D&D General Why the resistance to D&D being a game?

[Pedantic]

Oh. Wow. The thread really moved overnight. To avoid posting a dozen responses, here's a few responses.

Immersion. Tabletop RPGs have never been that immersive for me. Never. I'm always trying to find that immersion, but it's elusive. The fact that you have to stop pretending to engage with the mechanics breaks immersion. That you're literally sitting around a table with other people who're talking, planning, grabbing food and drink, etc breaks immersion for me. I've never been that immersed in a tabletop RPG. I have been far more immersed in video games. Not because or in spite of the mechanics, but because the whole experience is far more immersive. The graphics, the sound, the smoothness of play, etc. All together that feels far more like a secondary world you could live in infinitely more than any tabletop RPG experience I've ever had. And I've played with some amazing GMs in some amazing games. What breaks immersion in those video games is running into things you cannot interact with, doors that won't open, objects you can't touch, people you can't talk to, etc. The tabletop RPG GM solves for that problem...but utterly lacks all the elements that make a video game immersive. So why prevent the game from being well designed to preserve immersion when tabletop RPGs are so bad at immersion?

I've never related to video games this way and have always been a little baffled by people who do. I remember quite clearly a conversation with a friend who just couldn't deal with the graphics in Slay the Spire and found it essentially unplayable as a result. That struck me as completely bonkers, because that is a game all about the mechanics, and I've gone back and played Dreamquest to get a handle on the origins of the genre (and was literally done by an amateur in MS Paint), so StS looks great.

Immersion is mostly a uselessly subjective term at this point, but the idea that a video game could offer it better....I've had enough experience with other people to know it's true and valid position, but in a vacuum, I'd find the idea laughable. The very thing that video games can't do, but a TTRPG can, accepting a huge variety of player goals and at all points allowing players to bring every rule to bear is the whole point.

I don't think that's really an objection to the players knowing the rules, rather it's an objection to the rules being so badly designed. At least that's my objection to optimization. I don't care that the player knows the rules and can exploit them...I really hate the fact that the game is so badly designed that there are such glaringly obvious exploits in the game. Like...one person reading the book and making a post breaks the game...and yet the "professional game designers" completely missed that? People with basic math skills can spot that this combo is mathematically superior to every other option...and yet the "professional game designers" completely missed that? Fire the "professional game designers" and hire the people who can break the game in an afternoon with basic math skills and some thinking.

This is the point I thought you were going to make in the opening post of the thread, and that I was primed to agree with.

But, the flip side of that is players who know the rules and think they're limited to those rules. That's not how tabletop RPGs work. PCs have tactical infinity. That's what the GM is for. To adjudicate all the nonsense the players get up to.

If it doesn't handle elements it's supposed to well, that's bad design. What is D&D's "intended purpose"?

Tactical infinity is overrated, both as an RPG design goal and as a sticking point for designs. I'm going to go out on a nominative limb and suggest that it's strategic infinity that's more definitional to a TTRPG. Frankly, I don't think an infinite action declaration space is particularly important. Most action declarations get broken down into generic resolution systems and become equivalent to each other when it's seriously considered as a design goal anyway, and if the actual mechanic that's resolved is 1 of "say the correct words to resolve the problem without difficulty" or "say the correct words to resolve the problem with an X% chance derived from your skills" then it's not particularly infinite, is it? Most RPGs that claim to lean in to this space are really just flattening the mechanical actions permitted down to a small, easy to resolve number, or leaving it undefined and letting the GM design their own ultimately similar system as it comes up.

The real infinity that's structurally important to a TTRPG is the unbounded playtime and the player's ability to set new victory conditions. I'd argue that many RPGs actually only have a handful of actions, once you reduce those actions down to their mechanical elements, though I'd personally prefer an RPG with many, thoroughly specified and mechanically defined actions. The bit that's infinite is players deciding what they want to achieve with those actions, and once it's achieved or impossible, repeating with a new victory condition. Board games end, and begin with their victory conditions spelled out. Removing those two pieces and using some other method (what's often called "the fiction") to dynamically set them with players is the thing that makes it an RPG.

