Let’s bulls$&%.
Consider yourself warned. This is a Bulls$&% article. Just me spinning my wheels and spraying mud all over everything y’all think is good GMing and good game design. Like I do.
Today, I’m talking about how presentation is everything and why players shouldn’t know the rules and how nothing proves it more than how Apocalypse World’s most brilliant, beautiful idea utterly fails at the table.
Yes, I know that topic’s something like twelve f$&%ing years old now, but it’s what I’m thinking about today. So it’s what I’m writing about.
In short… let’s bulls$&%.
It’s All About Perspective:
How a Simple Word Choice Made D&D 5E Much Less Worse
Presentation is everything. Just ask any GM that grudgingly runs D&D 5E for a group that absolutely f$&%ing refuses to consider playing literally any other game system.
Last weekend, I ran off to Ohio to game with three dozen Angry supporters at the first ever Angry Games NonConvention. But I ain’t here to brag about that. Though I could. Because I put together a kicka$& NonConvention and a great time was had by literally all. I know because two separate people told me that had great times.
I am getting a lot of mileage out of that gag.
Anyway…
While chatting with some folks at the Angry Games 2022 NonCon — yes, I know what it sounds like and people pointing out what it sounds like is exactly why I’m keeping the name forever — while chatting with folks at the Angry NonCon, I actually complimented Dungeons & Dragons’s presentation. Which isn’t something I do ever, really. Because D&D 5E is not very well-presented. Like, imagine if you somehow managed to make a halfway decent sandwich with some rancid, old ingredients you had lying around. And to make it look good, you fished the greasy top of a moldy pizza box from a dumpster, plated your crap sandwich on that, and then offered it up with a flourish. “Ta-dah!”
What I’m saying is D&D 5E’s presentation isn’t doing the game any favors.
The thing is, though, that D&D 3.5 — the objectively and axiomatically best edition of D&D ever — wasn’t really presented better. Which is what that conversation I alluded to was about. Someone asked me, “so, what’s it like reading the 3.5 rulebooks?” And I said, “it’s like reading a compiled textbook full of stereo instructions.”
I know that’s an outdated analogy, but it’s a Beetlejuice reference, so f$&% off.
Yes, I know that’s an outdated reference, but it’s Beetlejuice, so f$&% off. When this millennium starts producing some pop culture worth a f$&%ing reference, I’ll start referencing it.
It’s like this kids: stereos were big, clunky electronic devices we used to play music from giant, clunky speakers before the invention of MP3s and iPods and streaming services. And they consisted of multiple different electronic components that had to be connected together with actual wires because we also didn’t have Bluetooth. So they came with instruction manuals.
Manuals were printed, step-by-step tutorials that we used to put s$&% together before the invention of tutorial videos. They were written in indecipherable — but highly detailed — broken English. Usually because they were translated from some other language using a method that makes Google Translate look like the f$&%ing Rosetta Stone. Not the software, the actual rock.
The Rosetta Stone was an actual stone inscribed in 200 BC with some Egyptian legal code repeated in Egyptian, Greek, and Demotic script and therefore allowed archaeologists to…
I think I’ve lost my laser-like focus on my point.
My point is, I wasn’t paying the 3.5 rulebooks a compliment. They were very detailed, they were very exhaustive, and they were a terrible slog to read. But they were gorgeous and really well-indexed and organized and cross-referenced. They were made for looking s$&% up and following procedures. They just weren’t made to read.
By contrast, the 5E rulebooks are unevenly edited. In some paradoxical way, they manage to be simultaneously over-vague and hairsplittingly nit-picky. They’re ugly — three words: encephalitic halfling bard — and they’re impossible to navigate. But they are super readable. Assuming you skip all the class abilities and spell descriptions, it’s a breeze to read that PHB from cover to cover.
And it’s down to a single word.
You.
5E’s written entirely from what we writers call a second-person perspective. The books address the reader directly. “You can do this,” they say, “and when you do, roll that to find out what happens.” It’s all nice, direct, imperative sentences instead of indirect and often passive declarations.
It’s the difference between:
a creature can make an attack against any other creature within its melee reach by making an attack roll to determine whether the attack is a hit.
And:
You can attack any creature in your melee reach. Make an attack roll to determine whether your attack hits.
Game Angry: How to RPG the Angry Way is also written in the second-person perspective. And so are most of my articles. Do you know why? Because it’s f%$&ing readable. It literally takes your brain more effort and energy to parse indirect, declarative, third-person sentences than direct, imperative, second-person sentences.
Do you know what else used the second-person perspective?
Dungeon World.
And that was a selling point.
How Did We Get Here from There:
Dungeon World
What’s a ten-year-old hack of a twelve-year-old RPG got to do with any of this s$%&? Let me explain.
