Here's the way I look at it: Dungeons and Dragons is not a game. It is several distinct games that share a cultural heritage, and play in phenomenally different ways. Gygax's Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is a hack of OD&D. TSR's Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is a hack of Gygax's game. When Gygax wrote Arcana Unearthed he was hacking his own game. Someone using just the core 3 did not just stop playing Dungeons and Dragons because they are not using his hack. If we want to be all essentialist about the second we deviate from anything written in any game book, which includes introducing new fiction we are engaging in game design. So I am not playing the same game as I was last week. So what does this mean in practical terms? We deal.
I can follow your logic.
Given ambiguity we seek meaning, drilling down into specifics until we can achieve mutual understanding. We also depend on context and if you are like me you embrace the hacker culture instead of pushing against it. When we want to talk about specifics we clarify our intent. Words still have meaning, it's just ambiguous and messy - like most human communication. I mean what's the real cultural impact of only accepting a single definition of role playing games, Dungeons and Dragons, or Greyhawk into being? We make it harder for the fringes to engage the greater community, and lose valuable perspectives. What's the cost of ambiguity? We sometimes have to drill down to specifics and perhaps expose new people to different games within the larger hobby.
I don't agree that the consequence of defining these things makes it harder to engage. I think it makes it
easier, because it helps define the experience you'll be in for.
By way of comparison, consider
Doom (2016) and how it isn't afraid to define itself as One Specific Thing.
Or even how D&D entrenches itself in the Fantasy genre (it's not quite One Specific Thing, but it's excluded a big swath of fantasy fiction and fandom in that decision!).
There's varying positions on that slider, of course - varying levels of focus. RPG's aren't all fantasy games. Not every D&D setting is the same. Even on Greyhawk, you have different nations and different lands and different threats that all produce different experiences. But each level excludes a little bit more, and that's OK.
I mean there is another cost when people join games, and don't communicate about their expectations as seen above. Can we stop doing that? I mean there is so much more to communicate about than which version of the game we're using. There's all this interesting stuff about theme, tone, possible hacks, etc. Let's not blame different expectations. Having expectations, bringing stuff to the table, and reaching consensus is critical to playing role playing games. It's a crucial skill for doing this thing we do. It's where the magic happens - I bring my fiction, you bring yours, and we engage together using the game so it's now our fiction.
Part of how you communicate better about expectations is by making those expectations less flexible, so that they can be safe assumptions.
ProgBard said:
Okay, so I've been thinking about some of the dialogue that was previously confusing me a little, because the last couple of rounds I was initially scratching my head that you'd put forth a response of "But changing that lore changes the experience of play," to which I could only reply, "Um ... yes?"
But I realized, after our previous exchange, that - assuming I'm understanding you right, natch - you define everything that affects the experience of play as a rule.
And, as I said before, I don't think that's necessarily wrong. But I think it is ... idiosyncratic. And I posit that it's potentially getting in the way of some of the conversation on this subject, because I don't think you're going to convince everyone to get on board with making the idea of "rules" that big an umbrella. And, if I may, I wonder if it's obscuring more than it reveals.
It's not that everything that affects the experience of play is a rule. If all the queens in your chess game were slick with human saliva, that would affect the experience of play pretty profoundly, but it's not a rule of chess that queens not be coated in a layer of drool. It is, perhaps, a very important aesthetic.
It's that rules describe how a game is meant to be played - they create a play experience. Part of the
play of D&D is describing your character. When you say "Rath is a dwarf," that's part of the play of D&D - everyone has some idea of what Rath looks like now, because they know the rules for how a dwarf looks (no one imagines him to be a twenty-foot tall column of eerie glowing gas).
According to at least one formal definition, all rules for all games have the following characteristics:
- They limit player action.
- They are explicit.
- They are shared by all players.
- They don't change during play.
- They are an authority.
- They are portable (in that anyone can use them to play the same game).
"Roll 1d20 to make an attack roll" and "Dwarves stand well under 5 feet tall" both fit that. By the rules, I can't make my dwarf six feet tall, it's clear to me and to the other players that dwarves are under 5 feet tall, the DM won't suddenly declare that dwarves are six feet tall one day and ten feet tall the next, if I try to make a six-foot-tall dwarf you can point me at the rules to show me that this is not kosher, and if I'm using these rules in Brooklyn and someone else is using these rules in Burkina Faso, neither of us will have six-foot-tall dwarves in our games (and if one of us
changes the rule, as D&D encourages, maybe one of us does!).
It seems to me that those that want to make a strong distinction between "lore" and "rules" are trying to draw a line that doesn't really exist - trying to remove acts like "describing your character" from the realm of
playing D&D and put it in some aesthetic category that's not relevant to actual gameplay. In the process, that distinction winds up being pretty incoherent.
ProgBard said:
True diversity recognizes that it can be important, but doesn't have to be, and that it isn't equally so for everyone
It still respects those that it
is true for.
ProgBard said:
Separating lore and rules, I would argue, doesn't by implication devalue or trivialize one of them. It merely recognizes that they are two dials, the adjusting of which have qualitatively different effects on the experience of play - even if, as you're quite right in observing, they both have an effect.
I don't see any qualitative difference between them. "As a hill dwarf, you have keen senses, deep intuition, and remarkable resilience" is equal to "As a hill dwarf, you have +1 WIS and +1 MAX HP." Both rules have largely the same effect: the tell you how to pretend to be a hill dwarf (the first rule through giving you an active direction, and the second rule by giving you numbers that that creates essentially the same experience as the first rule, but in combat scenarios where your ability to describe your character is a bit more constrained than usual).
ProgBard said:
And consider that it seems to be part of the design of the current edition of the game - or at the very least part of its designers' explicit approach - that you are invited to change and disregard lore as a distinct phenomenon of play. I don't think that means the WotC folks don't have any use for lore, or don't consider it of any value - they quite clearly love it very much, judging by how much of it they've been eager to refer to and build on. They've recognized, though, that you can love and even value lore without insisting that it needs special defending, or enshrining it with the same kind of assumed immutability as rolling d20 to hit.
They invite you to change
all the rules, which includes the height of dwarves as much as it includes what you add to something you're proficient in, how you account for spellcasting, how many ability scores there are, what monsters there are, how skills work, if you can "mark" enemies in combat....
The assumed immutability of the d20-to-hit is more a function of impact than of nature (it'd be akin to perhaps changing the game into a Western, from a "pure fluff" perspective - something you can
do, but not something that's exactly easy or straightforward, so probably best reserved for someone who already knows enough to know what they're going to break by doing it).