D&D 3E/3.5 Thoughts of a 3E/4E powergamer on starting to play 5E

[The_Furious_Puffin]

There's your issue. Context is important. The monk has other choices/effects that the fighter does not, and vice versa. If all you're doing is looking at damage choice A vs damage choice B and stripping out all the other context, then your analysis is flawed from the get go. As we say in the testing world, "garbage in, garbage out." Meaning, if you start with bad data, your result will always be bad.

The context is the symbolic significance of the choice to use your fathers weapon to get revenge. Why does the symbolic choice need to reduce that characters ability to influence the fiction?

The implication of your position that the mechanics supporting that symbolic choice creates meaning/drama is that your dad's dagger to avenge his death is *more dramatic* that using your dad's shortsword, which is again, more dramatic than using your dad's rapier.

I... don't agree.

[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] The choice is switching weapons around to create choice of damage type vs unable to be disarmed. This seems fine.

[MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] Bottom line, it reduces that characters ability to influence the fiction mechanically. Why is the drama/meaning increased if his dad's weapon is a dagger, not a shortsword? Why is it in turn reduced if his father's weapon is a greatsword?

And I don't understand yours. Your "solutions" would remove my agency as a player. Whenever I make a choice that is meaningful to the character, but, in the DM's determination, sub-optimal mechanically, the DM would just "top it off"?

The really funny thing is this happens all the time and people don't notice. IF you go back to 3.5E discussion threads when people were talking about the monk or fighter sucking at high levels, you often get stuff like 'oh yeah, my DM gave me an armlet that lets me turn into a tiger and get all these kick ass bonuses!' or somimlar. You even see it in this thread when someone immediately suggested giving a player who'd gimped themselves a bonus to help out. You also see in DM advice pieces where it's like 'make sure you create situations where every character has a chance to shine.'

Of course, I disagree with you that meaningful player agency is being removed - but I disagree with you because I don't think their should be trap options. Trap options are bad. Once we've removed trap options, this is a non issue. Regardless of what your fathers weapon is, it's a valid mechanical choice, there is the drama of the story, we can all high five and go for it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The context is the symbolic significance of the choice to use your fathers weapon to get revenge. Why does the symbolic choice need to reduce that characters ability to influence the fiction?

Just make sure that your father's weapon is a six-fingered sword that's the greatest blade since Excalibur.

The really funny thing is this happens all the time and people don't notice. IF you go back to 3.5E discussion threads when people were talking about the monk or fighter sucking at high levels, you often get stuff like 'oh yeah, my DM gave me an armlet that lets me turn into a tiger and get all these kick ass bonuses!' or somimlar. You even see it in this thread when someone immediately suggested giving a player who'd gimped themselves a bonus to help out. You also see in DM advice pieces where it's like 'make sure you create situations where every character has a chance to shine.'

DM intervention like that does work, and 5e gives you unlimited license to do so fairly seamlessly, since you have total control of magic item availability, and the opportunity to rule in a 'gimped' character's favor every time anything's being resolved, really.

Trap options are bad. Once we've removed trap options, this is a non issue. Regardless of what your fathers weapon is, it's a valid mechanical choice, there is the drama of the story, we can all high five and go for it.

Maybe I've been talking to Saelorn too much, but if a weapon really were strictly inferior, no one would use, it, right?

 

[pemerton]

So what if my barbarian character has the "vow"... "Big Weapons!!"? Does he in turn get inspiration whenever he uses a big weapon? If not, why not?

This example of a "vow" doesn't generate any sort of mechanical disadvantage or burden on the player. I think that's a sufficient basis for drawing a distinction.

what systems like the ones you have listed above do, at least IMO, is push the heavy lifting off on the GM and/or the group as a whole. Instead of telling us what the mechanical difference is between a greatsword and a shortsword they create a situation where there isn't any mechanically and then leave the fictional differences to be sorted out by the individual gaming group.

I thought we were meant to be into rulings rather than rules!