In the weeks leading up to NonCon, I was agonizing over how to fill 20 hours of gaming at my personal NonCon table. What the hell was I going to run? And I briefly flirted with filling some of those hours with an old convention standby of mine: Dungeon World.
Dungeon World — or DW — is an early Powered by the Apocalypse — or PbtA — game. And, arguably, it’s the game that turned PbtA into a mainstream term in the online gaming community for a while.
I was a very early fan of DW, having stumbled on it at GenCon a year before its Kickstarter publication. And I loved it. DW’s easy to grok, rules-lite, easy to prep for — but it’s not zero prep and it never claimed to be despite what some a$&hats in the community insist — and the character generation in DW is super approachable. Not a lot of RPGs let you get character generation and an entire adventure done in three or four hours.
DW didn’t make the cut though. See, Kobolds Ate My Baby is also easy to grok, rules-lite, easy to prep for, and includes super-approachable character generation. But it’s also funny as hell. And you can ignore the rules and just riff for a few wacky hours. Which was precisely what I needed for the last game of the last night of NonCon.
Anyway…
Dungeon World. It was on my mind even before that conversation about how a second-person perspective makes s$&% infinitely easier to read. And on the long drive home from Ohio, while Tiny dozed in the passenger seat, I found myself reflecting on how DW and PbtA games and even the granddaddy of all PbtA games — Apocalypse World itself — all totally failed to use you they way they wanted to. But they got so damned close.
Moving Right Along:
The PbtA Core Mechanic
I want to talk about Dungeon World’s core mechanic. But because it’s technically Apocalypse World’s core mechanic, I’ve got to give credit where it’s due. So let’s do the begats.
In 2010, Vincent and Meguey Baker begat Apocalypse World. And it made some waves. Earned some awards. Why? For one, it had a bunch of unique features. Like, for instance, a simple mechanic to create messy and complicated relationships between the PCs based on Mad Libs style fill-in-the-blank statements. And because the Bakers told everyone that if they liked Apocalypse World, they should feel totally free to print and publish and profit from their own games and call them AW hacks, even if that inspiration was totally of the vaguely creative variety and they didn’t use any AW mechanics at all. Thus was born the Powered by the Apocalypse moniker. PbtA for short.
PbtA meant any game at all that was inspired by a love of Apocalypse World. By word of the creator gods. Nowadays, PbtA generally means a game that uses the core mechanics and relationship systems from AW. PbtA begat lots of games like Monsterhearts and Transit. It got so you couldn’t swing a dead tabaxi on DTRPG without hitting a PbtA game.
So the Bakers begat Apocalypse World. And Apocalypse World begat the Powered by the Apocalypse logo. And then, in 2012, Sage Latorra and Adam Koebel begat the first real PbtA game to get real, serious traction and call attention to the whole PbtA thing. That was Dungeon World. Basically, DW was D&D PbtA. Got it?
And that begat my interest.
What’s important for today’s discussion is DW’s core mechanic. Which is also AW’s core mechanic. And which is also generally treated as PbtA’s core mechanic. And it comprises two intertwined yingyangs.
Yingyang One is the Ability Check. Need to resolve an action? Roll 2d6 and add an ability modifier — Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, you know the song so sing along. Got a ten or better? Great, you unambiguously succeed in your task. Got a six or less? Crap, you utterly failed in your task. But you get a shiny experience point so you can learn from your f$&% up. Got a seven, eight, or nine? Well, that’s complicated. You succeeded in your task, but only kinda. The GMs going to throw some kind of cost or bargain or something your way. It’s a “yes, but…” kind of success. Or occasionally, “yes, if…”
Honestly? It’s a pretty elegant mechanic. And easy to keep in your head. I dig it. I dig it way more than I used to, in fact, but my feelings on non-binary outcomes have changed over the years.
Yingyang Two is the Move. A Move is a discrete chunk of rules that tell you what to roll when. Or when to even roll at all. The designers themselves described it as a codification of the conversational flow that formed the core of the RPG experience. You know the one I mean: GM sets the scene, player describes character action, GM determines and describes outcome, yaddah yaddah yaddah.
So there were all these Moves in the game. That’s what they were called. Moves. For example, Hack and Slash. In the rules, it looked like this:
Hack and Slash
When you attack an enemy in melee, roll+STR. *On a 10+, you deal your damage to the enemy and avoid their attack. At your option, you choose to do +1d6 damage but expose yourself to your enemy’s attack. *On a 7-9, you deal damage to the enemy and the enemy makes an attack against you.
And that simple rule structure is totally f$&%ing brilliant. Because it encapsulates perfectly the most meta job every GM has to do.
