D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[Oofta]

I don’t mean like a report card. But you don’t have an idea about when someone has a good game? Or a bad one?

What determines that in your opinion?

Are they having fun and are they engaged.

I didn’t say they need to be perfectly informed. I’m saying that the players need to understand how the game works. They need to know the rules and procedures.

There are unknowns in D&D combat, but folks still know how it works.

Hopefully they understand the basics and how their PC. They may not know how something is working or not, they may not know how a legendary monster works or why things happen during a fight as an example.

I’d say you’re mistaken.



Sure. Again, it depends what you want out of play. I have no problem with a GM using their judgment. That’s a necessity. Granting them total authority is not a necessity. The more authority the GM has, and the more freely they can apply it, the less the game feels stable to me as a player. I don’t equate that instability with flexibility.



Well when the rules say you can do whatever you want, sure there’s no conflict.

In moments where story and rules actually do come into conflict… where you have to choose which takes priority… the answer to that reveals a lot about that game.

The rules never come into conflict with the story because I've established the scenario and the rules dictate the outcome. In very rare cases I may tweak the scenario (or more likely decide that an NPC is going to change strategy from what I had anticipated), but if a PC fails their 3rd death save they're dead. If running the game by the rules or the PCs make a decision that means the campaign doesn't go as planned then I just go with it.

I don't have a predefined story. I will typically have actors, motivation and an anticipated story. Whether things happen like I expected will always be up in the air.

“Due” in what sense? I mean, if it’s a check of some sort, why not let them know? The dice will decide what happens, not the GM.

If you as GM just decide they’re due for an encounter, then yeah, I guess I can see how you’d not share that. It breaks the illusion, I suppose.

The rules of the game should, ideally, reinforce the fiction. So the players knowing that a random encounter check happens with X frequency doesn’t translate to the characters knowing that. It corresponds to the characters feeling like they’re pushing their luck and it’s only a matter of time until they run into trouble.

The mechanics and the fiction can interact in indirect ways like that.

Something that was alluded for some versions of the game was a very set procedure that must be followed. The DM always had, or at least had a chance of, a random encounters after so many turns. In 4E you knew how many successes and losses you had and how many were required. Those kind of processes may reinforce the fiction for you, to me they will always just kind of throw "you're playing a game!" in my face. Which, obviously we are playing a game but it's disruptive of the flow and imaginary head space that I'm using to run the game as DM or run my PC as a player.

The use of game in such a negative way here is baffling to me. I mean… it’s a game. Why wouldn’t players want to game?

It's kind of like how I get immersed in a good book. I know I'm reading a book, but if the author is constantly breaking the fourth wall it can get old. I want to be telling a cooperative story. I want to get caught up in the moment. If my PC is worried about their friend dying I want to feel that emotion. I want to experience, not analyze.

If I wanted to just play a game, then there wouldn't be much difference between D&D and the old D&D Miniatures game. But when playing my PC is more than a set of numbers with a token to represent a pile of statistics. They're Bjorn the barbarian, a fictional character that I'm building piece by piece with his own emotions and motivations not just an avatar representing a complicated chess piece.

 

[Campbell]

I get the feeling. That's usually how I feel in these discussions. If it helps, I view this more in the engineering light, there are these X things, you can't have all of them and so a game that chooses flexibility inherently is missing out on other good qualities. There's also the notion that more flexibility doesn't necessarily mean just more good choices. I've talked about both of those things.

I don't believe D&D is better than those other games, possibly better for me, but mostly it's just different.

Consider this diagram :

The contention I am making is that in terms of playstyles Blades in the Dark and D&D 5e are P and R and definitively not R and Q. Same for the relationship between D&D 5e and Pathfinder Second Edition. That the idea that GM Decides will ever get you to the playstyles enabled by Blades is incredibly mistaken, by like orders of magnitude.

