When Adventure Designers Cheat

[pemerton]

You do realize that by the standard you suggest here, WotC itself has never published a module for 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons. There isn't a single module out there that follows hard and fast rules for encounter design. Every one of them presents encounters over a wide range of Encounter levels. Consider the Roper in 'Sunless Citadel' as just one famous example. Every one of them fails to offer a definate award after each encounter much less one always scaled exactly to the particular encounter. All of them bend and break the guidelines... errr 'rules' as written. So are you suggesting that they aren't actually D&D modules?

The rules don't state that there are to be 13 challenges of EL X, each with treasure Z. They do state that there are to be challenges equivalent to 13 of EL X, with treasure over the course of them equivalent to Z per encounter. Monte Cook, Wolfgan Bauer and others have written in (sometimes excruciating) detail about the processes of designing adventures that conform to these requirements, and the difficulty that a DM will have with modules that are written in this way, if the DM has given out non-standard treasure, has a party of more than 4, etc. (These latter sorts of comments are, in their function, no different from conversion notes.)

Or in other words, you seem to be saying, "If people don't play the game exactly how I play it, they aren't playing it right." This is one of the most egregious sorts of rules lawyering I've ever seen, because you aren't only trying to enforce 'the rules as written' but what is apparantly your own understanding of 'the spirt of the rules'.

I think you're misunderstanding me. I also think you're underestimating the improtance of the encounter, treasure and XP rules in the DMG.

I don't care whether or not people play 3E D&D as written. I don't very often - it's not my preferred game system. Of D20 games, I find Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, Conan or CofC give a play experience that I prefer. And my overall favourite game - due to the intricacy of its character design rules - is in fact Rolemaster.

What I do care about is game design, and understanding the relationship between game design and play experience. I think that, for various reasons - perhaps due to the desire to market to as broad an audience as possible - D&D has a history of pretending that its game system is "play experience neutral". In my view such a claim is absurd. What D&D tacitly relies on is that, in fact, people will drop or alter bits of the system in order to go for the play experience that they want.

As an example: although alignment appears in Core Rulebook 1 as a rule every bit as solid, mandatory and mechanically hard-wired as the system of skills and feats, we know that many people in play either ignore alignment as a practical matter, or just drop it altogether. They change the mechanics to get the play experience they desire.

The encounter-and-reward mechanics in the DMG are written with a deliberate purpose in mind: they tell you how to build adventures that will deliver a certain type of play experience for which 3E D&D is optimised - namely, a game of fantasy action and combat, based on the idea that defeating (typically, killing) monsters is the main character goal, and that those who defeat such monsters will be able to loot their hoards.

Just as no one is sitting at your table forcing you to use alignment rules, or forbidding you from giving every character an additional feat at 1st level, or declaring that all characters in your game also speak Elvish as a second language, so no one is forcing you to use these rules for encounter design. But it is interesting to reflect on what happens to the play experience as one moves away from them.

As it happens, dropping alignment rarely has a profound impact on other parts of the game. We can drop detect spells, and handwave our treatment of those comparatively few attack spells that rely upon it. Without alignment, as many have noticed, it does become harder to explain, in-game, the moral legitimacy of the principal activity most characters engage in, namely, killing and looting, but not impossible. Appeals to self-defence or defence of others do the job often enough.

What happens if you move away from the encounter-design and reward-placement rules? You gradually head into territory where the assumptions on which other parts of the game rely - particulary the character-building rules, but also the action-resolution rules, break down.

Thus, if you don't give out enough treasure, high-level fighters don't get the equipment the game assumes they have to make their fighting skills good enough.

If you give XP for roleplaying, or players (as opposed to their characters) solving puzzles, then you suddenly have to explain (the game rules don't explain it for you) why purely meta-game activities make characters better at fighting in-game.

What happens if you want to run a predominantly political game, rather than a fighting game? One thing you notice is that every level, automatically, all characters gradually (or not so gradually) improve at fighting and saving throws against dying, but they don't automatically get better at social skills. Indeed, for most classes, Diplomacy, Bluff and Sense Motive are cross-class skills; so PCs don't have enough skill points. On the other hand, the bulk of feats are designed to improve combat or related performancy, so in the social/political game PCs have too many feat slots - there is a limit to how much fun it is to keep taking Skill Focus feats and double-aptitude feats for one's various social skills. On the whole, I think we can say that D&D's character-design mechanics don't support this style of play as well as the fighting style of play.

