D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[soviet]

Would you say "gamist" is a good label for competitiveness, if its contents are only competitiveness? What might be it's other contents, if it has any?

I'm not sure that competitiveness is necessarily a good summation here. Sure there can be an element of competition, either between players or between the player group and the GM, but it's usually very friendly and sportsmanlike. I think 'challenge' might be more apposite - stepping up to the plate and being tested. There is a performative element to this as well, which can tie in with some aspects of modern day games being streamed for an audience and discussions earlier about 4e providing licence to 'go off' and grab the spotlight by performing some spectacular combo to beat your enemies decisively.

 

[Hussar]

I have to say, I see basically no evidence of "story now" RPGing in what I read about 5e D&D play. If it's happening, it's well under the ENworld radar as far as I can tell!

And, let’s be honest, other than a bit in 4e, it’s never really been a part of DnD. It’s just that after 4e sort of dabbled in Nar play, there is a REALLY vocal opposition to anything even adjacent to Story Now mechanics in DnD.

 

[clearstream]

I have to say, I see basically no evidence of "story now" RPGing in what I read about 5e D&D play. If it's happening, it's well under the ENworld radar as far as I can tell!

I agree with that. At most, 5e offers a faint nod to story-now (as I have said, TIBFs, Inspiration, and wording around those in PHB and DMG.)

Could 5e be played as story-now? Given some premises. Given one grasps and upholds TIBFs and Inspiration in just the right way. Using several of the options in the DMG (e.g. for progression.) And of course, given that DM and players conspire to lean into that mode.

Should 5e be used for story-now? On the one hand, I feel there are plenty of alternatives far better designed for that. On the other hand, supposing a group loved specifics of 5e such as one of its game-worlds, the kinds of characters they could play, its metaphysics, all those sorts of details, then maybe that group would want to make some decisions and possibly do some homebrewing to use it that way. I'm kind of curious how much design effort it would take to land somewhere effective?

 

[pemerton]

One possibility I'm leaning toward is that Edwards defined what he understood as "gamism", but that amounted to competitiveness (might as well have been called competitiveness), and that there are other goals or desires that gamers as gamers have, that were overlooked.

Edwards is clear - as per the quote I posted upthread - that competition is an optional extra, though an easy option, when step-on-up and challenge are in play.

Step on up doesn't have to be competitive (at least in Edwards's sense, of zero-sum competition).

I feel that I am not seeking to recite Edwards' definitions, arguments and conclusions, but rather to find my own. Thus we are not necessarily still talking about "gamism" in Edwards' sense, because at least one of us finds his definition unsatisfying.

My puzzle about this is that "gamism", as a label for RPGing, seems to have no meaning outside of the Forge usage. So what is the phenomenon you've identified, that you're working towards finding a definition for?

To clarify that by "success" I do not refer to commercial success, but success in play... success for its players. I agree with your sense that the two are not always aligned.

What RPG is not successful in your non-commercial sense, such that 5e D&D is especially noteworthy?

 

[clearstream]

I'm not sure that competitiveness is necessarily a good summation here. Sure there can be an element of competition, either between players or between the player group and the GM, but it's usually very friendly and sportsmanlike. I think 'challenge' might be more apposite - stepping up to the plate and being tested. There is a performative element to this as well, which can tie in with some aspects of modern day games being streamed for an audience and discussions earlier about 4e providing licence to 'go off' and grab the spotlight by performing some spectacular combo to beat your enemies decisively.

Challenge works for me too. We're talking about something closely in the same sphere - oriented toward challenges. We can coin the word "challengist" then. CNS.

As I wrote the above few comments, I started to realise that this was really bothering me. The use of the label gamist for a definition whose contents are only - oriented toward challenges. The problem I think is that many, many people would identify today as gamers, and many, many kinds of activity today would be identified as games. Focusing on the former, their goals in playing games - even when not simulationist or narativist - are much wider than being tested against challenges. More than one of the games that most successfully satisfy gamers as gamers, do so by enabling expression.

If we want to continue with gamist (or at least, if I do), I really do feel that it is creative expression in some arena of proof (PVE, PVP, freeform, social) that is the most important thing about it. That is the appealing pay off for a gamist agenda. Architecting mechanics that are expressive without being degenerate is a true test of a designer's craft. It takes high-octane ideas.

Or I am also okay with challengist, but then perhaps one needs a four-fold model...

