Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[Lanefan]

I’m pushing back on the idea that gamism needs the GM to provide challenges. All you need to play is a consistent and knowable board state, which a simulated world approach provides naturally. If the treasure is in a cave, and we have the means to burrow to it, then that should work because we’d expect that to work according to the rules of our world (following the simulation). In contrast are approaches that have hidden rules or state.

For example, if the GM wants to ensure certain narrative beats are hit or dramatic moments happen, then they’re going to adjust things to make sure the game works correctly. A clever ploy may or may not work depending on how it fits into things. That would be a hidden and unknowable board state. That approach to running is not bad, but it works against gamism because you don’t know necessarily what moves will be valid. Obvious things may work until they don’t. The incentive is to follow the cues.

Yeah, in my books that's usually bad-faith GMing even if-when done with the best of intentions.

In a sense, yes. A gamist is going to look at the possibilities and try to find the optimal path to their goal. Some times that’s going to look like something a bit subversive (such as burrowing to the treasure instead of going through the dungeon properly). Other times it’s going to look like the seemingly impossible (eliminating the dragon threat that no one can even approach). However, I would be careful with the word “exploit” to avoid negative connotations. I don’t think it’s about taking advantage for its own sake.

So, tying gamism to in-character ceeative thinking?

To me, that's simulation (as role-play) all day long: the players think like their characters would and, using the resources and abilities those characters have available to them, come up with an unexpected solution to a problem posed by the setting. Digging or mining through a wall to bypass the door they otherwise can't open is an obvious one to me, though it's truly amazing how rarely it gets proposed as a solution when that issue arises and the party has a Dwarf or other means of getting through stone.

IMO this only becomes gamism (in a negative sense) if-when it drifts into metagaming and players using knowledge or information their characters wouldn't have; because at that point you've got players trying to beat the game rather than players roleplaying their way to a creative solution.

 

[kenada]

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).

I was pushing back on the example given that a simulationist environment would not be a suitable place for gamism. The style of play you described is similar to how the OSR (the modern style not how people were playing classically) describes play, particularly in the Principia Apocrypha and Matt Finch’s A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. The fact that a simulationist in your model might include something for living world reasons doesn’t matter because the environment is still amenable to gamism. The world is still consistent. You can reason about it and use that plan your moves.

The core disagreement seems to be over how to define gamism. I find focusing just on fair challenges too reductive. It excludes the possibility of applying player skill to overcome unfair challenges. If the simulationists didn’t care for offloading so much on player skill, that leaves a gap in the model (assuming that this approach definitely wouldn’t fall under dramatism).

I used to consider myself a simulationist-immersive. Having things make sense was important. However, over the last few years, I’ve come to realize that I’m much more of an unalloyed gamist. I like figuring out how to overcome challenges. If they’re rigged to make sure they’re fair (especially when fair seems to mean an expectation that the PCs should win), then that’s not much of a test of skill. Where’s the fun in that?

 

[kenada]

Yeah, in my books that's usually bad-faith GMing even if-when done with the best of intentions.

So, tying gamism to in-character ceeative thinking?

To me, that's simulation (as role-play) all day long: the players think like their characters would and, using the resources and abilities those characters have available to them, come up with an unexpected solution to a problem posed by the setting. Digging or mining through a wall to bypass the door they otherwise can't open is an obvious one to me, though it's truly amazing how rarely it gets proposed as a solution when that issue arises and the party has a Dwarf or other means of getting through stone.

IMO this only becomes gamism (in a negative sense) if-when it drifts into metagaming and players using knowledge or information their characters wouldn't have; because at that point you've got players trying to beat the game rather than players roleplaying their way to a creative solution.

I’m less concerned about metagaming than I used to be. I find worrying about it too much can lead to pathological play. However, I do think there is a limit where the players do need to establish how their characters are able to do (or know) something, but I wouldn’t call failing to do that a form of gamism. I’d just call it poor play.

 

[Pedantic]

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.
I've not been precisely subtle about my dislike for skill challenges. They are a perfect way to get rid of all the gamist advantages of a simulated world. Primarily, they just aren't a very good game: the optimization paths are trivial or nonexistent, the design specifically avoids action compression, and the case for making any particular move over any other is unclear. I think they're a very good example of how you can have clear, specific mechanics for player choice that provide very little gamist engagement.

