A conversation with a dear friend the other day helped me put my finger on something that's bugged me -- largely subconsciously -- for a while about D&D.
I've been doing a bunch of thinking recently about establishing direction in TTRPGs, which I think is the keystone of better play. How that looks, precisely, varies with the game and the table, but as a general principle, I think it applies everywhere. The locus of who is doing what thinking will move around, but the people at your table need to be thinking about it. Doubly, triply so if what you're doing is narrative focused.
As a GM, I've been doing this for a while, albeit not always explicitly. Thinking about arcs for the player characters -- and the story they're cast in, if there is one beyond the arcs -- and how to drive towards those beats. As a player, I've long adopted this approach when designing my characters -- making sure I understand what their dramatic question or heroic ethos is, and where their arc might go.
I've progressively made this more explicit, as well -- asking players for their input or handing the work I've done on my character to the GM, communicating my expectations and fixed points, but leaving them loads of room.
(I've never used Stars and Wishes, but I think this is a thing that they do as well -- creating an explicit and regular communication channel that tends towards having players establish direction for their characters and world.)
Where the locus of this is and how it applies to a particular table or game is more flexible. Historically, I've tended towards what I think of as more of an 'architect' style of GMing -- crafting elaborate stories and arcs that play out over longer periods of time, and doing a large proportion of the direction work, using both my own input to the game and what the players have given to me.
There, I think the locus of direction rests on the GM. It's better -- much better -- if the players understand this and are working with it, being clear about what they want out of the story and their character's arcs. But there's also a lot more room for the unexpected -- the delight in seeing what someone comes up with and subjects you to. A lot of assumptions there about trust, shared sensibilities, and competence, but generally: I think that works really well.
A lot of narrative games in particular shift this locus of direction so that it's much more evenly distributed around the table. GMless games would be one extreme end of this, but even Powered by the Apocalypse and so forth create much more of a sense of shared responsibility for the world and story, rather than it being handed down a little more by the GM. (Obviously, it should always be flowing back and forth no matter your model, but in terms of the bulk of the direction, at any rate.)
I think this is the biggest stumbling block for those who have come up on more D&D-style games -- the sense of what's expected of them and what they're allowed to do. I also think there's some legacy mindset that 'approaching something out of character' is somehow 'cheating' or metagaming, in terms of developing a good roleplaying experience. Which is nonsense!
Games like Heart, which I talked about yesterday systematise this -- making the responsibility for directing your character an explicit part of the game. Which I love, particularly in terms of showcasing this way of thinking about play.
I think that cultivating this sense of direction and responsibility always leads to better play -- if for no other reason than it tends towards encouraging more explicit forms of communication around people's shared expectations of the game.
I keep coming back to Kieron Gillen's player principles for better play, particularly that first one: 'Make choices that support the table's creative goals'. There's a lot contained with in that: 1) The understanding that every table -- your table! -- has creative goals 2) That it is incumbent on you to know what those are; and 3) That your decisions should support those goals
All three is best case, of course, but even 1 and 2 are HUGELY important things that I think a lot of players can end up missing, some or all of the time.
Which brings me back round to D&D, and a specific point of frustration I've noticed in the past. One of the advantages of D&D for me, and probably the biggest reason I keep coming back to it, particularly as a gamerunner, is that the people I play with are, by and large, intimately familiar with it. They know how the game works, have at least high-level knowledge of the lore and world, and will often have a bunch of spare character ideas rattling around their head that they're itching to play.
...and that can often end up eclipsing the specific creative goals of any one game. Partly because people are excited by their existing ideas -- which is a nice thing! -- but don't always square that against the rest of what the table's doing. And also because of an identity issue with D&D.
D&D is... just so broad. That's by design, I assume, and it allows it to 'be' a lot of different games in a lot of different styles. But also means people bring in a lot of different expectations about it, which can be hard to overcome when setting up a game. Leading to some thematic/dramatic incoherency around the table.
This gets less so the more specific you go into the D&D product line -- if you look at a given setting, say the Forgotten Realms, or Greyhawk, or Spelljammer -- or beyond those into specific adventures like Curse of Strahd, the sense of tone and identity that emerge is a lot clearer. But that's also part of the problem, where people might come in with, say, gothic horror s their baseline for D&D. Or that cool character they didn't get to run in Curse of Strahd and they really wanna play -- but who might be a poor tonal fit for a over the top planeshifting extravaganza.
(Obviously, sometimes this can work out very well -- if there is a consistent tone at the table that one character just happens to be working directly against, that can lead to some really interesting outcomes! Problems tend to arise if all the player characters feel like they were lifted from entirely different genres of TV show, though. (Caveat to my caveat: I now want to make a game where that's an explicit creative goal -- have a character from each of a bunch of different vibes bundled together. But that underscores the point, really -- that would be working with the creative goals of the table.))
Crucially, I think all of this makes for better games. On paper, you might think that players would have more freedom if their options are unbounded, and in a sense, that's true. It's just not the good kind of player freedom. Everyone at the table has a stake in directing the game and the story, and the more they have a shared vision for what that is, the better it's going to be.
A corollary thought since I wrote the rest of this: Something I realise that I value from D&D as a long-term GM partly stems from this lack of core. I do like to do my own architecting and worldbuilding and show that off (without showing up with a Binder of Lore to bore my players). Most other systems I can think of I feel wouldn't let me do this in the same way.
Either they have such a strong identity to make that level of worldbuilding impractical, or they're broad enough that they don't grab me as alternative systems to D&D in the first place.
Hmm, this feeling merits more interrogation.
(One final final thought that doesn't fit anywhere else here: another reason that I have preferred D&D in recent years is good tooling. D&D Beyond is... such a treat as a player and GM. I don't need that level of tool as a GM or player, but I've got so used to it that I notice its absence.)