Pathfinder/3.5 as a Game System

[Squirrel_Dude]

There's a D&D blogger that I read every so often, calling themselves the AngryDM. It's a typical advice/opinion blog for DMs and players. I often find the writer's takes interesting, if not something that I always agree with. In a recent article, he talks about the 8 kinds of fun, and designing a campaign for your players. One little tidbit (yes little, the writer is very wordy) got me thinking, and I thought I would share it with the people that post here.


Link to the Whole post (http://angrydm.com/2014/01/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-fun/)

First, you know all those RPGs you own? Dungeons and Dragons? Pathfinder? Savage Worlds? Dungeon World? Numanuma? FATE Accelerated Armored Core Advanced? Star Wars: West Edge of the Saga? OSR and Castles and Sorcery? Guess what. Those aren’t games. And they weren’t designed by game designers. Why? Because YOU (if you are a GM) are the game designer. Every GM is a game designer.

D&D is not a thing you can just pick up and play. At best, D&D is a set of rules and instructions and elements that can be assembled into a game. D&D is game engine. A game system. A development kit. A physics engine. A game console. D&D is a Playstation or an XBox. Legacy of the Crystal Shard? Rise of the Runelords? Keep on the Borderlands? Beyond the Rim? Those are closer to games. Just like the disc that has Last of Us or HALO on it, adventure modules have all the encounters and monsters and stories and things in them. Those are games. Sort of.

See, you’re probably expecting me to point out now that if you write your own adventure, you are a game designer. Duh. That much is obvious. But I’m about to tell you that, even if you don’t write your own adventure or campaign, you’re still a f$&%ing game designer. Check that out.

How does that work? Well, unlike a game console, you can’t just shove Rise of the Runelords into a Pathfinder book and have a game happen. To “run the game,” a human being has to follow the Pathfinder instructions and the Rise of the Runelord instructions, just like the processor in the PS4 follows the instructions in the PS4 and on the Last of Us disc. Right? Except that the processor is not a computer. It is YOUR HUMAN F$&%ING BRAIN. And it makes a lot of decisions about how that game is going to be executed. It can ignore any of the instructions. Sometimes, the instructions don’t tell it what to do and it has to make things up. Sometimes the players wander outside the playable area and the human brain running the game has to scramble to generate new content on the fly or to get the players on track. Some human brains adhere strictly to the instructions. Others use them as loose guidelines. Others throw them out altogether and start making s$&% up.

Beyond that, that human brain running the game also decides how to present that game. Does everyone make their own characters or will we use pregens? What classes, races, and resources are allowed? How will we start the story off? Will we use miniatures and dungeon terrain or just our imaginations? How will we handle PC’s dying? What about when everyone dies? Will I fudge dice? How often will I even use the dice? When you look at it that way, the game that you have dropped hundreds of dollars on is woefully incomplete, huh?

Just the mere act of organizing and running the game experience has a great deal of influence over how the game feels. And that is assuming you are running someone else’s module. If you also decide to run your own adventures, run your own campaign, and/or design your own setting, you define a lot more of the game than Jason Bulhman or Fred Hicks or Mike Mearls or Sage Latorra ever did. You have a lot more say over how your players feel about the game. And yet, you don’t get a paycheck for running the game. Welcome to game mastering.

My point is, the question of fun is pretty damned central to the whole experience. We agree on that, right? And you, the GM, have a lot to say about whether the game is fun or not. More to say than any other so-called game designer who has dumped a lot of responsibility on you. So, you need to think like a designer. And when a group of game designers (admittedly in another field) say “hey, we discovered these sort of rules for how people have fun,” don’t you want to know what they are and how you can use them too? Does it make sense to let those damned game designers keep all the useful stuff from you
This obviously isn't some brilliant new theory that shifts the entire paradigm of viewing D&D, but it is a perspective I find interesting. And now for the most generic question to try and generate discussion: Thoughts?

[Invader]

I think it comes down to how yo define "game designer". Personally I think his explanation is a bit ridiculous and I don't consider the dm any sort of game designer. The game is designed already. Surely the dm has some input on how things are run but hes still following a prewritten set of rules regardless of whether or not he tweaks them a little bit.

[Red Fel]

Disclaimer: I've not read the entire article, so any comments are solely on the excerpt.

I think it's an interesting, if not novel, point. It's certainly valid. A good GM builds the world; he doesn't just act as a rules and mechanics referee, he gives the entire game life and vitality.

But that's incomplete.

The DM is part of the game design team. The other part is the players.

Consider. If you play Halo, or Warcraft, or Pokemon, there are a lot of things for you to do, but they are pre-programmed. For example, in Warcraft, you could go find some cloth and make a dress, or go kill some things that look different than you do, or go find some ore mysteriously sticking out of the dirt and mine that sucker. But you can't look at a hill and say "I'm going to dig until I level this, and build a cool monument here." In Halo, you can climb into vehicles. But you can't disassemble them and use the parts for cool things. In Pokemon, you can catch monsters that represent powerful cosmic forces. But you can't ask the creature that is the embodiment of time to take you to meet the Doctor.