Lend Me Your Ears:
Listening for the Action
Once you’re done narrating — as a GM — you become a little like one of those evil Alexa things. See, your players say lots of s$&% at the game table. Inane babble, intra-party planning, pissing-and-moaning, out-of-character jokes that totally break the mood, and so on. Occasionally though, a player will actually state their character’s intention to do something that might actually have an impact on the game world. And which actually requires a die roll to resolve.
When something like that — an action declaration — comes from a player’s noise hole, you — the GM — have to wake up, resolve the action, describe the result, and then shift back into low-power mode waiting for the next action.
Of course, much like an Alexa, you’re actually always listening and taking notes so you can somehow screw your players later. But that’s neither here nor there.
This s$&% is way more complicated than you realize. Imagine, for example, a social interaction encounter. Those are pretty much the hardest things for GMs to parse. Especially if the players are trying even a tiny little bit to play in-character. Lots of words get tossed back and forth, including pleasantries and insults and banter and repetition and clarification and useless pleading that can’t possibly change anyone’s mind. As a GM, you’ve got to stay on high alert for the occasional sentence that might actually change someone’s mind.
When you hear a thing like that, you set a DC and ask for a social skill check or you roll one yourself behind the screen so as not to wreck the conversational flow. And you use the outcome to decide what the NPC says next. Then you go back to just sort of playing the NPC.
This is just another of the umpteen billion vital things RPGs don’t explain. Well, Apocalypse World — and by extension Dungeon World — decided not only to explain it, but just to codify that s$&%.
In PbtA games, you — the GM — are waiting for the players to trigger Moves. To say specific phrases that tell you they’re doing something that requires some game mechanics. That’s what that bit in the Hack and Slash Move about when you attack an enemy in melee, is all about. That’s the thing a character does in the world that Triggers the Move.
Hey, Alexa, I want to kill that orc with my sword.
Okay. Roll two dice and add your Strength modifier.
See why this s$&%’s brilliant? Because it provides a perfect Baby’s First GMing Experience. It’s training wheels for running a game. Listening for s$&% that qualifies as an actual action and then resolving it and going back to sleep.
I Want to Play a Game:
The Simplest RPG is the Best
Let’s imagine an RPG without all the crap. Imagine the simplest RPG ever. Characters have six Abilities — you know the ones — and a modifier for each. And they’ve got a list of single-word Skills. Things they’re particularly good at. Trained to handle. That’s it.
Is that a playable RPG? Is it runnable? F$&% yes. It’s the easiest to play. Easiest to run. And also the deepest and the most fun RPG that could possibly exist. It’s supremely open-ended, supremely approachable, and as mechanically rigorous as any GM needs.
The players know how strong and smart and charismatic their characters are. And they know what they’re particularly good at. And that’s all they know. All they need to know.
Meanwhile, you — the GM — know how to listen for anything that sounds like a player-character trying to affect a change in the world. And you know that if that action might succeed and might fail and carries some risk or cost, you can pick an ability score, set a DC, and ask for a roll. And if a player says, “I’m trained for this,” you give them a bonus. If you agree.
And even though I often succumb to the siren’s song of crunchy mechanics and game balance and initiative systems and s$&% like that, I’d probably actually enjoy running that simple-a$& RPG more than any edition of any RPG system ever. It’d be hella smooth, hella playable, and hella fun. Because everything you layer on top of that simple s$%& is more likely to impede the experience than enhance it.
Especially if the players see it.
The Best Laid Schemes O’ Mice an’ Men:
An Apocalyptic Failure
If you’ve ever actually run Dungeon World — or anything Powered by the Apocalypse — you’re probably laughing your a$& off so hard right now that you’re going to need emergency gluteal reattachment surgery. Because that brilliant design philosophy I talked up? Yeah, that s$&% has never materialized at any Dungeon World table ever.
Players don’t describe their fictional actions and wait for the GM to say, “you activated my Move card!” Instead, they just say s$&% like “I Hack and Slash the ogre” or “can I Spout Lore about this city” or — worst of all — “a trap? I Defy Danger it” Even though the rules of the game explicitly f$&%ing forbid the players from invoking Moves, players invoke Moves. And it’s impossible to get them to stop. So you just give up and go with it.
Why? Because the players see the Moves. Hell, there are reference sheets for them. And even if you don’t hand those out, there’s still a bunch of special, unique, class-based Moves spelled out on any character sheet.
And the trick of not letting the players see the Moves? Every PbtA GM has tried that one too. It doesn’t work. Because there are some Moves that never, ever get triggered if the players don’t know they exist. Moves like Spout Lore and Discern Realities kind of rely on — in a weird way; it’s complicated and I don’t want to go into it — certain Moves rely on the players sorta acting on knowledge they won’t have until they take the action to find out what knowledge they have.