Another thing you find, when you move into this sort of territory, is that the timing rules for task and conflict resolution break down. The rules are extremely clear on how many attacks can get made per 6 seconds, how fast people can move, etc. But once we move into social conflict, they again hand wave it all away. How many times do I have to roll a Bluff check if I am filibustering in the Senate for 36 hours? And how often do my political enemies get to roll Sense Motive checks. What is the unit of time for social conflict? And how far away can my friends be, how fluent in the subject-matter of the debate need they be, before they can Aid Another? There is nothing specified as clearly here as the Hit AC 10 rule for Aiding Another in combat.

A third example, returning to the encounter-design and reward-placement rules: whereas the rules and the designers are very clear on assigning challenge ratings to monsters and physically harmful traps - we know these things are worked out by seeing how difficult the threat is for a party of iconics to overcome - they completey handwave the assignment of challenge-ratings in a social/political game.

And even if we solve the problem of assigning challenge ratings, what about treasure? The magic item rules are clearly designed with the assumption that pluses in combat, whether to attack, damage, AC or save, are very important, whereas pluses on skills less so. In the political game, where characters don't care about weapons or armour, the treasure-placment rules will tend to break down.

What about spending our loot on other things? We have a lot of rules in the PHB about what adventuring equipment costs. We have quite sparse rules on the costs of maintaining a court, bribing officials, and so on. To play this sort of game, then, the group has to alter various parts of the rules to deliver the desired experience. The rules as written won't do it for them. They simply fail to support this sort of play in the same way that they support the fighting approach.

None of the above is remotely a criticism of D&D. No RPG system can support all styles of play. That's why we have different systems. If I want to play a game where the pedominant mode of resolving conflicts between PCs and NPCs is repartee, I'll play Dying Earth, not D&D.

But as long as we keep pretending that D&D really is all things to all people, and that system and play experience are mutually independent - or, as is sometimes asserted, that there can't be mechanics better adapted than 3E D&D to supporting play experiences like the political/social game - we won't be able to explain why what, for some people, is the pinnacle of adventure design, is for others nothing but a snooze-fest or worse.

 

[pemerton]

My response to this is obliquely a response to vig.

I hope you don't object to a direct response to your post.

I share your preference for the D1-3 type module over White Plume Mountain or (shudder) ToH. But I think these latter two modules do represent a trend in 1E that is, as far as I can tell, completely missing in 3E (and I, for my part and given my play preferences, don't miss it!). Consider the Slavers series. As compiled in the single softbound volume, this has some similarities to the Drow-series in its episodic character, interesting NPCs and so on. But it also has "situational" challenges of the frictionless room variety, of which the pinnacle is probably being stripped of one's gear at the climax. Way to suck, if what you enjoy is playing your character - but great, if what you enjoy is essentially meta-game puzzle-solving.

I trust WoTC to know their market, and I therefore infer that my taste (and, if I've understood you properly, yours) is more widespread than that of those who liked these situational challenges.

 

[Celebrim]

I agree that the two systems support different play styles to some degree (I think it's a fairly small degree) but what I'm mostly referring to are differences in player expectation...So I think that's the difference in how many older modules are regarded. Designers used to not consider whether removing all teleportation, divination spells and (eventually equipment) was "fair" in Isle of the Ape. It just WAS, and you found a way to deal with it (other than complain to the GM).

Chuck

That pretty much describes exactly my experience as well. The biggest change between players reared on 1st edition, and the players whose only experience is 3rd edition is that 3rd edition players tend to see the role of the DM as primarily servant to the players. Third edition players believe that by agreeing to play the game with the DM, the DM is bound by a social contract to play with exactly those rules as written in the published books and that if thier is any disagreement, then they have recourse first to the books and then to negotiation with the DM. The general culture is that the DM should feel grateful that someone is willing to play with him, and that the DM is not the authority, the published material is.

