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

[overgeeked]

Right. We discussed superhero genre logic in the other thread, and I find it (or at least excessive amount of it) rather jarring, and would have hard time playing a game that relied heavily on it. I would probably quite like a more simulationist superhero game that took the superpowers seriously and explored the consequences in more grounded manner. Like you say, simulation and genre emulation are very different things and can easily be in direct conflict!

According to some in this thread, they are or can be identical. And folks who embrace this stuff wonder why people who don’t are confused by it all.

 

[Manbearcat]

I'm neither of the two you directed this to, but even among people who prefer primarily focused simulation play, there's always the question of relevance. One of the "gotchas" you'll see get launched at people who like simulation elements is "Why this not that? What's the line?" and to some extent its always kind of a silly reductio ad absurdem. Because in practice, no matter how much you prefer that, there are going to elide for simple practical reasons; that doesn't mean you're not committed to that, just that you stuck with the intrinsic limitations of time and process.

I'm less sold on this with "Camp", but I can see the Weather rolls not being particularly relevant to what's going on in Town phase in the vast majority of cases; at that point it can be dismissed as perhaps desirable but unnecessary background color.

The reason why the "why this and not that?" gets thrown around so often (often by me) is because it reveals that the overwhelming percentage of the time its a completely arbitrary line in the sand. Its nearly always an autobiographical footnote about the person rather than a decision driven by evinced principles.

That is a problem if you're going to put forth some iteration of the position "this is gamist nonsense" and/or "this violates internal causality"...and it becomes particularly fraught when you (a) don't like the game that you attribute this to consistently while (b) you like something else that can/should get dinged for the same thing while (c) you can't articulate the litmus test/line in the sand (precisely because it is something you've felt your way through, and brought in all of your biases and tribalism in the process, rather than conscientiously developed a principle-based working model).

But that is just talking about commenters on an internet message board.

When it comes to design? If I'm playing Torchbearer (for instance), there are so many areas where if I'm someone of serious Process Simulationist priorities, I'm getting dinged left and right. The Weather in Adventure and Wilderness phases but never in Camp/Town (oh, so the open market never suffers from a downpour that will close it down...oh, so our uncovered shelter of which we're spending the evening at isn't vulnerable to a downpour...etc) is just one.

* So our rations always go stale when we return to town? Always? At the gates...like clockwork? Uh huh...

* So we're these hypercompetent adventurers that pretty much never fail at our tasks (Fail Forward Success but Condition/Twist rules Test resolution outside of Contests and Conflicts) but the world just aggressively grinds us down? Good god...imagine what it must be like for the layfolks! How does anyone survive to reach puberty in Torchbearer-land to support functioning steadings/villages/etc? This world and the gods utterly hate us!

* Its crazy how having a map suddenly alleviates all possible complications of the Journey/Wilderness! The beasts of the land tend to their burrows and the skies part because I've got this rusty-trusty piece of marked parchment between my grubby fingers!

* It always seems to happen that my Enemy enters stage right or my Family/Friends/Hometown gets put into the crosshairs or I'm put in a situation to fight for or forfeit my Belief/Creed on a "failed" Ask Around or Circles check! Kinda odd that crap I don't care about or that isn't personal to me rarely ever happens!

Its littered with stuff like this which should tick the "gamist nonsense" or “narrative causality” clause. It does it because it was intentfully designed to be a brutal game engine for challenge-based Adventuring first and second and third its intended to be a crucible to find out whether you will fight for your Belief/Creed/Hometown/Friends/Family and forgive/confront your Enemy in a brutally unforgiving imagined space that makes every decision count and brings cowardice/heroism/sacrifice/expeditiousness at great tension via its structure and reward cycle.

There is a level of elision of Simulationist priorities within an intentfully designed game that has to at some point tick the "gamist nonsense" box for folks. But the reality is, after decades and decades of these conversations and the last decade here on ENWorld, its pretty clear to me that Sim priorities + game engine get deeply inventoried, overanalyzed, misapplied (due to something being ignorantly or willfully misconstrued) and vociferously lobbied against to attack this thing I hate...yet simultaneously the opposite for this thing I love!

That violates my sim priorities for functional conversation!

---

Back to Torchbearer. The reality is, there are many, many, many ways they could have simultaneously (a) actually made the game engine less intricate/complex while making it (b) more internal-causality-gratifying. They're trivial to enumerate. However, everything has a cost. And the cost would have been that (i) the decision-space of every moment of play would have been less consequential and (ii) the overall through line of play would have lost its deep, deep integration which is hell bent on distilling skillful play from unskillful play.

