[ur-D&D] What are we playing here exactly?

[Callan S.]

Okay, the second part - it's not just about engaging this outside author - everyones been pumped up so much about being in control and it's your imagination in charge utterly, sh!t (essentially another impossible thing before breakfast, where the advertising is YOUR imagination is in COMPLETE control - and yet you USE a document which is someone elses imagination - how can 'COMPLETE' work out?)...to the point where they both want an outside force dictating things, but they don't want that outside force controlling things - they don't want it dictating things ('rules should get out of the way!').
(breaking this into a third part in an attempt to post)

[Callan S.]

test /

[Callan S.]

(sorry to break up my post - it appears the word 'd-o-m-i-n-a-t-r-i-x' is causeing my post to not post! What, did the forum software become both sentient and prudish all of a sudden? I'm thinking some sort of banned words software got partially activated after the forum was last repaired)

So what you end up with is a d-o-m-i-n-a-t-r-i-x structure, where ostensibly mistress is utterly in charge - but f'n not really because the guy pays her and basically tells her what to do. It's as if she's in charge of the guy, but really she's the guys robot. It gives the illusion of interacting with another being, but without the icky sticky of having to actually interact with another being (who would if they were involved, like, think in not exactly the same way as this guy/group! Shock horror!) and enables all those 'oh, our imagination is so in charge!' slogans, but without (obviously) drifting into the wibbly wobbly colour land of not interacting with anyone else except those in the group. The very heart of 'the rules get out of the way!' sort of thought.

But there's alot of variables so this may have absolutely nothing to do with what is being talked about. But it was fun to write out!

[Erik Weissengruber]

Just to put a cap on the whole dungeon-Proust trail I have been following.

It wasn't until I ran Dungeons on Demand at Hammercon (in Hamilton) and Fan Expo (in Toronto) that I got the dungeoneering experience I had sought for.

The D&D I played '79-85 was pretty desultory. Running the Village of Hommlet and Keep on the Borderlands. A series of mildly diverting evening D&D sessions at the North York Public Library, a weird "you wake up on a beach with no armour and weapons" game. Playing Avalon Hill war-games like Titan or fantastical war-games like Divine Right provided more satisfaction. Stabs and Boot Hill and Star Frontiers were similarly disappointing. It wasn't until I ran the Bushido module Valley of the Mists that I got a taste of satisfying story-arc play.

Finally, at the age of 42 I had functional dungeoneering. LotFP allowed me to run a dungeon the way that I had imagined D&D would have done. A fantastical extra-dimensional adventure using HeroQuest allowed me to do all of the Steve Ditko/1960's Spider Man show/Leiber surreal adventuring that I fancied could accompany the dungeoneering of  D&D. And running a dungeon with modified Burning Wheel allowed me to introduce a long-arcing roleplaying element that was reminiscent of Tolkien.

So DW and Torchbearer don't really tempt me. I can do dungeons with a quick-running D&D clone, go colour-spray crazy with HeroQuest dungeons, and story-now/long campaign arc fantasy with Burning Wheel.

[Moreno R.]

So, I don't read the forum for a couple of days, and when I see this thread, it's too late, Joshua Bearden has already said what I wanted to say. But he will not rob me of the chance to rant again against D&D! I have always something more to add!

Building from his post: we have a lots of people who have invested a lot of money, time, pride, self-identity, community, etc to play that game. So, right there is the reason because the three things you list have to be there: because it has to be THAT game.

If that game had a point, a core theme, something solid around which everything else circle, it could be changed in the little details: you could make variants, in all the three things you list. But being a misshapen mass of sticky bits, you can't change anything: it would not be recognizable anymore. It's a parallel of the way some group, after arriving to a sort of "unstable state of being able to play at all", are afraid to change anything (from the seating order to the number of the players), afraid that any change could ruin everything.  The same thing exist with all the rest: rules, setting, and most of all, the "magic TSR sign" on the cover.