Fiction First. Yes, fiction-first games exist. And it's my preferred mode of play. But even those games are still games. They still have rules and procedures. The rules should be fun to interact with, those procedures should produce the kind of play the designers intend. If the rules and procedures do not produce the kind of play the designers intend, then it's a badly designed game. Playing the game should be fun for some subset of players. If not, then it's either not a game for them or it's badly designed.

I'm clearly doing a bad job of explaining myself. I'm not advocating for centering the game mechanics over everything else. I'm wondering why the design has to be so sloppy and produce pointlessly lame gameplay. Like...everything that's not combat in 5E. Most things are one-and-done. Make one roll and that's it. Either it's solved or it's not. And the only real option is to keep rolling until you succeed or walk away. That's lame. And yet that's how the game's designed. Make exploration into a fun part of gameplay, make it a mini game that's actually fun and engaging. But make it optional so tables can engage with it or ignore it as their preferences dictate. Same with social interaction. The minigame of social interaction is anemic at best. So make that into a fun and robust minigame. But one that tables can opt into or out of depending on their preferences. And even combat suffers because most combats are either a pointless cakewalk that's utterly boring or they're a slog with bags of boring hit points.

I view this as a design problem related to the immersion question above. Actions have some relationship to the fiction, and determining how that relationship works is part of the design plan for a game.

Realism and Verisimilitude. I've made this argument myself. It really rings hollow. The options are not 1) good, well-designed game rules or 2) verisimilitude. That's a false dichotomy. You can have both by designing the game rules to produce verisimilitude*. Trouble is, this is a selectively invoked argument. Verisimilitude only seems to come up when talking about non-casters. No one's arguing about how magic breaks their verisimilitude. Why? Because it's a fantasy game and magic is cool. Okay, so why make the verisimilitude argument about non-casters? Why can't they be awesome and do cool stuff too? It's honestly a terrible argument.

* But you need to know what the game's goal is as a game. Is the goal of D&D to produce verisimilitude? Then it does a terrible job at it. Is the goal of D&D to do something else? What? Design for that. Pick the thing D&D is good at and design for it. As it stands, D&D is half-assing everything.

I agree with all of this, but I take the obvious conclusion not to be "and therefor I don't have to explain why the sword guy does cool things" but to be "and therefor it's inappropriate to design a mundane sword guy as a player option in this game."

Ownership and Modularity. Yeah, that's basically my feelings as well. Everyone thinks their way is right, everyone else's way is wrong...and yet we're all pretending to play the same game. This is what I was talking about earlier in the thread about trying to accomplish too many disparate and mutually exclusive goals. No one game can serve all gamers, yet D&D tries and so does nothing particularly well. There are other games that do things D&D does only they do it far, far better.

I loved the idea of modularity from the DND Next playtests. Such a great premise and promise, and such a disappointment when that rug was pulled.

I was always super skeptical of the idea, given how foundational a lot of decisions need to be in an RPG design. It's not so easy a matter as having a "simple" core you can add stuff on to, the rules end up interlaced and connected in ways that require you to decide upfront what complexity costs you're willing to pay.

However, one component exists entirely outside the design space: there's only one version of D&D that exists at a time, and it will get more love and money and support poured into it than any other game in the space. Of course we're fighting about it, and all secretly wishing our preferences might become ascendant! In a very real sense, if you're going to play anything like D&D, then you can win or lose in the market: barring a huge shift in how the market works, we are actually in ideological competition for resources. Admittedly we have no actual control over the outcome, but the situation does pit us against each other.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Immersion. Tabletop RPGs have never been that immersive for me. Never. I'm always trying to find that immersion, but it's elusive. The fact that you have to stop pretending to engage with the mechanics breaks immersion. That you're literally sitting around a table with other people who're talking, planning, grabbing food and drink, etc breaks immersion for me. I've never been that immersed in a tabletop RPG. I have been far more immersed in video games. Not because or in spite of the mechanics, but because the whole experience is far more immersive. The graphics, the sound, the smoothness of play, etc. All together that feels far more like a secondary world you could live in infinitely more than any tabletop RPG experience I've ever had. And I've played with some amazing GMs in some amazing games. What breaks immersion in those video games is running into things you cannot interact with, doors that won't open, objects you can't touch, people you can't talk to, etc. The tabletop RPG GM solves for that problem...but utterly lacks all the elements that make a video game immersive. So why prevent the game from being well designed to preserve immersion when tabletop RPGs are so bad at immersion?