So if the above paragraph is true (and it is), then it becomes a very difficult argument to make that this game was designed upon some meaningful synthesis of Gamist priorities, Simulationist priorities, and Narrativist priorities. To whatever extent simulation exist in this game, it is merely the veneer of it sufficient to actually orient a group of 4 disconnected brains on a shared imagined space. Its not there for high fidelity to internal causality nor is it there to promote some kind of state of deep experiential consistency of actually being in Middarmark (or whatever land your Torchbearer game might be in). Its there to test how skillfully you can play individually and collectively, how your dramatic needs embedded in your character manifest within play, and to reflect upon the skillfulness and evolution of character.

I mean. I'll defer to my 3 players here. @AbdulAlhazred , @kenada , and @niklinna . Do you feel like your experience in our play would ever produce the italicized orientation toward play/experience with play above? You can certainly correct me with I'm wrong, but I'm pretty doubtful! I'm not saying that the experience of play is shallow at all...but whatever visceralness comes from play doesn't derive from the italicized priorities above in my estimation (and it hasn't for any of the groups I've GMed TB in the past either)!

 

[pemerton]

GNS is an attempt--I would argue a heavily flawed one, but one of the most full-throated and deeply-investigated--to develop "fluency" in what roleplaying games are for, their purposes and intentions.

We don't agree on this (ie on the heavily flawed bit). I don't think Edwards's model is perfect - Vincent Baker's work on fictional positioning and "clouds and boxes" gives more insight into techniques than anything I know of from Edwards - but I do think the model is pretty powerful.

Hmm... the blocker for me on that is a taxonomy doesn't make claims about incompatibility or dysfunction. My questions are formed around the presence of such claims in the theory.

I don't see that as being a matter of prediction. E.g., if I help someone to learn how to paint, it doesn't let them predict which brush strokes to make or which colors to use. The closest you get to "prediction" is the development of appropriate intuitions, "artist's eyes" and the like. E.g., learning how to paint will include color theory, which has certain limited "predictive" value (e.g. predicting that if you use color X, it will be unlikely to go well with color Y), but by and large is more just a matter of developing an understanding, and being aware of what things have worked for others before, so you can confidently choose whether to hew to or disregard convention.

<snip>

Awareness of the preferred flavors of French cuisine and the preferred ingredients of French cuisine is not, generally speaking, particularly useful for its predictive value. That doesn't mean it provides no information, nor that these things are useless if you want to prepare French dishes--exactly the opposite, in fact, these things are essential for learning how to produce French cuisine. But they aren't useful because they're predictive. They're useful for developing useful intuitions (which can be "predictive" in an extremely loose sense).

Actually, here, let's use a more specifically practical example. The English language.

Ezekiel Raiden gives some terrific examples here of how understanding - which can include the use of models, analytic taxonomies and the like - can be very useful, including for making one's way practically through the world, without being predictive in any meaningful sense.

I think you're using "predict" in a way, way, WAY broader sense than others are. You seem to see it as, "If we can derive literally any information from the theory, at all, about what is worth doing or might produce success, then it is predictive," and that's not generally how people think of "predictive" theory.

Would you characterise helpful advice as advice, that if followed, would with some likelihood lead to a better outcome or avoid a worse one?

The theory isn't predicting anything, it is explaining the set of designed games and real play reports that existed at the time the interpretation and analysis was performed. There's no reason to suppose that its interpretations and analyses will explain any future phenomena, no matter how apparently related they might be to the original objects of study.

In addition to EzekielRaiden's accurate remark, the second quote here from clearstream seems to contain a non-sequitur.

Weber's theory of legitimate government, and his related theory of bureaucracy, is (in my view) extremely powerful for explaining phenomena that have occurred since he wrote that work. But his theory does not predict anything. As @Hussar said, it does its explanatory work "after the fact" - ie we observe some phenomenon, we are puzzled by some of its features, its apparent internal dynamics, the sort of legitimacy it does or does not seem to engender - and then we bring Weber's analysis to bear, and things fall into place, the features become less puzzling, other things we see going that we had no intitially connected to our observed phenomenon are revealed to be consequences of it, or related to it in some fashion, etc. As a result of this, we might even have a better handle on how to engage, in practical terms, with the phenomenon. But having useful information or useful advice isn't anything like making a prediction in the sense that eg verificationist and falsificationist accounts of laboratory science have in mind.