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yep. The theory strongly implies that incoherence is bad and to be avoided. I feel this is trivially untrue. Sure, different design desires may conflict, but this is not automatically so. One can achieve harmony and even have different elements support each other. It would be like saying that comedy drama is incoherent as it contains conflicting design goals of drama and comedy. And furthermore, of course one can also have conflicts between design desires that fall under same category in GNS, as the categories are incredibly broad and vague.

Sure. Can you give a good example, though?

 

[clearstream]

Edwards is clear - as per the quote I posted upthread - that competition is an optional extra, though an easy option, when step-on-up and challenge are in play.

Step on up doesn't have to be competitive (at least in Edwards's sense, of zero-sum competition).

Indeed, I'm conscious of the catches with competitive. "Challengist" is the better label.

My puzzle about this is that "gamism", as a label for RPGing, seems to have no meaning outside of the Forge usage. So what is the phenomenon you've identified, that you're working towards finding a definition for?

Unironically, a meaning outside Forge usage is a goal in itself for me. Also to call out that the Forge three-fold is really "CNS" as orientation toward challenges is the only content of gamist. I explained the phenomena in various posts above.

Ron Edwards - or "GNS" - is not a tool for predicting market success.

What kind of success do you think GNS is a tool for predicting? What are some examples of predictable failures?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Returning to the OP, given some statements in a previous post:

In the simulationist thread, folk called out this or that game or mechanic as gamist and therefore not simulationist, without having an appealing definition of gamism to sustain the disjunction. Ease of play and engagement (or interest) were called out. Does one therefore suppose that narrativist games are perforce not easy to play, and not engaging or interesting!? That seems unlikely. FWIW I am more drawn to the camp that do not count techniques (such as distribution of power) as necessarily welded to goals (such as resolution of premises).

Addressing this, it's not that narrative mechanics "aren't engaging," but they're engaging in a very different and, generally, much more "cerebral"/"slow-burn" kind of way. It's hard to have impactful ethical choices without sufficient buildup. In games specifically built for "Narrative" play, this issue (if I'm understanding things correctly) is handled by, more or less, keeping everything focused "in the now," hence the "Story Now" label, and thus provides impact via keeping up the ongoing tension of the current moment. You're always under threat, or pushed to make a snap decision and have to live with the results, etc., which creates tension. Giving distributed narrative power, again if I'm understanding this correctly, is what makes sure the players aren't just feeling constantly tense with no ability to respond; they are subject to tension, but they have tools to respond to that tension.

Gamism, on the other hand, might be seen as either requiring less build-up, or being more...basic, I guess, in certain senses. Chess or Go can still have extremely deep strategy and such, but you don't need to understand a whole bunch of subtle context and past history to know why a particular action is exciting or engaging. With a game, all you need to know are the rules (which are necessarily a-contextual, that's what they're designed to be) and the current state of play (which should be fairly visible to the audience). It's the difference between being dropped into the middle of a chess game or fútbol match, and sneaking into a theater in the middle of a play you know nothing about or jumping into an improv scene without any knowledge of the preceding events. It's not that there's zero engagement in one or the other, nor that gaming is in some objective sense "easier" or "harder" than making tough ethical decisions, but there's still some sense in which one is supposed to be able to quickly understand the state and stakes of a "gamist" situation, while it is difficult (sometimes impossible) to truly understand the state and stakes of a "narrativist" situation if you weren't there for those events.

So I wondered, if we say that D&D is gamist, what does that mean? And perhaps more importantly, in what ways is gamism appealing or valuable? Why is D&D gamist (if it is?) Some terms I thought of were fairness, balance, diversity, and creativity. I think many would argue for challenge or competitivenss, but that seems to me an unsophisticated idea about what gamism necessarily amounts to. Gamers who identify themselves as such may enjoy more cooperative play, for example. Not all require GM as adversary. Is gamism even one impulse?! Is it one mode, or many bundled into one just because of insufficient scrutiny or understanding.

Again, do we say D&D is gamist? What does that mean? And what are its appealing benefits?

Building off the above (assuming I haven't gotten lost in another conceptual cul-de-sac), we call D&D "Gamist" because, in general, the way that it sets "things you care about as a player" (stakes) is via clever, strategic manipulation of rules-elements in order to overcome a fundamentally numerical or strategic challenge, having logistical concerns as a primary motive, and a fundamental emphasis on some sense of "winning."