My imagination has far better "graphics" than any computer game. Frankly, if I felt the way you do, I can't imagine even bothering the RPGs. To me you're basically saying that the whole point of RPGs doesn't work for you. You obviously get something out of it, but our perspectives are probably so divergent that we would never agree on what is good game design.

 

[Composer99]

See and this is the crux of my questioning... what is the recognizable D&D that should be the base? How do you even determine that? Is it low level dangerous play, tactical play, resource management, combat as war, combat as sport, high level superhero-esque play? hexcrawl, sandbox, linear adventure, meta-currency, and so on. Over the various editions of D&D it has been all these things and more. If all you're saying is support D&D in space or D&D at higher levels that, IMO isn't supporting different playstyles... it's supporting various aspects of D&D.

Now if you're saying there should be a robust tactical module, a module that makes the game narrative driven, or a module that supports hexcrawling or an extensive social module for non-combat settling of conflict... these are playstyles. They aren't dependent on level or simple trappings they are in fact different ways/styles the game can be played and I don't think one game can robustly support them all and stay commercially viable at the level D&D is on.

You are seemingly defining "playstyle" in a very narrow and incoherent way in order to assert an incompatibility that does not actually exist. By your own admission, D&D does support, and has traditionally supported "different playstyles", often more than of them in the same version of the game. So do other commercially-successful games.

Apropos of Narrow/Incoherent Defining of Playstyle

• There's nothing about "hexcrawling" that prohibits "extensive social module" or a "robust tactical module", because hexcrawling is, when you get down to it, just a way of imposing a structure on wilderness exploration. As a rule structure, it's literally already siloed off from social interaction or combat, meaning your social or combat rules can be as detailed (or not!) as you please without impinging on your hexcrawl rules or vice-versa. This just comes across as a way of asserting incompatibility that just isn't there.
• "Resource management" isn't a distinct playstyle. It can be part and parcel of multiple playstyles, whether the resource you're managing is daily spell slots, encounter powers, arrows, or what-have-you.
• "Linear adventure" or "hexcrawl" don't require massively different combat systems or rules for social interaction, and you can have a more-or-less linear adventure that includes hexcrawl rules for any wilderness exploration part of its play (aka Tomb of Annihilation).
• All you need in 5e for "combat as sport" is to have encounter-building guidelines with which to create encounters that test the players' tactical skill while remaining within the bounds of "solvable/winnable", and then remind DMs who want to play "combat as war" to just ignore those guidelines.

Apropos of D&D History

• In BECMI and AD&D, dungeon exploration/wilderness exploration with resource management was the focus of early play, and domain management with politics was the game's expected focus of higher-level play - the "CM" in BECMI, with a possible layer of cosmic/mythic play on top (the "I" in BECMI). Those are not just "at higher levels" - domain management is just plain different from dungeon crawling or mythic play.
• The capabilities of magic-using characters in 3.X, and to a lesser extent in 5e, literally cause the game to become wildly different at high levels, compared to playing at 1st-3rd level. DMs can't think about structuring adventures the same way when the PCs are 13th level as when they were 3rd level. It's one thing to present a mystery when the best they can do is augury and non-magical legwork, it's another thing entirely when they can just ring up a god and ask for the answer. The travel playstyle goes from "venture to the dungeon and back" to "instantly transport yourself and the party to a plane of existence that is fundamentally hostile to mortal existence or teleport yourself across continents".

Apropos of Commercial Success
Commercially successful games already do this sort of thing.

• WoW plays very differently if you're into hardcore raiding versus full-on PvP versus just kind of going with the flow.
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker, X:COM, or Horizon Zero Dawn all play very differently at the highest versus lowest difficulty settings. Like, they're almost different games at those two extremes - indeed, I would go so far as to say that at its lowest difficulty setting, Horizon Zero Dawn just about crosses over from "game" into "interactive immersive story experience".
• And yet somehow, each of these games manage to accommodate these differences within the same game, such that a player is recognisably playing WoW or what-have-you and not some other game. I'm sure the same can be said for Baldur's Gate 3 (another obviously commercial success).