Here is the quoted definition/description of the phenomenon of incoherence:

Play which includes incompatible combinations of Creative Agendas among participants. Incoherent play is considered to contribute to Dysfunctional play, but does not define it. Incoherence may be applied indirectly to game rules. Abashedness represents a minor, correctable form of Incoherence.​

The verb "contribute to" is not a component of a prediction, particularly when qualified by the phrase "but does not define it". No prediction is being made about when dysfunctional play will occur, nor about what will cause it if it does. A claim is being made that some dysfunctional play is sometimes the consequence, in part at least, of incoherence. That claim is too weak, isn't it, to count as a prediction? No one is suggesting that a controlled experiment might be run to test this conjecture; and - in contrast with complex claims about multiple factors of causation in (say) medicine - no one can even say what such a controlled experiment might look like, as the notion of "dysfunctional play" is not itself precise enough to be used in such an experiment. And that's before we get to the possibility of "abashedness" - any apparently-diagnosed incoherence, which appears not to contribute much to dysfunction, is amenable to being characterised as mere abashedness.

The point of the notion of "incoherence" is to enable individual players, or play groups, who find their RPGing unsatisfactory in some way, to reflect on what they and their friends are trying to get out of it, and to see if there is conflict going on. A third party observer can also use the notion to conjecture an explanation of why certain apparent conflicts or difficulties occur - eg in this thread I've suggested that much of the discussion and debate among D&D players is driven by the fact that most D&D play, and the published rules for 2nd ed AD&D, 3E and 5e, straddle the relatively thin line between gamism with fairly low competition, and characters-face-problems-high-concept-sim. None of that is prediction, except in the rather banal sense that I predict that debates about "fudging" in D&D, and about how the GM is expected to manage the pacing of an "adventuring day" to answer demands around balance, resource management, etc will not go away, because those debates are driven by the incoherence I've mentioned.

And the point of the notion of "abashedness" is to describe a recurring trend in the writing of RPG rulebooks, to frame things in terms that reflect the dominant game (ie D&D) or some other well-known and influential games (eg RuneQuest), even when its tolerably clear that the author plays the game in a different fashion and the game system will work best when played in that fashion. So you'll see a game that, as a whole, makes the most sense for gamist, or for narrativist, play, that neverthless contains boilerplate text about the players, via their PCs, experiencing the GM's world; or you'll see a game that, as a whole, makes the most sense for simulationist play, that includes gambling-gamist rules for random PC gen because those are copied from D&D. Calling such a game "abashed" is a way of signalling that it is easily drifted towards its profitable play mode, by (eg) ignoring the boilerplate text, or dropping the random PC gen, or whatever else. It's a term of criticism, not a way of making a prediction.

EDIT: here's another example.

An auto-repair manual seems pretty useful for repairing a car. Or modifying the car. Or pulling the car apart and then rebuilding it. But an auto-repair manual is not a prediction of when a car will need repairing, whether or not any particular person can repair it or rebuild it or modify it, nor even of whether any particular repair or modification will work - a person might read the manual and make a repair and yet the car still not go because there's some other factor at work that they didn't notice.

And the behaviour of a car is far more regular and predictable than a group of human beings engaged in a social activity!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm obviously not @Ovinomancer, but if I understood them correctly, I can see where they're coming from. When we're talking about the emergent story à la OSR, what we mean is that we see the threads of a story that came together in retrospect (which happens because OSR games do not force any narrative structures but let players play according to the assumptions of the universe). The kind of emergent story here is what I call "this could only happen in D&D", like the example of my players beating Cyan Bloodbane with a Bag of Beans seed that sprouted a small pyramid to which they lured the dragon. All of this happened with no regard to a story structure when we were playing and happened only because I was simulating what should happen given the previous circumstances ("Cyan is vain and wants easy treasure", "the roll on the bags landed on sprouting a pyramid, so I guess I'll now adjudicate how that pyramid would sprout even if it completely derails the adventure" and so on). Only when we looked back on that game and said "Wow, what a crazy game!" did it become a story in retrospect.

I guess the other qualifier is "if at all" as it isn't guaranteed that any story with the name WILL result (I recall that my sister, @Gilladian, created at Cleric and immediately as the party entered their first dungeon giant wasps stung them all to death, story over). I guess in a sense there IS a story. I'm not sure it ONLY arose in retrospect though, as often something that happened would immediately feed back onto the evolving situation.