Now, before people tear into that as "YOU CAN'T WIN D&D THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT," I don't mean "winning" in the sense of terminating play with a permanent victor. I mean "winning"--what I called "success" earlier in this thread IIRC--in the sense of achieving a triumph, of rising to the challenge and proving yourself superior to it, of (as has been referenced several times in the thread) "Step[ping] On Up." Unlike with "Narrative" experiences, there really are "loss" conditions. This is why, for example, when I tell people that I don't have random, permanent, irrevocable death in my games, a LOT of them immediately leap to the (erroneous) conclusion, "oh, so your game is BORING because NOTHING MATTERS?" (please for the love of God don't interrogate me on this one, if you have questions PM me or go looking for posts by me using the words "irrevocable" and "death.") That kind of response simply, fundamentally, is not a criticism that could come up in a "narrative" game context in GNS terms, because "success" in that context, success at making moments of poignant drama or answering questions of moral/ethical/personal value, is kind of unrelated to whether or not characters can permanently die.

Simulationism, on the other hand, seems to have a very...distinct relationship with the concept of "winning" or "losing." That is, in general, "process" Sim can superficially resemble Gamism because of its heavy emphasis on understandable states of existence. There's a distinct consonance between the value "process" Sim puts on a cognizable world that runs on understandable rules (which is probably what most people mean when they say things like "system as physics engine") and the emphasis Gamism puts on a cognizable state of play that runs on understandable rules. The distinction, as I understand it, is that "process" Sim wants those rules to be as naturalistic and grounded as possible, and (in general) achieving the maximum amount of detail they possibly can while still being usable, while Gamism is totally fine with rules that flout IRL intuitions without any explanation other than "because that makes a better game."

On the other hand, "genre" Sim can superficially resemble "Narrative" in that, as frequently noted above, it literally comes out of stories and trying to generate the feel and experience of building such a story through improvisation. The main difference, if I've understood things correctly, is that "genre" Sim is really only interested in the "feel" or "milieu" and doesn't really give two figs about whether the process of play is forcing people to ask and answer tough questions or the like, so "success" in "genre" Sim terms means "did it evoke the right feelings/tropes while you played?" and "victory" is understood in a rather nebulous way as, more or less, "did the end result feel like a <genre> story?" E.g. if you're playing a supers game, did it feel like your adventures were like something that would occur in an actual comic book? If yes, success; if no, failure.

So, as you can (hopefully) see from this, Gamism (and to a certain extent "process" Simulation) in some sense "offloads" some of the investment work onto things that don't require you to be playing. They both heavily use comparatively-detailed rules systems, where understanding those systems is key to achieving success/"winning." This is the sense in which they are "easier"--there's a provided, semi-fixed component to all contexts, which is then augmented by the specific context of "this particular fight/challenge. Those two pieces of information (the rules and the current, observable context) are the inputs, which are (when designed well) meant to be easy to pick up. Then the "engagement" comes in when trying to find how to respond to the current context, using those rules, in order to advance your position toward success and away from failure, and there's usually some kind of objective measure (e.g. HP in combat, distance in a race, number of failures vs successes in a skill challenge, etc.) for who is "closer" to failure or success.

 

[Campbell]

I agree with that. At most, 5e offers a faint nod to story-now (as I have said, TIBFs, Inspiration, and wording around those in PHB and DMG.)

Could 5e be played as story-now? Given some premises. Given one grasps and upholds TIBFs and Inspiration in just the right way. Using several of the options in the DMG (e.g. for progression.) And of course, given that DM and players conspire to lean into that mode.

Should 5e be used for story-now? On the one hand, I feel there are plenty of alternatives far better designed for that. On the other hand, supposing a group loved specifics of 5e such as one of its game-worlds, the kinds of characters they could play, its metaphysics, all those sorts of details, then maybe that group would want to make some decisions and possibly do some homebrewing to use it that way. I'm kind of curious how much design effort it would take to land somewhere effective?

None of the optional "narrative" rules in the DMG, Inspiration or BIFTS really point towards enabling Story Now play. Rather they support what the model would call High Concept Simulation because they reward reinforcing our current conception of who these characters are rather than finding out who they might be when facing adversity. BIFTS/Inspiration are really no different from the way chips/Hindrances work in Classic Deadlands, a thoroughly traditional game.

 

[Campbell]

My reading of the essays is that the sort of competition referred to in Step On Up is the same sort of competition you might see within a sports team or World of Warcraft raid team. It's about making the big play, standing out, being recognized for your skill. That Play of the Game stuff is a big part of the appeal to challenge oriented play.