Suffice to say that, bringing this back to the core topic, treating D&D as a game and undertaking deliberate design for it in that capacity would make D&D far more likely to successfully manage multiple player constituencies than would refusing to let D&D be treated and designed for as a game because "immersion" or what-have-you.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Right. But, to me at least, immersion is far more about presentation than tactical infinity. If I don't have tactical infinity, I can still be immersed in a game, see video games. If I don't have a good presentation, I cannot be immersed in a game, see literally all tabletop RPGs. Mostly because they literally can't offer the presentation of video games. Even the absolute best GMs I've seen, Matt Mercer, Brennan Lee Mulligan, etc, do not immerse me in their stories. It's always a person on the other side of the screen describing things, no matter how flowery or awesome.

I said as much later in that same post. But, you run face first into other gamers' preferences. See rules like encumbrance and ammo tracking, etc.

Absolutely.

Exactly. And that's the problem. D&D tries to be all things to all gamers and therefore doesn't do anything particularly well.
It's being pulled in a dozen different directions trying to serve a dozen different design goals. Even older editions of D&D do different parts of the game better than 5E does. But, 5E is effectively the only game in town. Other games literally exist, but they might as well not considering how difficult it is to find players, GMs, etc. So D&D has all the players and playstyles under one big tent and they do not all fit together. Yet here we are.

As far as the immersion issue goes, you have to know other people can feel sufficient levels of this from TTRPGs. Thus, it is a personal issue for you regarding gaming (I've got several of them myself).

 

[Composer99]

* But you need to know what the game's goal is as a game. Is the goal of D&D to produce verisimilitude? Then it does a terrible job at it. Is the goal of D&D to do something else? What? Design for that. Pick the thing D&D is good at and design for it. As it stands, D&D is half-assing everything.

Ownership and Modularity. Yeah, that's basically my feelings as well. Everyone thinks their way is right, everyone else's way is wrong...and yet we're all pretending to play the same game. This is what I was talking about earlier in the thread about trying to accomplish too many disparate and mutually exclusive goals. No one game can serve all gamers, yet D&D tries and so does nothing particularly well. There are other games that do things D&D does only they do it far, far better.

Apropos of D&D drilling down and focusing on the gameplay it's intended to deliver and therefore doing it well, I would certainly agree that D&D would be a better game if it focused on what I see as its twin cores of "casual heroic kill-and-loot gameplay" and "heroic character-driven adventure gameplay", even if I would find that personally disappointing. (For my part, though, I'd rather D&D be a better game than to be "my" D&D, as it were.)

I see D&D as having to appeal to multiple and often widely divergent constituencies not as a good or necessary end in itself, but rather because that is the challenge D&D has set for itself in its aspirations and marketing ("world's greatest roleplaying game" and all that). Suffice to say that even if that can only ever result in "satisfying"/"satisficing" design overall, D&D could do better with a more deliberate design approach (the sort of which that would be precluded by refusing to think of it as "a game").

 

[Micah Sweet]

Those aren't "mini-games" though... at least not in the way overgeeked seemed to be advocating for (unless I misunderstood them.)

Do you think even half the players of D&D want a "social combat" system for the Interaction pillar that is on par with what we have for Combat? With moves, and argumentative attacks, and verbal defenses and the like? And "social hit points" that go down whenever someone makes a good point? I've seen a few games that do in fact have systems of that nature and they've never really seemed to catch on. So while I do not begrudge someone for thinking D&D could benefit from a "social combat" system... I do not see why WotC should be the one to necessarily make it, especially not in the core Player's Handbook.

Not that I personally want that kind of social combat, but given how much more popular WotC 5e is than everything else, how many people have to like something in gaming for it to count for you as "catching on"?

 

[Imaro]

You are seemingly defining "playstyle" in a very narrow and incoherent way in order to assert an incompatibility that does not actually exist. By your own admission, D&D does support, and has traditionally supported "different playstyles", often more than of them in the same version of the game. So do other commercially-successful games.