"No change in rules? But if every edition change a lot of rules!". Well, yes, but (1) al lot of people don't change, they stay with the same set of rules. I am told my old group still play AD&D2, because that is "the real D&D" (for most of them is the one they started playing with, so it's "true", the other aren't), and (2) people who go for the "upgraded" edition, and don't run away horrified by the heresies they find there...  they swear, afterwards, that they ALWAYS played like in the new edition, and there is no difference (or, other times, they say that the new edition is a "return to the core of D&D", whatever that is)

The problem is that the CONCEPT of a roleplaying game, to be able to BE a knight, a mage, someone who has fantasy adventures in a fantasy world is so mind-blowing awesome, that at the beginning, you don't even realize how it works (and here is when the cancer at the heart of D&D, the "secret rules for the GM", hits with its poison). So, when you realize it DOESN'T work...  you search for that initial, awesome experience.

You search ignorance. The "system" is evil. Let's keep away from the system, it's the GM job, players should not even touch it. Players should not even know it.
You search conformity: everything MUST stay the same, to return to the initial awesome state. No matter if you can't return to it even if everything were the same, because now you see the reality behind the courtain: it can't be the same, it's not awesome, that DM must have done some error, he was not following the "official" setting, it's his fault.
You search VALIDATION, so you play the game that everyone play, the one "real", not an "imitation".
You search for something "REAL": if everything is at the GM's whim, what is real? The book is real, the setting described in the books is "real", it's the same for everyone, so everything "official", with the TSR magic mark, is "real".

There are variations, not every group is "searching for the garden of Eden" in the same way, but the core of it is the same: people searching for a mythological "pure D&D" that never existed. Because they have spent already too much, in time and in money and in other costs, to let it go. And the reality of gaming for most people was well described by someone in 2001 with "My straightforward observation of the activity of role-playing is that many participants do not enjoy it very much. Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated."

OK, nothing of this is new, we said this and more a lot of times. So, why even people who played BETTER games search for this poisonous Garden of Eden? Why even people WHO NEVER PLAYED D&D are doing it?

Who known, maybe for someone is a kind of challenge, to be able to "fix" D&D, and they don't realize that they can't, that everything they could design will never be enough because in any case "it isn't true D&D", because they never played in these groups. T&T wan not enough, it wasn't D&D, and, be assured, at the end Dungeon World will not be enough, it isn't "real" D&D, so it isn't "real" at all.

But I suspect that, for at least some of them, it's a kind of "disease" they got by playing, talking, living in the "gamers" environment outside of the Forge. An environment where every single indie games it's not really "real", it's not something that you can play more than for a laugh, because... it's not D&D. So you can get this concept of D&D as the "real thing" even if you never played it (or if you played just a little, or you played your little variant thinking you are playing the "real" one.

OK, but... why searching for the Eden, when you have better games?

Well...
Because "My straightforward observation of the activity of role-playing is that many participants do not enjoy it very much. Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated."
Indie games are no exception, at large, for this.

First, being "indie" is not a mark of quality: there are a lot of indie games around that are simply crap. And the indie games culture is not able to tell them apart, because people are so invested in playing every new game on the horizon, that most games are played once or twice, with a lot of errors, so (1) many games are played badly, not following the real rules, (2) even if you follow the rules, maybe the games was not playtested enough, maybe it was an alpha draft that the author considered "good enough" (especially if he is giving it away for free) or maybe it's simply crap

So, even if you play indie games... chances are that many of you gaming sessions are simply bad, of "not good enough", not good enough for your expectation. That are increased because...