Beyond that though, the other primary advantage they remove is that you're basically designing a small dice game to play each time you create one. When they're "good" it's usually because someone has expanded or tweaked the basic dice game into a slightly more bespoke small game to play in the middle of your TTRPG. On the one hand, it's good to provide some design guidelines to GMs (because honestly a lot of what they've been doing over the years has turned out to be on the fly game design anyway), but also they're an inserted, alternative game you play in the middle of the game you're playing. A completed simulationist game should ideally run entirely on the combination of existing elements in different combinations to unfold various board states, and not require new games be inserted.

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

Just to tie back in to this discussion, I don't think any of these concerns around how anti-climactic solving this encounter on the 1st house is are gamist concerns, they seem to be entirely narrative critiques. It just doesn't matter when that chance pays off, it matters that the PCs evaluated their options and committed to this die roll as the most efficient plan, and had the opportunity to select other plans and chose not to. If the situation was exclusively "flip one of these 8 cards until you get a queen" that would be a problem, because that's not a game to begin with.

We're assuming the PC's evaluated say, tracking these people around town, researching their political positions and so forth, and collapsed that universe of possibilities down to "sneak into this house." They're done playing the "how do we find out who it is?" game after making that decision and have put it down to play a tactical game about getting into the house instead. Whether or not the stuff is there just affects if/when they'll pick up that first game again.

The core disagreement seems to be over how to define gamism. I find focusing just on fair challenges too reductive. It excludes the possibility of applying player skill to overcome unfair challenges. If the simulationists didn’t care for offloading so much on player skill, that leaves a gap in the model (assuming that this approach definitely wouldn’t fall under dramatism).

I've been putting the burden on the process of player decision making. Games, to my thinking, are defined by interesting decisions made in limited systems in pursuit of specific goals. The players must want a specific outcome, have levers they can pull that will meaningfully influence that outcome occurring, and must be able to articulate a mechanical preference for one course of action over another. For the game not to be trivial, more than one course of action must lead to the desired outcome, thus that players must discriminate between them. It is important that these distinctions are mechanical, and not thematic; the most common rules-lite system failure to "be a game" under this model is that the differentiation between choices has no mechanical impact on the outcome, only a narrative one. From a gameplay perspective, I fundamentally do not care if I made an stealth or persuasion check to get what I wanted, if the game amounted to "roll a 10+ on this die."

 

[pemerton]

I’m pushing back on the idea that gamism needs the GM to provide challenges. All you need to play is a consistent and knowable board state, which a simulated world approach provides naturally. If the treasure is in a cave, and we have the means to burrow to it, then that should work because we’d expect that to work according to the rules of our world (following the simulation). In contrast are approaches that have hidden rules or state.

For example, if the GM wants to ensure certain narrative beats are hit or dramatic moments happen, then they’re going to adjust things to make sure the game works correctly. A clever ploy may or may not work depending on how it fits into things. That would be a hidden and unknowable board state. That approach to running is not bad, but it works against gamism because you don’t know necessarily what moves will be valid. Obvious things may work until they don’t. The incentive is to follow the cues.

The fact that a simulationist in your model might include something for living world reasons doesn’t matter because the environment is still amenable to gamism. The world is still consistent. You can reason about it and use that plan your moves.

<snip>

I used to consider myself a simulationist-immersive. Having things make sense was important. However, over the last few years, I’ve come to realize that I’m much more of an unalloyed gamist. I like figuring out how to overcome challenges.

A thought or two prompted by these posts:

Who doesn't like things making sense - a consistent fiction - in their RPGing? Setting aside deliberately nonsensical set-ups like Toon and perhaps Paranoia, what are the possible exceptions? There are "funhouse" dungeons like White Plume Mountain, Castle Amber or even Tomb of Horrors, but these still assume consistency at the local scale (eg the inverted ziggurat room in WPM is silly, but you can still solve it by reasoning about how volumes of water will behave in a room of that shape). There is "arena"-style play (whether PvP or PCs v monsters/NPCs), but that seems almost a limit case of RPGing.