First edition players are more likely to see the DM as 'god' and that by agreeing to play in the DM's game, you are agreeing to abide by his rules whatever they may be. Young players are often utterly taken aback when I explain that I started playing without knowing the rules, that I played with several DM's who never explained what the rules of the game as they were playing it were, that the 1st edition DMG claimed that combat resolution rules were the exclusive domain of the DM and thus a DM was rather in his right not to tell anyone what mechanics he was using to adjudicate anything, and that in one case I played through a D&D module in which at no point did I know exactly what my remaining hitpoints were because the DM considered that numbers consistuted 'game information' which represented something which the players should not know because the characters themselves could not know more than that they were severely or lightly injured, fatigued or still fit to fight, or whatever. The general culture was that you should feel grateful that the DM was willing to let you play, and that the DM was the authority and the published material was only guidelines.

You can imagine that I've occassionally had conflicts with young players over thier expectation of what them sitting down at my table means, and what I imagine them sitting down at my table means.

I don't know entirely how to explain this shift. Partly it stems from a less explicit granting of authority to the DM. A 1st edition DM could always counter 'book worship', by pointing to passages in the book that explicitly granted him more authority than the book. Partly it seems to stem from the very quality of the rules themselves, which demand less tinkering than that 1st edition rules and which offer the illusion of covering every circumstance and covering it well (something that was never true of 1st edition). Partly I think it comes from CRPG experience, in which the computer as game master is a mere slave to its rules set and this is the experience young gamers demand from thier pen and paper games. Partly I think it comes from 3rd editions focus on player options, leading to situation in which players seem to think that the purpose of the game is to obtain some end goal of a 'perfect' build of some sort (which feeds back into my point about CRPG's).

In any event, you are completely correct to note the shift in player expectations.

One thing that has really struck me in this thread though is the popularity of Monte Cook, who arguably produces material with a very strong 1st edition feel. His style of encounter design strikes me as very neo-Gygaxian. For example, while we've been focusing on 'Forgotten Temple of Thardizun', his 'Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil' provides recreations of EXACTLY the same scenarios described by the original poster - cold not preventable even by magic, darkness not illuminatable except by special items, etc. If you read over Monte's works, you'll find that he above all currently popular designers is more prone to 'cheating' as it has been defined in this thread (against my arguments, since I don't consider that to be cheating at all). Monte is a very 'anti-austere' designer, to use another term invented for the thread. He does things not in the rules as written all the time.

 

[Celebrim]

The rules don't state that there are to be 13 challenges of EL X, each with treasure Z. They do state that there are to be challenges equivalent to 13 of EL X, with treasure over the course of them equivalent to Z per encounter.

I do not see these as rules. Or to the extent that they are rules in that some of the game balance (which is pretty poor in D&D to begin with, but no more so than most game systems) was obtained with certain assumptions in mind, they are so flexible as to not force anything in particular on the DM. You are making very specific assumptions about what players want, and then using your assumptions to justify assumptions. But not only is that logic circular, it all falls apart when you point out that those assumptions are just completely wrong. A case in point in a little bit.

I think you're misunderstanding me. I also think you're underestimating the improtance of the encounter, treasure and XP rules in the DMG.

No, I don't underestimate thier importance to producing a particular experience. But that's just it. I don't think that that particular experience is the goal of D&D or that it stops being D&D when it produces a slightly different experience.

And my overall favourite game - due to the intricacy of its character design rules - is in fact Rolemaster.

That is a whole different tangent, and tempting as it is to address the tension between playability and complexity, lets just not go there.

I think that, for various reasons - perhaps due to the desire to market to as broad an audience as possible - D&D has a history of pretending that its game system is "play experience neutral".

I don't think its pretending anything. Almost all RPG's are play experience neutral, and in practice they often create play experiences radically different than what you'd expect even if you are playing by the stock rules as written.

In my view such a claim is absurd. What D&D tacitly relies on is that, in fact, people will drop or alter bits of the system in order to go for the play experience that they want.

I view your counter-theory to be absurd, but there we are.

Sure, that happens. Some game masters have a tendancy to be never satisfied with the rules and to tinker and fiddle endlessly. Sometimes this is directed to an explicit goal. Other times its just personal preference.

But that's hardly the only way in which play experiences differ. It's not like every group playing with the same set of rules generates the exact same play experience. Play experiences are largely rule independent. The only real role of the rules in determining play experience is what direction the rules will take the game when the groups social contract breaks down and one or more players starts using the rules to obtain some new game goal.

