I have definitely experienced this as well. If there's a pressure plate in the room that needs something heavy on it to open the door to the treasure vault, does the description of the room indicate that there's something heavy there? I've often found that there's no indication that there is anything heavy in the room to hold the pressure plate down because the trend is towards spartan room descriptions. If that's something the GM is supposed to simply create on the spot, I think a lot of GMs are missing that idea.
D&D General Why Combat is a Fail State - Blog and Thoughts
- Thread starter TiQuinn
- Start date
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Right. Combat was either very simple or you get into challenging judgement calls if the DM is put on the spot to invent a fair ruling for a special maneuver.
Yes, there is definitely an art and a science to it. Sometimes even a good room NAME can give substantial help to the DM in improvising from a spartan key, but balancing the amount of description and detail to give is a skill. And TBF "how much is enough" is a question with no one right answer because different DMs have different preferences, corresponding to their ability to extract relevant data from the text and to their ability to (and enjoyment of) improvise. Tomb of Horrors is probably a good example because it's a trap/puzzle dungeon. Each room needs enough detail to make it interactive. In other instances a given room might not need that much detail if there are monsters in it which can be talked to, and the adventure gives the DM enough data to RP the monsters, know what they want, etc.
Invisible Rulebooks.
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Potocki
Generic Title
As
However, I would argue that when it comes to interacting with the DM, dice are nearly indispensable for creating real drama. In this way, Fiasco is a poor example, since it's DM-less. Paranoia, is maybe a better example, since it encourages dice-less interpersonal drama between players while also having a DM telling a story (or at least trying to organize the chaos). The DM might introduce plot complications, or gags, or other narrative elements meant to entertain or inform, but the actual drama of interacting with the DM's narrative results from the players rolling to see whether they succeed or fail. Paranoia is also a good example since many adventures end with the entire party failing their mission, only for the DM to introduce some deus ex machina to resolve the plot.
Thinking about this some more, I think "dice rolling", "combat", and "randomization" are obfuscations of what we're really talking about - constraints versus no constraints. I think that when storytelling, especially collaborative storytelling, is unconstrained, it's less dramatic. I don't think this is a controversial opinion, to be honest. The more constrained the possibility space of the story, the greater the drama - as long as the number of possibilities is greater than 2.
EDIT: And I realize that we're probably hijacking the thread at this point!
Yes, I absolutely agree with the idea that pure improv can create drama too - we can't disregard interpersonal drama, character choices, and general drama-seeking behavior. I haven't played Fiasco, but Paranoia is probably a close comparison in players creating their own "fun" without needing dice to tell them what happens.
However, I would argue that when it comes to interacting with the DM, dice are nearly indispensable for creating real drama. In this way, Fiasco is a poor example, since it's DM-less. Paranoia, is maybe a better example, since it encourages dice-less interpersonal drama between players while also having a DM telling a story (or at least trying to organize the chaos). The DM might introduce plot complications, or gags, or other narrative elements meant to entertain or inform, but the actual drama of interacting with the DM's narrative results from the players rolling to see whether they succeed or fail. Paranoia is also a good example since many adventures end with the entire party failing their mission, only for the DM to introduce some deus ex machina to resolve the plot.
Thinking about this some more, I think "dice rolling", "combat", and "randomization" are obfuscations of what we're really talking about - constraints versus no constraints. I think that when storytelling, especially collaborative storytelling, is unconstrained, it's less dramatic. I don't think this is a controversial opinion, to be honest. The more constrained the possibility space of the story, the greater the drama - as long as the number of possibilities is greater than 2.
EDIT: And I realize that we're probably hijacking the thread at this point!
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Even with Mothership, basically every step the system takes, every new development moves it a little towards combat not being a pure fail-state, as the game is slowly metamorphosing from pure space-horror towards being more generalist space-opera-oriented-type game (primarily by adventures and add-ons).
And I definitely don't believe the designers of OD&D saw combat as a "fail state", given they were developing D&D from a wargame, rather it seems more like they saw "combat the PCs didn't intend to be involved in" as a "fail state".
I do think the biggest thing to learn in the last couple of decades has been when NOT to roll, rather than the direction which most of the '90s and early '00s (very much including 3.XE) which was "what if we make rules for literally everything and make you roll for literally everything". And that is to some extent an return to a more similar situation to older-school RPGs, but I think it's more convergent evolution than anything else.
The Firebird
Explorer
I think this is a really nice post, although I disagree almost entirely with it. RPGs for me are fundamentally about the game aspect, and I don't think you get that at all without dice and rolling.
I want to bring in another idea (which TiQuinn alluded to) of real-world physics, and implicit rules more generally. All RPGs have a pretty extensive set of implicit rules which are widely understood to be at play but never stated explicitly. Typically these are just our understanding of how the world works. The book doesn't have to say 'when there is nothing supporting your weight, you fall'; we all know that.
