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

[Ovinomancer]

No.


From my earlier post:



People seemed to agree that because what is no longer narrativistic, it is now a sim even though how remains the same. Now I think it is absurd to call this a sim, but that seems to be what GNS decrees...

Actually, I didn't get to answer that because plane ride, but thanks for bringing it back up -- I had forgotten it.

If you take PbtA and you drift it into Sim, you're going to find that the system hates you. Plenty of people do this, because they think sim, like from D&D, and try to run DW the same way. But then the system just doesn't work very well. You can force it, but you have to discount and ignore and modify like crazy and it clunks, hard. There's a few threads around that showcase this exact thing. So, no, you really can't use the same "how" for a sim game as for a SN game. You might be able to go gamist, though, as there can be a great deal of overlap in mechanics between the two, but how they're used is different.

So, no, the how is a pretty big part of it. 4e run in a gamist way doesn't really look like 4e run in a narrative way, because while the mechanics are the same for both, how they're invoked and used is different. For example, a skill challenge. In a gamist approach, the GM can script the challenge and the players are always going to be pushing for best match skill use to ensure that the challenge is won. In a narrative approach, the GM isn't scripting the challenge, but instead framing new obstacles every time the current one is dealt with (pass or fail) and taking what's happened and weaving it into the challenge. Best skill use is not prioritized, rather taking actions that promote the advocacy for the character are, whatever makes sense in the current situation. But resolution for each is identical, however how they're approached and applied is pretty different.

Trying to use a skill challenge for simulationist play is tough -- it doesn't align well. But, then, this is true of most of 4e.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I agree, so I can acknowlege that you made a salient point about "fairness" here. However, one would hopefully imagine that these challenges can be overcome in some capacity or another by the party. Otherwise it's just the GM playing rope-a-dope with the other players.


There tends to be more openness to this among Neo-Traditional Play. However, such games support this to differing degrees. Fate, for example, is honestly fairly High Concept Simulationist / Neo-Trad even though it gets labeled as a "story game" or "gamist" by its detractors.* But it has mechanical support for players to introduce backstory or for the GM to invite the players to do so as a natural part of play.

* I suspect that the source has to do a lot with how some people have differing expectations of what "simulationism" entails particularly in regards to immersion. Some people with simulationist preferences who advocate "Hardline Actor Stance," for example, regard anything that risks taking them out of their character immersion or dispelling the illusion as "(meta-)gamist" and "not roleplaying." So when things like fate points, invokes/compels, etc. in Fate that they claim break their personal sense of immersion, then Fate fails the purity test for what "simulationism" is supposed to be (for them).

Not quite sure what the argument you're responding to says, but if "fairness" is invoked, you're solidly in the G of GNS.

 

[niklinna]

Because they have chosen the direction of the game. The story is now about that thing. The thing may have in theory existed in the setting, like "here be dragons" on the map, but because the player chose their quest to be related to that, now it matters.

PRECISELY.

It matters.

Not precisely, however: There is no one story. Just like Charles Dickens wove many stories into his novels, the players in a group can weave together their characters' stories. If they don't, things can get disjointed as players vie for spotlight, so this is an issue to recognize and address. But it's possible to weave PC stories together and even embed them in a larger The Story, if that's what you want to do. The two are not necessarily in conflict.

 

[Ovinomancer]

'Traditional game' here merely meant one where the GM has almost sole setting authority, (like D&D 5e) and that such games can have players generating meaningful backstories, not that it is always done or that it must be done.

But now that you mentioned it, why are OS people hostile to having backstories?

Can players create meaningful backstories? I'd say, no, they cannot. They do not have this authority. They can color in backstory within the lines the GM has proscribed, which is a more specific version of 'create', or they can try to ask for things to be added, but the GM has to approve. Further, even if all of this is done, meaningful really only matters if the GM chooses to use anything at all from the backstory -- and then only if they don't just use it to subvert it for a 'better' story or just use it as leverage to get the PC to engage in the story the GM wants to present (the usual 'kidnap the sister' kinda stuff).

So, yeah, when you say "generat[e] meaningful backstories" there's a heck of a lot of caveats there.

 

[Aldarc]

Not quite sure what the argument you're responding to says, but if "fairness" is invoked, you're solidly in the G of GNS.

How I read this person's argument is that "fairness" is part of G but that "fairness" is not required for G. For example, OSR talks about how some challenges aren't fair and balanced, but the OSR is fairly (though not universally*) Gamist.

* or at least the portion of the OSR community that views OSR through the lens of intentional game design and philosophical approaches rather than a simple desire to play D&D retroclones.

The second part of my post on Fate was responding a separate point they made about traditional play and the hostility of introducing backstory.