In contrast (though admittedly my only experience with narrativist games is badly running a FATE Accelerated Pokemon oneshot and a few Cortex Prime games and reading some PbtA books, and apparently FATE isn't even categorised as a Story Now game so I might completely wrong), Story Now is about having mechanics that stricly distribute power over the fiction so that a narrative has to emerge. However, this emergence is (as the name suggests) in the moment and not retrospective like an OSR game. When you play Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and a character causes a d12 to be added to the Doom Pool by botching, the mechanics force everyone at the table to explain how the stakes got worse. That pushes everyone to add something to the narrative that reflects the mechanical effect. You might say that the Hulk throwing Ultron to incapacitate him revealed innocent civilians hidden behind that wall, and now Ultron has taken those civilians hostage. Now the opposition pool to anything the players do will have an extra d12 as a reminder of the raised stakes. This is not a piece of narrative that emerged only when you look back upon it, but it is a narrative that is forcefully made to emerge as a result of player-GM cooperation in shaping the fiction.

Right, so again, I'm not totally sure why one type is evolving and the other type retrospective, IMHO they're not really that distinct. In fact I would say that D&D (for example) is a 'fortune at the end' type of system where the story emerges as the dice are rolled, so to speak. While in fact many 'Narrative' (in the GNS sense) games employ mechanisms which may require that things are left unresolved until later. These generally use some sort of 'Fortune in the Middle' and then you get to tell more story and apply added factors that may change what comes next. Its all a bit fuzzy though, because there are potentially versions of D&D where this can happen too (IE exactly what hit point less meant may not be revealed until later, famously).
Anyway, I think that in general you can call RPGs a form of interactive fiction in which a story emerges as you play. I think the difference is more in terms of how much the story is central to the game process. In Narratively Focused games it is quite central, and there are processes in place which allow it to be managed in some sense. Game play itself will be ABOUT the story, whereas in D&D and similar games the story isn't a focus in any overall sense.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Only if you have a decoder ring. My seems to have gone walkabout.

Not everything needs spelling out. FKR games are traditional in the sense of a standard Referee / player split in authority.

FKR games are not live-action free-form. They’re tabletop RPGs.

Uh…no. They‘re about as similar as D&D and laser tag.

I can hardly see how that relates to Kriegspiels as a genre at all. These are highly simulationist games in which the real world itself plays a significant part (though maybe the constraints it imposes are simulating something different to a degree, such as when 2 military forces play in different rooms and players must go back and forth to communicate, which might stand in for geographically dispersed operations). Kriegspiels actually ARE free form in the sense that a referee adjudicates most actions, possibly with reference to some mechanical framework, but also by resorting to their own understanding of the situation.

The result is there is a range of degrees of 'table top' character to these games. They have historically often incorporated things like field exercises as inputs. For example back in the 1980's the Tuchux would play out a wargame with the SCA where combat would be conducted out on the field (including field battles, siege operations, etc.) and then the course of the operation would be decided by some people who could be described as referees. While this was not DESCRIBED as being a 'kriegspiel' it very much falls within the range of that definition! It is also a form of LARP, but that's kind of another thing.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Not everything needs spelling out. FKR games are traditional in the sense of a standard Referee / player split in authority.

I think it’s odd that “traditional” is clear to the point where you simply accept it as being suitably descriptive.

But it’s no more specific than the other terms that have been used in this discussion.

No one questions what you mean when you use “traditional” in this sense, even if there are folks who would question how appropriate a label it may be for the game elements it labels.

 

[pemerton]

Players in most PbtA games are very active participants in the formulation of the world (setting). In Dungeon World the GM is told very explicitly that they will ask questions and use the answers. It isn't a hard mechanically governed aspect of play, but it is DEEPLY a part of the agenda!

Right. The only classic RPG I know that even flirts with this is Classic Traveller. Hence why I have adapted it to a PbtA-ish style (the "ish" is doing real work there - I don't claim that it is full-blooded PbtA in any sense).

Beyond that, in most cases in PbtA games (again there are definitely exceptions here) the GM is pretty much entirely expected to frame ONLY scenes which address the dramatic needs of the characters

<snip>

in some sense the GM does control the challenges presented to the PCs and has the responsibility for how they resolve, this is a necessary part of generating drama, and is largely why earlier generations of gamers/designers who were interested in dramatic play found it difficult to give much control to the players. It was the working out of the Story Now kind of process that brought that together.

This is what I posted upthread about AW, and have reposted a coupe of times already:

On the surface, its allocation of functions to the GM and the players is very "traditional".