But there are different ways of providing consistency. This can be done by way of process - eg a carefully worked out set of resolution rules, a carefully worked out set of content-introduction rules (such as ecologically sound random encounter tables) - or by way of GM decision-making as things go along. The process approach can be consistent with gamist play, for the reasons you give - I say "can be", not "will be" because the processes may be so convoluted (imagine an interlocking system of yearly, monthly, daily and turn-by-turn event/encounter charts) that they are not in practice solvable. The GM decision-making approach tends not to be suitable for gamist play, again for the reasons you give - especially if some of the consistency that is maintained applies directly to the PCs and hence to the players' action declarations (eg "No one has ever broken in here in 100 years, therefore your solution that you've just come up with must have already been tried and failed, therefore I'm now retrofitting on an in-fiction reason why it fails" - I think someone upthread mentioned more-or-less this exact example).

But even the process approach, where the process is solvable, may not support gamist play. The processes may be too brutal in their consequences (whether these are deterministic or probabilistic consequences) to support gamism - RM/RQ-esque crit systems in combat can be an example of this. Or consider a process aimed at simulating a "living, breathing world": if it generates events/encounters that are primarily mundane, with little or no prospect of threat, reward etc, then there may not really be anything for the gamist player to do. In practice, I think this latter state of affairs is part of the explanation for the degenerate sort of play one hears about from time-to-time where the players rob shops, burn down farmhouses etc: the GM's focus is on presenting the "realistic" world of the village, the shopkeepers etc; the players' motivations are straightforwardly gamist; and disaster is the predictable result.

A slightly less degenerate/disastrous but similar sort of thing, that one hears about quite often (and that was an issue back in the late 70s/early 80s also), is groups who gave up on Classic Traveller because it's boring. This came up in a thread on these boards just this week! That also seems to me to be a result of a type of "living, breathing" sim approach on the GM's part simply not providing sufficient material for gamist players to work with. One can see the response to this unfolding over editions of Traveller: by 1982, the Traveller Book is including advice about how to use "illusionist" techniques that supplement or override the game's mechanical processes - both for content-introduction and for resolution - in order to make play more interesting. Of course, this undermines gamism in other ways - it's part of the high concept simulationist convergence of 1980s/90s RPGing that still reverberates today.

 

[kenada]

I've been putting the burden on the process of player decision making. Games, to my thinking, are defined by interesting decisions made in limited systems in pursuit of specific goals. The players must want a specific outcome, have levers they can pull that will meaningfully influence that outcome occurring, and must be able to articulate a mechanical preference for one course of action over another. For the game not to be trivial, more than one course of action must lead to the desired outcome, thus that players must discriminate between them. It is important that these distinctions are mechanical, and not thematic; the most common rules-lite system failure to "be a game" under this model is that the differentiation between choices has no mechanical impact on the outcome, only a narrative one. From a gameplay perspective, I fundamentally do not care if I made an stealth or persuasion check to get what I wanted, if the game amounted to "roll a 10+ on this die."

I like focusing on the player skill aspect because it sidesteps the thorny issue of trying to define what constitutes a game. It also applies more broadly. Even when the system doesn’t contribute much, one can still get something out of the experience based on how skillfully it’s approached.

I think yours is a fair preference, and either way seems to suggest a gap in a model that defines gamism based on the presence of (arguably rigged) fair challenges.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I've not been precisely subtle about my dislike for skill challenges. They are a perfect way to get rid of all the gamist advantages of a simulated world. Primarily, they just aren't a very good game: the optimization paths are trivial or nonexistent, the design specifically avoids action compression, and the case for making any particular move over any other is unclear. I think they're a very good example of how you can have clear, specific mechanics for player choice that provide very little gamist engagement.

Beyond that though, the other primary advantage they remove is that you're basically designing a small dice game to play each time you create one. When they're "good" it's usually because someone has expanded or tweaked the basic dice game into a slightly more bespoke small game to play in the middle of your TTRPG. On the one hand, it's good to provide some design guidelines to GMs (because honestly a lot of what they've been doing over the years has turned out to be on the fly game design anyway), but also they're an inserted, alternative game you play in the middle of the game you're playing. A completed simulationist game should ideally run entirely on the combination of existing elements in different combinations to unfold various board states, and not require new games be inserted.

I think you should learn more about the state of the art in 4e SCs c2012... Having run 1000s of them, I can unequivocally state that they are non-trivial and work quite well. I haven't created a 'new mini game' in many years, it's unnecessary.