Meanwhile, some Moves — like Defy Danger — absolutely can’t be used right if they’re invoked by players. Defy Danger is triggered when you — the GM — warn a player about some kind of in-scene hazard or upcoming terrible thing and then the player says, “damn the torpedoes, I charge and attack anyway.” But when players know it exists, they use it as a saving throw or trap-avoidance roll. Which it ain’t.
By all rights, DW should be an ideal, open-ended RPG in which the players think only about the fictional world the characters inhabit and their character’s capabilities. In practice, it’s a standard D&D-like game of pushing buttons and invoking rules and dragging the fiction along for the ride. What a f$%&ing shame.
But I still really love it for single-shot play.
What Did We Learn Today?
What’s the lesson here? I don’t know. This is a Bulls$&% article. Is it even supposed to have a lesson?
Let’s say the lesson’s about how presentation and perspective make the game. How rules are presented and who gets to see the rules matter way more than whatever brilliant design intentions you write down. Which probably ain’t news to any of you. It ain’t news to me.
But maybe the lesson’s actually about letting the players see the rules. And letting them interact with and directly invoke the rules. Every rule the players can see and touch damages the open-ended, freeform nature of RPGs. And honestly, that’s probably the biggest thing worrying me about the DBox One playtest s$%&. Because it’s definitely putting more and more rules on the wrong side of the screen. Letting the players see, interact with, and directly invoke too many rules.
It ain’t good for roleplaying games if the players can use the rules by name or call for rolls. And the latest One D&D playtest documents are leaning hard in that direction with the new social interaction and knowledge and perception rules. And that s$&%’s bad for open-ended play. The players should be able to play the vast majority of the game without ever naming a rule or asking for a die roll. Otherwise, you’re in board game or video game territory. Not RPG.
Huh? I guess I do give a crap about this DBox One bulls$&%. Imagine that.
I’ve been running a heavily modified version of Tales from the Loop for a few months. By “heavily modified,” I mean I cut out all kinds of extraneous crap, added a few skills, and made everything more adult and horrific. It’s not PbtA, but it is a very bare-bones system, and the result is much what you describe here: players mostly ignoring the rules, in a good way, because they find it easier and faster to engage the fiction, rather than the mechanics buttons. Gotta say, it’s extremely fun and requires just 1 hour of prep per session. Also helps that, even though we’re online, we don’t use a VTT, and we only look at maps for reference.
In a trick I’ve stolen from psychology used to keep folks addicted to social media (randomising rewards):
Sometimes, if a player asks for a roll, even if it seems like it would be challenging to accomplish, I’ll let them know they don’t need to roll. I narrate how their character’s skills enable them to perform the task, and just let them do what they wanted. There’s a slight deflation of the moment as the opportunity to roll a dice is removed but, after a few of these insta-wins, the idea of getting away with not rolling for what they want, and the slight randomness of what constitutes the need for a roll seems to reduce the amount of requests to roll. I can see there being some issues in the players minds but, the result? Much more anticipation and excitement around when a roll is called for from me, and less requests for rolls from my players.
Because I can imagine it will be a question on people’s minds: No, no one has increased their requests to roll because they’ve figured out they get free passes sometimes 😉
This was a great article. It points toward a ‘atomic’ level of fantasy adventure gaming. Do we need stats up-front? Do we need stable, permanent stats? Without the ‘accounting’ and ‘scarcity’ framework brought over from miniatures gaming, description – not statistics, not aleatory adjudication – would drive the game. If the players (not the GM) have to suss out what what possible consequences there might be to ‘success’ or ‘failure’, then all that’s left, as Angry says, is to determine a difficulty and a method for adjudicating the outcome fairly based upon the premises of the action (the succeed/fail description). Do we even need stats for this? What if every difficulty rating was the same? What if every challenge was 50/50, not adjustments other than the failure/success outcomes the player has set for themselves?
That’s a very nice baby you’re about to throw out, there…
Is it? I was watching the Blackmoor documentary and the whole idea of what D&D became was ‘What would you like to do?’. In order make that question make sense you need description. In order to make outcomes makes sense you need in-game consequences.Are permanent stats (I know, I know) and variable dice rolls the best way to do that when it’s description that drives the game? I’m not saying I’m right or you’re wrong. I just think you’ve made multiple good arguments over time that most of the infrastructure of D&D is unnecessary (including in this essay). Yes, it’s a bull**** essay in your view, but you make a good argument for taking away some of the scaffolding around ‘What would you like to do?’. A good argument for forcing the players to create and destroy their own characters using their imagination and sense of fair play rather than rules and stats. If the dice roll is always the same, players cannot obsessively look for in-game methods to mini-max that roll. Where – exactly – is the imagination and world-building in that kind of ‘gaming’ of the game? The GM still gets to say whether the players’ success outcome and failure outcome are reasonable for the situation the GM (and the game-world’s logic) has created. It’s a question of how minimal can you go and still have a valid, workable, playable game where description and “What would you like to do?’ drives the game, not mini-maxing dice rolls.
