Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[kenada]

Let me give an example of gamist creativity. There is a board game called Stone Age. It’s a worker assignment game where you play as a stone age tribe. You need to gather resources to build things and meet your tribe’s needs (i.e., collect food) to win the game (by accumulating VP). If you don’t feed your tribe, you lose VP. This suggests if you get enough VP every turn, you can offset the loss. I’ve played that strategy and won. It was silly (because of the big swings in VP every turn), but the rules of the game allowed it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh I don't think that's true at all. It's important that board state be honest, in that you can trust you can take any legal game action and the game will proceed, but you want the board state to be interesting so that your decisions actually need to be good. The problem here is conflating resolution and scenario design in challenge*. It's actually really hard to make a game system that will in and of itself produce interesting challenges (and frankly, might actually be impossible if the nature of the game doesn't allow you to set the game end and/or victory conditions), which is where GMs generally come in.

It's just that you need a quite strict division between their role in creating a world, their role in acting as the non-player agents in that world, and their role as an adjudicator of the rules. Perhaps it would be best to set that division as a principle, a guiding force for how the world/game should be created/adjudicated, even if it is impossible to achieve as a perfect reality.

*A DC 25 climb check is not more or less challenging or interesting than a DC 20 or a DC 10 one, but a castle patrolled by animated armor, made of superheated lava might is probably more challenging or interesting (though maybe not, depending on the PC position/level approaching it) than a bandit fort with a wooden palisade.

And to my mind this is the exact function of a GM in, say, Dungeon World. By constructing the game's process of play/agenda/principles in such a way as to surface the player's notion of the win conditions, and even reinforce them (IE the player creates bonds and decides when they are discharged, granting XP) then it all works really well. The GAME is pretty robust, and the GM has a specific set of conditions under which they offer up additional challenges. Those challenges are, mechanically, overcome via deployment of certain resources and a fixed dice rolling mechanism that doesn't offer the GM any chance to put their thumb on the scales. The GM can set the scale and thus the in-story pacing of the action, but that has relatively little impact on play in a mechanical sense. Since the GM doesn't explicitly create a world (they do have a significant role here, but it isn't dominant), they are not set up as the adjudicator of the rules (the table is), and while they do play the NPCs, as I said above, the most the GM can do with that is focus on or avoid certain types of fiction (IE a GM could play all the NPCs as aggressive belligerent jerks who constantly provoke fights or something like that). Even that is, at the very best, treading the line into bag GMing.

The one thing PbtA (and basically the same thing goes for other similar systems) won't do is lay off on the PCs! They ARE the focus of the game. Frankly, I don't think there's any point in discussing that dimension anymore though. IMHO the opposite 'choice' leads to the same place anyway, because the PCs ARE the focus of the game, that is simply ground truth.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think it's irrelevant.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't gamism about deriving satisfaction from getting your skills tested (to the point where more, harder challenges can be considered are reward in of itself)? I don't see how succeding by a mere coincidence scratches that itch.

I don't think its a general thing. Like, its fine if you use 'Find & Remove Traps' in D&D and hey, you rolled low! Congrats, you disarmed it! But this is simply one very small increment of play, there's still a whole dungeon maze out there, and you just burned one turn of torches and got yourself a wandering monster check in return for getting past that trap. Had it gone off, you'd also have a dead thief (or a caster now short a valuable spell, etc.). We cannot judge these things in isolation, the design of an RPG is a thing entire. Since they are generally also 'unbounded' in a fictional sense, and mechanics are at the very least deployed in response to fiction, there's always the possibility of 'driving off the reservation' into a sort of scenario where a given game doesn't do this stuff very well. The other option being to just create a very niche game where the only options which can exist have been taken into account. This is definitely possible in things like journaling games and such, or things like Paranoia or Cthulhu Mythos games where there ain't no place Yog-Sothoth isn't coming for you...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think we draw very different conclusions from this. I generally contend this is why simulation is necessary, or you're stuck doing what @loverdrive describes or you can't describe an impartial board state.

There are no impartial board states, and simulation, as you call it, is MUCH TOO WEAK to provide that. The most robust way I've found in my 47 years of RPG play/GMing is spelled out principles and process of play that leads to it, coupled with mechanics which are at least similar in some respects to @loverdrive's notion of fiction agnostic. As I've said, PbtA pretty much does all this, and it works.

I think you're making a mistake in placing the satisfaction in resolution instead of declaration. It's not particularly important how the actions play out, in the same way it's not particularly important who actually wins a board game. Instead, we all agree that we will try to win, because that gives context to make decisions in, and the pleasure comes in using that context and a limited system to make those decisions as best as possible.