This really just takes us back to the bigger issue: why does combat need detailed rules (eg weapon damage rules, facing rules, reach rules, etc) but talking, climbing etc have a rules framework that occupies not much more than half-a-column of text (the GM settles on certainty or uncertainty, if the latter sets a DC, then a skill check is made). If adjudication of fictional positioning is good enough for the latter, I just don't see why it's an inherent problem for the former.

in combat it will generally be immediate life-or-death. Other things might be important and potentially life-or-death, like a delicate negotiation, but those things can often devolve into combat to get to the life-or-death point, anyway. Plus, combat is pretty complex and necessarily abstract, while a negotiation is all too easy to 'just RP it.'

Climbing a cliff can be as complex as fighting an orc - and is unlikely to devolve into violence - yet in D&D it has almost always been resolved via a single die roll. You haven't given any reason why combat demands to be anything but an opposed check.

Well to be fair you haven't actually addressed any of the games that were listed previously

[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] addressed MHRP directly (Cortex+).

I don't agree that the systems themselves are particularly good at representing a wide variety of character types mechanically because the games like HeroQuest, Fate, etc essentially eliminate there being an actual choice with weight.

The weight of choice is moved from mechanical minutiae to fiction and framing. Again, I find it odd to have that dismissed as exemplifying a lack of weight in a thread where the OP has repeatedly been lectured about caring too much about mechanics.

The context is the symbolic significance of the choice to use your fathers weapon to get revenge. Why does the symbolic choice need to reduce that characters ability to influence the fiction?

The implication of your position that the mechanics supporting that symbolic choice creates meaning/drama is that your dad's dagger to avenge his death is *more dramatic* that using your dad's shortsword, which is again, more dramatic than using your dad's rapier.

I... don't agree.

<snip>

Why is the drama/meaning increased if his dad's weapon is a dagger, not a shortsword? Why is it in turn reduced if his father's weapon is a greatsword?

Agreed. The meaning, in this context, is the dramatic arc around vengeance. The implicit suggestion that that arc is more dramatic if the weapon is a dagger or shortsword rather than a longsword or rapier seems unwarranted to me too.

 

[pemerton]

The really funny thing is this happens all the time and people don't notice.

<snip>

You even see it in this thread when someone immediately suggested giving a player who'd gimped themselves a bonus to help out. You also see in DM advice pieces where it's like 'make sure you create situations where every character has a chance to shine.'

Of course, I disagree with you that meaningful player agency is being removed - but I disagree with you because I don't think their should be trap options. Trap options are bad. Once we've removed trap options, this is a non issue. Regardless of what your fathers weapon is, it's a valid mechanical choice, there is the drama of the story, we can all high five and go for it.

I agree with this too, but to me this just reiterates my point upthread about varying play styles.

If the aspiration for play is to create a character - including, perhaps, a weaker-than-default character - and then see what happens, the exercise of agency is in designing that character. The rest of play isn't about agency at all, but finding out what happens. If, in play, the GM reduces the character's weaknesses, then that's just part of what happens. (And drives home that such a game is GM rather than player driven.)

If the aspiration for play is protagonism, then the idea that it is an expression of agency to reduce the mechanical capacity to impact the fiction verges on the self-contradictory.

Related to these variations, I think, is something else that I'm not 100% clear on but seems to be a definite theme in some posts on this thread: the idea that it's virtuous for a player to renounce mechanical capacity to impact the fiction, and that it is a personality flaw (or, at least, not a virtue) for a player to aspire to impact the fiction via the mechanics. It's a type of lauding of passivity.

It reminds me a bit of Ron Edwards on ouija-board roleplaying:

How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power.

Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors . . .

Rarely, another person participates and (horrors!) actually overtly moves the planchette, or discusses how it's being moved. That person is instantly ejected, with cries of "powergamer!" and "pushy bastard!"​

In my experience, the way to reliably get dramatic play is to have players prepared to push their PCs in dramatic directions (that is, to overtly move the planchette). To do this, they need mechanical agency.

I'm also reminded of this passage from Chris Kubasik's "Interactive Toolkit":

Characters drive the narrative of all stories. However, many people mistake character for characterization.

Characterization is the look of a character, the description of his voice, the quirks of habit. Characterization creates the concrete detail of a character through the use of sensory detail and exposition. By "seeing" how a character looks, how he picks up his wine glass, by knowing he has a love of fine tobacco, the character becomes concrete to our imagination, even while remaining nothing more than black ink upon a white page.

But a person thus described is not a character. A character must do.

