D&D 5E (2014) Wandering Monsters: You Got Science in My Fantasy!

[Remathilis]

We can do this without the edition wars, or we can not do this. The choice is yours.

It was meant as a joke (hence the CSI reference and "not really" below.

 

[Mistwell]

All I did was include elements from D&D in that last big post. 3 different varieties of D&D. What more do you need?

Give me examples so I can speak to what you want.

You gave examples of how some people play RPGs, and zero examples actually from a D&D book to demonstrate what you're talking about. When we're talking about what a game designer is doing (which is the context of your comment), then surely you have an example from a D&D book to back it up? Your issue wasn't with how that game designer is playing the game during his own personal play, it was about what he's putting in the books he's writing - so give a friggen example already from a book!

 

[wedgeski]

D&D is a board game with the board hidden behind the screen, fog of war style.

I can have an entire session of D&D where the game, the cause of the characters, the world, the advancement of the PC's, and even the outcome of their quest can be determined purely by social interactions between the DM and the players. No rules required, beyond the social contract. Absolutely none. Is there a board game you can name where that is the case? Or are we now to engage in an escalating series of abstractions about what constitutes a "board game", as well?

 

[MJS]

"Wandering Monsters" would make a good band name.

 

[am181d]

That should be easy to do. Just play Fourth edition!

I understand that you were making a joke, but I thought it was worth a quick quote from the 4th edition Player's Handbook:

A roleplaying game is a storytelling game that has elements of the games of make-believe that many of us played as children... You "win" the Dungeons & Dragons game by participating in an exciting story of bold adventurers confronting deadly perils.

And this is 4th Edition, which has the (perhaps unfair) reputation of being the most "gamist" edition. I don't believe there's a wrong way to play Dungeons & Dragons, but storytelling has always been core to the game *as presented*.

 

[howandwhy99]

You gave examples of how some people play RPGs, and zero examples actually from a D&D book to demonstrate what you're talking about. When we're talking about what a game designer is doing (which is the context of your comment), then surely you have an example from a D&D book to back it up? Your issue wasn't with how that game designer is playing the game during his own personal play, it was about what he's putting in the books he's writing - so give a friggen example already from a book!

Don't engage in storytelling. How can we tell from what is written in a game book? I would look at the language and the concepts addressed. D&D books include player turns, rounds of play, resources in the game, the player's game piece and game abilities defined by the rules in relation to other game pieces (player or board), movement speeds (for almost everything), a game clock, tracking all of this, tracking it with a game board (a map in this case), and on and on. There is no end to game rules in early D&D mechanics. And all of these are about enabling players to game - to make strategies based upon their understanding of the game rules so they can think 5, 10, 20 moves ahead. To enable them to master the game as they can.

Game rules are unnecessary and irrelevant to storytelling. Freeform storytelling isn't a game because it has no rules for players either to follow or suss out the consequences of. It isn't an analytical enterprise at all. Instead, stuff like tropes are found in stories, self-created expressions where any limitations - rules - are at best considered a necessary evil and worst part about the activity.

When are we engaged in game play as art? When we start treating it as such. If you don't want tropes in your game, don't treat it as storytelling. If you don't want to engage in wrestling as theater, don't do so as a wrestler.

EDIT - - I should sum up, you can't read a text and know irrefutably it is to be engaged with scientifically, artistically, as a game, and so on. The book presents itself as a game, so treat it as such. Prepare the field of play, everyone learn the rules, and follow them once play begins. I present some of the game mechanics of D&D. You could tell a story about them, but they are designed for being followed in order to play a game IMO.

I can have an entire session of D&D where the game, the cause of the characters, the world, the advancement of the PC's, and even the outcome of their quest can be determined purely by social interactions between the DM and the players. No rules required, beyond the social contract. Absolutely none. Is there a board game you can name where that is the case? Or are we now to engage in an escalating series of abstractions about what constitutes a "board game", as well?

Social contract is about group storytelling and largely a sociological concept. At best, that idea "might" be relevant to the rules of a game, but it is unnecessary.

What you are doing isn't playing a game as there are no rules. Treat game like a label that means absolutely everything and you have nothing. What you are doing is storytelling as a group. You are addressing a fiction rather than a game.

And this is 4th Edition, which has the (perhaps unfair) reputation of being the most "gamist" edition. I don't believe there's a wrong way to play Dungeons & Dragons, but storytelling has always been core to the game *as presented*.

4e is a storygame about telling stories for the most part. But I disagree that earlier D&D was designed for storytelling. Role playing isn't storytelling and neither is game play.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

And Wyatt gets flak for declaring what things are or are not?