I’m not trying to piss you off. I think you’ve just opened up vistas for exploring options in pretend elf games that are really intriguing.
Because a roleplaying game is both a roleplaying exercise of imaginative storytelling AND a game. They are two different things, each with its own needs, working together to create something that is at once both and neither. If you remove too many of the mechanical elements, you will also remove the things that provide a satisfying, challenging, and fun gameplay experience. The dice rolling mechanics with it’s variability and allowance for player choices to affect the outcome in logical, fair ways — not just imaginative ways —, the fact that some things are more likely to work than other things, the fact that decisions compound mechanically, those are the elements that provide the essential ingredients that make a game a game, such as unpredictability, strategy, inertia, reversals, and so on, which are the things that make for fun gameplay experiences.
So, yes, you can throw away pretty much all the mechanical structural elements and sit around telling imaginative stories without much concern for the mechanical elements of the game and you’ll probably have a fun activity, but that will not be a game. It won’t feel like a game. It’ll be a storytelling experience. I suggest that you look into this further. A great deal has been written over the years by designers and pyschologists about the difference between a pastime or hobby or activity and a game and the elements that make a game a game and this provide the feeling of playing a game and not just participating in an activity.
It seems that you are outlining a tension here between the requirements of the game (i.e. that players can make choices with predictable outcomes) and the requirements of the narrative experience (players feel like they are inhabiting their characters in the fictional world).
If, as you suggest, RPGs should limit player-facing rules then to what extent should the GM make players aware of the potential consequences and likelihood of the outcomes of their actions? Or of possible alternatives?
Rules might help give newer players options.
From reading your previous work, I know you place significant value on the GM using their brain to reasonably adjudicate actions. To what extent would your ideal game employ GM-facing mechanics help to adjudicate actions? Do you think there is value in these types of mechanics because they help the GM to be surprised by outcomes?
Sorry. I know these questions are rather broad but I am genuinely interested.
I’ve tried some of what you’re suggesting, GrampaHowl, and in addition to what Angry said, I had MANY players push back because they wanted permanent stats. It’s really important to them to know that their character is Strong, Fast, Smart (or the opposites) and to what degree. And then they want to have those things impact their decision-making.
Remember that most players that sign up for this activity are hoping to play rather than create a story/world/setting. They want to play the part of their character and play the challenges of the game. Both things are supported by having tangible values assigned to the characters.
‘Remember that most players that sign up for this activity are hoping to play rather than create a story/world/setting.’
That may be true, but from what I see, that’s resulted in an utterly narcissistic style of play. And the entire D&D industry from WOTC reflects the feeding of that player-level narcissism.
The GM’s are producers (who typically don’t get paid) the the players are consumers who expect to be entertained.
This seems like an abusive relationship to me.
It also seems to me that this player-centric approach does not reflect the OG D&D style where the apex of playing a character was to grow powerful (and trusted) enough to run your own domain within the original game-world.
I think you can dump permanent stats to replace them with impermanent stats just as easily as various games allow for the addition of a ‘hero’ or ‘luck’ token that gets used up during the game and get rejuvenated via some mechanism or another. That’s the model I’m working with.
You earn ‘stats’ from playing and you use up stats to play. It’s rising and falling stats ecology where players ‘earn’ by ‘doing’ in the game-world. In D&D it would be like being able to use XP to perform ‘feats’ while still be able to earn XP if you perform actions without using ‘feats’.
If game-play isn’t ‘collaborative’ it seems that it’s either ‘consumerist’ or ‘adversarial’. Either way, why would you want to DM this way?
I can’t seem to reply directly, GrampaHowl, so I’m trying it this way.
I can see where you’re coming from. You’re looking to break out of the standard paradigm. It’s a useful way to help step back and see what works and why.
I suggest playing some Fate for a while and see how you like it. It’s one of the most mainstream of games to focus on what you might consider temporary stats. Fate Points are earned and spent to impact the narrative and gameplay, similar to your description of ‘earn XP’ then ‘spend XP to perform feats’.
You might also be interested in the FKR scene. They focus on beginning each game setting as purely lore/narrative and then only building minimal game mechanics to suit the stated premise.
Breaking away from the mainstream paradigm can be really useful, but it isn’t for everyone. Many people want to play the best way they can within the popular style.
Thank you for your reply and I believe you are correct. The FKR scene suggests how much pre-existing game-system scaffolding you can pull away and still have a ‘table’ at which a ‘game’ can occur. All I’ll do is note that not every ‘game’ or game-design is suitable for every kind of player or GM.
