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

[pemerton]

@niklinna

Are there any highlights you can tempt/tease us with?

As you probably know, I think Eero Tuovinen is an insightful commentator on RPGing, so I'm sure what he has to say is worth saying.

 

[niklinna]

@pemerton here are just a few. The text is thick with tart juiciness!

From Scenario Formation:

Dynamic Balancing

One of the most fundamental design choices that D&D has undergone in its historical evolution is resolving the balancing problem by reducing the game into a skirmish combat boardgame; by treating the game as a series of combat encounters it is possible to calculate how many enemies of what type provide an “appropriate” challenge for a given adventuring party. The solution is unacceptable for the wargaming way, as the responsibility for the outcome moves from the players to the game system, and simulating a fictional scenario gets replaced with a formally defined boardgame.

The “balancing problem” is this: as the game is not fun when adventuring is too easy or too hard, how does the referee ensure that the level of challenge is just right? Early D&D largely runs on precedent benchmarking when it addresses the question at all: an appropriate challenge for a 1st level party is an encounter with 3d6 goblins because that’s how it’s developed to be. An adventure for a 4th level party is known to be such due to a combination of eyeballing and comparing to prior examples.

However, there is a more fundamental approach to the conundrum to be had. Dynamic balancing is an approach that arises from the explorative aspect of wargaming. What if, instead of assuming that the referee is responsible for game balance, we allow the group to discover scenario balancing through the activity of play itself?

(Goes on to discuss scenario/negotiation phases again.)

From Refereeeing Fundamentals:

D&D rules texts have from the start contained an intractable methodological error that experienced gamers know to account for, but that keeps tripping up newcomers. The error is in the way the great constellations of rules are presented as something important: it is imperative for the game that you study these rules, and that you apply them perfectly. And if the game is not as fulfilling as it should be, the fault is either in you for not applying the rules correctly, or in the rules for not being the Perfect Rules, so better go out and buy some more in the hope of finding that one true game. It is a broken cultural institution.

Rulings, Not Rules
But still, the rules do not and should not cover all situations. That’s been tried, and it doesn’t work for a true free maneuver game; player problem-solving will be stifled by the ever- growing stacks of rulebooks, and the mechanical formalisms prove ever more important in comparison to authentic, situational problem-solving. D&D too reliant on the rules becomes a turgid edifice where a spell will always be better than an idea, simply because the spell is written down in some rulebook, ready-made to have potent interaction with every other rule, while the idea has nothing except the players on its side. If those players are unwilling and unable to defend their ideas against the rulebook, then the rulebook will win every time.

The Game Operates on Common Law
Rulings are produced by referees in a process very similar to how the judicial theory of common law produces law: we have a selection of rules texts (possibly arranged in an understood order of precedence), we have a history of prior rulings precedent, we have players facile in this corpus of law, and that all enables the referee to produce unbiased rulings based on the fundamental values that they are trying to uphold. Something like this:
Respect the players.
Respect the challenge.
Respect the simulation.
Respect the precedent.
It’s actually spooky how good D&D refereeing seems to align with judicial theory, particularly common law, in so many things. You can just apply ideas like say the bright-line test (“a good rule is easy to apply to the facts”) or balancing of principles (“sometimes the ref has to account for multiple contradictory values when making the call, finding the best compromise”) directly to the game. I’m not even a lawyer, and I still see it.

From Creative Virtues:

Egalitarian Refereeing
D&D refereeing has traits of a kind of carny huckster sociology in its cultural heritage. There is an underlying idea of the referee being a wonderful wizard who lets the players enter his magical world. His ways are mysterious, the rules of the game ever-fleeting and judgments arcane. The other players are encouraged to treat the referee as an authority figure.

Looking at this after the fact, it seems to me that the carny referee model felt useful in part for the showmanship aspects, and in part because it allowed the referee to obscure the prep. The game could be more impressive with less work if the referee was set on a pedestal like this. It also helped establish an authoritarian organization of the play group, which is better than no organization at all.

But then, on the other hand, there are also problems here. The huckster dynamics encourage player infantilization, referee cheating, and lack of long-term accountability. And let’s not forget the power struggles, the idea of adversiality that may come to be associated with the referee’s position.