For example, if you read 1st edition Vampire the Masquerade, its clear that the designers imagined a social contract in which the characters in some fashion objected to thier status as young vampires and who wished to be free from the 'curse'. There is nothing in the rules that prevents the game from being played in that way, but on the other hand there is nothing in the rules that explicitly encourages the game to be played that way. The reward structure encourages revealing in ones vampirism, resulting in a game which tends to 'super heroes in black' when that 'style' contract breaks down or is ignored. Is that a failure of design or a failure of player imaginition? Whether or not it is a failure of design, it doesn't change the fact that the play experience of the game itself depends entirely on the intention of the players and not the rules.

As for D&D being designed to favor combat resolution over other forms of conflict resolution, I've already agreed with you over that completely. Where I continue to disagree with you is over whether that forces any particular play experience. You are making a big and flawed assumption in your analysis.

As it happens, dropping alignment rarely has a profound impact on other parts of the game.

If and only if we agreed to note have alignment an integral part of the game in the first place. In another group game, removing alignment from the game might have an profound impact on the game as a whole. As it happens, the degree to which alignment is important rarely has anything to do with whether a group has agreed to drop it from the rules, and more to do with whether they take it seriously and make it central to the campaign. But, there are no rules as to how central any one particular element of the game ought to be.

What happens if you move away from the encounter-design and reward-placement rules? You gradually head into territory where the assumptions on which other parts of the game rely - particulary the character-building rules, but also the action-resolution rules, break down.

No you don't, and for the same reasons. Fiddling with encounter design and reward placement might break a game which heavily depends on those things, but it isn't gauranteed to break D&D games in general.

If you give XP for roleplaying, or players (as opposed to their characters) solving puzzles, then you suddenly have to explain (the game rules don't explain it for you) why purely meta-game activities make characters better at fighting in-game.

No you don't, any more than you have to explain why characters who primarily swing swords get better at Diplomacy or Move Silently even if they didn't use those skills over the course of the adventure.

What happens if you want to run a predominantly political game, rather than a fighting game?...On the whole, I think we can say that D&D's character-design mechanics don't support this style of play as well as the fighting style of play...Another thing you find, when you move into this sort of territory, is that the timing rules for task and conflict resolution break down. The rules are extremely clear on how many attacks can get made per 6 seconds, how fast people can move, etc. But once we move into social conflict, they again hand wave it all away. How many times do I have to roll a Bluff check if I am filibustering in the Senate for 36 hours? And how often do my political enemies get to roll Sense Motive checks. What is the unit of time for social conflict? And how far away can my friends be, how fluent in the subject-matter of the debate need they be, before they can Aid Another? There is nothing specified as clearly here as the Hit AC 10 rule for Aiding Another in combat.

I read through that, and at the end I had a really big guffaw. There is something basic going on here at such a low level you aren't even noticing it. You are certainly right that D&D has never developed the same complexity of rules for adjudicating social interaction that it has for combat. There is however nothing which prevents it from doing so. You could have a game system with complex and adequate rules for resolving conflict resolution of every sort - negotiation, fight, flight, contests, whatever. But there is strong pressure on a game system to develop good rules for resolving fights and not detailed rules for resolving negotiations and it has nothing at all to do with the preferred way players have for resolving conflicts. The reason D&D doesn't have as complex rules for resolving negotiations as it has for combats is that the players who care - the ones that prefer RP resolutions to problems and highly political games and lots of socialization - don't want a game system that provides a detailed means of resolving such challenges through recourse to the rules. A game system that explicitly supported gamist resolutions to role playing conflicts wouldn't be attractive to players that wanted to resolve conflicts through role playing. It would in fact remove the satisfaction such players found in that method of solving a problem.

D&D is actually a very good game system for supporting problem solving through role playing and highly political games, precisely because it doesn't provide rules for resolving role playing conflicts through die rolls.

What about spending our loot on other things? We have a lot of rules in the PHB about what adventuring equipment costs. We have quite sparse rules on the costs of maintaining a court, bribing officials, and so on. To play this sort of game, then, the group has to alter various parts of the rules to deliver the desired experience. The rules as written won't do it for them. They simply fail to support this sort of play in the same way that they support the fighting approach.

