D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[hawkeyefan]

I'm not following. At all. The game is it's own reward with plenty of back and forth, mostly between NPCs and PCs.

I wasn’t asking about rewards. I was asking how you evaluate a player’s performance. Like, what makes a good player? Or what does it take for a player to have a good session?

There’s not a right or wrong answer, but the answer may help explain the goals of play. These will vary by group and game, so I’m trying to understand your goals in play. Other than “fun” which I think is a goal for everyone and therefore sheds no light on the discussion.

I don't think there's anything wrong with playing in a participatory/thespian-heavy style with mostly FKR adjudication, as Oofta seems to be advocating for. "Game mastery" as a play motivation (where control over "earning a win condition" and "showing knowledge over the system" are desired) isn't actually a super common motivation in TTRPGs, especially as players age.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it! I was asking to better understand his game.

If the goal is more about story, then I can see how procedures like wilderness travel or dungeon exploration rules are being viewed as unnecessary. But if the goal is more about skillful navigation of tactical challenges, then such procedures (or similar ones) are more necessary.

Not that a game must be one or the other. Most games involve both, to varying degrees. I’m just trying to understand @Oofta ’s game a but better, and perhaps also explain why others don’t consider such rules systems as “unnecessary cruft”.

 

[FrogReaver]

I wasn’t asking about rewards. I was asking how you evaluate a player’s performance. Like, what makes a good player? Or what does it take for a player to have a good session?

There’s not a right or wrong answer, but the answer may help explain the goals of play. These will vary by group and game, so I’m trying to understand your goals in play. Other than “fun” which I think is a goal for everyone and therefore sheds no light on the discussion.

If I understand you correctly - you are asking whether the 'fun' is derived primarily from interesting roleplay interaction or whether the 'fun' is derived primarily from winning/overcoming the scenario.

I'd say for me the answer is the first, interesting roleplay interaction. At one time I was definitely more about winning/overcoming the scenario and 5e could be a bit frustrating at times there. Don't get me wrong it's still fun to win/overcome the scenario but failure is also interesting and often fun. For example: When my Wizard Lodu died part of his consciousness was imbued into his spell book/notebook. He could communicate to the party with the pages and provided a repository of information for the party going forward as well as an overarching quest they hoped to one day fulfill. So while this was definitely a 'loss' it was incredibly fun as well.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it! I was asking to better understand his game.

If the goal is more about story, then I can see how procedures like wilderness travel or dungeon exploration rules are being viewed as unnecessary. But if the goal is more about skillful navigation of tactical challenges, then such procedures (or similar ones) are more necessary.

IMO, skill navigation of tactical wilderness and dungeon exploration scenarios can be accomplished via a focus on the fiction instead of a focus on predefined mechanics. A large part of real world tactics is not having perfect information about how everything works and having to make the most of the information you have.

Not that a game must be one or the other. Most games involve both, to varying degrees. I’m just trying to understand @Oofta ’s game a but better, and perhaps also explain why others don’t consider such rules systems as “unnecessary cruft”.

Agreed.

 

[pemerton]

I've just posted an actual play report of the Torchbeare session I GMed today. It illustrates several procedures at work:

*Town phase, in which the players can have their PCs do down-time-y things in exchange for accruing lifestlye costs that have to be met at the end of the phase;

*Conflicts - in this session, a negotiation conflict and a trickery conflict - which are the main way of resolving high-stakes contests between the PCs and NPCs/monsters; these use blind scripting of three actions at a time for each side, with simultaneous declaration and no takebacks, and the opposing actions resolving against one another in a quasi-Rocks/Paper/Scissors fashion;

* Journeys - a way of working out how taxing it is to travel from A to B;

* The general resolution procedure of the system - that if a player fails a check, either their PC succeeds in their action but incurs a condition, or the PC party suffers a twist (setback or new threat).​

All of them require GM adjudication, as the play report illustrates. In the town phase, this included offering opportunities to the players consistent with their fictional position in town, which includes mechanically-established relationships like friends, parents and mentors.

In the conflicts, this requires helping to frame the stakes, based on the motivations of the NPCs; and also using those NPC motivations - defined primarily by traits and wises (which are a bit like BIFTs in 5e D&D) - to decide the sequence of moves that the NPCs script. The players use their own sense of those motivations to try and infer my scripting and hence script well themselves.

In the journey, the GM has to decide the base amount of "toll" that the travel exacts, and to the integrate in the results of the weather roll and the "Trouble on the Road" roll. And to have final say on whether or not the players can "pay" their toll as they want to (in today's session I let a player pay a PC's toll by expending her perfume - it was hard to stay fresh during such an arduous trip - but not her mirror, as no satisfactory account was given of how a mirror might have been used up during the journey).

Deciding how to narrate failure requires choosing which outcome to impose, and if it is a condition then choosing that (and not all conditions are equal) and if it is a twist than deciding what that is.

But this necessary adjudication doesn't undercut the basic function of the structures, which is to impose pressure on the players in a depersonalised fashion, and to give them the chance to strategise, choose and (hope to) get lucky in response. That is a different sort of play from a system in which the pressure comes from the GM making unconstrained decisions about how much pressure to impose, and when and how it comes to bear at any given moment.

 

[FrogReaver]

Can we all agree with the premise that a DM having less rules constraints on adjudication means there is greater flexibility in a game?