Second: your expectations are increased. If you ever played a really, really good campaign with some good game... what once was "a very good session" for you is not fun enough anymore (I confess that I am a walking clinic case of this: playing better games simply increased my expectations, making my better games much, much better that before... but my percentage of "less good than the usual" games is still the same, obviously: 50%, as for everybody else. But when I experience a session that is in the lower 50%, I am not satisfied and bore all the players afterwards with discussions about what went wrong, even if that same session would have been incredibly good with my standards of 10 years ago)
But why this should prompt someone to go back instead of going on? I mean, if I can't make a game work, I pester the author with questions and doubts (as Ron and some other game writer very well know this), and if I don't get answer of I can't make it work anyway, I want to play another game that SOLVES the problem I had with it, I don't want to return to D&D!
But that is because I don't believe in Eden anymore: if someone believes in Eden... well, it get BETTER WITH THEIR EXPECTATIONS! Observe as, now, finally, after all the forge games, that D&D of old has even become coherent! It's fiction-first! It even had a little of jeepform in it! It was really a very good game, that mythic D&D that nobody ever really played...
No "real" game can do that. The Pool didn't became better by itself when DitV or Spione were published. The Mythical D&D did.

Third: this is, I fear, the principal reasons for most people (not designers, they are usually described by the first two points). For most people, I think, the problem is that they are simply playing some variants of they old games.
In the same way people said that they played "D&D" because they playing with a TSR book on the table, even if they really played "the GM decide what will happen", now people say that they play DitV or Apocalypse World.. because they are playing with that book on the table, but they still are playing some variants of "the GM decide what will happen"
I see it in a lot of threads in a lot of forums, or in talking to people, or even by playing with strangers at conventions or in other occasions: sometimes I talk to people who say that they played DOZENS of indie games.. and I discover that they don't grasp what a conflict is. The play in a "now my pawn is going here, let's decide what will happen" way, the pre-narrate every situation, or the GM try to "trick" them to made them do what he want... I see thread after thread of people who play DitV with the King of Life that act like a NPC, or with the Dogs that are "always right" and play like Warhammer 40.000 inquisitors...

I think that one of the success of the Forge is that it was able to raise the standard of design. But its bigger failure was it mostly ignored the standard of play.  That it fostered a culture of people (who then migrated for the most part to storygames) that don't really play differently than before, but that BELIEVE that they do, or say so, and most of their enjoyment comes not from the games themselves but from "being in the smart people club".

These people would dream of the Lost Eden exactly as someone who played only D&D, because they are in the same situation: they are not playing really enjoyable games, they simply say (or believe) they do.

If we want to leave that poisonous myth really behind, it's not good enough to create good games: we should teach people how to play them, too. Even if that means saying sometimes "you are playing it wrong"., Even if it means losing sales, or making people go away. Because if the play experience is not changed... what's the point?

[Callan S.]

The Pool didn't became better by itself when DitV or Spione were published. The Mythical D&D did.

If I understand you right, that's a wry observation, Moreno! Very sharp! :)

[Joshua Bearden]

If we want to leave that poisonous myth really behind, it's not good enough to create good games: we should teach people how to play them, too. Even if that means saying sometimes "you are playing it wrong"., Even if it means losing sales, or making people go away. Because if the play experience is not changed... what's the point?

Yes! Now that "System Does Matter" has been established, it is time to go play and try to lock in our gains.  I sincerely hope you'll start a thread here or discussion in a venue of your choosing to build on your comments here. "Better play" is a movement I need and desperately want to join. 

[Eero Tuovinen]

I'm with the "Better Play" movement with bells on! I've been saying since I decided to rewrote TSoY in 2007 that it is a worthwhile endeavour to write a book on how to play Chess instead of writing a new Chess. Also, as I'm sure everybody's sick of hearing, I'm of the mind that the useful thing to do with D&D is to teach people how to play it, rather than try to "fix" it.

[glandis]

Eero (and all) - On teaching people to play it instead of fixing it: I'm pretty sure that Vincent thinks of many ApocWorld elements that way, that he'd just taken some things (fronts?) many people had already figured out (with D&D or whatever) and made them a little more codified and accessible. Most of my own play in the last decade has either been pretty happy with what we already figured out, or looking for something REALLY different, so that characterization actually made me unenthusiastic about DungeonWorld. I guess that's why I share the "I can (at least nowadays) already do that" take, although as I tried to cover earlier, I can see why some people would love the "better" way to do it that (for them) *World represents.