- emphasis mine

Not supporting something well is very different from forbiding it. Creating a list of costs for bribing officials, maintaining a court, and so on (all of which can be found in various issues of Dragon) doesn't break the rules of the game. In fact, it would have never occurred to me that price lists were rules, a term I find you use to generally, as price lists strike me more as something specific to a game world and not all D&D games as a whole. The ones in the PH are just 'default gameworld to get you started'. They are convienent to use (although they are notoriously badly designed and largely handwaved) in most cases, but it is a rather strange suggestion to say that if your game world had its own price list, or even that you modified the price list from town to town that you were breaking the rules and no longer playing D&D.

But as long as we keep pretending that D&D really is all things to all people, and that system and play experience are mutually independent - or, as is sometimes asserted, that there can't be mechanics better adapted than 3E D&D to supporting play experiences like the political/social game - we won't be able to explain why what, for some people, is the pinnacle of adventure design, is for others nothing but a snooze-fest or worse.

I disagree. I don't think we need to do any of those things to explain why some modules are enjoyable to some people and a snooze-fest to others. I don't recall anyone before you ever had trouble explaining why some people like ToH and other don't, while they were 'pretending' that D&D could support a wide variaty of play experience. I mean, it seems to me that the very fact that ToH is enjoyed by some people and not by others seems to suggest that D&D can ecompass a wide variaty of play experiences.

 

[pemerton]

Almost all RPG's are play experience neutral, and in practice they often create play experiences radically different than what you'd expect even if you are playing by the stock rules as written.

Your second claim here may well be true. I don't think the first is. A rules system can influence, facilitate or hinder without determining. Do you deny that Dying Earth facilitates repartee-based conflict in a manner, and to an extent, that D&D does not?

But that's hardly the only way in which play experiences differ. It's not like every group playing with the same set of rules generates the exact same play experience. Play experiences are largely rule independent. The only real role of the rules in determining play experience is what direction the rules will take the game when the groups social contract breaks down and one or more players starts using the rules to obtain some new game goal.

I agree with your first claim. Rules don't determine play experience. But they do help shape it. I disagree with your second claim. The function of the rules is not to support the game once social contract breaks down - at least, not in most games I have played or seen played. For example, in most D&D games that I'm familiar with, combat between PC and NPCs or monsters does not signal a break down in the social contract, but is in fact demanded by it. And most such combat is resolved in accordance with the rules.

As for D&D being designed to favor combat resolution over other forms of conflict resolution, I've already agreed with you over that completely. Where I continue to disagree with you is over whether that forces any particular play experience.

It may be that our experiences are very different, and thus that we are reasoning from quite different pools of evidence. But (to pick one example) I have never seen a D&D game, or a set of D&D rules, that satisfactorily support a pacifist character. This is, in my view, non-coincidentally connected to the D&D ruleset.

D&D does not support a super-hero approach very well, either, because the rules facilitate killing as the standard technique of combat resolution over disabling or knocking unconscious.

These are examples of rules facilitating or hindering certain play experiences.

As it happens, the degree to which alignment is important rarely has anything to do with whether a group has agreed to drop it from the rules, and more to do with whether they take it seriously and make it central to the campaign. But, there are no rules as to how central any one particular element of the game ought to be.

The first claim here is something with which I agree, and is quite consistent with what I said about alignment. The second claim is something with which I disagree. There are clear rules in D&D that make skill and feat selection more important than selecting the colour of one's robe or weapon-belt. Off the top of my head, the only part of the D&D rules I can think of that makes robe colour important is the description of Robes of the Archmagi.

I read through that, and at the end I had a really big guffaw.

I don't see the need to be rude. Reasons for disagreement will do.

You are certainly right that D&D has never developed the same complexity of rules for adjudicating social interaction that it has for combat. There is however nothing which prevents it from doing so.

Which is to say, nothing prevents one from playing a different game. I'm sure someone out there has written a d20 game that has social aspects better developed than D&D.

You could have a game system with complex and adequate rules for resolving conflict resolution of every sort - negotiation, fight, flight, contests, whatever.

The main one I can think of is Hero Quest/Wars. Dying Earth also does a reasonable job. Rolemaster's rules are complex, but some disupte their adequacy.

But there is strong pressure on a game system to develop good rules for resolving fights and not detailed rules for resolving negotiations and it has nothing at all to do with the preferred way players have for resolving conflicts. The reason D&D doesn't have as complex rules for resolving negotiations as it has for combats is that the players who care - the ones that prefer RP resolutions to problems and highly political games and lots of socialization - don't want a game system that provides a detailed means of resolving such challenges through recourse to the rules. A game system that explicitly supported gamist resolutions to role playing conflicts wouldn't be attractive to players that wanted to resolve conflicts through role playing. It would in fact remove the satisfaction such players found in that method of solving a problem.