Perhaps better than eliminating ability scores would be to keep them but hide them from the players, too. After all, how many of us can accurately determine our personal ability scores?
Players could develop reasonable approximations of their ability scores through play.
Alternative 1: players could have a randomly determined estimate of each score.
Alternative 2: the accuracy of the player’s knowledge of his character’s abilities could be based off his (unknown to himself) Wisdom score.
I was going to reply with a take about how it could be bad game design to hide these kinds of stats from the players, but then I realized it’s actually just very unrealistic!
We humans are OBSESSED with measuring and improving our abilities. Weight lifters know their max lift and are always trying to break it. World record holders for memorising the most amount of PI. Runners looking to shave the tiniest fraction of a second off their time. Elo systems for chess players. The list goes on. The point being, anyone who has spent time legitimately trying to be good at a thing, has a fairly reasonable guess as to how good they are at that thing.
Hey, Grampa, while I appreciate the discussion, I kind of get the feeling you’d be much happier if you were able to provide a full counterpoint on a blog of your own. So maybe that’s a consideration, huh? I think this point has been talked to death. So let’s call it done.
“Even though the rules of the game explicitly f$&%ing forbid the players from invoking Moves,”
This is a common misconception, but it’s not true. “Never name the move” is a rule for the MC (aka GM), *not* the players! Players absolutely *can* – and *should* – name the move they’re invoking. This is explicitly laid out on page 12 of Apocalypse World (the original version, I don’t have 2e but I’m sure it says the same thing). The player should say what the character is doing, and then name the move they’re making (paragraph beginning “Usually, it’s unambiguous”). If they only name the move, then the GM needs to ask what the PC is doing to invoke that move. If they only state an action in the fiction, the MC needs to clarify which move they’re making and if they actually intended that. (And if they didn’t – if they misunderstood the situation – they need to change what their character is doing.)
“Make your move, but never speak its name” comes from the Principles section of the MC chapter – it’s about not naming the MC’s moves (Explained on page 111 – ‘Maybe your move is to announce future badness, but for god sake never say the words “future badness.”’)
Dungeon World may not be as clear about this as AW – a lot of PbtA games aren’t.
It wasn’t my experience that the 3.5 books were well organized or indexed for use at the table at all. As an example, the reason nobody every remembers that Negative Energy is an intrinsically immoral and damaging force is because the explanation that it is so is contained inside the rules procedure for making a Turn Undead check.
I’ve never met a player with a game under their belt, or a GM who wasn’t just starting out, that didn’t know that negative energy is intrinsically badwrongfun and destroys life and whatnot. It’s not just the energy of death it’s the energy of undeath and whatnot, people know that.
Usually, when people act like it’s not, it’s just a GM deciding that that’s a stupid rule and getting rid of it so they can have non-evil vampires or whatever. Which, you know, you can definitely disagree with that stance or think it’s going against what was intended, but point is I’ve never seen a 3.5 GM who didn’t *know* that it was a capital-E Evil power. It probably has to do with the fact that it’s a fundamental energy type and it’s a bit weird to think of a fundamental power that’s just part of the world, that isn’t associated with the actual capital-E lower planes, as Evil.
I’ve had quite a few arguments on the subject. The problem seems to start from “Positive Energy isn’t objectively Good, it makes you explode.” (Despite the rules saying exactly that) and I’ve often seen it come up in questions like “Why is the spell Deathwatch an [Evil] spell, when it’s usefulness is primarily to healers?” and “Why is Inflict Wounds an [Evil] spell, when much obviously more maleficent spells such as Dominate Person and Fireball aren’t?”
This used to be one of the principal online flamewars back in the 00s, Frank Trollman wrote a whole guidebook on the topic.
I also think you’re right on the last bit- people think of Negative Energy as a kind of spooky electricity, and the concept of an intrinsically immoral electron gradient doesn’t track real world ethics, in much the same way as a fistful of sand from an Abyssal beach triggering Detect Evil.
So… where do we go with this? Most of your BS articles generally give me a new way of thinking about something, or an insight that’s interesting to take away and ponder. This one is probably the only one I’ve read where there’s not really any conclusion or anything to take away.
It also seems like these two desires are at odds with each other. On the one hand, less concrete mechanics forces players to interact with the fiction. On the other hand, hiding the mechanics from the players means they don’t know all their options. I guess maybe that’s the takeaway? It’s yet another situation where there’s no best way to do it, or correct answer, it’s a sliding scale that you just have to pick what works best for your situation.
idk, I’m thinking out loud in my comment. 😛
I think with small exceptions most people know what their options are, as long as the game is happening in a genre they’re familiar with, and even when they don’t they can just fall back to common sense. If common sense in your world isn’t the same as the real world it’s kind of the GM’s job to communicate that, idk, striking a child instantly kills you on the spot or something. Magic aside, obviously, since magic is this weirdly crunch-only thing in most systems exactly because it doesn’t exist in real life so the crunch is all we have to guide us, but you hardly need someone to tell you that your heroic knight can try to climb up the cliff to escape from the troll, then look for a fallen tree to push and crush the troll with.
