D&D 5E With the Holy Trinity out, let's take stock of 5E

[weldon]

On the contrary, it [American Football] is all about pattern recognition…

The primary factor of success in football is physical strength and speed. If you can't create an advantage in physical ability, then secondary factors like strategy, tactics and "pattern recognition" come into play. But they only come into play if you are evenly matched physically (which is generally the case in the NFL).

I know this is a ludicrous example, but if I had the Hulk on my team, I wouldn't need tactics or pattern recognition. In fact, I could just announce before each play that we are hiking the ball to the Hulk and he is going to run down the middle. Good luck stopping him.

What I will concede is that analysis of today's game in the NFL is focused on tactics because that is where the difference is made.

I think the discussion about the analysis of RPGs is similarly clouded by the fact that so much of the foundation is assumed that we turn to focus on the minor differences. In the same way that all human faces are 90-something % similar but our brains are highly tuned to focus on the minute differences to identify and recognize individuals. The fact that I can easily recognize all the members of my family, and talk at length about their differences in appearance, doesn't change the fact that they are incredibly similar.

I feel like in this discussion about "significant" differences in emphasis between different games, that the foundations of all of them are likely much more similar than we are letting on.

 

[howandwhy99]

I, and others, have said that D&D is a game that from time-to-time requires the GM to improvise in order to adjudicate action declarations by players.

And I have said it was designed with all its mass of hidden rules so referees do not do that.

The point at issue is: how is the list of predetermined outcomes determined?

I have answered your question repeatedly. Accept it. The referee uses the code behind the screen to learn the results. The mechanics in the books published are guidelines, suggestions. The DM must choose what to use prior to play just like in Mastermind.

Notice that the room, the platform, the splinters of wood, etc have never actually existed. They are imaginary.

Obviously you admit they exist, they are not references to anything outside the imagination beyond the map. Hense they are neither fiction nor nonfiction, but their own actuality. We've had this discussion before. You prefer a different philosophical outlook. I don't particularly hold to any way, but desire to know the thinking of how the game was designed to be played.

As a side point, I also note that there is an element here of improvisation (or "Schroedinger's wood spinters") - whichever socket is the first to be examined will contain the splinters. That is, the GM is authoring the imagined state of affairs, within certain rather constrained paramaters, as s/he goes along.

Which would be against the rules and gaslighting the players.

This is not anything like a standard usage of the word "map". For instance, I challenge you to post a photograph or link me to any RPGing map which contains pitons on it. Pitons figure on equipment lists - both generic lists of things that can be bought, and particularised lists on individual character sheets. They do not figure on maps.

Even moreso is this the case for mugs, which typically figure only as part of the flavour text in GM dungeon/room notes.

You want an illustration specfically from a gaming book of a piton or mug? Maybe someone published their personal stats? Published works are aids, not the "real" rules a DM must use. However, every DM needs to generate these materials prior to play if they are going to be in the game.

I don't see what conflicts have to do with anything. Action resolution mechanics are mechanics for resolving (= "determining the outcome of") player action declarations.

Gygax, in his DMG, refers repreatedly to the need to determine such things (ie to resolve them): see, for instance, p 61: "Determine if either or both paties are SURPRISED . . . Determine distance . . . Determine the results of whatever actions are decided upon", etc.

Determine = generate from the game system already in place, the code repeated, usually by rolling dice so the referee can find out the outcome.

It's also simply not true that all game play is the act of deciphering patterns. For instance, when a player declares thats/he has rolled a 6 on the initiative die, what pattern is being deciphered?

The distributive pattern of a 6-sided die roll is being learned. But when that pattern is the expression of that relationship in a game it has deeper meaning. It ties to how shifting the odds of that die are more than some linear ladder of + or -1s.

In any event, you still haven't told me how to resolve any of the contentious action declarations that have been mentioned (by me and others) upthread.

I have without fail repeatedly answered your question. I'm stopping now. As you fully know the mechanical suggestions in the books are not the rules of the game.

--
It's the holiday season and this is getting tiresome. You don't understand, I understand. I've gone to great lengths to help you understand. If you have any further questions I will try and answer them, but let's go to PM and quit bloating this thread which is quite clearly not about the topics you've been asking about.

 

[guachi]

You have gone to great lengths and yet the rest of us are confused by what you are saying and your unusual use of terminology. That indicates that the problem lies in your abject inability to explain yourself. Instead of using terminology known only in your head, perhaps you should describe things in our terminology.