Just to tie back in to this discussion, I don't think any of these concerns around how anti-climactic solving this encounter on the 1st house is are gamist concerns, they seem to be entirely narrative critiques. It just doesn't matter when that chance pays off, it matters that the PCs evaluated their options and committed to this die roll as the most efficient plan, and had the opportunity to select other plans and chose not to. If the situation was exclusively "flip one of these 8 cards until you get a queen" that would be a problem, because that's not a game to begin with.

And this is the perfect illustration! You're calling a simple mapping of SC mechanics problematic but then expound how a whole mini game of running around finding which house things are hidden in to better somehow. All while the flaw in it is obvious.

We're assuming the PC's evaluated say, tracking these people around town, researching their political positions and so forth, and collapsed that universe of possibilities down to "sneak into this house." They're done playing the "how do we find out who it is?" game after making that decision and have put it down to play a tactical game about getting into the house instead. Whether or not the stuff is there just affects if/when they'll pick up that first game again.
The core disagreement seems to be over how to define gamism. I find focusing just on fair challenges too reductive. It excludes the possibility of applying player skill to overcome unfair challenges. If the simulationists didn’t care for offloading so much on player skill, that leaves a gap in the model (assuming that this approach definitely wouldn’t fall under dramatism).
I've been putting the burden on the process of player decision making. Games, to my thinking, are defined by interesting decisions made in limited systems in pursuit of specific goals. The players must want a specific outcome, have levers they can pull that will meaningfully influence that outcome occurring, and must be able to articulate a mechanical preference for one course of action over another. For the game not to be trivial, more than one course of action must lead to the desired outcome, thus that players must discriminate between them. It is important that these distinctions are mechanical, and not thematic; the most common rules-lite system failure to "be a game" under this model is that the differentiation between choices has no mechanical impact on the outcome, only a narrative one. From a gameplay perspective, I fundamentally do not care if I made an stealth or persuasion check to get what I wanted, if the game amounted to "roll a 10+ on this die."

And yet the SC solution lets you do all of this, the PCs can even switch strategies and it will all 'just work's.

 

[pemerton]

If the simulationists didn’t care for offloading so much on player skill, that leaves a gap in the model (assuming that this approach definitely wouldn’t fall under dramatism).

I think yours is a fair preference, and either way seems to suggest a gap in a model that defines gamism based on the presence of (arguably rigged) fair challenges.

I hadn't worked out that the goal here is to show the incompleteness of the GDS framework.

To me, the "gap" seems to arise from the fact that it is based around a few paradigms rather than clear analysis of processes of play.

The paradigm for "S" seems to be Harn, the approach to Classic Traveller I've mentioned a few times in this thread, gritty RM or RQ, etc: purist-for-system resolution combined with "living, breathing" aesthetics.

The paradigm for "D" seems to be CoC, Vampire or some approaches to Ars Magica: "living, breathing" aesthetics combined with GM-fiat resolution of conflicts (that makes system-generated resolution of tasks somewhat irrelevant to the overall trajectory of play).

The paradigm for "G" I'm not sure of, but (in the eyes of critics) perhaps T&T and more traditional D&D modules or (in the eyes of fans) perhaps cleverly-approached Champions (build your PCs well, then overcome the opposition set up by the GM).

You're pointing to an approach that is not obviously close to one of these paradigms.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A thought or two prompted by these posts:

Who doesn't like things making sense - a consistent fiction - in their RPGing? Setting aside deliberately nonsensical set-ups like Toon and perhaps Paranoia, what are the possible exceptions? There are "funhouse" dungeons like White Plume Mountain, Castle Amber or even Tomb of Horrors, but these still assume consistency at the local scale (eg the inverted ziggurat room in WPM is silly, but you can still solve it by reasoning about how volumes of water will behave in a room of that shape). There is "arena"-style play (whether PvP or PCs v monsters/NPCs), but that seems almost a limit case of RPGing.

