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

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

The same way I would say that no specific type of Warlord class has caught on as being such an important part of 5E's third-party circuit that WotC should consider adding it officially to the game. Now have there been dozens of "let's make a Warlord class" threads here on EN World? Yup! Are there always players who say they want Warlords and participate in such threads? Yup! But have any of these Warlords that have been designed been such a hit with even a certain section of the community that it would ring a bell back in WotC HQ that says enough people want it? Not from where I'm sitting it hasn't. I don't believe there has been any Warlord class that has "caught on" to even the fringes of the D&D community such that we hear people talking about playing Warlords in their personal games. Now it's entirely possible I'm wrong about that and there are indeed many, many players and tables that have 3PP Warlords being played.

I don't think this would tell us if it would be a good/popular addition to the game either way. It's like the Fighter / mythic martial arguments. It could be true that most people don't want it enough. But it also could be true that a huge swath of players and DMs just buy the core books and play. No thinking about design parameters and immersion and 3PP stuff and so on.

If that is true, and a Warlord or Mythic Martial class was added to the core game, it could be that the vast majority of people would love these classes and want them as important parts of the game going forward. In retrospect, they might realize they fulfil archetypes that they see in fiction and wonder why they weren't included to begin with.

This might not be true either but seems like a fair possibility as well.

 

[overgeeked]

Immersion. I think we're defining immersion differently. I do not mean "able to imagine the fiction." I can't imagine engaging with this hobby without the capacity to do so. What I mean by immersion is "flow state" or "in the zone." Being lost in the activity, so hyperfocused that everything else falls away.

Flow (psychology) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Like sitting down to play a video game and blinking only to find it's three hours later. Or sitting down to read a novel only to blink and realize you should have gone to bed four hours ago. That's immersion, to me.

And the very act of playing a tabletop RPG literally prevents that from happening.

With a book you read the text and imagine what's there and just keep going. Read-imagine-read-imagine...until the book is done or you have to jump up to run to the bathroom to pee.

With a video game, the stimulus pops up on the screen, you react, press a button, and your avatar in the game fires a weapon or spell, hitting or killing the monster. The delay between in-game stimulus (monster on screen), to player reaction (oh no a monster), to player game response (press the button), to in-game character response (fire the weapon) is minimal. Fractions of a second. It's only because of this minimal delay that video games are immersive in the flow-state sense.

And it's because the delay between in-game stimulus and in-game character response are so long and involve so many steps that immersion in the flow-state sense is impossible, for me. I can't enter a flow state when the handling time of the game system is measured in tens or scores of minutes rather than seconds.

This is likely also why I prefer rules light games and FKR. The system gets the hell out of the way so I can immerse myself in the game world. It reduces the handling time of the game's mechanics to almost nothing or nothing.

 

[Composer99]

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.

I've pointed to examples of commercially-successful games that appeal to multiple player constituencies more robustly than D&D does (even just by the act of having a built-in "difficulty" slider!). If you don't think they have lessons D&D can learn from, as the saying goes, that's, like, just your opinion, man. And, bluntly put, I have no reason to think you've a better tab on D&D's pulse than I. (It's certainly clear, and fair enough, that you seem to think likewise.)

Look again at WoW: What have the sales of WoW been? Sure, it's not its halcyon days, but it still does well enough. And yet it still manages to robustly support multiple disparate player constituencies, and has done since its inception. Some of these player constituencies are surprisingly niche. Someone else on this site pointed out (might have been Ruin Explorer) that, for instance, the "regular raiding" player constituency is something like less than 1% of the WoW player base. But raiding is still "a thing" that the game supports - quite robustly, if not as robustly as during the Burning Crusade/WotLK days.

The situations for WoW and D&D are not exactly identical, but the principle is there: different player constituencies with different needs can be supported in a robust way by a single game with a more-or-less unified mechanical schema.

So, what I mean is that "WotC should, with the same deliberateness and care as the likes of Blizzard Entertainment or Sony Interactive/Guerilla Games (the respective publisher and developer of Horizon Zero Dawn), ascertain who are the core player constituencies of D&D and how they want to play the game (including how they actually play the game as compared to how it has been designed to date), and then design the game so as to maximally appeal to these constituencies and their gameplay needs".

How well has D&D done this in the past, and how well is it doing it now? I'm not convinced they did a great job in the past (for instance, I think if WotC had done a better job of assessing what the greater part of player base really wanted, we would have got something closer to 5e a long time ago), and I'm not convinced they couldn't be doing a better job now. I'm willing to bet that Tome of Battle had more uptake among the 3.5 player base than, say, the puzzle rules in Tasha's, or the downtime rules and tool-use rules in Xanathar's, or even the social interaction and wilderness exploration rules in the 5e DMG has among the 5e player base, despite the difference in unit sales between that book and the others.