Oh, and provide actual references to page numbers and quotes from rule books like others here have done. Or provide quotes from game designers describing what the intent of their games were supposed to be. I don't believe you have ever provided any quotes at all. You've made reference to how you interpreted the game's rules when you first played and reference to "hidden" rules that apparently only you and no one else has ever fathomed.

You've presented your opinion, but you've completely failed to provide any evidence to back it up.

 

[guachi]

And I have said it was designed with all its mass of hidden rules so referees do not do that.

How do you know it was designed with hidden rules? What are these hidden rules? Where did you find them?

Obviously you admit they exist, they are not references to anything outside the imagination beyond the map. Hense they are neither fiction nor nonfiction, but their own actuality. We've had this discussion before. You prefer a different philosophical outlook. I don't particularly hold to any way, but desire to know the thinking of how the game was designed to be played.

Terminological nonsense. You choose to redefine words to mean something different than the rest of us define them as. You have no one to blame but yourself if you engage in conversation using words with your own idiosyncratic definitions.

Which would be against the rules and gaslighting the players.

What rule? Please reference a book and page number with a relevant quote.

You want an illustration specfically from a gaming book of a piton or mug? Maybe someone published their personal stats? Published works are aids, not the "real" rules a DM must use. However, every DM needs to generate these materials prior to play if they are going to be in the game.

No, he said he wants a picture or photograph of a map showing a piton or a mug on it. He was fairly plain in his meaning. Not the stats of a mug or a description of a mug in a room or an illustration of a mug but a mug or piton on a map. Can you point us to a module where such a thing exists?

Can you provide a page number that references what the real rules are? Are they something that only you have invented in your head? Lastly, are you saying that if a DM hasn't predetermined that a piton or a mug exists in the game prior to play, then it doesn't exist? What "play" is it prior to? The entire campaign, just that session, after a bathroom break? Why must he generate them before play, anyway?

I have without fail repeatedly answered your question. I'm stopping now. As you fully know the mechanical suggestions in the books are not the rules of the game.

And you're giving terrible answers that don't adequately answer the questions posed of you. A big reason why is the above sentence where you redefine words like the rules in the books merely being "mechanical suggestions".

 

[pemerton]

On the contrary, it is all about pattern recognition.

American football is not about math, but it certainly based on sound tactical thinking, on an individual and team basis.

The primary factor of success in football is physical strength and speed. If you can't create an advantage in physical ability, then secondary factors like strategy, tactics and "pattern recognition" come into play. But they only come into play if you are evenly matched physically

I am assuming that "pattern recognition" is not just a synonym for human perception and cognition.

The two best chess players I have personally known both went on to be professors of mathematics at major US universities. Of the two best M:TG players I have ever known, one has a PhD in programming, and the other was quite strong at undergraduate mathematics. Of the two best Diplomacy players I've known, one also went on to be a professor of maths at Caltech, the other is a financial analyst who was a leader in his team at building Excel models.

These are the sorts of skill-sets, and skill-set combinations, that I think of when I think of "pattern recognition", or of the significance of the fact, mentioned above by [MENTION=3192]howandwhy99[/MENTION], that M:tG was designed by a mathematician.

None of these individuals I've mentioned was, to the best of my knowledge, ever any good at football (any version), although the Caltech guy was also quite a fast sprinter as a teenager and the Excel guy was, for a while, an aerobics instructor.

No doubt tactics are important in football, just as they are important in a range of other fields of physical endeavour (eg warfare). But based on the recruiting practices of the Allied armies during WWII, the individuals who are good at "pattern recognition" in the chess/M:tG/maths sense don't generally get sent to be front-line soldiers. They are used as code-breakers, to solve optimisation problems in relation to supplies, etc.

When Gygax (PHB p 7) said that playing D&D "realy increases playing skill. Imagination, intelligence, problem solving ability and memory are al continually exercise by participants in the game," I don't think he was meaning to imply that playing D&D will improve your abiity as a footballer. I've certainly never heard anyone say that of themselves, whereas I have read posts where people point to the game as having improved their mathematical skills (in my own case, it taught me to calculate and reason with probabilities).

I think the discussion about the analysis of RPGs is similarly clouded by the fact that so much of the foundation is assumed that we turn to focus on the minor differences.

