D&D General D&D isn't a simulation game, so what is???

[DND_Reborn]

Spell scrolls are just as odd as the spells. I can't think of any pre-D&D reference for how they work at all (unlike most other magic items). They're entirely an invention of the game as mechaniced, far as I can tell.

Whether an invention of the game or someone in pre-D&D literature came up with the idea first, what does that matter?

A game doesn't need a precedence for a mechanic to be valid. The idea is very reasonable IMO. You "write" symbols or runes of magic (which have been around in real life forever) with magical ink to store power which is released later, or you learn to study/pray/etc. to imprint those runes on your mind--to be released when the spell is cast.

It seems like you are putting value on something just because someone else thought of it first and used it in fiction, which frankly really has no bearing on anything as I see it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ah, good then. I mistakenly understood you to be putting the creativity of game designers in a separate category from the creativity of story writers. So that anything a game designer creates could not be based on imagined references beyond the mechanic itself (except where they can point to exact matches with pre-existing linear narratives.)

My take is that the game designers imagined a world that they felt was best represented by spells written on scrolls and consumed when used. A world that was just as valid imagined by Gygax or Arneson as it would have been by Dunsany or Leiber. Essentially, if the concern is that the game designers translated that world into forms accomodating the expected modes of consumption (or use), then every game mechanic under discussion suffers that objection.

The act of game design is an act of story-making: but rather than making one story in a world wholly controlled by the author, you are making every possible story that others might tell in that world. That is so effortful, that at present we experience a lot of limitations in what we can achieve. One take is that TTRPG designers have learned that it is more profitable to guide players to fabricate purposefully, than to provide that fabrication pre-authored for them.

Well...I don't view it quite that same way. Rather, I see that as only one way among several. More my perspective is that game designers can approach things from at least three perspectives, which map more or less to the three aforementioned categories:

1. Determine the nature the world should have, what is "in the fiction" as Dungeon World puts it, and then extrapolate from that nature the way that the mechanics should work. (This is, loosely, "simulationist" thinking in design.)
2. Determine the design goals you wish your game to meet, then develop what things must be "in the fiction" from that. (Loosely "gamist.")
3. Determine the felt experiences and tone that the game should evoke, and then establish both what is "in the fiction" and what the rules should be to facilitate that. (Loosely "narrativist.")

In my experience, both approach #1 and approach #2 don't really put much thought into the narrativist angle--that's an exercise left to the player, more or less. There may be some narrativist thinking, in that (for example) many games will intentionally make it hard or even impossible to earn money outside of doing ADVENTURE! things, not because that would break the game per se, but because that's not "what adventurers do," which is a narrativist way of thinking about game design--becoming a wealthy paper-pusher or spice merchant is not really something most games have interest in actively supporting.

And, to be clear, I think nearly every game engages in at least a little bit of all three, even games that are really overtly gamist. Further, sometimes a designer can be enacting two different things at the same time. E.g. "bennies"/"fate point" systems can lean pretty heavily into gamist territory, despite their inherent nature as narrativist tools (consider 4e's Action Points). Meanwhile, simulationist concerns undergird most desires for any economic stuff that is unrelated to what the vast majority of players will do (such as giving prices for various mundane trade goods like chickens and sacks of grain), but there can also be narrativist stuff wrapped up into that as noted above where "deftly execute large monetary trades" is theoretically a valid career path but is considered too boring to support, so the rules will often make it impossible to earn money (or at least meaningful amounts of it) from practicing a trade or buying and selling goods.