 

[Ovinomancer]

How I read this person's argument is that "fairness" is part of G but that "fairness" is not required for G. For example, OSR talks about how some challenges aren't fair and balanced, but the OSR is fairly (though not universally*) Gamist.

* or at least the portion of the OSR community that views OSR through the lens of intentional game design and philosophical approaches rather than a simple desire to play D&D retroclones.

The second part of my post on Fate was responding a separate point they made about traditional play and the hostility of introducing backstory.

Hmm. I think that fairness is actually required, in a sense. You can zoom into a particular view, like a very unbalanced combat encounter, and say that's not fair, and I think this is fine so long as there's a more zoomed out view where you can see exactly where it was fair and either poor choices or bad luck got to the zoomed situation. If there's not a point at which you can step back and say "yep, fair" then you're subverting the entire point of gamism and seem, to me, to have slipped into a particular version of simulationism where the point was to force an unfair fiction.

I've been in that game, btw. Where the GM wanted the game to end (it was a short run) with the party at each others' throats in a fit of paranoia and crashing and burning. Never once had a chance to succeed, despite play being nominally otherwise.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I am thinking also of the matter of degree of challenge. Suppose we take gamism to be just narrowly oriented to challenge: we might then suppose that if I want a tough tactical situation with losing very much on the table, a gamist system is one that must satisfy me. But what if I want an easy tactical situation with winning almost guaranteed? That can be equally satisfied by a gamist system, right, just one dialled to easy. Still, the former player with the gamist agenda is not at all satisfied by the latter game tailored to suit a gamist agenda. An apparent paradox!

Well, there's nothing intrinsic about sharing a general agenda that ensures that a given game of that type will be satisfying. You can have a pair of dramatists who love and hate horror respectively, for example. All the agenda says is that the focal point is important to you, not that you're going to use it in exactly the same way.

An example that comes up is the contrast you see with some people who like PF1e and those that like PF2e. PF2e can be pretty hardcore sometimes; you actively have to work to ignore the balance tools to not have encounters actually be serious challenges. Some people just love that.

But some PF1e fans are used to being able to bake a cake and deal with the D&D 3e style encounters by rolling over them. It lets them feel capable and enjoy the work they've done to build their characters, and PF2e can be very unsatisfying for them, because you can only do so much pre-game to bake your character, and as I noted you have to take what difficulty level encounters are in PF2e seriously; if you want an encounter to feel easy, you have to do it.

But both of these are fundamentally gamist concerns, they're just aimed at different spots in the spectrum, and different parts of the game experience (challenge in building characters in contrast to challenge in the tactical moment).

Bottomline, I don't think we can say 5th edition is gamist or not gamist, just on the basis of degree of challenge. I am not saying others are doing that, I am speaking here to rule it out (or at least, raise the notion that it should be ruled out). Perhaps the deeper concern, however, is the apparent paradox considering degree of challenge flags up.

I concur.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I agree, so I can acknowlege that you made a salient point about "fairness" here. However, one would hopefully imagine that these challenges can be overcome in some capacity or another by the party. Otherwise it's just the GM playing rope-a-dope with the other players.

Sure. But there's a difference that's pretty stark between "I have to absolutely be on my game or this is a fight we can lose" and "I can be expected to win if I don't screw up big time". See my comments in the prior post about PF1e and PF2e.

There tends to be more openness to this among Neo-Traditional Play. However, such games support this to differing degrees. Fate, for example, is honestly fairly High Concept Simulationist / Neo-Trad even though it gets labeled as a "story game" or "gamist" by its detractors.* But it has mechanical support for players to introduce backstory or for the GM to invite the players to do so as a natural part of play.

There are some games its really hard to get around. Point build Disadvantage using systems are deliberately set up to force you toward engaging with character, and sometimes to make that work, you have to deal with where it comes from. And of course some genres pretty much demand it; its really, really hard to have a functional superhero who's a tabula rasa, unless them being a tabula rasa is part of the point in the character.

* I suspect that the source has to do a lot with how some people have differing expectations of what "simulationism" entails particularly in regards to immersion. Some people with simulationist preferences who advocate "Hardline Actor Stance," for example, regard anything that risks taking them out of their character immersion or dispelling the illusion as "(meta-)gamist" and "not roleplaying." So when they see things like fate points, invokes/compels, etc. in Fate that they claim break their personal sense of immersion, then Fate fails the purity test for what "simulationism" is supposed to be (for them).

Yeah, that was certainly true of the real old school Simulationists that were key to developing GDS (though in the day they'd call that IC or Deep IC Stance rather than anything to do with Actor).