[glandis]

And because it happened to be the very next thing I read on the internet: http://www.story-games.com/forums/discussion/18975/talk-to-me-about-osr#Item_41

[Moreno R.]

What's interesting is the number of answers that talks about the dungeon as if it was "true". As if the player skill you use to avoid a difficult situation was a "real" tactical sense...  and not a "real" capacity to "convince the GM".

This is an example from my very first AD&D session, from the time when I had no idea about "how the DM do it" and everything was awesome: I played a 1st level magic-user, in a dungeon full of monster to save a prisoner (for the reward the father of the prisoner would pay to save his son, to be exact). The party was attacked by a pack of zombies and we got separated when the fighters didn't stop them from reaching me (they were at the first session too). I had already used my only spell (imagine the nostalgia, a game where you can use only one spell in a 4-hour session and you are shit at doing everything else. Really, who could want anything more?) and had 2 HP in total, armor class "no armor, no shield, cloth robe", for a grand total of "if some of them attack you, you are dead, period". So I simply run away, back to the previous room where we had killed a bunch of zero-level goons, with half of the the zombies following me and the other half fighting the fighters.
What I did was to hid with the other corpses in the room, the zombies didn't notice me, and continued along the tunnel.
At the time, I was rather proud of my quick-thinking and the way I had solved the situation. In OSR-terms, I had used my brain, my tactical sense, avoiding combat and "winning" by stealth. A great gamist move...

...or no?

Let's look at the situation.

Who decided that the zombie had no "sense live people" sense so that they did not notice me?
Who decided that I had the time to hid between the corpses before they did show up? (I didn't ask, I simply stated what I was doing... with enough sureness that I think the GM didn't even think about that)
Who decided that the zombie weren't interested in eating the corpses?
Who decided that I was so calm to stand still and not betray myself with noises or movements?
Who decided, in fact, that I had "saved myself without having to roll"...  without rolling to see if I was quick enough, then if I was calm enough, and then if the zombies were stupid/blind enough?
The exact same DM could have made me roll three times. In the same situation, with my same actions, with the same exact "fiction first"... first. 
With my stats, I had very few chances to win all three rolls, my character would be probably slain. So what could have happened at the table? I say my "great idea" to the GM, thinking that it's an intelligent idea. The GM make me rolls three times. My character die, and I am not happy. The DM want me happy. All he want is a show of cunning, ANY IDEA could have save me, because he would have changed the way the zombie think, act, their quickness, their senses, to "reward" a player who think, or to "punish" a player that has an idea he doesn't think is intelligent.

There is no room, there are no zombies, I am not really running. I am telling lies (my definition of role-playing games is "people who lie to each other and play at believing all the lies they say") to the DM. if he likes my lies, his "world" is ruled by heaven-sent luck, and any idea, no matter how risky, works. If he don't like my lies... well, Murphis' Rule...rules!)

In all this, the "fiction", the room, the zombies, the corpses, are the least-real things of all. The attention span of the GM is more real than them. The happiness or sadness of the GM at the moment is more real than them. What he did eat before and what he is drinking now is more real than them. If I smile and pass him the beer, the zombie changes, their step is more slow, if I am unsure, if I say it like "ehm... I don't know... I...  run? Maybe they will not follow me..." the GM could reply "no, they follow you and they reach you, what is your Armor Class?", but if I say it like "Ah! I am too fast for these shambling half-rotted corpses! I quickly dart between them and run in the corridor, they will never catch me before I reach the other room", the GM will agree. Because I have said it in a a way that if he doesn't, he would look stupid, or it could seems that he is not neutral regarding my character.

