Why PCs should be competent, or "I got a lot of past in my past"

[Umbran]

Where you start running into problems is when you want to let players define the game they want to play or where you want to run a game outside the box.

That is a "problem" only if you require one system to be all things to all people. I don't. I play lots of different games. If my players want something D&D doesn't handle well, I use a different system.

And, despite your assertion otherwise, no, I don't need to know exactly what game is going to result in order to choose. I only need to know generally. And of course I have sufficient discussion with my players to know what it'll be before we get to character generation.

Your position becomes very unimpressive if it contains doses of such assertions of things I supposedly must do, that I have gotten along for decades not doing.

Or any number of other things where you have a major component to gameplay that isn't dungeon crawling where mundane every day life isn't so mundane and is in fact pretty dangerous and potentially fulfilling as an adventure fantasy.

I begin to suspect we are referring to different things with the phrase, "mundane, everyday life".

I'm talking about the stuff that everyday people in the society do on a daily basis to get by - growing or creating food, manufacture of consumer goods for sale, the raising of children, and so on. These basic things must be low-risk, easily accomplishable tasks, or you can't have a reasonably stable society in your world.

I don't care if you commute to work by getting on a 20th century bus, or flying on a pterodactyl, or by picking up a pointy stick and going to dig for tubers - the bulk of the population must have very little problem doing it, or you lose a significant portion of the population every day to trying, and your fictional society falls apart. Broadly and statistically speaking, going to work in the morning must be pretty much a no-brainer.

If there isn't going to be a significant consequence and notable chance of failure, you don't need to roll the dice, and you aren't going to need mechanics. "Life skills," are things that generally succeed, and therefore don't need mechanics.

If you want to introduce complications in mundane life events, there are ways to do that without having so many "life skills" built out in detail.

... or perhaps more importantly, that the same long running campaign can't feature all of the above based on player choices at different points in the campaign. Because you know, I've been in a game that diverged across that many different types of gameplay in a single campaign/story without necessarily all of them being planned by any one participant (including the GM).

You've presented them as if they were entirely different forms of gameplay, when I am not sure that was necessarily the case.

Like "flying between asteroids" is not a fundamentally different type of gameplay than "sailing between ports". And the only real difference between pirates/bandits and merchants is whether they steal or buy their initial trade goods, and maybe not even then.

The items that stick out are the stone age scenario compared to, say, the feudal lordlings one. But therein, the issue is not that the system involved would not have the full skillsets for each, but that you'd not expect the characters to have the skillsets for both at the same time to begin with. The wannabe French Dauphin isn't going to know how to knap stone tools. I don't need to have a skill-system for a skillset the characters don't have!

 

[Micah Sweet]

That is a "problem" only if you require one system to be all things to all people. I don't. I play lots of different games. If my players want something D&D doesn't handle well, I use a different system.

And, despite your assertion otherwise, no, I don't need to know exactly what game is going to result in order to choose. I only need to know generally. And of course I have sufficient discussion with my players to know what it'll be before we get to character generation.

Your position becomes very unimpressive if it contains doses of such assertions of things I supposedly must do, that I have gotten along for decades not doing.



I begin to suspect we are referring to different things with the phrase, "mundane, everyday life".

I'm talking about the stuff that everyday people in the society do on a daily basis to get by - growing or creating food, manufacture of consumer goods for sale, the raising of children, and so on. These basic things must be low-risk, easily accomplishable tasks, or you can't have a reasonably stable society in your world.

I don't care if you commute to work by getting on a 20th century bus, or flying on a pterodactyl, or by picking up a pointy stick and going to dig for tubers - the bulk of the population must have very little problem doing it, or you lose a significant portion of the population every day to trying, and your fictional society falls apart. Broadly and statistically speaking, going to work in the morning must be pretty much a no-brainer.

If there isn't going to be a significant consequence and notable chance of failure, you don't need to roll the dice, and you aren't going to need mechanics. "Life skills," are things that generally succeed, and therefore don't need mechanics.

If you want to introduce complications in mundane life events, there are ways to do that without having so many "life skills" built out in detail.




You've presented them as if they were entirely different forms of gameplay, when I am not sure that was necessarily the case.

