D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[Maxperson]

@doctorbadwolf

Would you say the following is true for your D&D games:

I know this wasn't directed at me, but I will give my answers.

• Players take on the role of a crack group of specialists

No. Well, sometimes. It depends on the theme the players put together. Occasionally it's a crack team of scouts or thieves. Other times it's an eclectic group of novices that have come together for some reason.

• The players are expected to bite adventure hooks you provide them with (tailored or not).

No. Not even a little bit. They can bite or ignore and I don't care, and they know that. They don't feel obligated to bite and have even walked out on an entire campaign hook and shifted it to a different goal.

• The players are expected to act as a cohesive unit to solve the problems the adventure presents.

No. See the answer to the first question. Because they might or might not be cohesive, I never expect that they will be that way.

• Correct usage of daily resources are instrumental to success at solving said problems.

Sometimes yes and sometimes no. If they waste their resources freely, it can really bite them later on in the day.

• There is a strong focus on niche protection and spotlight balancing

I never protect the niche. If they all want to be sorcerers with mostly the same spell, they can be.

I do try to balance the spotlight, but it can be tough with my group. Two of my players are pretty passive, so it can be tough to get them into the spotlight in the first place. One varies considerably. Sometimes he's passive and sometimes very active. The last player is type A, so the passive players tend to just want to follow him around and do what he does.

 

[pemerton]

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.

The bit I've bolded seems obviously false to me. Here are my reasons (in rough order from most theoretical to most empirical):

*For participants in a game, the pressure that shapes their decision space is characterised by various parameters, including its source and methods of resisting or overcoming it. A GM with unconstrainted decision does not generate the same parameters as are generated in (for instance) the Torchbearer example I mentioned upthread, or in 4e when a skill challenge is being adjudicated, or in classic D&D when the dungeon exploration process - with its careful tracking of time, rolling for wanderers etc - is implemented.

*As a concrete example, consider the difference between playing chess in the regular way, and practising chess where the other participant is allowed to move the pieces into whatever position they like, from turn to turn, to create puzzles or traps for the practising player to grapple with. Practising in that way is not the same as playing chess. It doesn't produce the same sort of pressure. Returning to Torchbearer yesterday, the players made scripting decisions in the conflicts knowing (i) that I had locked in my scripts and (ii) that the various possible actions interact in certain ways. If I were free to change my script at any moment, and/or to change how the actions interact, they could not experience the same pressure and the same sort of decision-making experience. Likewise in the journeys: the players made decisions about how to handle their food supplies, whether or not to try and forage/hunt for more and/or eke out what they had, based on the parameters established by the travel rules. The pressure would not be the same if its source was not those rules, but the possibility of the GM deciding that they have not enough food.

*As I've often commented, I don't see the actual play example, or even hear reports of actual play, that demonstrate the same sort of pressure and experience arising in 5e play based on relatively unconstrained GM decision-making. And mostly when I hear accounts of tightly constrained decision-making by players it's in the context of combat, which in 5e D&D is based around a very tight procedure - an "artificial predefined structure" to borrow @Oofta's phrase from post 502 upthread - or in the context of debates about how to reconcile the relatively strict resource-and-recovery rules with the loose structure of 6-8 encounters per day. Given my preceding two points, I'm not surprised that I don't see these examples, because I don't think they exist. If the GM is free to introduce whatever fiction they want, based on their imagination about events happening offscreen, then the pressure on the players flows directly from the GM's imagination. That's a type of pressure. It doesn't replicate the pressure that arises from other processes of play.

 

[FrogReaver]

*As a concrete example, consider the difference between playing chess in the regular way, and practising chess where the other participant is allowed to move the pieces into whatever position they like, from turn to turn, to create puzzles or traps for the practising player to grapple with. Practising in that way is not the same as playing chess. It doesn't produce the same sort of pressure.

I'll touch on the rest later. It just so happens this piece is the easiest to respond to and hopefully with set the stage for my future response.

You imagine a chess game where one player can arrange the pieces any way he wants. Suppose he always arranges them such that his arrangement is identical to a legal move in the game of chess. To me this example supports my claim of pressure being able to be identical with a less constrained/more flexible move space.

This isn't to say there isn't no point in there worth discussing, just maybe this example doesn't illustrate it.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Even the same DM from campaign to campaign may play differently and sometimes even within the same campaign!

It me!

Hell we did a pure narrative frame story scene followed by an investigation with some added rules, followed up the next session by a heist with its own added rules.

 

[FrogReaver]

The bit I've bolded seems obviously false to me. Here are my reasons (in rough order from most theoretical to most empirical):

*For participants in a game, the pressure that shapes their decision space is characterised by various parameters, including its source and methods of resisting or overcoming it. A GM with unconstrainted decision does not generate the same parameters as are generated in (for instance) the Torchbearer example I mentioned upthread, or in 4e when a skill challenge is being adjudicated, or in classic D&D when the dungeon exploration process - with its careful tracking of time, rolling for wanderers etc - is implemented.