The final two sentences are highly contestable. Admittedly I have only ever encountered, or read the writings of, a miniscule proportion of the world's role players. But many of those, who want a politics-type or social-type game, do want action resolution mechanics (which I take to be what you mean by "gamist resolutions") to support it. Your experience of such players may be different, but I think your generalisation from that experience is in doubt.

I also find it interesting that you contrast roleplaying and combat. I tend to regard resolving combats as one form of roleplaying - indeed, for many players of a typical fighter character, their main roleplaying outlet is through building their character to be good at fighting, and then playing their character during the fight.

D&D is actually a very good game system for supporting problem solving through role playing and highly political games, precisely because it doesn't provide rules for resolving role playing conflicts through die rolls.

This seems to be the equivalent to the claim that D&D is good for supporting political games becaue all social conflict resolution is free-form.

Obviously, player's preference for free-form game systems varies widely. But free-form is not the only way to do it. Just the same as combat, in D&D, is not simply "rolling a die" - there are all sorts of decisions to be made, like which manoeuvre to use, which foe to attack, which position to take, and so on - so rules for social interaction can be developed in the same vein.

There are also questions about the relationship between free-form resolution and in-game versus meta-game considerations. If there is an expectation, for example, that a free-former will mould their behaviour to reflect his or her character's stats, then it makes a difference to the free form whether or not the game has a Charisma stat, a Diplomacy skill and so on.

In any event I don't think it's true, of many incarnations of D&D, that it is free-form in the way you appear to suggest.

1st Ed AD&D had highly structured rules for a number of social interactions: recruting henchman and hirelings, numbers of henchman, loyalty of henchman and hirelings, tricking monsters into giving up pursuit, etc.

3E D&D also has rules for social interaction: Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidation, Gather Information and Sense Motive skills. To get free-form play you have to ignore these rules. This will tend to shortchange the players of Bards (and probably some Rogues, Paladins and Clerics). But when you want to take the rules into account, you find they are not all that well developed: the most detailed rules under Bluff and Intimidation, for example, concern their use to gain advantages in combat.

Again, this is not criticism of D&D. It is observation.

Not supporting something well is very different from forbiding it.

True. But it may discourage it, or encourage a different sort of play.

Creating a list of costs for bribing officials, maintaining a court, and so on (all of which can be found in various issues of Dragon) doesn't break the rules of the game. In fact, it would have never occurred to me that price lists were rules, a term I find you use to generally, as price lists strike me more as something specific to a game world and not all D&D games as a whole. The ones in the PH are just 'default gameworld to get you started'. They are convienent to use (although they are notoriously badly designed and largely handwaved) in most cases, but it is a rather strange suggestion to say that if your game world had its own price list, or even that you modified the price list from town to town that you were breaking the rules and no longer playing D&D.

It is becoming clear to me that we have quite different conceptions of what counts as the rules or mechanics of a game. You seem to have in mind the action resolution system (or perhaps a certain subset of it, like the combat rules - I get the impression that you may not regard such aspects of D&D as the list of example DCs in the DMG, or the Diplomacy reaction influencing table, as rules) and probably the character building system (or at least part of it - you don't seem to regard the XP system, which undergirds character development, as part of the rules).

You seem to exclude from the rules such elements as the encounter and reward systems, the equipment lists, I suspect perhaps the magic item building system, and I imagine the city-building system. I'm not sure whether you regard alignment as part of the rules or not.

Of course, changing the cost of a longsword up or down by 5 gp may not have a huge impact on the game; changing armour prices will have a bigger impact, because it will affect the starting AC of 1st level characters - a very important part of the game for new players and new campaigns.

These are still relatively minor aspects of the rules. But the fact that certain activities are supported by the equipment list provided - buying alchemical devices, or purchasing healing spells - but others are not - hiring an alchemist (compare this to 1st ed AD&D, which devotes quite a few column inches to hiring alchemists), or paying for a bed in a hospital - contributes to the support of certain play experiences rather than others.