Character is action. . . . This means that the best way to reveal your character is not through on an esoteric monologue about pipe and tobacco delivered by your character, but through your character's actions.

But what actions? Not every action is true to a character; it is not enough to haphazardly do things in the name of action. Instead, actions must grow from the roots of Goals. A characterization imbued with a Goal that leads to action is a character.​

Characterisation of a PC, as set out by Kubasik, is passive. It doesn't involve the player actually impacting the fiction. But until we actually see the player establishing and acting on a goal for his/her PC - not just lamenting the death of his/her father, but actively pursuing it - we won't have a dramatic arc. And this requires the tools to act within, and upon, the fiction.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

I agree with this too, but to me this just reiterates my point upthread about varying play styles.

If the aspiration for play is to create a character - including, perhaps, a weaker-than-default character - and then see what happens, the exercise of agency is in designing that character. The rest of play isn't about agency at all, but finding out what happens. If, in play, the GM reduces the character's weaknesses, then that's just part of what happens. (And drives home that such a game is GM rather than player driven.)

If the aspiration for play is protagonism, then the idea that it is an expression of agency to reduce the mechanical capacity to impact the fiction verges on the self-contradictory.

Related to these variations, I think, is something else that I'm not 100% clear on but seems to be a definite theme in some posts on this thread: the idea that it's virtuous for a player to renounce mechanical capacity to impact the fiction, and that it is a personality flaw (or, at least, not a virtue) for a player to aspire to impact the fiction via the mechanics. It's a type of lauding of passivity.

There is a fictional trope called "the load", which describes a character in fiction whose main purpose is to be a burden on the other characters. This is, in a way, another type of spotlight hogging. Instead of hogging the spotlight by impacting the fiction in a positive way, you impact the fiction in a negative way and make the group have to work that much harder to overcome it.

The rest of your post is awesome, btw

It reminds me a bit of Ron Edwards on ouija-board roleplaying:

How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power.

Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors . . .

Rarely, another person participates and (horrors!) actually overtly moves the planchette, or discusses how it's being moved. That person is instantly ejected, with cries of "powergamer!" and "pushy bastard!"​

In my experience, the way to reliably get dramatic play is to have players prepared to push their PCs in dramatic directions (that is, to overtly move the planchette). To do this, they need mechanical agency.

I'm also reminded of this passage from Chris Kubasik's "Interactive Toolkit":

Characters drive the narrative of all stories. However, many people mistake character for characterization.

Characterization is the look of a character, the description of his voice, the quirks of habit. Characterization creates the concrete detail of a character through the use of sensory detail and exposition. By "seeing" how a character looks, how he picks up his wine glass, by knowing he has a love of fine tobacco, the character becomes concrete to our imagination, even while remaining nothing more than black ink upon a white page.

But a person thus described is not a character. A character must do.

Character is action. . . . This means that the best way to reveal your character is not through on an esoteric monologue about pipe and tobacco delivered by your character, but through your character's actions.

But what actions? Not every action is true to a character; it is not enough to haphazardly do things in the name of action. Instead, actions must grow from the roots of Goals. A characterization imbued with a Goal that leads to action is a character.​

Characterisation of a PC, as set out by Kubasik, is passive. It doesn't involve the player actually impacting the fiction. But until we actually see the player establishing and acting on a goal for his/her PC - not just lamenting the death of his/her father, but actively pursuing it - we won't have a dramatic arc. And this requires the tools to act within, and upon, the fiction.

 

[BryonD]

It reminds me a bit of Ron Edwards on ouija-board roleplaying:

How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power.

Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors . . .

Rarely, another person participates and (horrors!) actually overtly moves the planchette, or discusses how it's being moved. That person is instantly ejected, with cries of "powergamer!" and "pushy bastard!"​

This is a stunningly bad analogy.
The very concept behind ouija (setting all absurdity aside) is the mutually shared illusion that nobody is controlling the planchette. Whether the group is purely having silly fun or is completely off the deep end gullible, the "fun" would be damaged by anyone claiming to be moving it. Everyone at the table is in the same role.
TTRPGs, at least those closely related to D&D, have a DM and players which creates a wildly asymmetrical dynamic.
The ouija could just as easily apply to soccer to make the claim that anyone should be free to take agency with the game by picking up the ball rather than this being limited to the goalie.