The pleasure is in being given choices, and making the choices which are most effective. Particularly when it requires complex decisions with multiple levels of impact. You need wincons, losscons, and a real challenge. One that is so shallow a die roll can short circuit it is not going to suffice.

 

[loverdrive]

I don't think its a general thing. Like, its fine if you use 'Find & Remove Traps' in D&D and hey, you rolled low! Congrats, you disarmed it!

I was talking about a hypothetical situation where there's this whole investigation that would under other circumstances be a pretty huge portion of gameplay, but was trivially won by a chance instead.

It's quite different from a single trap

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is very much where my sim credentials fall down. I love littering my wholly complete, self-contained worlds with all kind of surprisingly level appropriate problems, admittedly mixed in with whatever else you know, should be there. If my PCs get any advantage over the "average" adventurer, it's that they're lucky enough to rarely find themselves in environments entirely lacking something within their paygrade.

Well, one has to remember that the people that developed the RGFA GDS included on both the simulationist and dramatist side people who were more hardcore about it than anyone I've seen in this thread; not all of them were, but enough to make it clear why they were looking at ways to explain why a lot of game design at the time was really not serving their purposes.

(Only one of the Gamists leaned in as hard on that, but then, far as I can tell there were all of three of us throughout the period when that whole discussion group existed).

 

[Thomas Shey]

What you’re describing is similar to OSR play, which has gamist qualities. The answer’s not on your sheet, player skill over character skill, encounters are not necessarily balanced to the PCs’ abilities, etc. The only way such a setup would interfere with gamism is for the GM to block a particular course of action (or adjust things behind the screen to a preferred outcome), which seems like it would also be a violation of simulationist priorities.

There are some elements that overlap with OSR play, except the simulationists were not fans of offloading character abilities onto players all that much. And I think, honestly, that even most OSR proponents would be hesitant to go nearly as far as the simulationists of the time went. Too many of them are still too interested in making encounters at least interesting, which was not an intrinsic property the simulationists cared about; the interesting qualities were supposed to be about the setting and characters, and you set up any play benefit when deciding that, and beyond that it either generated interest or it didn't.

OSR types might not care about whether a situation was balanced, but they usually don't bother to drop things out there that are, from lack of a better term, pointless other than to show its a living world--other than the ones that, of course, share strong simulationist tendencies.

One of the critiques that was directed at GDS at the time was that it seemed to assume a sort of hard line between the agendas, which was a little unfair (almost everyone acknowledged you could mix them) but not entirely unfounded (because a nontrivial number of the dramatists and simulationists really didn't want to, in particular to get any icky gamism in their setups).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Another option is to smooth it over with adjudication, not every house requires something interesting, provided there's also less time invested, regardless of if they have security systems. The world might be a world, but the GMs narration still has to be a camera, and much as a documentarian does, what that camera focuses on is still an artistic question. The GM could brush past what's found if they try and brute force every house, or even impose a simulative consequence, framed as a question "Since you're brute forcing it, I can let you do that to find the correct house, but I demand X spell slots in exchange, to reflect the resources you're losing since every house on the block has security, otherwise you'll have to figure out which one is the one you're looking for since brute forcing it would be too time-consuming in terms of game time"

This is, for me, the huge advantage of systems like 4e SCs. 'Complexity 4, level+1 Skill challenge with failure consequences XYZ and levels A, B, C of success giving these specific outcomes' completely deals with all of it. This is a principled approach with an objective structure that is not subject to any of the foibles so far described. Should the PC's actions deviate wildly from a solution path, the worst that can happen is the GM might just call the whole thing. BitD style clocks will also work, but the SC being an entire specified process maximizes integrity of play.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

This is, for me, the huge advantage of systems like 4e SCs. 'Complexity 4, level+1 Skill challenge with failure consequences XYZ and levels A, B, C of success giving these specific outcomes' completely deals with all of it. This is a principled approach with an objective structure that is not subject to any of the foibles so far described. Should the PC's actions deviate wildly from a solution path, the worst that can happen is the GM might just call the whole thing. BitD style clocks will also work, but the SC being an entire specified process maximizes integrity of play.

Oh yeah, that's a consideration as well-- in our PF2e games, I'd probably use Victory Points (BITD style progress clock) to ad hoc a search process as a means of interfacing with the world in this way.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I was talking about a hypothetical situation where there's this whole investigation that would under other circumstances be a pretty huge portion of gameplay, but was trivially won by a chance instead.

It's quite different from a single trap

Yeah I was more explicating that, not opposing your statement. Those narrow hypotheticals are fine, but people try to overgeneralize them.