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

[Thomas Shey]

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.

That's a specificially GNS/Forgeite gig however; I promise you it was not the position of the developers of GDS.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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's going to happen with any preference from the majority of people. Because, again, things always get elided for convenience at some point in the process, and where that is is almost always a matter of taste than strong principal.

That doesn't make it invalid, it just means that people should really realize that where they're drawing the line is fairly subjective, and be a little less quick to dismiss people who put it in another place.

 

[Hussar]

Could be. Most of the theorizing is a waste of time.

My style of DMing is to run sandboxes. I run the world, the players play their characters, there's no pre-written story or rails. Whatever that's called, I don't care.
/snip

Just a second. Let's back up a second.

You say there are no pre-written stories in your campaign. So, you have not created a single dungeon, adventure, or anything other than a setting before the campaign begins. That, without the players, there would be absolutely no adventure to be had in anything you've written? There's no Baron Von Evilton over in Thatland doing dastardly things? There's not Cult of Ickyness threatening the town that the players start in? Hell, there's no town for the players to start in before the entire group as a group activity creates it?

Because if you have any of those things, you're not playing Story Now. You're either doing Sim or Gam play. That's not a judgement at all, simply a label to help understand what's going on at the table.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

I kind of see the reason for calling that "traditional" but at this point there's been enough variations in that split for long enough it pretty thoroughly privileges "tradition"--though I suppose this is a thread about D&D which has been very conservative in this area, comparativelyu.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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).

There can be a matter of perspective when it comes to a couple cases. Specifically, almost from the start of superhero RPGs, players have been bolting on sometimes substantial setting elements with all but the most fussy GMs just nodding and going along. Arguably that's because its not too likely someone is going to do something that will cause conflicts with what the GM and/or other players are doing (and it'll be pretty obvious when they are).

You also have the odd cases of groups that have combined campaigns where all the players are also fellow GMs participating in a combined world setting (with, say, separate countries or regions under their control) which was apparently not uncommon even back at the start in D&D, but I can understand an argument that's not the same thing.

Neither of these, of course, was systemized.

(I'm a little puzzled where that appeared in CT though; was it just in the implication that players would fill in their homeworlds?)

(This, by the way, is one of the reasons I look at claims that traditional Dramatists didn't do this with a jaundiced eye; some may not have, but it was abundantly clear that many of them considered players filling in elements of the setting as they went not only acceptable but expected. It wasn't systematized, but it was a pronounced thread among them.).

 

[Hussar]

That's going to happen with any preference from the majority of people. Because, again, things always get elided for convenience at some point in the process, and where that is is almost always a matter of taste than strong principal.

That doesn't make it invalid, it just means that people should really realize that where they're drawing the line is fairly subjective, and be a little less quick to dismiss people who put it in another place.

The point being though, these models are not passing judgement. But, people then use the models to reinforce their preferences.

It's no different than genre discussions I suppose, in that sense. Claim that Star Wars is fantasy and lots of people will get their back up. Heck, talk about the difference between fantasy and science fiction and lots of people take it as a value judgement.

It does get rather tiresome though when you have to constantly have two conversations - one about the thing you actually want to talk about and the other constantly wrangling over definitions.

 

[pemerton]

I'm a little puzzled where that appeared in CT though

The whole idea of non-refereed play, where the players generate the world-map.

Also the example of PC gen (Merchant Captain Jamieson), where the backstory is filled in around the dice rolls, and presumably the player is doing that, not the referee.

And in the discussion of world-design, reference is made to the referee custom-building (rather than rolling for) worlds deliberately designed to torment or reward the players. This suggests the GM picking up on player signals, in the way that PbtA games emphasise with asking questions and building on the answers.

None of that compares in scale or scope to PbtA, but I don't recall a hint of this in OD&D, B/X or AD&D (the closest AD&D gets is the GM allowing the player to set out the geographic details of the area they want to build their castle in), nor in T&T or RQ.

I agree with you that it is pretty integral to supers.

 

[niklinna]

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.

This is pretty much what I was going to say (maybe with a different board game, though). Mapping is a fair bit like the little lightning-bolt cursor in original Myst that let you go someplace you'd already been and skip intermediate screens (which took minutes to load on CD-ROM drives of the time). Or teleport nodes in MMOs like Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV. You have to find them first, but once you do, you get to skip everything in between. Pure convenience to get to new challenges.

More generally....

All of the genre/setting emulation in this system is, as @Manbearcat stated, a veneer—which the GM and players are free to lay on thinner or thicker and spend as little or as much time describing as they want. But, the rules are not concerned with such things. They do offer content in the form of classes and races and such that fit the genre & setting, but those ultimately wind up being bundles of rated attributes you use to deal with challenges, for which there are rules, and rules, and rules (and seemingly an exception to every rule, sigh).

A lot of the mechanics (Belief, Creed, Goal, Instinct, Traits, twists) look like narrativist tools, but their uses in the game are blatantly about gaining bonuses to tests or aquiring one of the game's several currencies that are used for...gaining bonuses to tests, or introducing a new challenge to be resolved by tests, or being able to transition from one game phase to another, thereby enabling different kinds of activities (which are resolved via test and for which there is another currency! so many currencies, sigh). Again, the GM and players are free to spend more or less time talking about the narrative impact of these things, but the primary purpose is overt: to define a complicated state machine you have to master and work through to overcome challenges.

Does this mean Torchbearer completely lacks simulation or narrative elements? No; the game—like many modern boardgames with their thematic art and fluff text—would be dead boring to most players if the veneer were stripped. But its priorities are clear.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The point being though, these models are not passing judgement. But, people then use the models to reinforce their preferences.

It's no different than genre discussions I suppose, in that sense. Claim that Star Wars is fantasy and lots of people will get their back up. Heck, talk about the difference between fantasy and science fiction and lots of people take it as a value judgement.

It does get rather tiresome though when you have to constantly have two conversations - one about the thing you actually want to talk about and the other constantly wrangling over definitions.

Welcome to gaming discussions. People can't even agree that using terms-of-art are okay at all, let alone what they are.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The whole idea of non-refereed play, where the players generate the world-map.

I didn't even remember a discussion of this. Too many years, I guess. Though I suppose there probably were enough random generation tables you could do this, though it'd require a considerable amount of engagement not to be pretty pro-forma (and at least some halfway decent firewalling with combat encounters).

(If D&D had an outdoor generation system to go with the dungeon generation that existed in the Strategic Review (and as I recall hearing, AD&D) you could probably have done that there, too. But there was no discussion of it outside of the solo-play dungeon generation).

Also the example of PC gen (Merchant Captain Jamieson), where the backstory is filled in around the dice rolls, and presumably the player is doing that, not the referee.

That's what I wondered if you were referring to.

And in the discussion of world-design, reference is made to the referee custom-building (rather than rolling for) worlds deliberately designed to torment or reward the players. This suggests the GM picking up on player signals, in the way that PbtA games emphasise with asking questions and building on the answers.

None of that compares in scale or scope to PbtA, but I don't recall a hint of this in OD&D, B/X or AD&D (the closest AD&D gets is the GM allowing the player to set out the geographic details of the area they want to build their castle in), nor in T&T or RQ.

Well, given the schematic nature of OD&D, it'd have been pretty unlikely there. I vaguely recall some discussion of tribe generation in a couple places regarding RQ, but its been long enough it could have been in APAs rather than anything published.

I agree with you that it is pretty integral to supers.

Well, it doesn't hurt that you actually have to go out of your way to put in something disruptive to a typical supers setting. What's one more evil agency or alien planet (or even empire) among friends?