Obviously you and I have wildly different views on play style. But I still believe that my experiences are highly typical. Players absolutely want to impact the game and take charge. But they want to do it without "controlling the planchette". They want to overcome challenges purely as their character. If they can use the powers of the DM to overcome their goals then they have instantly failed to overcome the challenges "as that character". (Which also touches on my view of extreme "kick ass powergaming"; if you can't lose, the you can't win. Just write an app that flashes "You killed a <random monster>" at you every 20 minutes and then calls you awesome.)

Keeping everyone other than the goalie from picking up the ball adds a lot of value to the game.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Climbing a cliff can be as complex as fighting an orc - and is unlikely to devolve into violence - yet in D&D it has almost always been resolved via a single die roll. You haven't given any reason why combat demands to be anything but an opposed check.

The cliff's not trying to kill you, per se.

But, seriously, that looks, to me, like an argument that climbing the cliff should be more complex. I don't see it, that'd seem boring. Is that what you're getting at? Combat's more detailed because it's meant to be exciting, where more of the game 'happens?'

 

[I'm A Banana]

Players absolutely want to impact the game and take charge. But they want to do it without "controlling the planchette". They want to overcome challenges purely as their character. If they can use the powers of the DM to overcome their goals then they have instantly failed to overcome the challenges "as that character".

I think there's plenty of room for different playstyles, some of which are very concerned about who gets to control and contribute to the world and its fiction. These playstyles I think seek out more and better opportunities to create interesting stories. The major play goal is to create a good narrative. In the MDA model, you could say they're leaning toward expression - having fun using the game to be creative, generating cool and interesting stories. That's one of the major things they seek out of a TTRPG. More of this good!

You'd be hard-pressed to say this wasn't some a part of EVERY TTRPG experience, but for me, my play goals shift depending on if I'm the DM or the player. As a DM, that expression is absolutely one of my big play goals. As a player, it's really not.

Instead, as a player, I seek out what the MDA model might call Fantasy - I want to pretend to be someone else. My primary play goal isn't in creating a story, it's in pretending to be a different person.

Much like an actor trusts a director and a writer to have bigger things in mind than The Moment, so that they can get fully into the character's mindset in that moment, as a player, I trust my DM is busy behind the scenes making an interesting story, and my duty (and where I have the most fun) is in focusing on the moment-to-moment of thinking in a character's mindset. A good DM (like a good director) can follow the energy where it leads, can set a stage, can keep your motivations in mind.

This is part of why meta-mechanics (as relied on by many indie RPGs in the interests of telling an interesting story) kick my fun in the junk so hard. My play goal isn't to create an interesting story. It's to be an interesting person, and those are not the same goals and they are not supported by the same mechanics and they can be alongside each other much of the time, but sometimes they can conflict with each other. Meta-mechanics are one of those conflicting places.

I think when talking about a "general audience" (ie, people who may have never played a TTRPG before), you can get a lot of variation. But it might be useful to think about it in terms of low barriers to entry. "Pretend to be a wizard" has a typically lower barrier to entry than "Tell a good story about a wizard." But a good creativity game makes the latter easier, and if that's the goal you're going to get people who LIKE that challenge anyway.

Keeping everyone other than the goalie from picking up the ball adds a lot of value to the game.

To maybe get the analogy a bit closer to the feeling: the skillset for being a good actor and the skillset for being a good director are different skillsets. Having these being defined roles means that a production can use disparate skillsets and talents and interests in the service of a bigger goal. As a player, I can worry more about my performance. As a DM, I can worry more about my narrative.

Or to bring it back around to the subtly condescending planchette analogy: if one person controls the planchette and answers the questions while the other people try to ask interesting questions, this makes the game more broadly appealing than a game that just concerns itself with planchette controls, because some players can have a different kind of fun in asking questions than other players who have fun moving the planchette around.

Then, you're looking at what happens when a ouija board becomes a medium.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

I think there's plenty of room for different playstyles, some of which are very concerned about who gets to control and contribute to the world and its fiction. These playstyles I think seek out more and better opportunities to create interesting stories. The major play goal is to create a good narrative. In the MDA model, you could say they're leaning toward expression - having fun using the game to be creative, generating cool and interesting stories. That's one of the major things they seek out of a TTRPG. More of this good!