My overall point, above, was more that many of the design decisions in the earliest forms of D&D were essentially open about their gamist nature, but as the hobby spread, this gamism wasn't as noticed by a significant chunk of the audience. This has, for example, led to the situation where people see HP as meat points, despite Gygax explicitly and soundly rejecting that interpretation. They do so on the basis of purely narrativist and/or simulationist perspectives. Some say, "well no one would call it 'cure wounds' if there weren't wounds to be treated, right?" This is an inherently simulationist argument, essentially saying that no one would have called the spell "cure wounds" unless the world itself actually had the spell removing physical wounds on physical bodies, and thus regardless of what the mechanics or story say, there must be wounds present that are being healed by the spell. Narrativist critiques are rarer (mostly because 3e fans tend to like simulationism and 4e fans tend to like gamism), but I imagine the idea would be something like "injuries only have meaning if they're actually something that matters to the protagonists, something they can perceive; you can't see or touch a loss of 'luck,' so hit points have to be rooted in physical injuries, in order for them to actually be what drives characters to make decisions."

None of this passes any judgment about whether any of these three ideas is good or bad. As I've said elsewhere (possibly earlier in this thread), I actually value all three to some extent. Simulationism is just one I see as really cool polish on top of the other two things, rather than a critical component. Others, naturally, differ rather a lot on this front. All three approaches can lead to truly fascinating fiction content if leveraged well. E.g., I consider the 4e concept of "Investiture" to be a very clearly narrativist mechanic, driven by the fact that the designers wanted to give players the experience of deities who are distant for the general world but personally active for individual characters; yet it has the slight gamist touch that they specifically wanted to avoid the 3e solution of "yeah, your god can just pull the plug whenever they want." This mixed narrativist/gamist approach then leads in very interesting directions: the gods are not able to access the mortal world easily (leading to the development of the Primal Ban and the overall fleshing out of the Primal Spirits), and the gods have to be very picky about the people they choose to Invest in otherwise they might get burned and be unable to take their power back, and that then leads to finding an answer to the question "well...what happens if someone DOES turn coat?"

Which led to one of my favorite classes in 4e, the Avenger. It is not a grid-filling class, as some have asserted. Rather, it is the (gamist) answer to a question induced by narrativist thinking about the kinds of stories the designers want to tell regarding specific things (in this case, gods and faith). And I love that sort of stuff! Likewise, a successful simulation can potentially lead to very interesting game mechanics, and central game mechanics to which one has committed can lead to fascinating story potential if leveraged well, or spawn new simulation opportunities once the mechanic has been accepted by a potential player as a valid tool to be reasoned about rather than criticized.

 

[Hussar]

Whether an invention of the game or someone in pre-D&D literature came up with the idea first, what does that matter?

A game doesn't need a precedence for a mechanic to be valid. The idea is very reasonable IMO. You "write" symbols or runes of magic (which have been around in real life forever) with magical ink to store power which is released later, or you learn to study/pray/etc. to imprint those runes on your mind--to be released when the spell is cast.

It seems like you are putting value on something just because someone else thought of it first and used it in fiction, which frankly really has no bearing on anything as I see it.

No, but, he is making a point though. The mechanic is often added to the game, and then players and DM's come up with some sort of in-world justification for the mechanic, that was only there as a purely gamist element, and, then, over time, people start to incorporate these things into their experience and suddenly these mechanics become simulations because people have internalized these elements to the point that they can't separate the mechanic from the narrative.

Of course levels exist in the game world. Despite the fact that virtually no fiction actually works like this, and it makes absolutely zero sense most of the time - how exactly does killing orcs make me a better singer? - we actually incorporate the notion of levels and leveling in to the narrative of the game world and make it actually part of the simulation. Even though, as created, levels had zero to do with simulating anything and were a purely game element that allows us to use bigger monsters because using bigger monsters is fun. And, also, that nice little endorphin hit when you gain a level doesn't hurt as well.

From a narrative sense, or a simulation of anything, it makes no sense whatsoever. Doesn't correlate to anything outside of the game. But, it's a HELL of a lot of fun and, like HP, leveling is again, one of the most successful mechanics ever invented.