When I played, I was very sure of my actions. I was of the idea that "a bad plan is better that no plan", so I was always in action, always with a plan. The GMs, accustomed to a group of apathetic couch potatoes, was mesmerized and all my ideas were "good". In that way I won at the time a "best player" award at a regional convention, simply by taking the lead and having the party follow MY ideas!

Then, I started to play GM-only for years, and yes, I was sure, I was a impartial God. I didn't have favorites, I objectively would judge if an idea would work, or not. Right?
I don't know, all I know is that when I started to play again with other GM...  the game world became really, really absurd. Maybe the problem is that the new GMs had a more strong idea of "the way the story should go", maybe they simply did know me better and they feared me having too much "my way" with their game world, or maybe simply they had to separate themselves, as "new GMs", from my shadow, and they could not always agree with me. But, really... the world stopped having sense. I could not out-run a goblin with the legs of a 6-years old. Fireballs stopped melting metal, so I could not use them anymore to do that. Any idea was answered by a "no, it's impossible to jump over a two-meter-wide hole in the ground" or a "roll for it: one roll to jump, one roll to avoid falling and hurting yourself if you reach the other side, one roll to see if you get dizzy from fatigue and fall back into the hole, one roll to see if you pull a muscle..."

I have never, ever, found another world by another GM that did make full sense, after these years as the only GM. Even if they are not absurd universes like the ones of the other GMs in the group, even if they are much more logical... I prod, I jump, i try everything, I still play in that way, and I expect the universe to act the way MY perfectly impartial universe did. But they never do.

Because these universe simply doesn't exist, and what I am really exploring, mapping, judging, is the GM brain, his bias, his knowledge of things and his ignorance of others, the way he get convinced, what make him stubborn and unreasonable. That is "real".

When you use you "tactic", your "strategy", to avod fighting the zombies..  you are doing nothing of the sort. What you are using is your voice, your acting, the influence and knowledge you have over the GM, to "push it" to change (or model) the world the way you want.

THIS is what I liked about games like the Pool, Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, Trollbabe, etc: these games acknowledge this! They are not built about a "myth" where everybody at the table try to avoid looking at the elephant in the middle and they all act like they are being "good tacticians" and not simply good speakers. They are games for THINKING people, for people who understand what really happen at the table, how role-playing games really works!

And when I angle to get more dice in Dogs in the Vineyard, I am REALLY using strategy. I don't need to convince the GM, I only need to use a good strategy in the sequence of rolls. THAT was, after all these years, the first time in a decade I had really had the feeling that my "strategy" MATTERED!  (by the way, this is the principal reason I don't like the bonus dice mechanism in Sorcerer: you still get them by convincing people, the GM or the group, to give them to you).  And for the first time in decades, I could finally interact with the GM with sincerity, without having always the thought of "tricking" him in my favor)

There is gamism in D&D, yeas, but it's not the gamism of Chess, or the gamism of a wargame: it's the gamism of being able to fool, swindle, lie, act, persuade: it's a seller/marketer game, not a tactician's game.

[Judd]

The GMs, accustomed to a group of apathetic couch potatoes, was mesmerized and all my ideas were "good". In that way I won at the time a "best player" award at a regional convention, simply by taking the lead and having the party follow MY ideas!

It sure sounds like this GM was at a table of players who were not bought in and not having a good time and you are using that table to paint all of D&D with one brush.

A technique or problem to watch out for and be wary of because it could render all strategic decisions into marketing ploys meant to impress the GM? Sure.

Proof positive that all D&D is a big mess about appeasing a patriarchal DM? Not so much.

[Moreno R.]

Judd, it's you that are painting my observations around that single table...

The passivity of that table (that, if you have read the thread with my old gaming history, it's the "older" group of people who played together D&D from the '70s) has no weight in my observations. I used them to illustrate why it was so EASY at that table, and then I used another table, years later, as an example of a situation where, with other players, another GM, the exact same things became impossible. Metal stopped melting, chasm that I (someone who practice no sport) could be able to jump easily in real life become "insurmountable" for my character, etc.