I agree there are overwhelming similarities. That's one reason why I generally find the term "story game" unhelpful, as the games that it ostensibly carves out (often, though not always, ones that the poster doesn't pesonally care for) are simply not that different from (say) AD&D.

From my point of view, there are two things that the typical RPG has in common, that are practically definitive of this genre of games. The most important, I think, is that there is an imagined world, a shared fiction, in which the events of the game are imagined as taking place - and (unlike, say, in Battleship or M:tG) this fiction matters to the resolution of action declaration. This means that playing the game is not strictly algorithmic; judgement calls have to be made.

The other is that each of the players, other than the referee, has principal custody of, and responsibility for, one particular character within this shared fiction. Many of the differences in play approach arise from varying the distribution and detailed responsibilities of these roles (eg different expectations about the functions of the referee, about the motivations to which playes are expected to have regard in playing their PCs, etc).

Just as, from the point of view of a non-RPGer, RPGs are overwhelmingy similar, so I imagine that from the point of view of a non-human human social passtimes would look overwhelmingly similar, whether football or tabletop game-playing (social, draw upon and challenge distinctively human perceptual and cognitive capabiities, etc). Still, for those of us within the club the distinctions can be worth drawing, I think.

 

[Parmandur]

Well, I don't actually accept the definition of "game" as supplied, or the idiosyncratic "Mastermind" model of D&D.

But, the math involved in American football might surprise you; the plays coaches need to design and train players in are fairly complex.

 

[pemerton]

The DM must choose what to use prior to play just like in Mastermind.

I find the comparison to Mastermind quite unhelpful. Mastermind is, literally, a code-breaking game: the "referee" creates a hidden pattern, the "player" takes goes at guessing it, and is given strictly-defined feedback by the GM after each attempt.

D&D differes from Mastermind at almost every point. The GM does not literally create a hidden pattern, but rather draws a dungeon map and writes up a description of it. The players do not try and guess the GM's dungeon map. Rather, they describe their PCs entering and exploring the dungeon, and the GM is obliged to describe what the PCs can see. There is no need for the PCs to try and reconstruct the map from oblique clues (as in Mastermind).

when a player declares thats/he has rolled a 6 on the initiative die, what pattern is being deciphered?[/quote]The distributive pattern of a 6-sided die roll is being learned.[/quote]Nonsense. A person doesn't learn ("decipher") the distributive pattern of a die roll by checking for initiative. You learn that by reading a maths textbook, or from Gygax's discussion of dice probabilities on pp 9-10 of his DMG.

Rolling for initiative isn't about deciphering any sort of pattern. It's about determining a mechanical game-state, in this particular case for the distribution of turns within a combat. An analgoue is found in the late-70s Toltoys boardgame "Battlestar Galactica", that I have been playing recently with my older daughter. In that game, when you launch laser torpedoes against your opponents, you roll a d6 (or, if your gameboard is still intact, you spin the spinner with numbers 1 to 6) to see how many shots you get. That is not "pattern-recognition" either - the pattern-recognition already took place, when you decided that now was a good time to spend your laser torpedoes card.

This simply illustrates that not all games are identical in their underlying structure. Some do not have randomly-determined game states (eg chess, Mastermind). Some use randomisation to determine the parameters of the players' moves (eg backgammon, ludo and many other race games) - choosing moves involves "pattern recognition", but rolling the dice isn't an exercise in pattern recognition. Some games use randomisation to allocate turns - rolling for initiative, or to see how many shots of laser torpedoes are permitted, is like this. It's not pattern recognition either.

And I have said it was designed with all its mass of hidden rules so referees do not do that.

<snip>

The referee uses the code behind the screen to learn the results.

<snip>

every DM needs to generate these materials prior to play if they are going to be in the game.

As I have asked before, where does this "code" come from? Who writes it? When?

And, as I have stated before, the number of permissible player action declarations is, for practical purposes, unlimited. Hence it impossible for the GM to write, in advance, a "code" for resolving all of these.

I've given several examples upthread where the rulebooks do not provide any "code": using a hammer and piton to smash a winch so that a portcullis will quickly drop down; hurling a mug onto a floor so that it shatters, making a noise; jumping a 10' wide pit.

Here is another example: a player turns up with "bag of knucklebones" written on his PC sheet. The GM has never before thought about the significance of knucklebones in the game. Then the player's PC meets a goblin, ends up in freindly conversation, and challenges the goblin to a friendly game of knucklebones for a silver piece stake. How do we work out who wins the game of knucklebones. Where is the relevant "code" to be found?