For instance, I'm confident that D&D would be a better game if, say, it undertook the approach to adventuring gear that I suggested upthread, as opposed to the approach that exists now (which I am confident asserting is largely ignored by most of the player base and is the bane of the remainder of the player base that wants something with more teeth) - although I am sure it would be an even better game if professional designers were to be the ones coming up with the approach.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

So why do people object to it being treated like a game?

I suspect it is because people have different meanings of "game"and "recreation" and "pasttime".

 

[James Gasik]

In my experience, players who want D&D to be something other than a game desperately want it to be art — and specifically storytelling or performance art. Games are low-class; art is high-class. It's a metanarrative born from pretentiousness.

Like how "comic books" and "cartoons" are for kids.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Someone else on this site pointed out (might have been Ruin Explorer) that, for instance, the "regular raiding" player constituency is something like less than 1% of the WoW player base. But raiding is still "a thing" that the game supports - quite robustly, if not as robustly as during the Burning Crusade/WotLK days.

It was, and to be fair, WoW did improve that a great deal.

With WoW what was shocking was the drop-off in % playing as you got into more and more punishing raids. Going from memory, back in the day it was something like:

40% of players have killed at least one boss in Molten Core.

20% of players have killed at least one boss in Blackwing Lair.

10% of players have killed at least one boss in Zul'Gurub/AQ20/AQ40.

Significantly less than 5% of players have even seen the inside of Naxxramas (back when it was a 40-man dungeon in Vanilla), let alone killed a boss!

Then you had a similar pattern repeat, but even more extremely, with lower numbers at every tier, with The Burning Crusade.

Wrath of the Lich King made things a lot friendlier and saw much better numbers, before Cataclysm made them much worse and saw good initial numbers absolutely crumble from the utterly punishing first set of Cataclysm raids (even the dungeons were stunningly painful compared to WotLK).

Then it got turned around again - and back and forth - nowadays WoW raids have more people than Cataclysm (as a percentage), but far fewer than WotLK.

But your general point is correct - WoW does a fairly good job of supporting a lot of niche playstyles. Sometimes they go a little too far and actually unnecessarily create niche playstyles and then support them better than more mainstream ones, but to be fair that was something the previous generation of designers were keen on and that the current gen of WoW designers does less.

In my experience, players who want D&D to be something other than a game desperately want it to be art — and specifically storytelling or performance art. Games are low-class; art is high-class. It's a metanarrative born from pretentiousness.

I find this totally implausible as an explanation for the resistance to game-ish-ness.

Completely implausible.

Almost everyone I've ever even come across who truly hates "game-ist" RPGs and "game-ism" in general is a total and utter beer-and-pretzels type. There's a certainly a massive correlation between playing more hack-and-slash and older RPGs and hating gamism.

So that absolutely flies in the face of any "pretentiousness" explanation. The people who tolerated the deeply game-ist 4E, best, for example, were people who'd played a lot of RPGs, generally speaking, and who realized that different RPGs were different, and not every every RPG was a simulation. But a lot of those people were quite keen on "storytelling" games and so on, which doesn't at all fit your explanation.

So it's definitely not that. If anything gamist and narrativist people tend to align, and those who think of RPGs a simulations who object to both of those.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Like how "comic books" and "cartoons" are for kids.

It's clearly not that though.

Because it's a totally different group objecting, and very often the people who get most mad about game-like elements in RPGs are those who play some of the most basic and traditional RPGs, and again often in a beer-and-pretzels kind of way (which I don't use disparagingly note, I love some beer and well maybe not pretzels but crisps sure - chips I believe Americans would say).

 

[pointofyou]

I love some beer and well maybe not pretzels but crisps sure - chips I believe Americans would say

Yes. "Chips" is the correct word.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I suspect it is because people have different meanings of "game"and "recreation" and "pasttime".

And 'doll' and 'action figure'.

Much like comics, there's also an element of denying that we're playing pretend and instead doing super important grown-up activities.

 

[Cadence]

My imagination has far better "graphics" than any computer game.

Tangentially, I'd kind of like to get the fMRI people across campus to take a look at the brains of folks with and without aphantasia when they game. (I don't have anything but short sketchy bursts of graphics in my imagination, but some other part of my brain must be keeping track of spatial things and the like).