Of course I can make up my own prices for these things. I can also make up my own rules for social conflict. I can also make up my own rules for grappling. As I said above, D&D has always relied on players being prepared to adapt the rules to their own game. This is not evidence against the claim that rules contribute to, even shape, the play experience. It is evidence for it: if I want a certain play experience, I have to make up new rules.

(As an aside: one interesting example within d20 of new rules for equipment buying, designed to support a different play experience from D&D, would be the wealth rules in D20 modern.)

I disagree. I don't think we need to do any of those things to explain why some modules are enjoyable to some people and a snooze-fest to others. I don't recall anyone before you ever had trouble explaining why some people like ToH and other don't, while they were 'pretending' that D&D could support a wide variaty of play experience. I mean, it seems to me that the very fact that ToH is enjoyed by some people and not by others seems to suggest that D&D can ecompass a wide variaty of play experiences.

Or, alternatively, that different people are using the D&D rules as a starting point for playing different games - which is what I am contending. What counts as "playing D&D" as opposed to "playing XYZ"? How much variation do these descriptions tolerate? I don't really care. The publishers of D&D obviously do care, given their financial interest - they want people to think of their game as a D&D game, even if it varies quite significantly from the rules as written by WoTC in their Core Rulebooks.

What I am interested in is the influence of game rules and mechanics - understood in the way I have characterised them, as those parts of the rules text which tell or show players how to play, and what counts as playing, the game - on play experience; and (in the context of this thread) on the compatability of adventures with the different play expectations generated by differences across games.

I am sure that among 3E players these difference exist. It is undoubtedly true that they exist across editions. 1st ed AD&D and 3E D&D support quite different play experiences. As many have noted, 1st ed characters are quick and dirty to create; the mechanical experience of playing one 7th level fighter is much the same as playing any other; no wonder the game supports a style of play where meta-game thinking and puzzle-sovling is a good part of the fun! Such a character is well-suited to being a mere vehicle for bringing the player's mind to the situation.

Contrast this with a 3E character. By the time a fighter is 7th level, it is likely that hours of planning, influenced by the lessons of actual play, have gone into the build of the character, selection of feats, planning of combat tactics and techniques, and so on. Who wouldn't be at least a bit frustrated by challenges in an adventure that make all that effort return no reward? 3E is geared to quite a different set of player expectations.

(By the way, you suggest that my ideas are original to me, and novel in some way. While the details of the above analysis are my own, the basic idea of the influence of mechanics on play is not mine - I picked it up by reading Ron Edwards at The Forge.)

 

[Nightfall]

What are you talking about?

I'm talking about this:

If the PCs could use magic, the adventure would be done in 15 minutes

That's why I ask why would you bother to give them food then?

Psion,
You're right. It's like condemning a movie about those things even though the movies might be good in and of themselves. Sound familiar huh?

 

[Hussar]

This is consistent with my suggestion that the sort of play style supported by 1E and 3E are different, leading to different criteria for what counts as a good module for each system.

Well, considering that 1e pretty much necessitated resource gathering to gain levels, I would say that the play styles are almost identical. Kill the critter and take its treasure hardly started with 3e. About the only difference is buying magic items, however, that's not explicitly in the rules and there are a large percentage of gamers who do not have magic shops.

That pretty much describes exactly my experience as well. The biggest change between players reared on 1st edition, and the players whose only experience is 3rd edition is that 3rd edition players tend to see the role of the DM as primarily servant to the players. Third edition players believe that by agreeing to play the game with the DM, the DM is bound by a social contract to play with exactly those rules as written in the published books and that if thier is any disagreement, then they have recourse first to the books and then to negotiation with the DM. The general culture is that the DM should feel grateful that someone is willing to play with him, and that the DM is not the authority, the published material is.

Ok, I have no idea who you've been playing with, but, this is utter ballocks.

First edition players are more likely to see the DM as 'god' and that by agreeing to play in the DM's game, you are agreeing to abide by his rules whatever they may be. Young players are often utterly taken aback when I explain that I started playing without knowing the rules, that I played with several DM's who never explained what the rules of the game as they were playing it were, that the 1st edition DMG claimed that combat resolution rules were the exclusive domain of the DM and thus a DM was rather in his right not to tell anyone what mechanics he was using to adjudicate anything, and that in one case I played through a D&D module in which at no point did I know exactly what my remaining hitpoints were because the DM considered that numbers consistuted 'game information' which represented something which the players should not know because the characters themselves could not know more than that they were severely or lightly injured, fatigued or still fit to fight, or whatever. The general culture was that you should feel grateful that the DM was willing to let you play, and that the DM was the authority and the published material was only guidelines.