But there is value to understanding these implicit rules as rules because it affects our understanding of what the referee is doing. Take the trap example: suppose there is a pressure plate that causes a boulder to crush you, but it can be disarmed by properly snipping a wire. Even in a system with no 'rules' for trap disarming, when the players interact with this, explore how it works, and try to disarm it, the referee will make rulings based on the implicit rules of how physics work, and how these objects interact.
This means that 'rules-light' games aren't so much lacking rules for adjudication as relying more heavily on the accepted implicit ruleset.
There is something to be said about different tastes here. I played Fiasco once and absolutely hated it. It wasn't that it was lacking drama--but that drama had no real sense to it, there was no structure. (Bryce Lynch also has a somewhat crude tirade about Fiasco, at the end of this interview). For a game to work, it has to present the player with meaningful choices. And for those choices to be meaningful, there has to be enough structure so that the outcome of different choices is, to some extent, determined beforehand. They can be randomized (i.e., if we go here, roll on table A, if we go here, roll on table B), but if table A and table B are both 'make it up', then there is no meaningful choice.
Oh absolutely! I do not dispute the notion that many players enjoy RPGs (and D&D and its derivatives especially) as ostensibly just as board games with a bit of player imagination thrown in for flavor. RPGs sit on the number line between "board game" at one end and "free-form improvisation" at the other. And depending on one's interest... you can play games that fall anywhere on that line. Heck, people will sometimes play Monopoly or Clue as a "roleplaying game" by taking on a character and acting as that character as they play. When I ran an online Diplomacy game, all the negotiation was done between players talking "in character" the entire time. So these games ostensibly became one-shot RPGs.
And D&D absolutely can be played in that way too. That's why there have been several attempts in years/editions past at translating the combat portion of D&D into actual tactical miniature games and authentic board games... by removing the whole "in-character" part of it and just offering the dice rolling mechanics as the premise of play.
But from that point, one can slowly move down that number line by beginning to add bits and pieces of "free form improv". Players narrating ideas of where their character is walking, rather than merely counting squares on a board. Players coming up with and saying dialogue that hasn't been pre-written by the rules of the game for them to "say". So on and so forth, heading to the far end when everything is entirely made up by individual participant and there's no "rules" to speak of (other than standard "rules of agreement" for cohesive adult interaction.)
I just happen to be of the belief that of the two ends-- boards games and free-form improvisation-- that when kids and/or adults get together as a group at someone's house to entertain themselves for the evening... it is a much easier sell to suggest and accomplish playing a board game than it is to do free-form improvisation. Which means for most people, RPGs are really the only way to even come close to moving even slightly down that number line. And thus my argument has always been "If a person wanted to play a board game they could easily just get together with friends to play any number of board games. So if they instead have chosen to play an RPG instead of a board game... to me it's because they want to move down the number line." So at that point, why bother keeping one hand gripped so tightly on the board game end, rather than just letting go of it and then start gently sliding further and further down the line towards the other end just to see how it goes? And there are any number of RPGs that can lead you and guide you forward down that line.
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Yeah. Rules aren't there because imagination fails.
Rules are there to relieve us of the need to negotiate every single freakin' thing in play. We have pre-negotiated to use the rules for that.
Edit to add: Oh, and for some folks playing with rules can be fun itself.
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This is fantastic stuff.
As you'll see in my post that appeared right below yours where I was responding to someone else... I brought up the concept of the number line that runs between "board game" at one end and "free-form improvisation" at the other end, and that all manner of RPGs fall somewhere on that line.
I absolutely agree with your take on where you find the most enjoyment on that line and do not dispute anyone else's stated desires for their preferences of games on that line. I think everyone finds RPGs that land on that line in the places they gain most enjoyment, whether closer to the board game end, the free-form end, or any place in between.
My only disagreement would ever be with people who would dispute the existence of the line at all. Because I think they are just seeing their own definition of what an RPG is as the only definition and cannot conceive of another way of looking at what an RPG can be.
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Yeah, another great blog post.
"How to tell if someone is lying?"
Player: Well, I've seen this work all the time in movies and tv shows, and so this is a game where I'm a character from that genre, so this should totally work.
DM: I know that evaluations of lying based on expressions have no basis in scientific reality, and so I'm not going to let that work.
Player: Wait a minute, but you let this other thing happen last session that isn't realistically possible either!
And really, the only way that you get around that, I think, is agreeing upon the fiction of the world, and then giving both parties ample opportunity to walk back or alter their actions or descriptions after discussion, i.e. you can't turn a miscommunication or disagreement about what works in the fictional game world into a gotcha.