I'll stop there, but the last chapter, The Nihilistic Void is also tart and juicy. It basically says that in the wargaming way, your character is going to end, by death or retirement, so accept that fact and be ready to start over at level 1 at any time. But of course it says more than that, too.

 

[niklinna]

Okay I can't resist posting some really tart bits from the glossary:

Adversial GMing is a heterodox old school D&D doctrine that construes of the game as being a wargame conducted between opposed sides, with the adventuring party on one side and the GM on the other. The idea is not very popular, and is more viewed to be a creative difficulty when a player holding adversial views tries to play with others.

Balancing test is common law legal jargon for a situation where the judge has to make a ruling on a case that involves the opposition of two or more legitimate interests: the ruling has to be found in a compromise of interests because it is impossible to satisfy all relevant principles perfectly.

A D&D referee, being a type of judge, is often faced with having to perform balancing tests as well; it is common for social obligations, pedagogical interest, creative preferences, fairness, and more to come to logger-heads. The defining feature of a balancing act is that I cannot give a qualitative precedence for these various values in a ruling situation: I can only advise you to quantify the various stakes and seek a ruling that preserves great value while sacrificing minor value.

Game Balance is a lie. Or rather, it is a game design concept that applies poorly to the wargaming way, so you get to spend a lot of time addressing thought patterns surrounding this rather dominant concept of gaming culture.

Procedural hygiene is a refereeing practice where you intentionally choose methods, procedures, and rules that reduce the possibility of unconscious bias in referee decision-making. Not merely the absense of corruption, but the avoidance of even the possibility. For example, pre-committing to rolling random encounter checks every Turn is more hygienic than choosing to do it when you feel like it because the latter involves a greater chance of inappropriate bias in the decision.

Realism is a traditional bugbear of RPG theory (and art theory in general, really), a word that can be used to mean just about anything. When I use it here, realism is the creative value of capturing a facet of reality in art. You are engaging in “realism” when, given the opportunity, investigation of reality is given precedence over other possible values such as genre emulation, rule of cool or romantic idealization. Realism is the position of anti-dramatism.

 

[niklinna]

And this stinger from Further Reading:

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977) was enormously influential in its time, but I would characterize it as a matter for advanced study today, a source of variations more than the foundational text it was back then. Full of half-baked and outright bad ideas, AD&D should be taken with a grain of salt.

 

[pemerton]

@niklinna

Very interesting - thanks!

 

[clearstream]

@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).

You're right. From the back cover "For best results, study Muster alongside the old school D&D rules text of your choice." The concepts fit well with games such as TB2 and WWN.

Interesting in particular to read in tension with Situationist ideas such as that (as I also quoted elsewhere this morning)

The element of competition must vanish in favour of a more authentically collective concept of play: the communal creation of selected ludic ambiences. The central distinction made between play and everyday life, which keeps play as an isolated and temporary anomaly, must be surpassed. Johan Huizinga writes, “Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life, [play] brings a temporary, a limited perfection.” [8] Everyday life, which was previously determined by the question of survival, can now be rationally controlled (this possibility is at the heart of every conflict of our time). Play, radically breaking with a delimited ludic time and space, must invade the whole of life. Perfection cannot be its endpoint, insofar as this perfection signifies a static construction opposed to life. However one can propose to push the beautiful chaos of life to its perfection. Eugénio d’Ors considered the Baroque to delimit once and for all “the vacancy of history”, and the organised afterlife of the Baroque will hold a major place in the coming reign of leisure

 

[clearstream]

@pemerton here are just a few. The text is thick with tart juiciness!

From Scenario Formation:

From Refereeeing Fundamentals:

From Creative Virtues:

I'll stop there, but the last chapter, The Nihilistic Void is also tart and juicy. It basically says that in the wargaming way, your character is going to end, by death or retirement, so accept that fact and be ready to start over at level 1 at any time. But of course it says more than that, too.

Tuovinen has an article on the "sacrament of death" that is worth reading on this last (nihilistic void).

But I have to also quote (from much earlier in the book)!

Neutral referee The Game Master is a referee; their task is to prepare a challenging scenario and conduct it fairly to whatever outcome. Teaching the rules, and adjudicating the events.The referee does not have a plan for the outcome of the game. They’re not responsible for the outcome, and therefore there is room for players to have agency.The referee is not an authoritarian master. They are a functionary of the game, not your social superior. You are learning to dance together.