You'd be hard-pressed to say this wasn't some a part of EVERY TTRPG experience, but for me, my play goals shift depending on if I'm the DM or the player. As a DM, that expression is absolutely one of my big play goals. As a player, it's really not.

Instead, as a player, I seek out what the MDA model might call Fantasy - I want to pretend to be someone else. My primary play goal isn't in creating a story, it's in pretending to be a different person.

Much like an actor trusts a director and a writer to have bigger things in mind than The Moment, so that they can get fully into the character's mindset in that moment, as a player, I trust my DM is busy behind the scenes making an interesting story, and my duty (and where I have the most fun) is in focusing on the moment-to-moment of thinking in a character's mindset. A good DM (like a good director) can follow the energy where it leads, can set a stage, can keep your motivations in mind.

This is part of why meta-mechanics (as relied on by many indie RPGs in the interests of telling an interesting story) kick my fun in the junk so hard. My play goal isn't to create an interesting story. It's to be an interesting person, and those are not the same goals and they are not supported by the same mechanics and they can be alongside each other much of the time, but sometimes they can conflict with each other. Meta-mechanics are one of those conflicting places.

I think when talking about a "general audience" (ie, people who may have never played a TTRPG before), you can get a lot of variation. But it might be useful to think about it in terms of low barriers to entry. "Pretend to be a wizard" has a typically lower barrier to entry than "Tell a good story about a wizard." But a good creativity game makes the latter easier, and if that's the goal you're going to get people who LIKE that challenge anyway.



To maybe get the analogy a bit closer to the feeling: the skillset for being a good actor and the skillset for being a good director are different skillsets. Having these being defined roles means that a production can use disparate skillsets and talents and interests in the service of a bigger goal. As a player, I can worry more about my performance. As a DM, I can worry more about my narrative.

Or to bring it back around to the subtly condescending planchette analogy: if one person controls the planchette and answers the questions while the other people try to ask interesting questions, this makes the game more broadly appealing than a game that just concerns itself with planchette controls, because some players can have a different kind of fun in asking questions than other players who have fun moving the planchette around.

Then, you're looking at what happens when a ouija board becomes a medium.

Here's my problem. I play TTRPGs to both kick butt and roleplay, or specifically to roleplay buttkickers(Samuel L. Jackson style, for example). If I only wanted to kick butt, I'd play Final Fantasy instead. What makes me want more player control as opposed to DM control isn't so much esoteric theories or roleplaying philosophy, but practical concerns. In order to roleplay a butt kicker, I need to be able to take actions with confidence. The less control and less transparency I have as a player, the less I can act with confidence, which either knocks me out of character or paralyzes me to the point of inaction.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Here's my problem. I play TTRPGs to both kick butt and roleplay, or specifically to roleplay buttkickers(Samuel L. Jackson style, for example). If I only wanted to kick butt, I'd play Final Fantasy instead. What makes me want more player control as opposed to DM control isn't so much esoteric theories or roleplaying philosophy, but practical concerns. In order to roleplay a butt kicker, I need to be able to take actions with confidence. The less control and less transparency I have as a player, the less I can act with confidence, which either knocks me out of character or paralyzes me to the point of inaction.

In practical terms, it sounds like your goals are first to kick butt, and second to pretend to be someone else.

Like, it sounds like you wouldn't have fun pretending to be someone else if you had to pretend to be someone weak, right? Where those two goals conflict, you're a butt-kicker first. It's not like you're ONLY a butt-kicker, but butt-kicking isn't something that can really be compromised on if you're going to have a good time.

Am I in the right area?

If that's true, then I can see that to make and play a kick-butt character, you need to have the freedom to build a butt-kicking character (and the granularity to support many different avenues of butt-kicking), and you need to have confidence that your butt-kicking is going to be respected and honored in play. Someone's not going to just "change the rules" on you at the last minute, and the dice won't determine randomly if you kick butt or not.

Without that, you can't be the butt-kicker you want to be. And if you can't be the butt-kicker you want to be, the roleplaying by itself isn't enough to make it a fun time for you.

If I'm not totally off-base there, I can see that 5e's different priorities would knock your fun down a few pegs.