Also that the actual process of play in a conflict resolution game is no more inflexible than the one used by task resolution games. A determination that obliges and/or impacts the GM or another player is not less meaningfully flexible overall than one made by the GM that obliges/impacts a player. It might be more inflexible from the GM's perspective but that's not the same thing as overall flexibility of play.

Basically Blades is not a specialized form. It is not more focused. It is merely different.

I will concede that I can see the argument that D&D 5e and Pathfinder First Edition might have an R to Q relationship. I am not entirely comfortable with it though.

 

[FrogReaver]

Consider this diagram :
View attachment 262440

The contention I am making is that in terms of playstyles Blades in the Dark and D&D 5e are P and R and definitively not R and Q. Same for relationship between D&D 5e and Pathfinder Second Edition. That the idea that GM Decides will ever get you to the playstyles enabled by Blades is incredibly mistaken, by like orders of magnitude.

I agree with that. I haven't always so I get the reiteration, but I've been persuaded.

I still think games can have different amounts of flexibility, but I don't think that's quite as important anymore.
1. As you have pointed out it's quite difficult to determine more overall flexibility.
2. Even if some game has more flexibility, it's not like flexibility can turn it into every game.

So why do I view 5e as flexible? Because I see how I play it and read accounts for how others do and it's all so very different, even to the point where there are many tables I don't believe I would enjoy playing at. Which also goes into why flexibility is important as a whole to D&D players - none of us want our playstyle codified away in favor of that other 5e groups style that we dislike. Couple that with external factors like sunk cost and ease of finding players for the system and hopefully it's easy to understand why we count flexibility so highly - even if that flexibility is quite a bit more limited in scope than we initially imagined.

Also that the actual process of play in a conflict resolution game is no more inflexible than the one used by task resolution games. A determination that obliges the GM or another player is not more meaningfully flexible overall. It might be more flexible from the GM's perspective but that's not the same thing as overall flexibility of play.

Maybe, I'm not sure on this one.

 

[pemerton]

A referee in a football game must make decisions about what constitutes illegal contact.

They are expected to be neutral. Part of this is being indifferent to the outcome of the game, and the quality of play (provided it stays within the rules).

@Campbell (as I read his posts) is contrasting that neutrality with some approaches to GMing where the GM is expected either (i) to care about the quality of the shared fiction ("GM as storyteller") or (ii) to empathise with the PCs and care about their fates ("GM as fan of the player characters").

In my Torchbearer game on the weekend, I laughed more than once at the suffering of the PCs. I also admired their successes (they won both conflicts, one very much against the odds). If I was making those decisions - about how they suffer and how they succeed - via, for instance, extrapolation from the established fiction, then the laughing and admiration would be misplaced. What makes is acceptable is that I am not the one deciding to establish the circumstance at the table to which I am responding.

 

[gorice]

Lots of replies, and lots of things I feel compelled to make small comments on.

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.

I actually agree with this, in part. Modern gaming culture, in general, is extremely averse to tackling problems of information and communication, and I think poorer for it.

That said, I don't think there is a dichotomy between fiction-focus and process-focus. To me, good rules use clear and effective processes to help me generate the fiction. They are tools, not just constraints.

I disagree. They need to know what their PCs are capable of. They need to know what their PCs know so they can make informed decisions based on what they would know if they were there. This can involve PC skills. If travelling through the mountains they may know that blizzards are possible any time of year and based on a nature check may know that they need to find shelter soon. They may know that if they're travelling through the swamps doom that it's monster infested so try not to attract attention. [EDIT: it's also a question of how well they decided to prepare and how successful they were. I want PC actions and knowledge to have an impact.]

Do you call for a nature check, or do the players do it themselves? If the latter, how did they learn to do that?

Arbitrary banning was a distinct strangely opposed complaint aka the Gandalf used a sword argument.
In other words genre was both more open and more confined too LOL. Banning is also less flavorful than providing a magical variant (this rune-scribing would of course call on Dex)

Perhaps casters are limited to the suits of Tarot, with Athame (including daggers and swords), (wands staves and rods also under their own). then it has an in world fiction these are the foci and some are weapons already.