 

[Remathilis]

I understand that you were making a joke, but I thought it was worth a quick quote from the 4th edition Player's Handbook:

And this is 4th Edition, which has the (perhaps unfair) reputation of being the most "gamist" edition. I don't believe there's a wrong way to play Dungeons & Dragons, but storytelling has always been core to the game *as presented*.

Very much so. The DMG is very storytelling based rather than procedural based. You could almost reframe each encounter as a "scene" and string PCs from scene to scene emphasizing story while minimizing the mundane tasks (the guard at the gate). While the combat system gets tagged as gamist/wargamey, the DMG really tries to push the story element.

Too bad the modules didn't in the beginning.

 

[pemerton]

James Wyatt coming across as arrogant and one true wayist, as usual.

I seem to be in the minority who enjoyed the thread, moslty because it canvassed an option - non-modernist explanations of society and environment - that I think are an important part of the fantasy tradition, but are so often ignored in D&D setting material.

People like the tolkienesque elements of D&D. But in play, they head for the pulp. Thats where the fun is.

Speak for yourself!

Contra Wyatt, D&D owes at least as much to Robert E. Howard as it does to Tolkien, and a setting modeled on Howard's Hyboria would incorporate evolution as a matter of course.

I've recently been reading a lot of REH Conan. A settig modelled on Hyboria would also incorporate REH's virulent racism and the biological concepts through which he expresses it. I think a degree of reactionariness is inherent in fantasy - it's an essentially backwards-looking genre - but I think I prefer Tolkien's to REH's when it comes to setting the basic parameters for play.

Which means I'd rather the game build in supernatural or ad hoc social and environmental explanations by default, and then allow different groups to particularise these as they wish (including perhaps by their own versio of scientific explanation); than build in some default socilogical and biological explanations that, simply in virtue of that connection to realworld explanations, force me to confront the real-world politics of the designers.

what about all of that scientific philology in LOTR? Would it be a more pure fantasy if Tolkien hadn't bothered developing such realistic fantasy languages? AFAICT they have no direct importance to the "mythic resonance" of the work--they're pretty much pure nerdery in JRRT's area of scientific interest. If we're going to hold up LOTR as the paragon of "classic fantasy" then I don't see why we should discount the work of another fantasy author/RPG designer/DM merely for substituting as the simulationist, supporting element a bit of nerdery in biology or geography or psychology or whatever else for JRRT's linguistics nerdery.

I think this is an interesting point. For me it's about whether it goes to the core or the periphery. As you note, Tolkien's philology is essentially peripheral to the mythic resonance of the work; if a fantasy author similarly expresses some sort of nerdish interest in architecture or metalworking I don't think that would bother me.

But scientific biology and "scientific" social theory - at least in my experience - tend to make their way from the periphery into the centre. And I at least don't want that as the default. The default should be "anything goes" - and scientific explanation is one version of "anything" that some tables might want to use.

As for the larger question of "is it okay to kill orc babies?", surely that must be a campaign-specific decision? If I'm playing LotR, the answer would seem* to be 'yes'.

I don't think so. When Sam puts on the Ring, and is able to listen to the orcs complaining about their lives as soldiers and expressing their hope for the future, I think this is meant to evoke a degree of empathy on the part of the reader. And Gandalf praises Bilbo to Frodo for not having killed Gollum when he had the chance.

Orc warriors are legitimate targets of violence, of course - but that is just the traditional morality of warfare. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we never see orc women or babies. Tolkien is not really inviting us to speculate on the more subtle anthropology of orcdom.

Re the orc baby dilemma, I think the way to solve it is to simply never have the adventurers run into any orc babies. Only a small minority of players are going to have their sense of verisimilitude thrown off if they don't encounter any orc children in an orc lair. They should be told to forget about it and if they persist they should not be played with.

This I basically agree with, at least as the default. (And I think it is Tolkien's solution too.)

I don't mind (and have GMed) games which treat orcs in a more serious anthropological way, but this shouldn't be the default for D&D, and when that sort of game is being played then we don't need any shorthand to tell us what to do with the orc babies than we need it to tell us what to do with the bandit king's baby.

In the "Worlds and Monsters" book, yeah.

I think you may be confusing W&M with Races & Classes.

 

[pemerton]

D&D is a game, not a story. It is about strategizing to achieve one or more objectives within the game as defined by the rules.

<snip>

D&D is a board game with the board hidden behind the screen, fog of war style. Roleplay vs. Rollplay was a derogatory distinction from the late 80s for everyone who played the game of D&D rather than engaging in fictional personality performance. It was effective enough to manipulate the leftovers in TSR to throw away the game they had and write in 2e's DMG that telling stories and acting in character was "the point of the game", however poorly the ruleset was a misfit for doing so.