 

[niklinna]

I am thinking also of the matter of degree of challenge. Suppose we take gamism to be just narrowly oriented to challenge: we might then suppose that if I want a tough tactical situation with losing very much on the table, a gamist system is one that must satisfy me. But what if I want an easy tactical situation with winning almost guaranteed? That can be equally satisfied by a gamist system, right, just one dialled to easy. Still, the former player with the gamist agenda is not at all satisfied by the latter game tailored to suit a gamist agenda. An apparent paradox!

How on earth is this a paradox? The player in question has an agenda that's more than just gamist. Your very example made that abundantly clear! They have a particular gamist agenda, and may have other factors involved too. Just because the GNS model has high-level catergorizations, doesn't mean those are the only factors under consideration. In fact, the GNS model goes to some pains to examine agendas within those top-level agendas.

Bottomline, I don't think we can say 5th edition is gamist or not gamist, just on the basis of degree of challenge. I am not saying others are doing that, I am speaking here to rule it out (or at least, raise the notion that it should be ruled out). Perhaps the deeper concern, however, is the apparent paradox considering degree of challenge flags up.

See my posts and @pemerton's about applying a broad brush and categorizing games and players with concepts meant to apply to moments and actions.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@Hussar perhaps made a similar point earlier, and I have of course been irksomely skeptical of knowing what RPG is played without knowing the cohort of players (i.e. the game is settled in the interpretation of the cohort).

I mean, I can tell you right now that I have had some occasional struggles with this as a DM. Many groups form from just friends deciding to play together. Mine formed because I had several friends I trusted, and one of them was going through a real tough time personally, so he tried playing D&D and his first group was....really bad. Really, really bad, to the tune of "a player pressured the DM into giving them a ninth-level spell as a level 1 racial feature," among other issues. I saw that and thought to myself, "I may not be confident that I'm a good DM, but I am absolutely 100% certain that I am better than that." So I assembled my group from various friends I know.

The composition has changed a lot, as have the preferences of the various participants. I've had a hardcore powergamer/instigator, a player who has shifted from a bit naive instigator/explorer to a more mature, sober instigator/explorer, a very cerebral story-centric/actor/strategist player, a shy powergamer just beginning to test the waters of roleplay, etc. We've got people spanning several decades in terms of age groups. It's a diverse thing with few perfectly shared interests.

As a result, I'm fairly sure it hasn't always been obvious from the outset what "cohort" my players belonged to, and it hasn't always been a perfectly smooth experience producing a game that engages everyone. Gaming groups are, very often (but not always), things that form from friendships, which often form from chance associations. Most of my good friends are people I met as a result of having been a member of the old Golden Sun GameSpy forum, or having played freeform text RP back on AvidGamers, or people I met as a result of having met those people. We represent a huge swathe of different origins, locations, cultures, etc. I can almost guarantee that if you picked a random group of five of my friends, even if they all got along with one another, they wouldn't want entirely the same things out of their RPG experiences.

Forgive me for being naive, but wouldn't tying specific races to classes imply a narrative game?

I mean, it might. But it also might not--and I lean toward "might not." I find most "race-as-class" or "classes restricted by race" things are exclusively for simulationist reasons, not for "narrative" ones, whether that be "process" Sim or "genre" Sim. That is, it's not that dwarves can't be clerics but can be runecasters because there is a story to be told or a dramatic moment to experience, but rather, because dwarves in this setting are atheist because they killed their gods and stole the rune magic they used ("process" Sim: the dwarves have no living gods, and thus have no way to engage the "devotion to gods" process, but do have a technique they zealously guard from outsiders); or, alternatively, because this is a setting heavily inspired by The Elder Scrolls, where the "dwarves" are the Dwemer, pointedly atheist technologists who believe all beings can (and, from what I can tell, should) ascend to a similar height as the gods ("genre" Sim, featuring the Conceit of technology and Frankensteinian "toying with forces beyond the lot of mortals" type stuff.)

A key thing, here, is that "Narrative" in the GNS does not mean "a game where narratives exist," because that statement describes damn near all games ever. If you give anything even a little bit of descriptive text, you have some kind of narrative. Thus, the casual definition of "narrative" is kinda worthless for discussing roleplaying games, because it refers to literally almost anything. A different, more specific, definition is substituted. Specifically: games where the primary player activity is personally creating and exploring narrative events. Hence my emphasis on Value and Issues in my own taxonomy. For the player to be the one who is creating the narrative, they have to be the one defining what protagonism means in context (the scene that the DM has framed), which means deciding what they care about or wish to see, what I called their Value(s), and then facing and "resolving" conflict (quotes because "resolving" it may mean succumbing to it, or deciding it doesn't actually matter anymore, etc.), aka Issue(s) putting those things to the test.

Again: "a game where narratives exist" describes essentially all RPGs. "A game where the players themselves create narratives as the action of play itself," however, is much more specific.

I had a lot more to say on this but...well, it might have been in excess. So I cut it out. Should it be relevant I have it saved though.