Casters not feeling like casters most of the time esp at earlier levels was also kind of bleh to many folk, cantrips fix that.

People were all about realism back then too and crossbows being easy to use... is probably how they ended up in the casters hands of 3e.

Tarot-based casters sound brilliant, actually.

I fully agree. I don't see anyone saying get rid of all the rules in D&D. So I think we all agree the rules should provide a starting point. The question is what that starting point should ideally look like.

As a separate thought: Is rules shifting sometimes potentially desirable over consistency?

In D&D, I think it's not only desirable, but necessary. I know I'm flogging a dead horse here, but I don't think the basic D&D procedure does much work without a broader procedural context (time pressure, or costs for failure, or whatever). This also means that the game tends to require mechanical flexibly, since e.g. the dungeon-delving rules I crib from B/X aren't going to cut it for courtly intrigue.

Depending on your tastes, this might be a good thing. I'm completely OK with different rules for different contexts -- so long as there are some rules I can work with. I'm also thinking of e.g. Lancer, where in-mech and out-of-mech play are completely different games.

My procedure as a DM for determining how close the evil Duke and his scary knights are to tracking down the PCs goes like this:

(First, the duke wouldn't be pursuing the PCs adversarily in the first place except in response to actions the PCs took with the knowledge that it might cause the duke (or at the very least, some powerful political figure) to come after them.)

1. I'd start by determining how much of a priority the PCs have made themselves for the duke, considering any actions the PCs took (especially the success or failure of deliberate actions) to either increase or decrease that priority.
2. Based on the priority the duke places on finding the PCs and his overall available resources, I'd next determine the resources he would devote to tracking the PCs.
3. Finally, I'd determine how likely those resources would be to find the PCs in the elapsed time so far, taking into account the PCs' intervening choices (e.g. where to travel next, how high of a profile they're maintaining, etc.), especially the success or failure of PC actions intended to make it easier or harder for the duke to find them. The duke finds the PCs after the elapsed time catches up to the time required to find them, assuming the PCs are still in the area being searched at that time.

These determinations rarely give specific answers. When deciding between multiple possibilities, I consider the following factors:

• Consistency with material already established so far in play.
• Plausibility in the context of what the PCs know of the game setting.
• My preference for outcomes that cause the PCs' interactions with the setting to lead to learning more about, and becoming further involved with, other actors in the setting.
• My perception of whether having an encounter likely to lead to combat would be desirable, pacing-wise, at any particular moment, based on my read of the players' emotional state and current level of engagement.
• My deliberate bias towards ensuring that the PCs' actions impact the course of events and/or the state of the game setting.

I'd then repeat my process (tweaking the details, as relevant) to determine whether and how much the PCs learn of the Duke's pursuit.

Please note that although I've described my process methodically (based on reflective self-analysis), in actual use my process is more of an intuitive synthesis and less of a step-by-step resolution. I've been applying this process (with hopefully increasing levels of success) to running ad-hoc informal RPGs since before I knew D&D and similar packaged games existed, and continue to apply it with every system I run. Since I have a predefined process for running games, I prefer systems that provide useful action resolution mechanics and mechanical support for desired setting elements without trying to prescribe a specific process for running my game.

I realize that you would consider the fact that I need to bring in an external process for running 5e to mean that 5e is "incomplete" by your definition. However, from my standpoint, I suspect that any system you would consider to be "complete" would (unless it was written just for me) have process rules that would conflict with my personal process, and thus would be less useful to me as a tool for running games than "incomplete" games are.

