Flavour First vs Game First - a comparison

[Delta]

And then you add a gamist system that allows heroes to take away this lethality or at least control it better...
On top of that, you could add "narrative" powers that allow the player to narrate certain events in the game...

Yeah, I honestly don't see any difference in the way you describe those two cases. To me, they both look narrative. And so it goes.

 

[Dinkeldog]

I don't know how to put a strongly enough worded warning into this thread.

Knock out the combative crap or the thread's over and you'll be taking a nice long vacation. If you're unsure if this means you, chances are it does. If you think you're skirting the borderline, don't. Get this back to a civil discussion post haste or we're done here.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yeah, I honestly don't see any difference in the way you describe those two cases. To me, they both look narrative. And so it goes.

Well, they are a resource that have to be managed. A game like Torg relies heavily on managing your possibilities, and the real narrative aspects are usually relegated to subplot cards in the drama deck. That's why I consider such a mechanic more gamist. But maybe they are indeed a mix of both, because it gives the player influence over the game world and the power to narrate things differently then the "simulation" rules would suggest.

 

[Delta]

Hmmm. And here I thought the thread had gotten noticably more civil over the last two days. Whatever.

MR, thanks for the reply, later.

 

[pemerton]

I agree that my ideas would probably cause the game to fail to reach its design goals. I feel that 4E is a game first system and its mechanics are much tighter than previous editions with the goal of delivering tactical enjoyment in series of encounters. My ideas would probably interfere with that.

It's interesting that people have quite different persepctives on the sort of pleasure that 4e is apt to provide. I don't think of it as offering tactical enjoyment per se - I can probably get that better from MtG or a wargame in the true sense - but rather flavour enjoyment in which the tactical play is part of that flavour (analogously to the violence in better super hero comics, which is not the represented, but rather the representer of/metaphor for conflict of some other, deeper sort).

 

[pemerton]

As usual great analysis Pemerton of the hp spectrum from a variety of games.

I like your last paragraph as it hits the heart of the issue across the spectrum of games.

Thanks.

It's funny, because to me, gamism might be associated with "anti-narrativism", and therefore I'd prefer the former. But to other people gamism might be associated with "anti-simulationism", and therefore they'd prefer the latter.

I'm inclined to agree with Ron Edwards, that some mechanics are apt to suit either gamist or narrativist play, because they give the players a degree of metagame control which can be used either to display skill (by gamists) or to control the story (by narrativists).

RQ and Classic Traveller are the purist simulationist systems that I know - even character build is determined entirely by dice which model in-world likelihoods of various career paths - and I can't imagine getting much gamist satisisfaction out of either of them. And any narrativism with them would have to be very vanilla, I think.

Iyou could create a system that simulates combats with a high degree of detail and a "realistic" level of lethality. And then you add a gamist system that allows heroes to take away this lethality or at least control it better. The system can stay "gamist", or you pretend they actually represent something in the in-game world- maybe the characters extraordinary ability to manipulate the flow of quantum probabilities (A Torg-Like approach, and apparently also something the James Bond RPG used, if I read MerricB correctly).

But are the Fate Points a gamist system? Or a narrativist one? Or neither? It depends on what the players want to do with them and how the reward system works. If you have gamist players, however, then there is a good chance that they will become a desirable currency, and that will certainly put the robustness of the system to the test!

In HARP, Fate Points are earned in a metagame fashion, for clever ideas, good roleplaying and spectacular stunts. This is a hard system to play in a gamist fashion, and in fact probably best-suited to a sort of high-concept simulationism - if you play your PC in a genre-appropriate fashion, you get Fate Points. In this rules variant for HARP in the Guild Companion, I suggested a way of making Fate Points the primary reward currency in HARP, which would make them more of a narrativist device - being earned for achieveing player-defined PC goals, and being able to be spent in the pursuit of such goals. Still hard to play (and break) in a gamist fashion, I think.

On top of that, you could add "narrative" powers that allow the player to narrate certain events in the game (be it the enemy moving into a position so that he can use his 5 pressure point exploding heart technique, or him deciding that he has a previously unestablished connection in the foreign place the party has to visit) - which again could be modifying quantum probabilities, or just a game mechanic with no attempt to simulate anything.

Your "narrative powers" sounds like my "fortune in the middle". This is not unique to narrativist play - as I've repeatedly noted, 1st ed AD&D uses this approach for saving throws - but it is particularly well-suited for narrativist play. In hardcore gamist play players are likely to drop the narration, at which point the game may come close to morphing out of an RPG and into a tabletop wargame/boardgame with a bit of fantasy flavour.

Or if you invert the question and put the shoe on the other foot:

"Is it an objection that the mechanics inform the players and GM what has happened in the game?"

The answer is - perhaps, if the players and GM want the mechanics to set parameters while leaving them freedom. See my remarks above about RQ or Classic Traveller as an example of games in which the mechanics do a lot of the work, in a way that some players may not like.

Herremann: I've never been seriously injured.

To an extent this is true of any edition of D&D in which a PC has never died, as in any such game the PC became conscious reasonably quickly and had no serious performance
penalties (even in 1st ed AD&D a week's rest was enough to get back to full performance). Certainly in AD&D the action resolution mechanics will never lead to a weapon permanently maiming or severing a limb unless a sword of sharpness is wielded.

How to handle this? I think it's best written off as a genre convention. If you want satisfactory genre play, it's helpful for the PCs to not "break the 4th wall" and comment on these conventions (which, for example, superheroes don't do in comics). Conversely, if you don't want these conventions then play RQ or RM or C&S or . . . D&D has never been for grim and gritty play of that particular sort.