Apropos of Narrow/Incoherent Defining of Playstyle

• There's nothing about "hexcrawling" that prohibits "extensive social module" or a "robust tactical module", because hexcrawling is, when you get down to it, just a way of imposing a structure on wilderness exploration. As a rule structure, it's literally already siloed off from social interaction or combat, meaning your social or combat rules can be as detailed (or not!) as you please without impinging on your hexcrawl rules or vice-versa. This just comes across as a way of asserting incompatibility that just isn't there.
• "Resource management" isn't a distinct playstyle. It can be part and parcel of multiple playstyles, whether the resource you're managing is daily spell slots, encounter powers, arrows, or what-have-you.
• "Linear adventure" or "hexcrawl" don't require massively different combat systems or rules for social interaction, and you can have a more-or-less linear adventure that includes hexcrawl rules for any wilderness exploration part of its play (aka Tomb of Annihilation).
• All you need in 5e for "combat as sport" is to have encounter-building guidelines with which to create encounters that test the players' tactical skill while remaining within the bounds of "solvable/winnable", and then remind DMs who want to play "combat as war" to just ignore those guidelines.

Apropos of D&D History

• In BECMI and AD&D, dungeon exploration/wilderness exploration with resource management was the focus of early play, and domain management with politics was the game's expected focus of higher-level play - the "CM" in BECMI, with a possible layer of cosmic/mythic play on top (the "I" in BECMI). Those are not just "at higher levels" - domain management is just plain different from dungeon crawling or mythic play.
• The capabilities of magic-using characters in 3.X, and to a lesser extent in 5e, literally cause the game to become wildly different at high levels, compared to playing at 1st-3rd level. DMs can't think about structuring adventures the same way when the PCs are 13th level as when they were 3rd level. It's one thing to present a mystery when the best they can do is augury and non-magical legwork, it's another thing entirely when they can just ring up a god and ask for the answer. The travel playstyle goes from "venture to the dungeon and back" to "instantly transport yourself and the party to a plane of existence that is fundamentally hostile to mortal existence or teleport yourself across continents".

Apropos of Commercial Success
Commercially successful games already do this sort of thing.

• WoW plays very differently if you're into hardcore raiding versus full-on PvP versus just kind of going with the flow.
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker, X:COM, or Horizon Zero Dawn all play very differently at the highest versus lowest difficulty settings. Like, they're almost different games at those two extremes - indeed, I would go so far as to say that at its lowest difficulty setting, Horizon Zero Dawn just about crosses over from "game" into "interactive immersive story experience".
• And yet somehow, each of these games manage to accommodate these differences within the same game, such that a player is recognisably playing WoW or what-have-you and not some other game. I'm sure the same can be said for Baldur's Gate 3 (another obviously commercial success).

Suffice to say that, bringing this back to the core topic, treating D&D as a game and undertaking deliberate design for it in that capacity would make D&D far more likely to successfully manage multiple player constituencies than would refusing to let D&D be treated and designed for as a game because "immersion" or what-have-you.

Let me try to better express my point...

I believe that D&D does this already. I don't believe that designing it "as a game" will alleviate any of the issues that arise due to it's widespread playstyles (now using your definition of playstyles)... mainly that robust support will exist for any one playstyle. It's not feasible from a design or sales perspective. To further simplify this... what were the sales of the Book of Nine Swords, Psionics Handbook and Epic Level Handbook... and from those sales what was the actual adoption rate by groups? It's a fraction of a fraction. This is why WotC leaves this design space for 3PP.

EDIT: I also don't understand how in approaching it as a game where more must be defined and codified (unless I am not understanding what your usage of the term means, and if so please correct me) would result in a game that better caters to a wider range of playstyles... it seems it would just narrow the playstyles to those most compatible with said codification of the rules.

 

[cbwjm]

I've never felt that people are resistant to DnD being a game, they just have different things they want out of the game. This is why people stuck with ADnD when 3e came out, or why people stuck with 3e or moved to pathfinder when 4e came out, or prefer the more tactical game play of 4e to the game play of other editions.

I prefer the older editions, BECMI and 2e over others, 3e was good but complex, 4e was a little too tactical for me, 5e is probably my next favourite after 2e but there are definitely aspects I don't like. Each edition brings a different playstyle, everyone seeks the one they enjoy playing the most.

 

[mamba]

You can't both design for blandness and design for richness. I think that's part of what I'm running into. 5E tries to be everything to all gamers and doesn't do much, if anything, well.

I agree, I have similar issues with it

Right. But the result will be people simply leaving the hobby, not jumping to other games in any appreciable numbers. Even with the OGL fiasco and a few other games having their best sales ever for a month or two, the needle barely moved. Unless the MCDM RPG or Daggerheart somehow take the industry by storm. Best wishes to the other companies doing their not-5E games, but I don't see any of them moving the needle much at all.