Games have limits and restrict their players. PnP RPGs don't have these limits. You literally can do anything, up to and including changing the nature of the entire game based upon your actions.

And I'm not saying that the players are game designers simply because of an increased degree of interactivity. I'm saying that a smart DM takes the players' actions and preferences and alters the world in reaction to them. Are the players combat-ready killer whackjobs? Suddenly the world is a giant arena gauntlet. Has one of them recently become a Vampire? Suddenly more things happen at night, or in caves. When the players' actions have a more direct impact on how the game is played, and what its contents are, the players are in many ways contributing to the design and operation of the game.

As I said above; clever, if not novel, but incomplete. DMs are game designers. So are players. Ain't it a wonderful thing?

[Larkas]

It's a very interesting point, if a bit obvious. RPG systems are not games; campaigns are.

I think that it might be easier to visualize the difference between "system" and "game" by resorting to a chess analogy: this (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Chess_board_opening_staunton.jpg/640px-Chess_board_opening_staunton.jpg) isn't a game; this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_mbxf4qjUA) is.

[Alent]

This obviously isn't some brilliant new theory that shifts the entire paradigm of viewing D&D, but it is a perspective I find interesting. And now for the most generic question to try and generate discussion: Thoughts?

This very notion is actually what attracted me to D&D in the first place.

As someone who aspires to be an indie RPG developer, one of the things you're told most often is to test your game's concept by making it a board game. It's sort of a no-brainer: test your idea first in the most malleable medium of them all: the theater of the mind.

For years I had a terrible impression of D&D from Forgotten Realms book fanboys and the various canned plots of various D&D based games. The Mary Sue Protagonist of the stories just left me Pizz't off, most D&D computer game plots boiled down to the same 3 or 4 canned tropes over and over, the classes were boring, the list goes on. Worse yet, there are a great deal of computer RPGs that seem to have began as someone's campaign log, and you get railroaded into doing the exact same thing as the players did no matter how absurd or inconceivable ever doing such a thing would be.

Despite being driven away from D&D from it's supporters, I eventually came to try it out after an MMO burnout event. (MMOs are miserable for game designers to play, especially when you know enough about the technical side to see the negligence and ignorance at work.) I found my current group, where the guy who usually DMs is open to homebrew, does his own homebrew, and is fairly open to out of the box thinking. Seeing homebrew and houserules in action connected dots between board games and game design I'd never seen before, and it was great.

After a few weeks of play, I came to realize that D&D was more or less the "Whatever you make of it" game. If you administer the rules wrong, it still works. If you bend the rules for a story, it still works. It wasn't as flexible as some other systems, but it still got the job done.

Several years later, I'm now quite addicted and need to get more time from my IT job and health woes to work on the campaign setting I'm building.

So yeah, I absolutely see D&D as a platform and middleware library, rather than a game. If you don't like something, you just change it. It's the power of the medium.

[Za'hynie Laya]

I am inclined to agree with most of this edit of the AngryDM.

From its genesis in 1974, the D&D game engine was bulky and complicated. So much so that two D&D systems were developed back then: Basic D&D and (the more popular) Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

Any game system requiring a modulator, referee, judge, storyteller, and/or game master must allow certain liberties for the "Dungeon Master". The role of game designer does fit as one of the many hats the DM wears creating and running games/campaigns for his players.

Borrowing from Gary Gygax's 1st edition DMG, I see the game system written as rules for its players, but guidelines/suggestions for the Dungeon Master. The title Game Master implies he is not mastered by the game, but that he masters the game/system.

So long as the DM communicates clearly early-on to his players what type of game he runs (house rules, errata applied, etc.) there should be no confusion as the campaign progresses. Rulings made that are not covered in any book should be consistent for continuity's sake and mutual enjoyment for all players.

I once read another blogger post a unique description of our game as: group participatory interactive fiction. I use this description when asked what kind of hobby I pursue. I feel it creates more interest in what we do as players/DMs.

[Psyren]

I'm a big, big fan of the MDA study so just about anything derived from it is a winner in my book. And I agree wholeheartedly, the DM is as much a designer as anyone working for WotC or Paizo.

For a succinct take on the topic (as well as a crash course in what this whole "MDA" thing is), Extra Credits has you covered. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uepAJ-rqJKA)

[The Trickster]

I do agree that DM's are, in theory, "game designers". However, it is fair to note that Minecraft is a game, and it needs player input to be complete as well.

I guess I would call D&D more of a skeleton if a game, where the players add the details to flesh it out (no pun intended).

In a way, you could reverse the roles and the idea could still work. D&D is the game, and your brain is the console. The stronger the console, the better the story/graphics/whatever.

My 2 copper.