Like "flying between asteroids" is not a fundamentally different type of gameplay than "sailing between ports". And the only real difference between pirates/bandits and merchants is whether they steal or buy their initial trade goods, and maybe not even then.

The items that stick out are the stone age scenario compared to, say, the feudal lordlings one. But therein, the issue is not that the system involved would not have the full skillsets for each, but that you'd not expect the characters to have the skillsets for both at the same time to begin with. The wannabe French Dauphin isn't going to know how to knap stone tools. I don't need to have a skill-system for a skillset the characters don't have!

Does having such rules alongside the simpler ones you prefer present a problem for you? If not, what's there to complain about?

 

[Maxperson]

And my main point is that the two things are not nearly so different as you pretend. While a typical adventure rarely makes the decision tree as obvious as a multiple choice (though it can, "Turn left or turn right", for example) very often the list is implicit (again, "Turn left or turn right") and the players are fundamentally just guessing what is on the multiple choice list by playing "Mother may I?"

Not if you have creative and proactive players. Players like that often come up with things you didn't think of that would or could work to overcome the situation. Whether you as the DM shut those things down cold or allow them to work/possibly work will quickly clue the players in to whether they are in a railroad or not.

Passive players may never figure out where the rails are. Creative, proactive players will. Unless there are no rails.

 

[Wolfpack48]

I was playing and running games no later than 1982 and I assure you that even primordial adventures were more diverse than that and already by say 1984 or so I was running into problems where the game rules weren't supporting the sort of games I wanted to play very well - say what should the rules be for successfully rowing a boat through rapids. Remember, we were "playing at the world" and are inspiration was everything we had ever seen in an adventure or fantasy story from any media - TV, movies, or books.



I'm not talking about what a table must do. I'm talking about how well the rules support a GM through a situation and how much the rules empower the player to take that as a valid way of playing.

Well given that I’ve been running games since 1976, I can say with certainly that there are quite a few D&D adventures in later days that were more than kill monsters and take their loot, though that was always popular. Ravenloft for example was more than a simple dungeon crawl. I’d argue that while the 1e ruleset didn’t offer a lot of direction initially for doing more than a dungeon crawl, it wasn’t exactly rocket science to move into other types of adventuring. I’ve since moved on from the system as well but it’s certainly possible to do more with the D&D editions. I know because we did.

 

[Corinnguard]

Players like that often come up with things you didn't think of that would or could work to overcome the situation.

True. Like using the Sleight-of-Hand skill to untie your bound wrists that were tied behind your back. A couple months ago my party had been captured by members of Cult of the Dragon. When they came to, each of them discovered that their wrists had been bound and tied behind their backs. My Bugbear Ranger used Sleight-of-hand to undo his. The party's Half-Elf Paladin of Bahamut used his Smite ability on his. The party's Goliath Blood Hunter set his hands on fire by cutting himself and igniting his blood to melt his.

 

[Umbran]

Does having such rules alongside the simpler ones you prefer present a problem for you? If not, what's there to complain about?

I, personally, am not an issue as far as this discussion is concerned. The question is not whether it presents a problem for me.

From there, it depends what you mean by "alongside".

For example, in 5e, Feats were presented in the PHB as optional, "alongside" the standard mode of just taking stat increases. But, it seems like Feats are the expected norm. So, we might say this approach to "alongside" failed to keep them viewed as optional, by players and designers alike.

So, the question is really what impact the presence of the expanded system has on the game as a whole? There comes a point when the choice to make a thing into a separate supplement, or seek the aspects in a separate game entirely, would likely be a cleaner design choice.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I, personally, am not an issue as far as this discussion is concerned. The question is not whether it presents a problem for me.

From there, it depends what you mean by "alongside".

For example, in 5e, Feats were presented in the PHB as optional, "alongside" the standard mode of just taking stat increases. But, it seems like Feats are the expected norm. So, we might say this approach to "alongside" failed to keep them viewed as optional, by players and designers alike.

So, the question is really what impact the presence of the expanded system has on the game as a whole? There comes a point when the choice to make a thing into a separate supplement, or seek the aspects in a separate game entirely, would likely be a cleaner design choice.