 

[clearstream]

Ahh, sorry, bit of confusion there. You most certainly can and do narrate effects in D&D as they happen. We all do it. But, we also mostly ignore fact that the narrations we make would make zero actual sense because they are so often contradicted a very short time later. But, in the process of play, we all have pretty much zero short term memory and no one remembers what you narrated two rounds ago, let alone in a previous combat. Yes, yes, I know you remember that one fight in clear detail, but, I'm more than willing to bet that if someone were to run a session with, say, four combats in it, then question the players at the end of the session about the details narrated during the combat, you'd get a pretty broad range of answers and most of them would be wrong.

Oh right, and yes I agree with your intuition that we elide. Where I resist the intuitions of some other posters, is that I work from a certainty that we always elide. We lean on our human ability to gloss, to ignore missing details, to say that a narrative is close enough for us to be carried along with it as if it were right.

You probably know about the many mechanisms in our brain to helps sustain such elisions. A few include filling in colour, prioritising only a few objects for processing, reordering the time sequence, scanning forward and revising backward (in reading written words), and adjusting edge-contrast. We humans are amazing at drawing upon a few cues and weaving an impressionistic narrative just good enough to persuade us.

Because it's all so fuzzy and wibbly wobbly, we just don't worry about it that much. Which is why we talk about making these coherent narratives out of D&D. It's not that the narratives are actually coherent, it's just that we all spackle over the inconsistencies and forget most of it immediately afterward anyway.

All RPG systems rely on elisions, reframings, overlookings, summarisings, subconscious revisions. There are no exceptions. It's all spackle over inconsistencies.

Which is where a sim system steps in. In a sim system, the system is guiding you towards making coherent narratives that can't be immediately contradicted. Because we actually have some idea of what happened and what didn't happen, we can more reliably narrate events. Imagine two systems where we do zero flavor narration, only the game terms.

D&D- hit 5 damage, hit 10 damage, miss, hit 5 damage, miss, miss, hit 10 damage target dies.
Sim system - Possible hit averted by parry. Hit 5 damage. Miss because of dodge. Hit 5 damage. Hit but damage Soaked no damage. Hit 5 damage. Target dies.

In the sim system, you actually have something, very, very bare bones, but something of a narrative there. In D&D, there's nothing until the target dies.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Both are causal chains. Both articulate some but not all change along the timeline. The difference is a matter of granularity, where in all cases the count of change omitted is far vaster than the count of change articulated.

A short example, just for the parry. Did it deflect downward, or upward? Does it leave the foes closer, or further apart. Are they both still centered, or is either off-balance? If off-balance, in what direction? How are feet moving to maintain or recover balance? If the parry is blade against blade, do both weapons have guards to catch the possible finger-slicing slides of sharp edges? If the parry is blade against lucerne hammer, is there a check for a break? What if the sword wielder has specifically faced hammer wielders many times? Do they have any better chance to avoid or mitigate that check? What level of exhaustion does the parry result in for each foe: how much longer can they fight just based on stamina alone, even if they are not hit? Does the parry slightly decrement each sides stamina? After the fight, how much time does it take to hone the blade? What sound did the clashing weapons make? How far did it carry? Does it carry further along a hall than in a windy forest?

There are so many details that could be articulated. It's just a matter of degree.

 

[clearstream]

Whether an invention of the game or someone in pre-D&D literature came up with the idea first, what does that matter?

A game doesn't need a precedence for a mechanic to be valid. The idea is very reasonable IMO. You "write" symbols or runes of magic (which have been around in real life forever) with magical ink to store power which is released later, or you learn to study/pray/etc. to imprint those runes on your mind--to be released when the spell is cast.

It seems like you are putting value on something just because someone else thought of it first and used it in fiction, which frankly really has no bearing on anything as I see it.

One can only envision that if Gary had dashed off a short-story in which there were spell scrolls that were consumed when used, then that would have been a valid reference. That he imagined a world in which spell scrolls are consumed when used, and articulated that in the form of a game, makes it invalid. I will speculate that interpretive dance (scrolls waving around, crumbling) would equally be dismissed out of hand.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It seems like you are putting value on something just because someone else thought of it first and used it in fiction, which frankly really has no bearing on anything as I see it.