But there are different ways of providing consistency. This can be done by way of process - eg a carefully worked out set of resolution rules, a carefully worked out set of content-introduction rules (such as ecologically sound random encounter tables) - or by way of GM decision-making as things go along. The process approach can be consistent with gamist play, for the reasons you give - I say "can be", not "will be" because the processes may be so convoluted (imagine an interlocking system of yearly, monthly, daily and turn-by-turn event/encounter charts) that they are not in practice solvable. The GM decision-making approach tends not to be suitable for gamist play, again for the reasons you give - especially if some of the consistency that is maintained applies directly to the PCs and hence to the players' action declarations (eg "No one has ever broken in here in 100 years, therefore your solution that you've just come up with must have already been tried and failed, therefore I'm now retrofitting on an in-fiction reason why it fails" - I think someone upthread mentioned more-or-less this exact example).

But even the process approach, where the process is solvable, may not support gamist play. The processes may be too brutal in their consequences (whether these are deterministic or probabilistic consequences) to support gamism - RM/RQ-esque crit systems in combat can be an example of this. Or consider a process aimed at simulating a "living, breathing world": if it generates events/encounters that are primarily mundane, with little or no prospect of threat, reward etc, then there may not really be anything for the gamist player to do. In practice, I think this latter state of affairs is part of the explanation for the degenerate sort of play one hears about from time-to-time where the players rob shops, burn down farmhouses etc: the GM's focus is on presenting the "realistic" world of the village, the shopkeepers etc; the players' motivations are straightforwardly gamist; and disaster is the predictable result.

A slightly less degenerate/disastrous but similar sort of thing, that one hears about quite often (and that was an issue back in the late 70s/early 80s also), is groups who gave up on Classic Traveller because it's boring. This came up in a thread on these boards just this week! That also seems to me to be a result of a type of "living, breathing" sim approach on the GM's part simply not providing sufficient material for gamist players to work with. One can see the response to this unfolding over editions of Traveller: by 1982, the Traveller Book is including advice about how to use "illusionist" techniques that supplement or override the game's mechanical processes - both for content-introduction and for resolution - in order to make play more interesting. Of course, this undermines gamism in other ways - it's part of the high concept simulationist convergence of 1980s/90s RPGing that still reverberates today.

I would just point out that narrativist concerns also weigh as much as gamist ones! An overly uninteresting 'realistic' world leaves no room for interesting story or drama, except of a mundane domestic sort I can easily get by arguing with my wife about pretty much anything.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was pushing back on the example given that a simulationist environment would not be a suitable place for gamism. The style of play you described is similar to how the OSR (the modern style not how people were playing classically) describes play, particularly in the Principia Apocrypha and Matt Finch’s A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. The fact that a simulationist in your model might include something for living world reasons doesn’t matter because the environment is still amenable to gamism. The world is still consistent. You can reason about it and use that plan your moves.

I was about to discuss what GDS gamism was defined as, but in your next paragraph...

The core disagreement seems to be over how to define gamism. I find focusing just on fair challenges too reductive. It excludes the possibility of applying player skill to overcome unfair challenges. If the simulationists didn’t care for offloading so much on player skill, that leaves a gap in the model (assuming that this approach definitely wouldn’t fall under dramatism).

Its hard to describe the difference, but GDS gamism very much was supposed to be challenges that were, perhaps, not fair but at least interesting. To what degree that applied to "come up with a very limited number of workable solutions and then the problem is trivial" is a matter of perspective, but I'm not sold all that many people find that interesting. Which gets back to the question of how much PCs have access to the the tools for the job, and in some cases, how a gamist will view some on-the-fly assumptions--a GDS Simulationist wouldn't hesitate to patch a hole if it didn't seem like a logical flaw in the problem so much as just something he hadn't thought about. That'd have been pretty bad form for a pure Gamist. If a simulationist of the stripe back then decided that any active opponents involved would have thought of it even if he didn't, he wouldn't even blink about addressing it--and a lot of the people playing with that view wouldn't think anything of it, because to them not doing so would have violated the setting integrity.

I used to consider myself a simulationist-immersive. Having things make sense was important. However, over the last few years, I’ve come to realize that I’m much more of an unalloyed gamist. I like figuring out how to overcome challenges. If they’re rigged to make sure they’re fair (especially when fair seems to mean an expectation that the PCs should win), then that’s not much of a test of skill. Where’s the fun in that?

See above however. I'm suspecting that sort of "fix it after the fact because it doesn't make sense" would go across badly.

(If not, it just means you're a simulationist/gamist hybrid by GDS standards, which wouldn't be shocking; as I noted, purists were never as common in the wild as they were on RGFA.)_