It’s not just interacting with the fiction, it’s encouraging the players to *build* the fiction. They cannot do that if the assets they need to build are too scarce (and it’s no fun if the assets are too abundant). In your game, what are the assets that players have to ‘build the fiction’ with? If it’s stats, then they’re going to mini-max on stats. If it’s feats, then they’re going to mini-max on feats. If it’s treasure then they’re going to mini-max on treasure. Whatever incentive structure is built into your game (including the game system) is eventually going to be sniffed out by the players and mini-maxed. Make sure that incentive is conducive to the kind of game you want to GM.
I’m running mostly 5e. All I want is a way to make my players stop trying to push buttons. Especially, perception checks. I’m already telling them not to, and even poking fun at them some times, like saying the character stops everything and start rolling a die in the ground. But they don’t stop. I don’t know if I just run with it or risk being a jerk calling them out all the time.
They’re wasting time asking for checks. Maybe start using Angry’s tension pool, and visibly increase it every time they do.
That’s a good call. I’ll think about it. But maybe it’s too much?
You’re in control of the severity of complications. It’s only too much if you want it to be.
Players shouldn’t be initiating checks. Calling for a check is something the GM does. So the question is how did it get to this point? Players are always trying to mini-max their playing, so they’re very sensitive to any cost/benefit structure built into the game. Is this pushing of buttons about acquiring treasure? Acquiring experience points? I would try to find out what benefit the players think they’re deriving from all these ‘buttons’ they’re pushing and see if you can alter your cost/benefit structure to get the behaviors you’re looking for. Building a good incentive structure is one of the hardest things to do.
I think it get to this point because this is how usually people learn how to play. I try to prevent that when I introduce people to RPGs, but I can’t control who already learned like that.
The funny thing is that this is a player who says he prefers “roleplaying” over rules (I know we call BS on this in this site), and prefer social interaction over combat. Nonetheless, he use this kind of pressing the buttons all the time
Look at what Angry said about 5e: the book uses “You” everywhere, referring to the Player. It tells the payer they make checks. Here is the Investigate skill:
“When you look around for clues and make deductions based on those clues, you make an Intelligence (Investigation) check. ”
Read back a few pages to ability checks and the players see “The DM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results.”
As a player, they say “I look for clues and try to make deductions” and the book tells them they either make a die roll or there is no chance of failure and they succeed. They don’t expect to be automatically successful so they roll because *the game told them to*
Ugh. I run for a game of noobs and a game that’s half noob and half experienced. My new players are pretty easy to train out of pushing buttons and into actual actions.
But my experienced players are constantly just asking to do checks all the time. Everything takes so much longer with them because there’s the constant back and forth of, “What’s your intent?” Uh… to see if there are any enemies. “And what are you doing to find out?” Uh… looking around real hard.
I’m just finally starting to see some growth from my experienced players. It took a lot of patience and a lot of scaffolding, but it’s finally happening.
Is there a conflation here between players having buttons to press and players knowing their capabilities? Because the former is a simplistic option in encounters and the latter integral to figuring out your options in an encounter. I may well be misreading things, but it seems like Angry is saying pressable buttons are bad. I see them as a fine part of a larger toolbox.
My expectation is that D&DOne characters will mainly have buttons to press and no comparable capabilities next to them. Bounded accuracy applying to ability checks next to very unbound spells would do that.
I wonder if the issue with how DW did it’s Moves was in how they are named? They are named as actions, not skills.
“I spout lore” is a declaration of what the character does. But “I history this room” isn’t. So at least with the last one the DM can ask: Okay HOW do you history the room?
I think as long as something isn’t a resource style feature of a class, then calling it out by name isn’t really needed. But, when it’s a resource it’s sort of needed to at least be mentioned, so everyone knows the Barbarian is Raging, and has used Reckless Attack. At the same time, it does end up feeling like the Barbarian pressed 2 and 3 on his keyboard, in order to pull off the combo.
“Rage, Reckless attack, Great Weapon Master, I hit the Orc” is a sentence I have heard many times in combat…
I think this goes back to “there are only two answers to ‘what do you do?’ and neither of them is the name of a skill.” Finding the pretend elf’s most beneficial course of action is roleplaying while finding game mechanics to modify a roll is a check is called for is not. It’s “what is around me? Can I use it to my advantage?” creative thinking versus “let me check my character sheet for another +1” button pushing. Computer games have a lovely keyboard full of buttons to press, pen and paper RPGs do not.
