure is like writing a novel.

A good D&D campaign is similar to the creation of a fantasy novel, written by the DM and the players.

Sometimes I forget that D&D Fantasy Adventure Game is a game and not a novel I'm reading or a movie I'm watching.

The term "Gameplay" seems to have arisen in conjunction with video games, where all of the possibilities are fairly well prescribed. It apparently has no tightly defined universally accepted definition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameplay

"Game mechanics" are not the entirety of a "game" . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_mechanics

I am unaware of any version of D&D where all of the outcomes are defined by clear mathematical parameters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_game

Naturally, everything possible cannot be included in the whole of this work. As a participant in the game, I would not care to have anyone telling me exactly what must go into a campaign and how it must be handled; if so, why not play some game like chess?

This game is unlike chess in that the rules are not cut and dried. In many places they are guidelines and suggested methods only.

Several definitions of game don't involve math and some don't involve strategy at all. They certainly don't require that those be dominant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man,_Play_and_Games

... but the players are just as important, for they are the primary actors and actresses in the fascinating drama which unfolds before them.

Get in the spirit of the game, and use your persona to play with a special personality all its own. Interact with the other player characters and non-player characters to give the game campaign a unique flavor and "life". Above all, let yourself go, and enjoy!

ADVANCED DUGEONS & DRAGONS is first and foremost a game for the fun and enjoyment of those who seek to use imagination and creativity.

As a role player, you become Falstaff the fighter. ... You interact with your fellow role players, not as Jim and Bob and Mary woho work at the office together, but as Falstaff the fighter, Angore the cleric, and Fimar, the mistress of magic! The Dungeon Master will act the parts of "everyone else",

The players and the DM share in creating adventures in fantastic lands where heroes abound and magic really works. In a sense, the D&D game has no rules, only rule suggestions.

 

[howandwhy99]

. . .Aaaannndd you lost me. Our paradigms and definitions are too far apart meaningful discourse, I fear. If by culture you mean anything close to "a collective group of peoples who might be wronged or offended", then I have to admit that I cannot conceive of a "culture" that doesn't have a story or stories. To my understanding culture is defined by its story/stories.

I have enjoyed our conversation.

When ideas are conflated, like attempting to make games into stories and vice versa, I find it's important to deny attempts to make life more uniform. The consequences are almost always a world where we annihilate other ways of thinking for what's being called one true way philosophies, in this case literary theory philosophies. Literature and theories on making stories are fine. I would never want those practices to stop, but I feel you may need to free yourself from narrative as an absolutism or you're only going to end up provoking others when they disagree with you about this. By denying absolutism I'm not denying you or your right to believe as you do. I'm merely suggesting holding story creation to be a kind of fundamental certainty of existence isolates you from all the world where this absolutism doesn't exist. For many, this includes our real world, which I hope you don't take to be a story you made up.

You seem to be attempting to give "game" a more certain definition than I have seen support for elsewhere, and to ascribe less story and more math to "RPGs for a good 20-30 years" than my 33 years of experience meshes with. (I'm open to arguments about "a good 4-7 years" of D&D's life since I only have 2nd hand evidence about that time period and no original sources in my collection.)

Cherrypicking quotes from early texts of D&D isn't going to help you relegate D&D to the Forge model of gaming or any attempt to define gaming or roleplaying as storytelling. Those are ideas invented less than 20 years ago. D&D is 40 years old. That D&D is a simulation game like most stories in books are simulation stories isn't in dispute. That playing D&D, most any older RPG, or a computer RPG is similar to what simulation stories try and do is also true and a lot of early gamers and game designers saw that. But let's not confuse the pattern recognition of playing a game and the creating of patterns by game designers with the construction of a story. Stories are patterns too so players can read them, but they are sequential patterns and lack most of the core characteristics games have. However repeatedly and blindly one model attempting to describe games confines games solely to literary concepts, we would do a disservice to all games by removing from them and the very thoughts of their players what games can do and stories never can.

The term "Gameplay" seems to have arisen in conjunction with video games, where all of the possibilities are fairly well prescribed. It apparently has no tightly defined universally accepted definition.

Great. If you have some reason to use the term, feel free to describe your definition for clarity purposes.

"Game mechanics" are not the entirety of a "game".

The rules on their own are the game like a story printed in a book is the story. Game is a multi-definitional word that refers to all sorts of things like playing a game, gambling, deciphering a situation to achieve objective usually against other people, and even treating another person like a game piece (gaslighting perhaps?).

That playing a game by following a game's rules is also called a game, like we might go watch a sports game, doesn't make the rules any less the game.

I am unaware of any version of D&D where all of the outcomes are defined by clear mathematical parameters.

3e and 4e leave out huge chunks of needed mechanics IMO, but the logic patterns the character optimizers are sussing out are hardly unknown and make me doubt your assertion.

This doesn't mean all pattern recognition of course is covered by mathematics, but much of math is the study of patterns, so let's not be unnecessarily pedantic of what that current study contains.

Several definitions of game don't involve math and some don't involve strategy at all. They certainly don't require that those be dominant.

And I don't want their definitions to be removed from the pool of attempts trying to comprehend games and playing in games. But perhaps we might not limit our game play and game designs to the conclusions of a few others who are engaging in pattern recognition about game and game play? I'm not suggesting anyone anywhere has completely solved what goes on in the games. The descriptions you offer can lead to different schools of games too.

But let's not confine games to storygames. That would be like denying all games, which aren't sports. Or worse, demanding all games be treated exclusively as sports and "good game design" as what makes sports successful. That pretty much sums up my experience with the storygame community.


BTW, can we actually discuss all those ideas I brought up in my previous post? Simply repeatedly denying any and all ideas which conflict with the Big Model is halting the exploration of interesting ideas in this thread.

 

[Cadence]

Cherrypicking quotes from early texts of D&D isn't going to help you relegate D&D to the Forge model of gaming or any attempt to define gaming or roleplaying as storytelling. Those are ideas invented less than 20 years ago. D&D is 40 years old. That D&D is a simulation game like most stories in books are simulation stories isn't in dispute. ...

I never mentioned the Forge model and couldn't tell you what it said.

Using the back cover blurb from one of the most widely played early exemplars of the genre and the dominant theme in the forwards of it and the other most widely played one at the time strikes me as a strange definition of cherry picking.

The quotes from Moldvay where he repeatedly likens playing D&D to writing a novel is from 1981. 2014-1981=33>20.

Could you give me your definition of "simulation game"? I'm currently getting it conflated with the use of simulation in things like:

[AD&D] does not attempt to simulate anything either.

However repeatedly and blindly one model attempting to describe games confines games solely to literary concepts, we would do a disservice to all games by removing from them and the very thoughts of their players what games can do and stories never can.

I've never said that the math and figuring out the game world weren't a large part of the game. I would argue that you are blindly following one model by denying that storytelling (in the colloquial, non-Forge, Moldvay crafting a novel usage) is a large part of the game.

BTW, can we actually discuss all those ideas I brought up in my previous post? Simply repeatedly denying any and all ideas which conflict with the Big Model is halting the exploration of interesting ideas in this thread.

I'm not trying to confine the games to anything.

You seem to be repeatedly trying to confine the first 20 years of RPGs to pattern recognition in spite of the personal experience of others and numerous quotes from the creators of the two most popular versions of those early games.

Your counter evidence is your say so.

Simply repeatedly denying any and all ideas which conflict with non-storytelling all-pattern-recognition primacy is halting the exploration of interesting ideas in this thread ;-)

But point taken. I'll go back and try to suss some stuff out of your posts upthread later this evening.