I particularly liked this excerpt from one of the articles @Malmuria linked upthread, which quoted Brendan from Necropraxis as saying:

"[Lack of codification of procedure] is a weakness because it is notoriously hard to learn how to play an RPG (which involves conversational form, conflict resolution, rules math, and many other components) from a text alone. It is a strength because it leaves the borders of potential wide open, assuming that you want to use the rules more like a toolkit than a how-to manual."​

Using that terminology, I have a very strong preference for using a game system as a toolkit, rather than as a how-to manual. So, the how-to process elements you view as necessary for a game to be "complete", I view as actively unhelpful for running my game. I'm thrilled that there are both complete and incomplete game systems out there to cater to different preferences, but as far as my own use-case goes, I personally consider "completeness" (as you define it) to be undesirable.

I don't really accept the manual vs. toolkit analogy. I see all rules as toolkits. To extend the analogy: I want a complete set of tools to work with, and clear instructions on what they do. Then I can make informed decisions about how I employ them.

As for your system, a couple of points. The first is that this seems like a massive cognitive load to me; I'd want some kind of mechanical shorthand for some elements, so that I don't forget something important.

The second is about this line: "My deliberate bias towards ensuring that the PCs' actions impact the course of events and/or the state of the game setting." That's a huge, positive, and arguably even necessary step, IMO. My belief is that 5e does next to nothing to support this out of the box (and arguable subverts it, with the emphasis on things like easy fights and pre-plotted adventures).

 

[Maxperson]

I don't understand how your post responds to mine. I was replying to something that FrogReaver posted, about the relationship between pressure in the fiction and the experience of play.

Your reply said the following.

"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."

That says that because someone can sit down and tell a story to a bunch of people who are not playing a game, you don't view fictional pressure to be pressure on players playing a game or their play experience.

That's apples and oranges. Being able to recite a story to people who aren't playing a game isn't at all like a DM providing fictional pressures, which does in fact create pressure on the players and is part of the play experience.

1. Are they playing the game when these pressures happen? Yes they are, so it's part of the play experience.
2. Do fictional pressures put pressure on the players during the play experience. Yes it does, so it's part of the play experience and different from just listening to a story where they hear about pressure on storybook characters.

Perhaps you meant a different kind of pressure. I don't know.

 

[Maxperson]

So, one of the selling points of many open-world games is the ability to, and I quote, "do whatever you want." This is a major thing that nearly all games in the genre will push, very hard, because it's such an unequivocally good thing, right? Freedom is always better than confinement, right? (Obviously being a bit facetious with this question.)

It is and it isn't.

It is better if, and it's a big if, you have proactive players. Proactive players can and will set goals for their characters and just set to accomplishing them, discovering bits of the sandbox world that can influence or change those goals as they go about trying to accomplish them.

It is not at all better if your players are not proactive, because they will lose focus or not focus in the first place

This issue was particularly exemplified in the gaming culture of 5e that rejected the notion of providing DMs guidance. One that responded to anyone seeking advice with "you're the DM, you figure it out." It was an almost aggressively anti-advice culture of play, as though seeking advice was an error, something DMs should be taught not to do. This has softened over time, particularly with the rise of youtube DM-advice channels, but has not disappeared by any means.

I have been on this forum for the entirety of 5e and have not seen this. Oh, there's an odd individual or two who might have said that, but for the most part you got a lot of replies with advice from DMs if you came here and asked. In fact, you'd often get competing advice and the thread would devolve into an argument about whose advice was better and why.

Where was this culture you mention? Reddit? The D&D forums?(I didn't see it there, either). Somewhere else?

 

[Umbran]

It is and it isn't.

It is better if, and it's a big if, you have proactive players. Proactive players can and will set goals for their characters and just set to accomplishing them, discovering bits of the sandbox world that can influence or change those goals as they go about trying to accomplish them.

And, in this we can note there are reasons why players may be more or less proactive, and it doesn't all come down to, "that's just the way they are."

And the difference between them may seem, to many, to be equivalent to "confinement".

 

[hawkeyefan]

Are they having fun and are they engaged.