I share your preference for a style of RPG which is about gaming within rules, rather than the thespian style of play, guided by the firm hand of a storytelling GM, that 2nd ed AD&D tended to encourage.

I think it is too much, though, to say that D&D is one of those styles rather than the other. 2nd ed AD&D, and a fair bit of 3E/PF played in a similar style, are part of the tradition too. (See the current, very long Fighters vs Casters thread.)

Role playing is playing a role

<snip>

The label of the role you play is less important than the game in which you play it.

<snip>

A game is its rules.

<snip>

I think D&D enabes players to both play and create within the game rules and those sessions build over time into a campaign setting.

<snip>

I think 4e is more about treating D&D as a story telling game than any previous version. And its rules and years of DM and Player advice were geared towards storytelling more too. Simple ignore the packeted encounter combat game and it's all about turn taking narration.

I don't think that what you say here about 4e is entirely wrong, but I don't think it is entirely right either.

4e is not about turn-taking narration. In describing it that way you are, I think, missing the fact that the players in a 4e game are still inhabiting and participating in the game from the point of view of a particular character, and - within the structure of the action resolution rules that define what the player can aim at with that character - are taking part in building up the "campaign" (though as a sequence of dramatic events rather than a geographic setting - temporal sequence is more important than geographic location). The story is emergent, not expressly created. The participants don't inject story, but simply fictional content - it is the job of the mechanics that regulate those injections to make sure that the sequence of fictional content that is injected constitutes, in its totality, a story.

(The contrast with 2nd ed AD&D can be seen failry clearly in this respect if one looks at pacing. 2nd ed AD&D urges the GM to keep a tight grip on pacing. In 4e the GM doesn't need to be so self-conscious about pacing - rather, the GM needs to skillfully deploy the encounter-build and resolution guidelines (including "say yes"), in which case pacing should take care of itself - and if it doesn't, that's a problem with the rules, which are meant to produce dramatic pacing emergently, rather than with the GM's own management of pacing.)

It was called roleplaying as that is playing at and learning a role via pattern recognition. The term is used according to the definition widely understood from post-WWII through the mid-80s. Only then did "improvisational acting" become the popular definition commonly used.

<snip>

The game elements are the rules. For D&D, the story elements are the stories you tell your friends about the game you saw or took part in afterwards (as you could do for anything ~ which doesn't make the entirety of existence a story). The role playing is the role you perform as defined by the rules of the game. In the case of D&D, the role is defined by the code behind the screen.

I think this is too narrow given what RPGing actually involves, and has involved for 30+ years.

The playing of the role isn't confined to the sort of pattern recognition you describe. It can also include adopting, for the purposes of play, the outlook of a particular character whose situation is dramatically charge and then responding, in play, to cues that engage that dramatic orientation. This is not mastering the code, but it's not thespianism or improvisational acting either, in the sense of putting on voices and emoting one's dialogue. It's recognising and giving voice to patterns concerning value (as found in the character, and the world put forward by the GM) and their conflicts (as seen in the collision of characters and world). In this sort of play tropes have a role not because of their contribution to story-telling, but because they are easy-recognised symbolic bearers of value (eg angels; dragons; elves; children etc).

I see 3 different types of game called RPGs:

The first is about creating a story. The ruleset is small and usually about defining who gets to tell the story next.


<snip>

The second is kind of a broken design (IMO). These are games with incomplete rules sets where the DM invents stuff whenever any player goes outside the rules. Game play is both strategically building a character with the "crunch" and using those builds whenever rules apply during the game. Story telling happens when the rules run out and the DM invents whatever is needed on the fly. Some newer versions allow the players to invent things too. Role playing is considered making decisions like your character would, not necessarily as you would in the game.

<snip>

The third is the oldest and least remembered design. Game play is paramount including strategic thinking, analysis of game situations, setting objectives, making and enacting plans, noting moves as you go, and so on. It relies heavily on the players' abilities to remember, project forward along the game timeline for potential consequences of actions, be organized, work together, and plenty of other activities too.

<snip>

The DM is an impartial referee who refers to the design behind the screen as players take their turns. Storytelling happens afterwards when the players tell their friends about their exploits just as any pro athlete might tweet after a sports game.

You account of the third (Gygaxian, classic D&D) style seems right to me.

Your critical account of a certain style of 2nd ed or 3E play fits with my own experience, but I'm sure is likely to be contentious among the proponents of those editions.

Your account of shared-narration games is fine as far as it goes, but for the reasons I've posted I think is not an accurate account of 4e (or other "story now") style RPGing, because it misses the key importance to that style - which is shared with Gygaxian play - of the player inhabiting a PC for the purposes of engaging with the gameworld. A nice treatment of the contrast between standard "story now" play and shared narration play is in this blog.