[old and new D&D] Moreno and the D&D Orthdox Catholic Communion

[RangerEd]

Considering the metaphor Ron is using here, I wonder why religious icons have not come up. Thinking about my myself as a long time AD&D adherent, I would like to offer a bit of background from my personal experiences.

1) My group and I were both poor and woefully rural. It was just the handful of us (sometimes swelling to a dozen in the Vampire days of the early '90s) on a desert island. No Cons either.

2) I had one buddy that predominately DMed. The game mechanics were a mystery for everyone else. In hindsight, he was flying by the seat of his pants, but he had a strong vision of what he wanted and had definite thoughts of what was reasonable for a game. It worked, and as kids and young adults, no one questioned his authority of the material. Years later, reading the rules and bringing them to the table would ruin the game for me, but that was a temporary (10-year) mistake.

3) Our desert island, which existed until the year 2000 or so, had minimal dysfunction for some reason. Don't know why, Perhaps good luck. Perhaps #2 explains a lot.

4) The game for us as players was about the artwork. It was the thousand words cliché. We got it, the game that is, by simply looking at the artwork of dragons and heroes and maps. We were poor, but the better the artwork and the more there was in a source, the more likely we could scrap together some cash from somewhere. Maybe birthday money, maybe an odd job for the neighbor.

So back to iconography. Thinking about one through four above, I think we knew how to play AD&D by looking at pictures. I think casual parishioners do the same. It seems to fit the metaphor of the post.

[Mike Holmes]

Moreno, great example. Note that I don't believe that TSR pioneered the trend to railroaded modules, as it happens. I think that the first such examples were probably written for Traveller or Call of Cthulhu or the like, when the writers discovered that "dungeon" play really didn't emulate sci-fi or horror genres at all. It was only later that the TSR writers saw these more "advanced" forms of module presentation that could deliver a story, and decided to get on that bandwagon and create the orthodoxy. By comparison the early dungeon presentation method is much less prone to difficulties. Sorry if Ron or somebody above already mentioned this.

Ed, yeah, I hear ya. I recall getting the Holmes Blue Book Basic as my first version of D&D, and seeing that Dragon on the cover... in a Dungeon... with adventurers attacking. Seemed pretty straightforward. Imagine my surprise when that book had no dragons in it, and we were told we'd have to wait for AD&D coming out to get them.

Of course, the problem is that this vision of how to play that the art provides is going to be an individual thing. And quite often, the rules won't support it. So you get what you got, with the DM playing Calvinball (essentially making up whatever rules are needed as you go) to get the sort of vision they desire. So this is where you get the toxic "the rules don't matter, as long as you have a good GM" meme. Even if the GM is hiding that they're playing Calvinball, you're still aware that it's not the rules that are making the game have the feel that it has, since you're not even visibly seeing them. All of which becomes part of the orthodoxy with "Rule Zero."

I don't have any issue with the parts of the OSR that espouse simple grognardy wargamey play, nor even with folks who are able to go back to old rulesets and use them as written to provide functional play by employing good technique within the rules to do so. Where the OSR and I part ways is with that subset of the movement that has this narrative about the power of rule zero. They'll even regale you with how it is that the D&D system was so lethal (especially at low level) that it encouraged players to go about trying to solve modules using methods other than combat. And how, since the rules didn't have any way to resolve these other methods, the GM just made rulings. Which, they claim, avoids a perceived problem with recent editions where players only attempt actions defined by the rules, since there are so many of them. Including the dreaded diplomatic options, which they dread in reality because their gamism sense is (rightly from a gamism POV) upset by the unbalance that this presents.

The only way to solve this problem? No rules! Yes, this branch of the OSR has come around to the POV that the freeformers came around to the same year that D&D came out. It doesn't do what we envision, and there's no way to fix the rules to make it do so, so the only way to make it work is to have no rules. The fact that the orthodoxy kept on reinforcing at first gamism and then the later railroady play style, meant that the freeformers would continue to be right until people started to challenge the notion that rules can't support play that's creative in different ways. The OSR people of this stripe seem to have missed the creation of all of these games, and so are still stuck in their own schism of the orthodoxy.

[RangerEd]

Mike,

Your Calvinball game idea sparks a thought. The way our Calvinball game continued to be fun was through the consistency of the DM. Having been a temporary member of many protestant religious sects growing up (Baptist, Southern Baptist, Methodist, Assembly of God, another flavor of Methodist, Catholic, LDS, back to Baptist...), I think those churches had the same "big man" political structure (Jared Diamond's term) and reliance on consistency from the leader. The similarity here between D&D and religion not only supports Ron's metaphor, but reminds me of that Six Sigma business trend. Six Sigma concentrated on removing variance across six dimensions and strikes me as an interesting potential for game analysis. I wonder what dimensions a DM might stabilize variance out of for gaming in order to keep players satisfied?

Ed

[Callan S.]

Ah, Flamsterd - known to his friends simply as 'Terd.

They forgot to write up his burning bush power...

My god, that was just beautiful - so much railroading today is so scuttley, hiding behind the scenes, even the practitioners hiding it from themselves (as Moreno says). To see it so flagrantly written in cold, hard ink - it's just beautiful in a strange way!

Got a few more good links for my interesting RPG links file, now!


Mike, you mentioned salvaging in your post, so I wondered what you meant by it rather than what I would mean? Of course these modules even railroad the DM, in that a sort of sunk cost fallacy means we try and get something out of what we've bought (as Moreno says, you could have bought several comics or a couple of fantasy novels for the price. Can't just put that in the bin, can we?)