I don't care how they're viewed though. I can make my own choices. I care about options.

 

[Umbran]

I don't care how they're viewed though. I can make my own choices. I care about options.

I understand. However, the difference matters when we get to beyond considering you, personally, which is more my interest. So, to a degree we will talk past each other on this.

 

[TwoSix]

I don't care how they're viewed though. I can make my own choices. I care about options.

I think a lot of games (certainly D&D among them) work better as toolkits, and as such optionality and modularity are definitely positives.

I think there are other games where tone and setting and presentation are paramount, and a ruleset with an abundance of switches and options would be actively detrimental to their play.

 

[Celebrim]

Well given that I’ve been running games since 1976, I can say with certainly that there are quite a few D&D adventures in later days that were more than kill monsters and take their loot, though that was always popular. Ravenloft for example was more than a simple dungeon crawl.

I'm going to pick on you here because you gave me a really nice introduction to the topic, but this post is really a response to the entire thread.

First all, this conversation almost never is productive and I think I'll have to drop it because invariably this topic creates a lot of defensiveness about whether or not they are a good DM, or whether they had good DMs, or what it means to be good DMing and I'm really not interested in those topics and least of all when discussed from a defensive standpoint.

But that said it is so incredibly obvious from this claim that I'm not communicating well and you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

Because absolutely, I6 Ravenloft (my favorite adventure of all time) is just a simple dungeon crawl. Indeed, it's a simpler dungeon crawl than a lot of the things that are on offering up that point. The great thing about say I6 or Hickman's other masterpiece 'Pyramid' is that Hickman takes the tools that 1e AD&D provided and he doesn't demand anything of the system other than what it already provides for and supports. I6 Ravenloft is a pure dungeon crawl of check for traps, kick down the doors, kill the monsters, and take their stuff in its purest form. But what he does is make that pure dungeon crawling experience powerfully evocative and literary by the use of a great framing story, by the use of a proactive antagonist, and by the use of great atmospherics including probably the best designed map in the history of gaming. But there is nothing going on in the game other than dungeon crawl and one of the ways you can tell that is that Hickman has to create relatively few inline rulings or minigames to describe the encounters that he designed.

I6 Ravenloft is not a module that shows off 1e AD&D's limits as a game. Quite the contrary, it's a module that shows off the game's strengths. If you want to show off the weaknesses of the system you are much better off picking another even older dungeon crawl and that's S2 White Plume Mountain. This is a "dungeon crawl" that is anything but a classic kick down the doors dungeon crawl and instead envisions the entire dungeon as a series of custom minigames where the rules of the game are encoded into each encounter area. Read the text of S2 and then imagine you're a brand manager or design manager for the game tasked with reviewing a writer's submissions and making sure that he is adhering to the game rules and making sure that single set of rules are utilized by all the various writers, designers, and contractors you've hired. It's really clear that there is absolutely no concept of that in publishing S2 and also that the designers of the dungeons are getting more creative than the rules allow. Sure, there is less story and literary value here than in I6, but I6 sticks within what the game knows how to cover. S2 however immediately creates the problem that 1e AD&D's lack of a unified skill system means that how a particular challenge is handled by the game is all over the place, not only across the brand but sometimes even within the same product.

I’d argue that while the 1e ruleset didn’t offer a lot of direction initially for doing more than a dungeon crawl, it wasn’t exactly rocket science to move into other types of adventuring.

I played back then as well and we had blast and for the first few years this was all so novel that I didn't even realize we were having problems or what they were and I sure as heck didn't have a clue what the solutions were. But as for the claim this isn't rocket science, go look at the text of the flooding room trap in C1 and evaluate it as a set of skill rules for swimming with the intention of using it as the basis of general rules for swimming/drowning/rescuing people ect. Imagine the rules used for PC's as lifeguards on the beach or something if you think it wasn't rocket science to shift game focus.

Because like I said, the fact that you evaluate I6 as something other than a simple dungeon crawl is hugely revealing that this problem never even struck you back in the day and you really never had a lot of soul searching about it. I'm not saying that to attack your DMing, because I sure as heck am not defending all my DMing back before age 23 or so or even heck to this very day (I still learn and make mistakes). But we are really really on different pages.