D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[Maxperson]

But I figured I’d point it out because I really think these conversations would go better if people stopped doing that.

I missed that part. It would also go better if they didn't choose words designed to start arguments instead of discussions.

 

[Campbell]

The GM's experience of play is part and parcel of this. There are a multitude of things I would absolutely never do running D&D that I frequently do in other games because the constraints and principles introduce the specter of the unwelcome - outcomes that neither the GM or any of the players would choose on their own. Sometimes it's out of a sense of fairness, sometimes because we would have never thought of it otherwise, sometimes because it's fundamentally unfair and often because we don't want it to happen but the real possibility that it could happen is necessary for the tension of the game to be preserved.

In a D&D game I would never have the result of a PC threatening an NPC result in shifting the scene to them being interrogated because in D&D that's just unfair. The expectation would be having to play out the possible capture, but as a hard move in Apocalypse World it feels right and almost necessary. It's not my decision - it's the game and I am honoring the game's agenda.

I get emotionally invested in the player characters of any game I run. I like them as people. I want the best for them. I do not want to do bad things to them, but the risk that bad things might happen is essential to play. So I need to take my sentiment out of the equation if play is going to be functional so that things like death, broken swords, broken alliances and betrayals can be real risks without being certain.

Sometimes there's also just the matter of my fun just getting to sit in the heads of NPCs and take actions, finding out how they work out. In D&D like land there's just about no better feeling for me than running a conflict in Pathfinder Second Edition because the game prompts me when I need to make judgement calls and otherwise I just get to play. You set the scene and just like go. Context switches are much easier because they are explicit.

 

[Campbell]

From my perspective in order for a game to be about rulings over rules a GM must be principally constrained to consider only the situation at hand and their understanding of the setting. For it to be a ruling it cannot just be deciding without constraints. You cannot both be lead storyteller and referee. You must choose one or the other.

Addendum : In all of this I am not trying to say that 5e is lacking or should be changed. It's an excellent design well suited to its niche (although Numenera gives it a run for its money). I am only responding to claims I feel try to deny the fundamental unique value of other sorts of design and play processes. The flexibility claim in particular is one that really bothers me because it puts forward the implication that both the design of other games have not produced unique value and also puts forward the implication that the skillset GMs like me who have put in a lot intellectual labor to acquire could be just as easily achieved through other means. I find it deeply insulting because of the connotation that much of my last 15 years of experience as a GM have been wasted, but I am still trying to engage in good faith.

 

[Manbearcat]

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.

I think the way I would depict the phenomenon (one that I've spoken of many times about a GM extrapolating their sense of the imagined space, which includes their unique and exclusive access to offscreen conditions and secret backstory, and freeforming a newly minted gamestate downstream of their mental modeling) a little different.

1) You have a Chess Game with the following conditions after move 3 where the players are white and the GM's setting is black:

2) Fast forward to a future gamestate x moves into the future. From the White-side of things (players), it is unclear how many moves value x is because they aren't aware of how many moves Black has made because the board is shrouded (the GM setting action economy is unknowable, or borderline unknowable, to the players). Regardless, its several. Maybe its 12 moves into the future. Maybe its 20. Unclear. It may be possible for the players to suss out the action economy (how many moves made), but its not concrete how that might be done and to what degree it might be done. The action economy of the GM's setting moves is shrouded to a fair or large or complete degree.

3) Suddenly, the board is arrayed quite, quite differently than it was prior. During this intervening period, the board has a default setting of "shrouded" to a fair or large or complete degree. It may have been possible to somewhat demystify the intervening period and the offscreen moves made during that period, but its not concretely established how that might be done and to what degree demistyfing the intervening period is even possible or even an effective expenditure of whatever action economy you have available (and again...because you're somewhat or wholly unaware of (2) above, you can't know how your own action economy compares).

4) The gamestate that the newly arrayed board could be any of a large number of different set ups. But it just so happens that the forces deployed against White (which doesn't just include asset-advantage but also how the entire board is now arrayed) are extremely large. Black not only has a total asset-advantage (sheer numbers), an array-advantage (their Pawns beautifully defend and ensnare and their offensive pieces have many gambits available to them), but they also have more pieces of certain types than are possible (like 3 Knights and 2 Queens) along with a foreign piece which isn't even a part of the Chess ruleset on the board (like a Giant Squid equipped with an 27 RPGs) whose moveset may or may not have been able to be surveiled/inferred by White (so at the beginning of White's next move, they know little to nothing of what this new piece is capable of). Perhaps White could have sussed out to some degree details regarding this asset-advantage, this new array, this strange number of Queens and Knights, and how this "RPGs Squid" moves...perhaps not. Its unclear.