If I may distill this down to my understanding of your position - "A players knowledge of the rules impacts his decision making. Therefore, even if the fictional outcomes are the same the experience from the players perspective will can be different."

That's persuasive. I agree with that point. I think it might be worth talking about 'how different' at some point.

I think a good example of this would be 2 processes in two nearly identical 5e D&D games. One uses the death save process in the text (you must fail 3 death saves before death). Another uses a custom death save process where the dm rolls a hidden d6 and that determines how many death saves a 0 hp PC can fail before dying.

In both instances another player may immediately healing word that PC before they need to attempt 1 death save, but the pressure and tactical evaluation around whether to choose healing word or do something else was different, because the player knew there was an immediate albeit small risk of death in not immediately healing the 0 hp PC.

I think I'm persuaded. While we can potentially get the same outcome with different rules, the pressure and thus experience will be different. Also, under certain situations we can expect the decision-making process of the players will diverge, eventually causing the games to diverge (high likelihood).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Isnt that the engineering statement ... you can have 2 of three virtues but not all at once?

Not...really?

I'm more saying that one person's "elegant" can be another's "over-designed," and that two different people can both use the word "flexible" but straight-up mean conflicting things.

@FrogReaver I seem to have explained myself poorly. That is you seem to think I am talking about how there are pitfalls to "flexibility," pros and cons, when both people agree on what "flexibility" fundamentally means, that is, more total options.

I am saying I do not think all people agree that "flexibility" means more total options.

To use a perhaps morbid analogy, the human spine is extremely flexible for a bonus object. If we were to shatter that spine, it would by definition have a larger number of options for directions it could move. However, I don't think most people would consider that an increase in "flexibility." That is the disagreement I am pointing to here. That more options can actually transform "flexibility" into "enervation," at least to some viewers, meaning that a larger number of options is not merely "pros and cons," it is straight up (subjectively) not flexibility anymore.

Because a shattered spine can bend in any direction, but can't actually support movement or action anymore, specifically because it permits (but does not support) movement in any direction. IOW, some will define "flexibility" as you have: more options, more flexible, always, no matter what. Others, like me, would define flexibility as "more supported options," meaning that an increase in options without support would not actually be "flexibility" and might even reduce it.

 

[FrogReaver]

I am saying I do not think all people agree that "flexibility" means more total options.

I haven't seen anyone propose it to mean anything else. Even below you don't provide a definition, just an analogy. I can tell you why i don't think the analogy is fitting, but then we are just going to argue about the analogy. Let's cut to the point and talk about the definition.

Others, like me, would define flexibility as "more supported options," meaning that an increase in options without support would not actually be "flexibility" and might even reduce it.

Okay, so what does 'more supported options' mean and what does 'options without support' mean?

 

[pemerton]

If I may distill this down to my understanding of your position - "A players knowledge of the rules impacts his decision making. Therefore, even if the fictional outcomes are the same the experience from the players perspective will can be different."

When I talk about play experience, and pressure on the players, I am not meaning the fiction and the imagined pressure on the protagonists.

Here's why: a group of people can sit down, and one of them recite a story to the others in which various pressures are experienced (in the story) by various protagonists. But that wouldn't be a play experience at all.

Instead of a single storyteller, we could imagine the story being told round-robin. That still wouldn't be a play experience.

The play experience that I'm talking about is not the experience of imagining events, but the experience of creating a shared fiction via the distinctive medium of the RPG which is (roughly, and in most cases) that one participant takes on a type of "backstory/adversity management" function, while the rest take on "protagonist" functions. What distinguishes RPGs, and hence play experiences, within this broad medium is the various procedures whereby those functions are constituted, and integrated.

 

[Maxperson]

That's kind of my point, though. 5e is incomplete; I have to shove the guts of another edition in it to make it work. For what it's worth, 5e also does a lot of things (e.g. giving out powerful cantrips like candy) that can undercut traditional dungeon exploring. So, 5e isn't vanilla, it's just a really watered-down and insipid chocolate.

5e is not incomplete. 5e was designed with the goal of rulings over rules. To that end they provided a complete rules system that leaves open a lot of things for the DM to rule on. It seems to me that you might be conflating "incomplete" with "doesn't have what I'm looking for."

5e doesn't have what a lot of people are looking for, and those people will have to supplement it with other editions or a ton of house rules. For a lot of us it has what we need and what house rules we have are simply for preference or to make the game a bit better for our tables. I don't go to other editions for my game except to find old lore. 5e is too fluff light for my tastes and so I use my 2e and 3e stuff for the lore.

 

[Maxperson]

Must I really defend discussing ideas rather than clutching pearls about a word chosen?

If someone is using derogatory and/or pejorative language, what they are saying is quite often not even worth looking at. At least not until they acknowledge what they are doing and stop.

Making a judgement about and responding to the offensive language is not "clutching at pearls." Especially when those people decide to dig their heels in and continue using the language, often throwing it in the face of the person who is offended by it. Why should I give what those people say the time of day?