The example is useful because it is, almost unequivocally, a situation where mechanics led fiction, rather than the other way around. IOW, a gamist choice ("spells would be overpowered if they could be repeatedly used, so they cannot be repeatedly used") caused the fiction to take a certain form ("when you use up a spell's energy, it is removed from your mind and you must wait until you are mentally refreshed to re-purpose that energy again.") Simulationism implies the opposite approach: one starts from fiction-state and extrapolates the rules that that state implies, or at least rules which naturally support that state of being occurring. This is the sense in which simulationism is like "physics of the world": actual physicists, like most scientists, make a hypothesis about how the world works, collect data and analyze it, and then strive to determine the underlying rules which must have existed in order for the observations to have appeared as they did.

This is not, at all, to dismiss either approach. Sometimes the "what is there, in the world?" question leads. Sometimes the "what story does this world tell?" leads. Other times, "what method lets us play in this world?" leads. The point is not to say that these things are bad because they were gamist; it is only to say that they were gamist, but have become simulationist because they have become presumed. It's sort of like how some audiophiles today want certain audio characteristics of older technology like vacuum-tube-based amplifiers, because those purely technological differences between older songs and modern-day songs have become part of the auditory experience, and their absence means the sound doesn't feel right even though it is theoretically "higher fidelity" or the like. This is obviously a loose analogy, but the idea still stands: a purely technical characteristic that has become part of the process/reasoning, and thus is now desired for simulationist reasons, even though the mechanic itself was proudly gamist in its day (though, of course, it wouldn't have been called by the term "gamist," since that came later.)

 

[clearstream]

The example is useful because it is, almost unequivocally, a situation where mechanics led fiction, rather than the other way around.

Are you making an assumption here that mechanics cannot be a form of fiction? A mode of creatively expressing an imagined reality?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Are you making an assumption here that mechanics cannot be a form of fiction? A mode of creatively expressing an imagined reality?

No? I'm assuming exactly the opposite. Rules can be (and, for some games, are) the means of producing an imagined reality in the first place. The imagined reality only comes after one or more rules have been chosen, in that case.

The mechanic was--with as much certainty as we can have about such foggy past events--developed because it served a game balance function. It then became a source of fiction: if this is how spells work, then the world must look like X and Y. Being gamist in origin implies no limit whatsoever on what can arise from the resulting mechanics.

You keep getting caught up on this and I just...I really don't understand it. All I'm talking about is where things got started.* Did the designer start from fiction they knew to be true, and then extrapolate mechanics from those truths? Did they start from mechanics they knew they wanted to include, and derive what that must say about other things? Or did they start from asking about the kinds of story they wanted to see happen, and thus determine what fiction is required, and/or what mechanics would permit or foster such stories?

Like...let me break down that second question there. "A mode of creatively expressing an imagined reality." Does that reality already exist, in the sense that you have invented it and could describe its characteristics to others? That sounds simulationist: you have a world that is, and must determine how it works from its nature. The imagined reality is "already there," and one describes how it goes about its business via creating new mechanics. In this circumstance, fiction leads mechanics; you know what the world already is, and the mechanics are whatever either must follow, or (more often) one reasonable thing that could follow from the world being whatever it is.

But, instead, it might be the case that the world doesn't exist, in the sense that you haven't populated it with any fictional entities or behaviors, and are instead going to figure out what entities or physical laws that world should possess given the rules you wish to use for it. That's a gamist way of doing things. It starts from the rules, and from that foundation, spins the world into fictional existence. The imagined reality is not "already there," instead it follows after the rule-making.

Spell scrolls, HP, and a variety of other things followed after their selection as game mechanics. That does not, in any way, reduce or deny the power as tools-of-reality-description of these mechanics. The existence of these things has, demonstrably, driven an enormous amount of fictional events--across thousands or even millions of campaigns across D&D's near-50-year lifetime. But there can be difficulties that arise from using tools with one clear and intended purpose in ways rather outside that intended purpose. Choosing to say, "This is a bedrock part of this fantasy, what rules does that imply?" is a perfectly valid thing to do, but it is worth remembering the origin.