[Mike Holmes]

Calvinball is one of Ron's terms (referring to a game played by the titular characters in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes), and it specifically means adjusting the rules as you go along to get what you need. So if the game was really consistent, it may not have been Calvinball per se. The rules may simply have been hidden from you. On the other hand, the consistency may simply have come from never getting to see the rules.

I mention Calvinball here because when GMs play with the curtain drawn on the rules, they typically claim to do so in order to prevent the players from being removed from the fiction by the rules. But often the reality is (take it from a guy who has done this), that this is just a way to constantly fudge everything and look like you're a master of your hidden ruleset. When often you're just freeforming and making it look like there's some consistent rule-set at work. In my case, this was a reaction to a rule-set that I didn't like and wasn't providing the sort of play I wanted. Better to pretend to be playing it, and not actually engage with the rules at all, I figured.

How visible were the rules in this game? Did you see them at all? Do you think that the GM was actually using them?


Callan... I'm sorry, you have me very confused. I'm really not sure if you even have a question that you'd like me to answer or not.

[RangerEd]

Thanks Mike,

When you mentioned it before, I could not remember the punch line to which Hobbs was subjected, but I remembered the game. I think sprinkles of pop-culture and literary innuendos are fun. I don't get all of them right away, but a quick search helps open new metaphors.

The rules for the game were available to anyone who wanted to try and understand them. That did not happen much. I did eventually read them because I wanted to offer the DM a break. He ran a weekly game (give or take) for nearly six years. He was using them, but had many, many on the spot rules he would bring into play. Some of which caused contention because I disagreed with the simulation mechanic or the ruling broke some critical part of the character I was playing. Right or wrong, though, he was consistent as an atomic clock.

On the curtains drawn behavior of some DMs, if forced to choose as a player, I would lean towards an outcome of a fun game over the obligation to follow the rules. Although, there are two are two sides of a dialectic reasoning argument going on here from my perspective. Dialectic reasoning has its flaws, but I like it for bounding a linear space between to opposite extremes. The thesis I think most gamers tacitly assume speaks to rule-based gaming, but strict adherence to rules can diminish fun at the table. Any of us could formulate examples of rule-following-gone-bad from our own experiences. The antithesis is something like continuously applied rule 0 or calvinball, which can be equally disruptive for a fun game. Your posts above demonstrate that idea. The synthesis is likely somewhere in the middle. Judgment of which to lean towards on the line then becomes the challenge.

I would like my players to believe I am a strict rule follower. That desire is what puts me up against the wall as a DM for 3.5, especially at stepped increments around 7th, 13th, then 20th character level games. Holding that many interrelated sets of character stats all at once taxes the hell out of me. I end up leaving players alone and ignored in some ways on the other side of the screen as I manage the NPCs, tracking tactical implications of 5-foot steps, and adjudicating situational modifiers. I have no idea if the players are having fun or if a story is even going on. I am mentally running (anaerobically) to keep up with the pace of the action. Mistakes get made that come up later in post-game conversations over tacos; important ones that would have dramatically altered the outcome for the player characters. All I can say is sorry, but wasn't it fun?

5th edition seemed like the road to Abilene from the playtest materials. Wiki-development was creating a game design by committee. OSRIC relieved many of the pressure factors that 3.5 and Pathfinder built up, but was too confining for the level of personal detail my friends and I wanted in our snowflakes. I was truly frustrated. I wanted both sides of the dialectic: rules I could follow and have enough horsepower left to guide story creation. The Journal is the game I put together so I could do both. The reason I bring up the game, my dissatisfaction with D&D editions, and the behind the curtain behavior is as context for what I am about to admit. On the first playtest, I fudged dice rolls on my side of the screen to keep the action rising when I identified a local climax to the emerging story. I was the wizard of oz, hoping no one paid attention to the man behind the curtain. My dilemma is that I think the friend that helped me with the playtest would be disappointed if he knew I fudged the dice rolls. I think he needs to feel as though everything boiled out of the mechanics. My rationalization for that hypocrisy is that sometimes, I don't want probability to interfere with events, even if those events should technically adhere to the rules for contested actions.

Could I be hiding a CA divide between my friend and I with my little secret?

Ed

[Mike Holmes]

Ed,

I think we're getting a bit far afield from the topic of the thread. But your experience is so interesting that perhaps it would merit it's own thread. If you do split it off, post a link here please.

What I will say is that you seem to me to be caught in a fallacy of the orthodoxy, that being that you can't possibly have both fun play, and play by the rules all the time. Well I'm here to tell you that you can have both. If you're avoiding the rules, they're rules that aren't working to create what you want.

I've been where I think you are now. Worried that I need to have certain sorts of rules for the players to feel that the game is somehow... right. When in fact those rules are making the game non-fun in other ways. Usually the solution I've found is... just don't have that sort of rule. I've likened the feeling that there is a need for such rules in the past to being in the Matrix. Take the right pill, Neo.

Mike

[glandis]

Hi Mike -

"And then this is where the Village of Homlett goes up in flames, if you will. Some players, fed up enough with the lack of control, will take the implied fight option instead. And now we have the problem that there's no reasonable way to salvage the situation presented in the module (though very creative GMs can even work around this sort of disaster). Either the PCs are dead, or the Patron is."

The question would be, maybe, is there anything valuable in looking at how those "very creative GMs" work around the disaster? I'd say it's in realizing that if that kind of creativity was available all along (and not just from the GM), there was no reason to be on the gorram module-path in the first place! But there may be other answers.

-Gordon

[Ron Edwards]

It makes me sad, but I do think it's time to spawn daughter threads and to let this one rest.
Best, Ron