*Note there are pros and cons to greater flexibility

 

[Campbell]

@FrogReaver
The way I would put it is that games like Blades in the Dark and Apocalypse World direct the GM and influence players in how to apply their judgement. When I am running Blades, Apocalypse World or even something much more detailed like Pathfinder Second Edition I am still very much making judgement calls almost every second of play. They are just different sorts of judgement calls then I would be making in D&D Fifth Edition and are prompted by the rules of the game instead of an override of the rules of the game.

These games will often directly call out where the GM is expected to make a judgement call and offer best practices / principles / expectations of what factors should be involved in those decisions. The judgement calls are still constant. Like damn near every moment of play, often exceeding the number of judgement calls I need to make in something like 5e at times. Blades and Cortex for instance involve a boatload of judgement calls when it involves things like interacting with the supernatural elements of the game or any scenes involving any kind of violence that are very well defined in almost every D&D like I have ever played.

Also speaking generally my experience is that DMs of the modern D&D are more principally constrained by the culture of play then is often acknowledged on these boards (mostly because the constraints in place do not feel constraining to most who identify with the play culture). Look no further than the objections I have seen from players on these boards (and in real life trying to run D&D) to techniques like hard scene framing, asking questions and building on them, putting one player in the spotlight (expecting their character and only their character to act) or Apocalypse World style soft and hard moves. In particular many D&D players often expect an amount of world building and detail of geographic/architectural details I have absolutely no interest in exploring as a GM outside of dedicated dungeon crawl / wilderness exploration games.

I am speaking to actual experiences at actual game tables where I have run headlong into cultural expectations of play where I was principally constrained by the expectations of D&D players in the way I wanted to run the game.

 

[pemerton]

Can we all agree with the premise that a DM having less rules constraints on adjudication means there is greater flexibility in a game?

No, for the reason @Campbell already posted:

I just got done playing in a session of L5R Fifth Edition. It has interlocking systems that reflect the emotional tension of the samurai between serving their daimyos and realizing personal desires while trying to keep their honor in tact and make a name for themselves. Say we were using Adventures in Rokugan (a D&D 5e fork) could we have played a narrative where those elements were central to the enfolding story? Sure, but it would have been an exercise in collaborative storytelling instead of series of decisions we make based on the the desires our characters could not help but act on. The playstyle of the game would not have even been close to the same because it would have lacked the necessary pressure that made our game feel so real to me.

A game is more than the fiction produces. It is also an experience where we make decisions about what our characters do. How those ramifications are felt and generated is a fundamental part of the play experience.

The GM deciding what happens next - or to use my own words from just upthread, the pressure on the players coming from the GM making unconstrained decisions about how much pressure to impose, and when and how it comes to bear at any given moment - is one sort of play experience. A game that is based around that experience is what it is. It doesn't seem especially flexible to me.

If the flexibility is supposed to consist in the sorts of events that can occur in the shared fiction, than of RPGs that I regularly play I think the most flexible is MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. I've used it for superheroes, D&D-esque fantasy, and LotR/MERP. This flexibility results from the open-ended nature of PC build (relevant descriptors and milestones); the use of free descriptors (scene distinctions) in scene-framing, which allows a wide variety of scenes to be framed, from a standard D&D-ish fight, to Being Pursued By Giants (which resolves a bit like a skill challenge in 4e D&D) to Uncertain What To Do Next, which I used in the LotR game to create a situation reminiscent of Aragorn's uncertainty on Parth Galen; and the fact that all action outcomes are themselves represented by free descriptors which can be mechanised as dice that add to pools or step back other descriptors - so the same resolution process allows a player to flee the giants (setting back that scene distinction) or fight a giant (inflicting stress or a complication on it) or steal the giant's oxen (creating a Giant Oxen asset).

The structures of the system support rather than undercut its flexibility.

 

[pemerton]

my experience is that DMs of the modern D&D are more principally constrained by the culture of play then is often acknowledged on these boards (mostly because the constraints in place do not feel constraining to most who identify with the play culture).

<snip>

many D&D players often expect an amount of world building and detail of geographic/architectural details I have absolutely no interest in exploring as a GM outside of dedicated dungeon crawl / wilderness exploration games.

I've often posted that I'm a bit mystified by the almost obsessive detail that D&D play still seems to accord to geography and architecture.

 

[FrogReaver]

No, for the reason @Campbell already posted:

The GM deciding what happens next - or to use my own words from just upthread, the pressure on the players coming from the GM making unconstrained decisions about how much pressure to impose, and when and how it comes to bear at any given moment - is one sort of play experience. A game that is based around that experience is what it is. It doesn't seem especially flexible to me.

Counterpoint: A GM with unconstrainted decision making ability can also make the same decisions, apply the same pressure, etc, as a DM with heavy constraints. That he could also do other things in addition to that is why I say less constraints yields greater flexibility.

 

[TwoSix]

Can we all agree with the premise that a DM having less rules constraints on adjudication means there is greater flexibility in a game?

*Note there are pros and cons to greater flexibility

I don't think "less constraints" = "more flexibility" is really in dispute. It's more that the value of "flexibility" is questionable depending on the group's motivations for playing. "Flexibility" is valuable in the "shared improv" portion of a TTRPG, much less so in the "game" portion. Games, as in contests with stakes, don't really benefit from flexible rules in the same manner.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't think "less constraints" = "more flexibility" is really in dispute.

Well.... @pemerton already gave an explicit no and quoted @Campbell as he believed his previous post implicitly agreed.

So, SURPRISE!