That may mean they're enjoying the game.

Is there any skill on the player's part? That they can play the game well or poorly?

Hopefully they understand the basics and how their PC. They may not know how something is working or not, they may not know how a legendary monster works or why things happen during a fight as an example.

So that's a good example. Maybe the players don't know what a legendary monster can do. But they must know that it gets legendary actions that allow it to act more than once per turn, right? There's a format there that they understand and can expect.

The rules never come into conflict with the story because I've established the scenario and the rules dictate the outcome. In very rare cases I may tweak the scenario (or more likely decide that an NPC is going to change strategy from what I had anticipated), but if a PC fails their 3rd death save they're dead. If running the game by the rules or the PCs make a decision that means the campaign doesn't go as planned then I just go with it.

I don't have a predefined story. I will typically have actors, motivation and an anticipated story. Whether things happen like I expected will always be up in the air.

So this sounds like what you're saying is that you'd go with the rules over the story if needed. That if a PC has some implied destiny... some major goal they're working toward... but they get dropped below 0 HP and then fail 3 death saves, they're dead. Their story ends in an unsatisfying way, but the rules are upheld.

Does that sound right?

Something that was alluded for some versions of the game was a very set procedure that must be followed. The DM always had, or at least had a chance of, a random encounters after so many turns. In 4E you knew how many successes and losses you had and how many were required. Those kind of processes may reinforce the fiction for you, to me they will always just kind of throw "you're playing a game!" in my face. Which, obviously we are playing a game but it's disruptive of the flow and imaginary head space that I'm using to run the game as DM or run my PC as a player.

Sure, these procedures help to constrain the GM so that the game doesn't consist solely of things the GM has decided, but instead many outcomes are determined by dice. The GM is less free to just establish what happens, and I think you guys are conflating that for lack of flexibility, but I don't think it's the same thing.

The players have to follow processes and procedures all the time. Why should the GM be different?

Now, if you don't like to have to keep track of all that stuff and be aware of what processes are called for and when, then sure, get rid of them. Just be aware of how that impacts the game.

It's kind of like how I get immersed in a good book. I know I'm reading a book, but if the author is constantly breaking the fourth wall it can get old. I want to be telling a cooperative story. I want to get caught up in the moment. If my PC is worried about their friend dying I want to feel that emotion. I want to experience, not analyze.

Yeah, but with a book you're not also helping to write it. If you were, you'd likely need to keep in mind that you're writing a book.

If I wanted to just play a game, then there wouldn't be much difference between D&D and the old D&D Miniatures game. But when playing my PC is more than a set of numbers with a token to represent a pile of statistics. They're Bjorn the barbarian, a fictional character that I'm building piece by piece with his own emotions and motivations not just an avatar representing a complicated chess piece.

This kind of implies that other ways of playing render Bjorn as nothing more than stats.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I guess congrats on finding the most concise way to dismiss a post.

I'm not dismissing the post. I was making a point by summarizing it.

There seems to be a divide though. 5e DM's mostly describe themselves as setting things up and putting things in motion (sometimes with an occasional thumb on the scale event - my most common being skipping what I think would have been an encounter if it's getting late).

But others seem to describe that same thing as trying to tell a story. There is a style of D&D thats closer to telling a story but it seems these 2 different things may be being conflated?

Well look at the process that was described by @Xetheral . The GM is deciding all the things that are going to happen. Yes, he's considering the relevant fiction and other factors to make that decision (which I would hope is always a factor), but he's still deciding what happens based on what's "most plausible", with possible exceptions based no pacing and current level of player energy and engagement.

Are there dice rolls involved? Something else beyond the GM deciding?

So this is why some of us see this as this being the GM telling a story. It affords the players the base amount of say through control of their characters, and then the rest is for the GM to decide. I mean, 5E describes the DM as the "lead storyteller".

Now, this isn't a problem. It's just the way the game works.