 

[BryonD]

The quality of the story depends on the players telling it.

Yep.
So you must make certain that the mechanics you choose can keep up with the quality the players establish.

 

[Raven Crowking]

The mechanics simulate nothing full stop.

That works for me, although I disagree with your statement about the saving throw mechanics in 1st ed AD&D (or any edition D&D).

As Lost Soul has repeatedly pointed ouot, the hp/healing surge mechanics establish certain constraints on what can (consistently with the rules of the game) be pretended to be the case in the imaginary world.

If, and only if, you are either willing to accept Schrödinger's Wounding. Or, as you put it:

Some players want mechanics that deliver the story. Others want mechanics that set the parameters for the story. 4e will not do the first job.

and

I agree also that 4e is qualitatively different in embracing the non-simulationist character of the hp mechanic.

Again, while I disagree with your comments about 1e, the above shows that you understand what I am saying. The only difference is, of course, that I am claiming specifically that the 4e mechanics interfere with setting the parameters for the story, if and only if you wish to be able to tell the story in real time. I.e., to tell the story in real time, for the sort of gaming I enjoy, you must be able to determine what the mechanics mean in real time. As with Schrödinger's cat, I can only tell what hit point loss means in the game world after I have looked into the box -- and I cannot look into the box until after the hit point loss is restored.

Obviously, if Schrödinger's Wounding doesn't bother you (and, for some, it may rock the boat), then there is no problem (for you).

But I predict that this, and things like it, cause a significant enough problem for a significant enough fraction of the gaming populace that either 5e or 6e will claim to fix it.

I could be wrong. Time will tell; it always does.


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

Hang on a sec - maybe I'm just know seeing what you are saying. Let me try to put it in my own words.

Hit points are pretty abstract; they don't have any objective meaning in the game world.* Because they are so abstract, they don't define what is happening in the game world. When I'm describing hit points - either loss or recovery - I'm just "pretending" to give them meaning.

I'm unclear on why you say "pretending". There are no mechanics for whether or not my PC hates an NPC or not, so I'm just pretending that he is, but it's not like it has no meaning. Maybe I'm not getting what you mean though.

* - Now I see they have a little, and that is that they determine how much staying power you have, how much fight you have left in you.

Not quite. In order to understand what I am saying, you have to disentangle the game from the game world for a moment. "Hit points" have no objective meanining in the game world (they do in the game).

Hit points, in previous editions of D&D, represent something that has objective meaning in the game world in real time. This means, when I take a hit, I can compare it against my remaining hit points, and I can determine what it represents. Despite the apparent controversy over the naming conventions of cure spells, no future events within the game force me to decide between altering my description of the wound I took (on one hand) or claiming to still have a wound that has no game meaning (on the other).

Conversely, in 4e, when I take hit point damage, I don't know what it represents at the time I take it. If I declare it is an actual wound, and I use a healing surge later, I am potentially stuck with either (a) my wound having disappeared without having actually been healed, or (b) claiming to still have a wound that has no game meaning. If, on the other hand, I declare that it represents no wound, and I have magical healing later, I am potentially stuck with the healing of a wound that doesn't exist.

Compound this with the sheer absurdity of Inigo being able to put his hand over his wound and soldier on, not once, but repeatedly, day in and day out. And, unlike in The Princess Bride, there is never a cost for that wound. Unlike in Die Hard, he never is taken to the hospital at the end of the movie. He just goes to the next dungeon, fresh as a daisy, ready to do it all over again.

That just doesn't work for me.

I'm not saying that, if it does work for you, you should stop playing the game. Obviously not. If it works for you, it does work for you. But I am saying that, when one claims that it doesn't work for him, and gives you the above reasons, that they are valid reasons.

It is one thing to say, "Yes, this happens, but it works for me" and another to say "No, that doesn't happen". When people pointed out problems with 3e, other people said "No, that doesn't happen"....until WotC pointed out the same problems. Then, many of those folks agreed that it was obvious that it happened, and were happy that 4e was going to "fix" those problems.

I didn't say that the game was wrongbadfun and that you shouldn't play it. I said that these elements cause this problem, and that this problem makes the game unsatisfying for me. It is a real problem. All game systems have real problems. Those who enjoy a game system usually do so because the problems the system has are easy for them to ignore.

And that's a good thing, btw, when playing at the table.

Pretending that the problems don't exist when they are being discussed in an open forum, OTOH, is not. IMHO at least.


RC

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

But I predict that this, and things like it, cause a significant enough problem for a significant enough fraction of the gaming populace that either 5e or 6e will claim to fix it.

You might be right, but one thing I find notably - it really seems only to be a problem if you spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. And in most games, I just don't. All this discussion about narrative vs simulation vs gamist has usually proven meaningless at the game table - I just don't think in any of that terms when I am playing the game. I don't dissect all the rules.

What gets in the way far more often are "clunky" mechanics - mechanics that take long to resolve or cause the DM or the players headaches. Or "unfair" mechanics, that put one participant (NPC or PC) in extreme favor and make the contribution of the other meaningless.
Or mechanics that limit how an adventure can unfold, or what kind of characters are "required" for effective play.

So, if a revised hit point / healing surge mechanic will really stand high on the 5E/6E agenda, I suspect it will be because the head-aches and the imbalances have gone for the most part. Maybe 4E is already there. I certainly hope so, since the designers definitely tried to address all these issues. But nothing is ever perfect.