[D&D as conflict simulation] Muster: A Primer For War (first impressions)

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm excited about Eero Tuovinen's new book "Muster - A Primer for War. Advice for playing D&D the wargaming way!" (Muster - Arkenstone Publishing | DriveThruRPG.com) and want to share my first impressions and ask for yours.

I'm not much of an art guy normally but the art immediately grabbed me. I may wind up printing this one out.

I'm also impressed by the clarity of the layout/organization and by the fact that he immediately contextualizes it with Kriegspiel and open-ended conflict simulation. I can totally imagine myself printing out the Manifesto section to routinely hand to new players to inform them what my game is about, which of the 8 types of fun I intend to serve. I love how the work positions gaining insight as a core motivation for play:

D&D is a roleplaying game that is also a wargame. Its philosophical basis is in conflict simulation gaming of the war-gaming tradition. The principles we insist upon here are only novel compared to other types of roleplaying games.​

Wargaming originates in the 19th century as a hobby and training tool of military men. Its creative ideals are about learning and sportsmanship; we play to understand conflict dynamics, learn culture and science, and grow in the contest.​

Although this may often be ignored today, D&D remains one of the high achievements of wargaming.​

Yes! A thousand times yes!

I'm getting new ideas for my game already, just from pondering the manifesto. What if I made my Dungeon Fantasy dungeons (hexcrawls) increase in realism as you go deeper (northward), instead of increasing in difficulty? What if going deeper (northward) is how you give the DM permission to stop telegraphing danger, introducing monsters in small numbers before encountering them in large numbers, following the Three Clue rule, and avoiding effective-but-unfun traps and security protocols (like magical claymores that obliterate you with overkill, instead of just scaring you with medium damage)? What if player actions can signal the GM to stop doing the things that make it a fun game, and start doing the things to make it more of a realistic conflict simulator?

Those are my first impressions. What are yours?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Another idea I just had: if the GM's job at the end of the session is to "score" the players' actions by handing out character points (or XP)... then in some scenarios, I should hand out character points for retreating! If retreat is a wise course of action given what has just been learned about the opposition, I should reward that intelligent decision the same as any other intelligent decision.

This might also make it more interesting to GM, because you're taking on the role of critical reviewer/mentor instead of a neutral observer. Commenting on player decisions would be welcome and expected after the delve is over, instead of feeling like interference.

I would still want to rotate GMs frequently though. Now I'm excited to try this as a method for awarding CP. I can't wait to plop down a spellcasting dragon and then reward the players for wisely hiding until it goes away. (Or killing it, if they manage to do so through other wise decisions, such as luring it into traps they found elsewhere or having meteoric iron bodkin arrows.) I have the soul of both a designer and a teacher, so the chance to design scenarios for people to learn from excites me.

 

[niklinna]

I just stumbled upon this and have started reading. It looks pretty interesting!

 

[niklinna]

About halfway through and this bit in particular (in the chapter "Scenario Formation") really caught my attention:

I say this plainly: without player-controlled retreat, the game is broken; you might as well drop the players too and have the GM play on their own, as they are both choosing what’s behind the door and forcing you to open it.

And then the below (empasis in the original). There is some setup text before it, but I didn't want the quotation to be too long.

A common misunderstanding of the neutral arbitrator role ofthe referee is that you must be strict at all times. That’s what consistent and fair adjudication means, right? Being strict. However, the actual structure of the game is more complex than that, and while many referees seem to grasp the creative dynamics naturally, sometimes there is cognitive confusion: why do I feel like the game cannot possibly function if I keep being objective, simulative all the time? It’s because it can’t.

An extended campaign necessarily has two distinct phases that it switches between as we keep playing. One is the scenario play that we do when everything is set up and the hunt is on; the players maneuver smartly and the ref adjudicates strictly because we are now playing for real. The other phase of play is what happens in between the scenario play, the negotiation phase so to say: we haven’t quite established everything for the scenario to begin yet,and so we are still exploring, still negotiating what the next challenge will be like.

The player roles are fairly different in scenario play and in the negotiation phase of the campaign, so being explicitly aware of the shift can be very useful for improving your play. As a player,your job during a scenario is to think and maneuver to win the scenario. During the negotiation phase, there is nothing real to win or lose, there are no stakes on the table. This enables the players to maneuver more freely, to negotiate the terms of the next challenge with the referee.

And similarly, on the referee side: during scenario play, you are strict and fair, and play the situation as it falls. You don’t fudge probabilities or merely assume that things fall together in a convenient way. But when the game enters a negotiation phase, you as well have vastly greater discretion: the goal is scenario formation, and it cannot possibly happen if you pretend to be an unbiased machine.

I have to say, I hadn't been particularly interested in actually playing OSR games, although I've looked at a few. This text really piques my interest in playing, now. Reading this in conjunction with @Iosue's "Let's Read Moldvay Basic" thread has really illuminated a lot of things for me about old-school gaming.

 

[pemerton]

@niklinna

To me, the passages you've quoted read like a retrospective re-casting or re-theorisation of old-school RPGing. They remind me quite a bit of Torchbearer (which is probably not that surprising - I have at least some recollection of Eero Tuovinen posting about revisiting classic D&D around the same time that Luke Crane was doing so in the lead-up to Torchbearer).

 

[niklinna]

@niklinna

To me, the passages you've quoted read like a retrospective re-casting or re-theorisation of old-school RPGing. They remind me quite a bit of Torchbearer (which is probably not that surprising - I have at least some recollection of Eero Tuovinen posting about revisiting classic D&D around the same time that Luke Crane was doing so in the lead-up to Torchbearer).

Formal phases of play, as in Torchbearer, Blades in the Dark, and Dreamland, really make a lot of things clear. So much in early days was done implicitly and, even when documented, not formally called out as vital to play.

 

[pemerton]

I can't find what I'm remembering, but what I think I'm remembering is Eero Tuovinen posting comments on a Luke Crane Moldvay Basic actual play report on Story Games.

 

[pemerton]

Formal phases of play, as in Torchbearer, Blades in the Dark, and Dreamland, really make a lot of things clear. So much in early days was done implicitly and, even when documented, not formally called out as vital to play.

Moldvay was better in this respect than Gygax. Gygax's discussion of time in his DMG is a recipe for "muddy" play. Together with his stuff about reactive dungeons, it pushes towards the whole "choosing what's behind the door and forcing the players through it".

 

[Alzrius]

I hadn't heard of this before, but I'll definitely need to pick it up now!

 

[niklinna]

I'm up to the Appendices now, and so essentially done with the treatise. The last couple chapters under Advanced Matters (Refereeing Fundamentals, Creative Virtues, and The Nihilisic Void) were full of tart, juicy wisdom, tarter and juicier than what I quoted above. Tuovinen many times drove a needle right into a lot of the attitudes prevalent in gaming that have always made me very uncomfortable about GMing, and gave me the idea that I just might be able to do it, enjoy doing it, and help everybody at the table have an unabashedly good time. Very glad I've read this text, and I expect to reread good portions of it.