---

This is where the GM will typically say "my moves were legal. The players could have sussed out my shrouded action economy. The players could have sussed out all or most of the GM's offscreen moves during the shrouded period. I operationalized the most rational-actor and sensible-extrapolation-of-the-imagined-space gamestate given all of the various components of setting that I folded into my mental model. The players could and should have seen this coming. The players could have resolved my total asset-advantage and my array-advantage if only they would have played well. They could have uncovered the nature of my "not Chess piece" and how it moves.

But they didn't. They played poorly."

The GM feels their mental model run of all of the various aspects and collisions of an offscreen imagined space and their freeform operationalizing of this downstream gamestate were appropriate and well-played on their end.

But how much meaningful decision-making and action resolution happened from gamestate 1 to gamestate 4 on the players side? Its unclear. All you have is the fictional account of the affairs, the GM's opinion of the legitimacy of their offscreen moves (their accounting of the offscreen setting assets and offscreen setting moves that can be brought to bear to change the gamestate thusly), and how the players feel about the nature of the gamestate move from (1) to (4)...which could be any number of feelings including all the feelings from "awesome" to "this gamestate transition is completely illegitimate and deserving a board flip!"

This is why these sorts of conversations about freeform extrapolation of offscreen assets/imagined space array with attendant fictional account of what happened (rather than the nuts and bolts, gear and levers, belts and pistons, and opened books for auditing) don't go anywhere. There is little to no way to vet it in conversation (even if the GM feels 100 % certain what they put forth was absolutely legitimate in terms of operationalizing the appropriate moves and giving players the gameplay sufficient so they could make all the consequential decisions/moves possible to ensure that such a blind gamestate 1 to gamestate 4 transition doesn't manifest during play)...and players may feel that way during play or during the reveal or post-play. Which is why I'm not a fan of calling a player "bad-faith" or "poor sport" if they don't get on board with the gamestate transition from 1 to 4. It isn't a particularly low "buy-in bar" for a prospective player and for some players its an insurmountable buy-in bar.

 

[Oofta]

From my perspective in order for a game to be about rulings over rules a GM must be principally constrained to consider only the situation at hand and their understanding of the setting. For it to be a ruling it cannot just be deciding without constraints. You cannot both be lead storyteller and referee. You must choose one or the other.

Addendum : In all of this I am not trying to say that 5e is lacking or should be changed. I am only responding to claims I feel try to deny the fundamental unique value of other sorts of design and play processes. The flexibility claim in particular is one that really bothers me because it puts forward the implication that both the design of other games have not produced unique value and also puts forward the implication that the skillset GMs like me who have put in a lot intellectual labor to acquire could be just as easily achieved through other means. I find it deeply insulting because of the connotation that much of my last 15 years of experience as a GM have been wasted, but I am still trying to engage in good faith.

Not sure I follow the storyteller vs referee. I don't see any inherent conflict. As a storyteller I make what I hope to be a rich and engaging world, a fun sandbox for the PCs to play in. I get to give voice to those NPCs, paint pictures in people's imagination of the world around them.

As a referee I enforce the rules, trying to be fair but not judgemental. For the most part that's a combat thing, but I do rely on PC skills and abilities outside of combat as well.

I see them as different roles that can be complementary.

As far as the addendum, I make no judgment on what other people enjoy, even when I have fairly strong preferences.

 

[Campbell]

While I cannot speak

Not sure I follow the storyteller vs referee. I don't see any inherent conflict. As a storyteller I make what I hope to be a rich and engaging world, a fun sandbox for the PCs to play in. I get to give voice to those NPCs, paint pictures in people's imagination of the world around them.

As a referee I enforce the rules, trying to be fair but not judgemental. For the most part that's a combat thing, but I do rely on PC skills and abilities outside of combat as well.

I see them as different roles that can be complementary.

As far as the addendum, I make no judgment on what other people enjoy, even when I have fairly strong preferences.

My use of storyteller here is specifically related to making decisions as a referee (during play) that are influenced by what the referee thinks would make for a better story. I would also include scenario design that is built to pressure players into choosing particular goals for their characters or with a certain outcome in mind. Nothing wrong with that being anyone's jam I just do not view it as being a referee. Designing interesting settings and scenarios that provoke action is just GMing in my book.

I don't take exception with anyone's preferences. Just what I view as unfounded claims about how other games work or that they are fundamentally providing the same sort of play experience. I also hope I am not coming across as judging play preferences.

 

[Garthanos]

They're also much more susceptible to misunderstanding and problems with arguments about appropriateness. Its one of those things that's probably an unalloyed good with group with a very tight understanding of what is expected from everyone, but I'm not sold that even applies to a massive minority of groups.

I did some inquiries around here about the DCs DMs would apply for attempting something the ranges were from not allowed at all.. to relatively decent at 15 (and allowed as a reaction). Its not exactly something I have confidence that 5e has helped establish at all. And assuming people really have common ideas about likelihoods of just about anything seems an error.