I agree, many rather leave than explore. I am looking around right now to see what else is out there, the solution might have to be heavy houseruling however, to dance around the 'D&D or nothing' mentality (which is probably still a far cry from where I would actually like to be, or at least explore)

I think if some games ran with 5e's base design but flavored it differently for different interests, they could be relatively successful, but maybe I am mistaken. I believe a game that is rather different is more of a hurdle to selling however.

 

[overgeeked]

Immersion is mostly a uselessly subjective term at this point, but the idea that a video game could offer it better....I've had enough experience with other people to know it's true and valid position, but in a vacuum, I'd find the idea laughable. The very thing that video games can't do, but a TTRPG can, accepting a huge variety of player goals and at all points allowing players to bring every rule to bear is the whole point.

It all depends on what is meant by immersion. I get immersed in books far more than video games. In video games far more than tabletop RPGs. It depends on how engaging and "all-encompassing" it is to experience. I can fall into a novel in a flash, I can fall into a video game after a few minutes, and I've never got anything even remotely approaching either experience with tabletop RPGs. The act of sitting around a table throwing dice never disappears. I can't get lost in the fiction of the game.

Tactical infinity is overrated, both as an RPG design goal and as a sticking point for designs. I'm going to go out on a nominative limb and suggest that it's strategic infinity that's more definitional to a TTRPG. Frankly, I don't think an infinite action declaration space is particularly important. Most action declarations get broken down into generic resolution systems and become equivalent to each other when it's seriously considered as a design goal anyway, and if the actual mechanic that's resolved is 1 of "say the correct words to resolve the problem without difficulty" or "say the correct words to resolve the problem with an X% chance derived from your skills" then it's not particularly infinite, is it? Most RPGs that claim to lean in to this space are really just flattening the mechanical actions permitted down to a small, easy to resolve number, or leaving it undefined and letting the GM design their own ultimately similar system as it comes up.

Hard disagree. It's literally a defining feature of tabletop RPGs. Without it, you don't have an RPG.

The real infinity that's structurally important to a TTRPG is the unbounded playtime and the player's ability to set new victory conditions. I'd argue that many RPGs actually only have a handful of actions, once you reduce those actions down to their mechanical elements, though I'd personally prefer an RPG with many, thoroughly specified and mechanically defined actions. The bit that's infinite is players deciding what they want to achieve with those actions, and once it's achieved or impossible, repeating with a new victory condition. Board games end, and begin with their victory conditions spelled out. Removing those two pieces and using some other method (what's often called "the fiction") to dynamically set them with players is the thing that makes it an RPG.

That's definitely important. One key distinction between computer RPGs and tabletop RPGs. You can only go on the quests the designers programmed with a video game, but you can go on any quest you and your GM can imagine with a tabletop RPG.

I view this as a design problem related to the immersion question above. Actions have some relationship to the fiction, and determining how that relationship works is part of the design plan for a game.

Anything your character can do is tied to the fiction. Whether its tied to the mechanics is a different question. To me, it should be one harmonious thing. Mechanics so light an intuitive they get out of the way of the fiction so you the player can make a declaration and maybe roll some dice and quickly get back to the fiction.

However, one component exists entirely outside the design space: there's only one version of D&D that exists at a time, and it will get more love and money and support poured into it than any other game in the space. Of course we're fighting about it, and all secretly wishing our preferences might become ascendant! In a very real sense, if you're going to play anything like D&D, then you can win or lose in the market: barring a huge shift in how the market works, we are actually in ideological competition for resources. Admittedly we have no actual control over the outcome, but the situation does pit us against each other.

Honestly, not me. Since we're all stuck together pretending to play the same game I'd much rather a modular design that can do multiple things well. A good, well-designed and robust social mini game, ditto an exploration game, ditto a combat game. Provide something between "one check solves it" and "so detailed it makes the combat rules look light" and give tables the option of which to choose. Hell, you could have them choose in the moment rather than pick one and use it forever. This combat is filler with a bunch of mooks so let's use a quick combat resolution, but the next fight is a boss battle so we're using the full combat rules. So too with social and exploration. I want all of it well supported and left to the table to decide.