But as soon as we drill below the surface, we can see that it upends that "traditional" approach completely, because of the expectations it puts on the players to drive play through their PCs (a bit like a classic sandbox, but even moreso, and with emotional connections and relationship really being foregrounded) and on the GM to keep buiding up the pressure via those soft moves, which will eventually explode into trouble, because someone is going to roll 6- some time soon.

What is crucial to "story now" play, I think, is not the allocation of authority, but the principles and expectations that govern its exercise.

This is what allows even a very "traditional" system like AD&D or RM to be drifted to "story now" play. Of course a well-designed game like AW will do it better, but vanilla narrativism is a real thing and it is changing principles and expectations that will allow a group to do it.

 

[overgeeked]

I can hardly see how that relates to Kriegspiels as a genre at all. These are highly simulationist games in which the real world itself plays a significant part (though maybe the constraints it imposes are simulating something different to a degree, such as when 2 military forces play in different rooms and players must go back and forth to communicate, which might stand in for geographically dispersed operations).

The result is there is a range of degrees of 'table top' character to these games. They have historically often incorporated things like field exercises as inputs. For example back in the 1980's the Tuchux would play out a wargame with the SCA where combat would be conducted out on the field (including field battles, siege operations, etc.) and then the course of the operation would be decided by some people who could be described as referees. While this was not DESCRIBED as being a 'kriegspiel' it very much falls within the range of that definition! It is also a form of LARP, but that's kind of another thing.

You’re conflating a few things. Kriegsspiel is German for war game. Specifically the Prussian war games of the early 19th century, typically with a lot of very complicated rules and no referee. Free Kriegsspiel is the late 19th century movement that arose in response to the convoluted rules of Kriegsspiel and tossed the rules in favor of an experienced officer deciding the outcomes, much like a modern DM often does. Free Kriegsspiel Renaissance is a modern tabletop gaming movement which, much like FK, eschews the rules bloat and focuses on getting back to quick resolution and outcomes.

Kriegspiels actually ARE free form in the sense that a referee adjudicates most actions, possibly with reference to some mechanical framework, but also by resorting to their own understanding of the situation.

You mean exactly like a DM can simply make a call on whether an action is possible, impossible, or requires a roll. But not one’s going to confuse D&D with an FKR game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I mean. I'll defer to my 3 players here. @AbdulAlhazred , @kenada , and @niklinna . Do you feel like your experience in our play would ever produce the italicized orientation toward play/experience with play above? You can certainly correct me with I'm wrong, but I'm pretty doubtful! I'm not saying that the experience of play is shallow at all...but whatever visceralness comes from play doesn't derive from the italicized priorities above in my estimation (and it hasn't for any of the groups I've GMed TB in the past either)!

No, that is to say that the TB2 game world is more like the board in Monopoly than it is like a map of Atlantic City, NJ c1929. It serves its purpose, as do the game's rules and procedures. Mapped areas are easy to traverse because we paid a substantial grind cost up front to earn that. Even so, if you think about it, what did we earn? It is just NARRATIVE FREEDOM as no matter where Awanye, Jasper, and Jacob are on the map, they will start hitting the grind! It is merely color, just like the names of the properties in Monopoly are mere color. Our PCs may now decree that they have hiked to the top of the mountain. This is fun and cool, we now get to have a story about exploring the other side, instead of repeatedly replaying a narrative of making the climb (until inevitably some bad dice luck killed us probably). I'd note that we could have, instead, constructed a permanent camp partway up, and stockpiled a bunch of food and whatnot there instead. I'm not sure of the relative grind costs and risks vs rewards of each of those options (mapping vs building base camps). Anyway, as you can see, this is all very gamist, but it also does serve to allow for a more interesting narrative, and we can make trade offs between the two.

I think its POSSIBLE for a GM to arrange some similar kind of tradeoffs and whatnot in D&D, and I would not think that D&D is more or less realistic, overall. It could be that the GM will try to describe things more realistically, which isn't even an option in TB2, really. I'm happy about that actually, as I am of the mind that most appeals to 'realism' are actually cloaked forms of illusionist play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

We don't agree on this (ie on the heavily flawed bit). I don't think Edwards's model is perfect - Vincent Baker's work on fictional positioning and "clouds and boxes" gives more insight into techniques than anything I know of from Edwards - but I do think the model is pretty powerful.

I would say the two are compatible though. Edwards talks about agenda and structure, Baker talks more about technique. They do overlap a good bit, but as I see it the two models dovetail. Baker can tell you something about a game's agenda in GNS terms! Likewise Edwards can point out why certain types of games probably need rightward arrows, but other ones don't (as much).