 

[pemerton]

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 doesn't seem to replicate playing chess. Now I'll admit I'm not a chess player; but I'd imagine part of what playing chess involves is not only seeing the pieces arrayed at any particular time, but knowing how they got there, so as to infer the "trajectory" of play (eg what is this other player trying to do) and responding to that. I don't think playing chess is just solving puzzle after puzzle.

 

[Campbell]

So on the bit about house rules I think there's a bit of confusion that often occurs between the indie and trad communities on this score because of the way the indie community values explicit processes and talks about making changes. So within the indie community it is common practice to refer to changes as an act of game design, extension or a hack even if the adjustments made are fairly minor. But most of us view ourselves as amateur designers. I haven't met an indie GM once who doesn't have at least two-three half way finished hacks or game designs. Adjusting our individual processes as a group is incredibly common.

In addition many indie games expect play groups to do some of their own design work as part of play. Blades inventions and rituals are all play group designed. Special permissions are for unique fictional situations that require custom mechanics. In the Blades game @Manbearcat is running for us over Discord @Manbearcat designed some mechanics to deal with the Forgotten God we have summoned from across the sea. Currently we are designing some of her core features as a group.

My own in person playgroup is constantly iterating on the games we play we have a Vampire - The Requiem hack that utilizes a custom setting that combines of elements of Old World and New World of Darkness while placing some additional emphasis on the immortality / death themes. Substantial alterations were made including the use Cortex style Milestones. We also have a Cortex based Exalted hack, a PbtA based Star Wars game, some substantial adjustments to Infinity 2d20 and a Cortex based D&D like. My Stars That Bind Us (mecha horror) game started its life as reskin of Lancer (because I hated the 3d printing stuff), became a slight hack of Beam Saber (a forged in the deck mecha game) and ended its life as a Wildsea hack. We're discussing options for going back to the setting - considering elements from Cortex, Dune and Apocalypse Keys. Not sure what the design will look like yet.

Let me tell you about my hack/game is the indie version of let me tell you about my character. Replace with OSR community as needed.

 

[pemerton]

many indie games expect play groups to do some of their own design work as part of play.

Two examples that I thought of straight away.

In A Wicked Age has beautifully clear procedures - it is as close to "complete" (in @gorice's sense) as any RPG I know of. Each session begins by choosing - by way of group consensus - one of four "oracles" (Blood & Sex, The Unquiet Past, A Nest of Vipers, God-Kings of War), then dealing 4 playing cards to select four of the 52 options under each oracle. Each of these is a short phrase (maybe five to twenty words) describing a person or a place or an event (or maybe more than one of those) that fits under the oracle's broad theme.

This done, the group then goes around the table, taking turns to build up a list of characters from those oracle entries - some are explicit (like if the oracle entry mentions a person) and some are implicit (like a place might imply an occupant, or an intruder, or an invader, or whatever). Then each player chooses which character will be their PC, and the rest become NPCs under the GM's control.

There is then the process of assigning character attributes. And then, if any character has a "particular strength", that has to be designed. As per the rulebook (pp 4-5),

Choose whether your character’s going to have a particular strength. If she is, choose and list it now. Choose one that already exists or name a new one – you’ll get to create it in just a minute. . . .

Particular strengths are unusual skills, magical arts, innate powers, allies, and treasures that characters can have. As you play you’ll create a variety of particular strengths for your various characters. . . .

Give the strength a name.

Describe the strength. You may be able to copy its description straight from the GM’s story sheet.

Describe the strength’s special effects: what it requires, and how it appears in action.​

There are then rules for the mechanics of building a particular strength, and a couple of examples. The last time I played this game, we had four characters with particular strengths: the PC illusionist's illusion magic, the PC courier's skill with horses, the PC warlords treasure chest, and the NPC champion's Spear of Power. As this was not part of an ongoing campaign, but was a one-off, we had to build all these from scratch. It probably took 10 minutes or so. All of them came into play during our two hour-ish session.

The other, and contrasting, example is Cthulhu Dark. This is an "incomplete" RPG. Here is the core of its action resolution procedure (pp 2-3):

To know how well you do at something, roll . . . your highest die shows how well you do. On a 1, you barely succeed. On a 6, you do brilliantly. . . .

If someone thinks it would more interesting if you failed, they describe how you might fail and roll a die. . . .

If their die rolls higher than your highest die, you fail, in the way they described. If not, you succeed as before, with your highest die showing how well you succeed.​

Why I say this is incomplete is that it doesn't tell us how to decide what follows, in the fiction, from barely succeeding or from doing brilliantly. The group has to bring this from somewhere else. I use "intent and task" when I GM this system, as that works well for the sort of no-myth approach that I prefer with Cthulhu Dark.

I'm not sure if either of these examples fits what you (@Campbell) had in mind, but as I said are the ones I thought of straight away.