Where presentation really matter is “A, B, and C give a +1 to Check-X” versus “A, B, or C may be worth up to +1 on Check-X at Gm discretion.” The former is an out of fiction button for the player to press, while the latter informs the pretend elf’s options but must be justified in fiction. For example how many character can aid another? The rules might say up to N, but the fiction might dictate that there is enough rope for all party members to pull on it, while the lock is in a confined space where only one character may access it at a time, so much for up to N aid another in either case. However, in the second case if time permits the entire part could poke at it one at a time before conferring on their expertise and have one delegate attempt it, but that is not a button to be pressed.
Magic, and to a lesser extent, combat present additional challenges to this idea, but magic can be handled more like elemental bending where the application needs to be described while combat could be less granular and handle in longer maneuver instead of micro action.
And now ere are back to rule books failing to teach how to play and only explaining the rules. Good luck learning how to drive, much less drive off road, from a Haynes Manual.
How does this square with players knowing the difficulty of dangerous actions? Like if a player wants to walk across a chain stretched over a spikey lava river, and I say “you need an 18 Dexterity check or you fall”, the player may change his mind. Wouldn’t knowing the rules in this case lead to more meaningful choice?
Wouldn’t the exact difficult depend on the approach taken? How fast is the character trying to move, is the character under duress, is a pole being used for balance, is the condition of the chain uniform or is there a trickier section, are thermal drafts coming of the lava going to pose additional difficulties? If the character cannot calculate the odds, why should the player know any more than it looks very easy/easy/average/hard/very hard/ nearly impossible. Closer examination might permit refining this assessment, but that would take extra time, is time plentiful.
Knowing the DC before committing would encourage +1 stacking, while having only a rough idea leads to choosing between safety and efficiency with the two being subjective parameters. How safe do you think you want to play it vs how many buff to stack for a satisfying DC.
The DC is an in-table mechanization of all those in-fiction conditions exemplified above. If the conditions can be assessed by the character, the character would know how difficult the action is, and hence can decide whether to actually attempt it or not based on informed opinion. So should the player have the “same” information, aka the DC.
If the character cannot assess the in-game difficulty of the action, neither should the player know the actual DC.
If you want to get picky, and there are known and unknown conditions, you can give the player a range or subjective estimation of how difficult the action actually is. The point is that to reinforce the shared mental space, you can not restrict the players from accessing the information that their characters have (in this case, the difficulty of the action, regardless of whether it is described as a lot of in-fiction conditions or summarized and boiled down to a mechanical DC)
This is how you use metagame with a positive outcome: You force your player’s mind to be more in sync with what his/her character is experiencing.
Actually, the DC is in-table representation of many of the fixed and reasonably predictable conditions. While I agree that they may or may not be visible to the character, they are generally a best in-world guess about how difficult an expert with reasonably complete knowledge of the situation would consider the difficulty. Which means, while a character may or may not have reasonably complete knowledge and you’re welcome to hide the DCs in situations wherein, for example, the PC can’t read an NPC’s mind and therefore can’t deduce the liklihood of a argument persuading them, and you’re welcome to hide the DC, the DC should be something that could be discoverable in the world with investigation and tools. That is, the character who did some research, background checking, and feeling out should be able to reasonably guess a DC.
All of the unforeseen difficulties, the ephemeral qualities that change from moment to moment and day to day, the perversity of human mood and the natural world, and all the other unpredictable s$&% that gets in the way of someone succeeding at something they should be able to succeed at? That’s the die roll.
In short, GMs should absolutely err on the side of sharing the DC — and for full and complete clarity, sharing both the DC and a general in-world description of the task that explains the difficulty — or at least ensuring the DC is deducible or discoverable and should rely on the dice to account for all unforeseen and unpredictable crap.
Defy Danger looks like almost a brilliant mechanic. It makes me want to see a game where the GM or other players choose a passive bonus for each player based on their play style, without telling that player which bonus they got.
Maybe the GM gives another player 3 cards from a deck of 20 like “Gave a Rousing Speech: +1 to Initiative rolls” or “Too Cautious in Fights: +1 to Passive Perception”, and that player chooses a bonus for the first player without telling them.
“Just ask any GM that grudgingly runs D&D 5E for a group that absolutely f$&%ing refuses to consider playing literally any other game system.”
I know that feeling. Got 2 TTRPGs (once a month sessions) up and running, but can’t get the 3rd one up and going because it isn’t D&D. “I want a session that is on Saturdays, run by adults, and can only do about once a month.” “Oooh, I’m doing just that, except it’s Savage Worlds and not D&D.” {crickets}
Have you considered using Knave? It’s just stats and equipment.