Count yourself lucky if you didn't have rules lawyers at your table in 1e. I remember far and away spending too many hours debating various rules with players and DM's. Grateful that the DM let you play? Again, ballocks.

You can imagine that I've occassionally had conflicts with young players over thier expectation of what them sitting down at my table means, and what I imagine them sitting down at my table means.

I don't know entirely how to explain this shift. Partly it stems from a less explicit granting of authority to the DM. A 1st edition DM could always counter 'book worship', by pointing to passages in the book that explicitly granted him more authority than the book. Partly it seems to stem from the very quality of the rules themselves, which demand less tinkering than that 1st edition rules and which offer the illusion of covering every circumstance and covering it well (something that was never true of 1st edition). Partly I think it comes from CRPG experience, in which the computer as game master is a mere slave to its rules set and this is the experience young gamers demand from thier pen and paper games. Partly I think it comes from 3rd editions focus on player options, leading to situation in which players seem to think that the purpose of the game is to obtain some end goal of a 'perfect' build of some sort (which feeds back into my point about CRPG's).

In any event, you are completely correct to note the shift in player expectations.

One thing that has really struck me in this thread though is the popularity of Monte Cook, who arguably produces material with a very strong 1st edition feel. His style of encounter design strikes me as very neo-Gygaxian. For example, while we've been focusing on 'Forgotten Temple of Thardizun', his 'Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil' provides recreations of EXACTLY the same scenarios described by the original poster - cold not preventable even by magic, darkness not illuminatable except by special items, etc. If you read over Monte's works, you'll find that he above all currently popular designers is more prone to 'cheating' as it has been defined in this thread (against my arguments, since I don't consider that to be cheating at all). Monte is a very 'anti-austere' designer, to use another term invented for the thread. He does things not in the rules as written all the time.

I would suggest you read more modules. Try the World's Largest Dungeon or Rappan Athuk before making broad sweeping generalizations like that. Considering WOTC has only recently gotten back into the module game, we don't have that many WOTC modules to make a comparison of. However, even of the ones we do have, several break the errrm rules all over the place.

 

[pemerton]

Well, considering that 1e pretty much necessitated resource gathering to gain levels, I would say that the play styles are almost identical. Kill the critter and take its treasure hardly started with 3e.

I don't disagree with this. What I had in mind was that 1E was more likely to involve meta-gaming approahces to killing the critters and getting the loot - for example, traps or puzzles that the players resolve without worrying too much about how their characters resolve them. Whereas in 3E, given the effort one has typically devoted to building one's character, one probably wants to use the character, rather than faff around with WPM or ToH-type stuff.

 

[Celebrim]

I would suggest you read more modules. Try the World's Largest Dungeon or Rappan Athuk before making broad sweeping generalizations like that.

I suggest you not assume my lack of familiarity with what has been published out there.

 

[Hussar]

I don't disagree with this. What I had in mind was that 1E was more likely to involve meta-gaming approahces to killing the critters and getting the loot - for example, traps or puzzles that the players resolve without worrying too much about how their characters resolve them. Whereas in 3E, given the effort one has typically devoted to building one's character, one probably wants to use the character, rather than faff around with WPM or ToH-type stuff.

I think that had more to do with the modules that different people played. For example, as was mentioned, the Slave Lords modules didn't have much of the meta-gaming puzzles, nor did the GDQ series. I would actually say that the whole "test the player" bit was more the exception than the rule. Yes, it cropped up from time to time, but, not as frequently as all that.

Celebrim - I can only judge by what I read. You make broad statements like

"if you read over Monte's works, you'll find that he above all currently popular designers is more prone to 'cheating' as it has been defined in this thread (against my arguments, since I don't consider that to be cheating at all). Monte is a very 'anti-austere' designer, to use another term invented for the thread. He does things not in the rules as written all the time."

when that simply isn't supported by the modules out there. WLD and Rappan Athuk both take lots of liberties with the RAW. Dungeon is filled with modules that do this sort of thing. Heck, even in the AP's, arguably some of the most played modules out there, introduce all sorts of funky mechanics and rules tweaks.