I think the first instinct for many GMs would be opposed DEX checks (or a straight DEX score comparison). But what is the DEX of a goblin?

Determine = generate from the game system already in place, the code repeated, usually by rolling dice so the referee can find out the outcome.

Many people, including me, describe this as action resolution, meaning the resolution (= determining the outcome of) a player's action declaration.

there is an element here of improvisation (or "Schroedinger's wood spinters") - whichever socket is the first to be examined will contain the splinters. That is, the GM is authoring the imagined state of affairs, within certain rather constrained paramaters, as s/he goes along.

Which would be against the rules and gaslighting the players.

With what authority do you assert that Gygax is breaking the rules, when he wrote them? What rule is he breaking? Where is this rule stated?

You want an illustration specfically from a gaming book of a piton or mug?

No. You said all these things will be on the referee's map. I asked you to point me to a map containing a piton or a mug. Heck, point me to a map with a portcullis that also indicates where the portcullis winch mechanism is located.

Notice that the room, the platform, the splinters of wood, etc have never actually existed. They are imaginary.

Obviously you admit they exist, they are not references to anything outside the imagination beyond the map. Hense they are neither fiction nor nonfiction, but their own actuality.

I don't admit that purely imaginary things exist: that would be straightforwardly contradictory. They are not "their own actuality" (whatever that is meant to mean). They aren't real.

There is a very extensive technical literature on reasoning about imaginary things: the literature on counterfactuals; the literature on paraconsistent logics; the literature on fictionalism. But we don't need to engage with that literature to see what is going on in typical RPG play.

I gave an example in a talk I gave at a conference earlier this year: speaking to my audience, I said - Suppose that this room was quite a bit smaller than it is; and suppose that there were a hippopotamus in it. Then either there would be fewer of us in the room than there currently are, or alternatively some of us would be squashed.

That is an example of reasoning about the imaginary - an imaginary hippopotamus filling an imagined room. It is very commonplace for human beings to engage in that sort of reasoning. D&D referees, in particular, have to be quite good at it if they are going to do their job well.

 

[pemerton]

But, the math involved in American football might surprise you; the plays coaches need to design and train players in are fairly complex.

Football coaches are, to football players, a bit like generals and quartermasters are to soldiers. I've got no doubt that there skills in "pattern recognition" are quite good. They also probably competent amateurs, at least, in the fields of physiotherapy and sports medicine.

But I don't think coaching football is the same thing as playing football. If you go down that pathway, you are in danger of ending up with the same absurd conclusion as Plato did, that the only true musicians are music critics. Plato might have wished that every human pursuit was really, at it's heart, an intellectual one. But I don't think he was right.

 

[TrippyHippy]

I’m really happy with it. Looking back, I was frustrated with all previous editions for one reason or another - but this one makes me want to play without hesitation. I like the diversity in character options - which I suppose were there with 3E - combined with the simplicity of the rules - which, in a way, were there with 4E (or at least the 4E Essentials), whilst retaining the feel from earlier editions. It’s a complete package for me - with the only minor criticism of art direction, occasionally (choices for cover art, etc) being a really minor issue.

I have a player in my group who is a die-hard 4E fan, and it gets irritating to hear his criticisms which largely amount to ‘it’s not the same as 4E’ (regardless of context). The observation I make in his case is that a) he has limited experience of playing anything other than D&D4E, and b) he’s invested so much in the 4E line that it’s hard to let it go. From my experience, the acceptance of 5E may take some time….but in terms of my preference and enthusiasm it’s been the best thing to happen to D&D for a long, long time.

 

[Parmandur]

Football coaches are, to football players, a bit like generals and quartermasters are to soldiers. I've got no doubt that there skills in "pattern recognition" are quite good. They also probably competent amateurs, at least, in the fields of physiotherapy and sports medicine.



But I don't think coaching football is the same thing as playing football. If you go down that pathway, you are in danger of ending up with the same absurd conclusion as Plato did, that the only true musicians are music critics. Plato might have wished that every human pursuit was really, at it's heart, an intellectual one. But I don't think he was right.

One of the players on the field, the quarterback, traditionally plays a sir of "field commander," calling out changes to the play in-game based on judgments of conditions in play, and expecting the other players to adjust to these calls.

Now, this isn't all calculus, but the great teams are often separated by intellectual factors on the pro level, where all the athletes are at peak physical condition.