Is the problem that I'm using the word "fiction" here? Like, do you think that I'm saying that it is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE to write a story inspired by game rules when I say "mechanics led the fiction"? Because that's not at all what I'm saying here.

*I should say, I did also allow for things to get started in more than one place. Gamism and simulationism are hard to mix, but it can be done. The other two possible pairs--G/N and S/N--generally mix relatively well, so it's entirely possible to do something like "I think point-buy games are neat and want to tell a story about tragic magical-girl protagonists, what fiction can I derive from this?"

 

[DND_Reborn]

No, but, he is making a point though. The mechanic is often added to the game, and then players and DM's come up with some sort of in-world justification for the mechanic, that was only there as a purely gamist element, and, then, over time, people start to incorporate these things into their experience and suddenly these mechanics become simulations because people have internalized these elements to the point that they can't separate the mechanic from the narrative.

His point was always looking for some precedence for the mechanic (seemingly in fiction), and my point was why is that necessary?

I have no idea what Gygax et al. were thinking or why. Maybe they did imagine the fiction of the system and try to find a way to represent it mechanically, or maybe it was mechanics first and in-world justification later. Again, who cares and why does it matter? Either way, the mechanics of the game should simulate some "in-game-world" concept, whether that concept is real-world (like jumping) or fiction (like spells).

When it comes to magic and fantasy, there is no real-world precedence unless you look at history "magic" as valid. We know from occult and religious studies that nearly all cultures have rites, rituals, runes, etc. So, in a fantasy game we can use such things. We can limit it in any fashion which we want to justify since it is purely fiction.

Now, when you want to look at things that happen in real life, like jumping, we have a precedence and need mechanics to simulate them.

 

[clearstream]

No? I'm assuming exactly the opposite. Rules can be (and, for some games, are) the means of producing an imagined reality in the first place. The imagined reality only comes after one or more rules have been chosen, in that case.

Typically the designer has in mind a world they are aiming to create. Not usually all of that world at once of course.

The mechanic was--with as much certainty as we can have about such foggy past events--developed because it served a game balance function. It then became a source of fiction: if this is how spells work, then the world must look like X and Y. Being gamist in origin implies no limit whatsoever on what can arise from the resulting mechanics.

That doesn't track with the history of D&D's evolution. It started with a desire to play out solider and gunslinger skirmishes. Based on what I've read, the skirmishes were pictured scenarios.

Like...let me break down that second question there. "A mode of creatively expressing an imagined reality." Does that reality already exist, in the sense that you have invented it and could describe its characteristics to others? That sounds simulationist: you have a world that is, and must determine how it works from its nature. The imagined reality is "already there," and one describes how it goes about its business via creating new mechanics. In this circumstance, fiction leads mechanics; you know what the world already is, and the mechanics are whatever either must follow, or (more often) one reasonable thing that could follow from the world being whatever it is.

What do you mean - already exist? Do you mean in the way Barsaive "already existed"!? Spells? Monsters? Which part has to already exist? What references are you counting as valid? Why?

But, instead, it might be the case that the world doesn't exist, in the sense that you haven't populated it with any fictional entities or behaviors, and are instead going to figure out what entities or physical laws that world should possess given the rules you wish to use for it. That's a gamist way of doing things. It starts from the rules, and from that foundation, spins the world into fictional existence. The imagined reality is not "already there," instead it follows after the rule-making.

The rules are a mode of expression. A medium. Think of it as like writing down your imagined stuff in words... but in rules instead.

I could paint a picture of a dracohamster I am imagining.
I could write down a story about a dracohamster I am imagining.
I can fabricate rules representing a dracohamster I am imagining.

These creative acts all have a reference - the dracohamster I am imagining. The dracohamster is expressed in different mediums. Paint, words, rules. I don't need to start from a painting of a dracohamster to express the one I am imagining in rules.