They are simply examples. Use them to understand what I am saying, not as "proof" of anything.

I simply don't need any "proof" to tell you that the dungeon doesn't exist, the zombies don't exist, and the success or failure of environment-based tactics in a environment that gets decided at why by a GM, BY THE RULES, is not tactic at all. It's persuasion.

But if you still believe that the Dungeon is real, and that the GM is not deciding your success or failure by whim, that he REALLY is looking at the real dungeon in his mind, fixed, unchangeable (so that every decision he makes in the course of the adventure it's not really a decision, it's an observation), you simply can do some experiments.
- Insult the GM at the same time you are declaring what you do. I should not make any difference, right?
- Don't describe what you do. You description don't change the environment in any way, right?
- try to play the exact same dungeon with different GM. Seeing that nothing in the dungeon change at whim based on the way you act, the two dungeon should be exactly identical, to the most minute detail, right? And the same exact tactics should work exactly in the same manner, with every GM in the world, right?

OK, sorry, I was enjoying a little bit of sarcasm on you in the paragraph above. Sorry, but the usual fable that only "bad GM" do humane things in D&D, and all the other 99.999% of GMs (that nobody ever encountered) are perfect beings for whom psychology and logic don't apply, become really tiresome after the 500th time you hear it...

And, anyway, in the very part you just quoted, I explained that using these exact same techniques I won a regional tournament, with the votes of three OTHER GMs... (all the judges). Are all these only exceptions, and these "objective" GM that I have never meet in thirty years of gaming, should be the norm?

[Callan S.]

Thing of beauty, Moreno, your post is a thing of beauty! It's like you're punching confirmation bias right in the face! You got away from the zombies...but instead of treating the 'solution' you found as if it was THE solution, you actually questioned the validity of your solution. A path that few, as the confirmation bias studies have shown, are inclined to take.

And when I angle to get more dice in Dogs in the Vineyard, I am REALLY using strategy. I don't need to convince the GM, I only need to use a good strategy in the sequence of rolls.

I have no idea how you get more dice. What are the rules on that?

- Insult the GM at the same time you are declaring what you do. I should not make any difference, right?

Heh, good one! I'm going to remember that for another day!

try to play the exact same dungeon with different GM. Seeing that nothing in the dungeon change at whim based on the way you act, the two dungeon should be exactly identical, to the most minute detail, right?

Yep, good question!

I like your description of the gamism involved being one that revolves around persuasion. The critical issue is that it's hard to tell when the GM simply wants to agree with you - in which case there is no freakin' difficulty to play (it's like rolling a D20 that's covered in 20's). You can't lose - and for gamism, that's utterly worthless.

It is indeed why I hate letting play revolve utterly upon persuasion. Why gameplay where gameplay hinges on whether the GM will ask you to roll or auto pass you is...well, it's incredibly vulnerable to a GM just wanted to be persuaded by you.

That's why I favour having either a random element still be present (with persuasion only being able to give a bonus and not be the sole determinant) or direct player skill check (I once had the check of throwing a RL dice into a RL bowl to do something. Being good at persuading the GM wont help you pass that!). This way if the GM does want to be persuaded by the player, atleast the player is still facing the risk of bad luck in his rolls, or poor personal skill. Never let all of play just hinge on GM determination.

And I predict you'll have a hell of an uphill battle getting your argument across, because over the years I've had a hell of a time trying to! However your presenting it as a persuasion skill is a really good way of putting it, so maybe you'll do better than I have in the way you put it!? Anyway, it was really nice to read your post - I could feel a few tiny knots of tension in me release with a sighing feeling of 'see, I'm not the only one!'. You deserve beer (or your beverage of choice)!

[Eero Tuovinen]

I started a new thread about this last topic, because it seems worthwhile to address. As you might imagine, I have a thing or two to say about the characterization that all D&D play is about ass-kissing the DM ;)