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

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

I say some kind of "fairness" is necessary for Score-and-Achievement play, because Scores that have no fairness at all aren't really "scores" anyone would care about, and Achievements that result from such things are seen as devalued. You've seen that viral tweet, "you cheated not only the game, but yourself." That requires some notion of "fairness" applied to both game and player.

But "fairness" can mean different things. Many praise the games From Software makes because they are brutally hard, but have a certain fairness in their difficulty. The intent is that no death in games like Elden Ring should be, as Josh "Strife" Hayes puts it, "some bull$#!*," but instead should be clearly traceable to an objective, preventable error on the player's part. The Score is thus brutally enforced, because every error will cost you greatly (possibly killing your character outright). As a result, however, the Achievement is greatly sweetened (for the fans), for various reasons: a feeling of ownership (if the game is brutally hard, then victory is "earned," it "belongs" to the player), a feeling of "growth" or "advancement" tied to an objective and external standard rather than participation ribbons or guaranteed success, satisfaction from having actually reached the "gain" after "risking" your time and investment, etc.

I think it's the "Dark Souls"/"Elden Ring" type of "fairness" that OSR Score-and-Achievement play seeks. It isn't "fair" in the sense of, say, a chess match where both sides have exactly the same resources and only differ based on who made the first move. Instead, it's "fair" in the sense that there is always a path to eventual victory, but finding that path may be excruciatingly difficult, and require a great deal of failure and loss before it can even be discovered, let alone walked.

 

[Scott Christian]

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.

This is a great explanation. Thank you.

 

[niklinna]

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.

I'd be interested in seeing it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'd be interested in seeing it.

Alrighty. Just remember, you asked for it!

The idea as I understand it with GNS "Narrative" play, is that the DM takes a back seat in terms of the narrative action, in the same way that in a gamist game, the DM takes a back seat in terms of the gameplay action. Hence it is considered a faux pas, at least among most D&D gamers I know, for the DM to unilaterally declare what the PCs choose to do, and unless the players are definitely okay with it, it is generally frowned upon to "force" things to end up where the DM wants them to be. (Even for folks who don't share my opposition to fudging and railroading, it is generally accepted that doing any of those things in outright defiance of what players are trying to do is...unwise, shall we say.)

In a GNS "Narrative" game, the players are the ones choosing the Value, the goal, the purpose of play, and deciding how to deal with the Issues that result from pursuing that goal, with the GM acting only enough to frame the scenes sufficiently that the players actually do have Issues to deal with. In a GNS "Gamist" game, the players are evaluating their own performance by some metric of Score, e.g. surviving combats or collecting treasure etc., in order to obtain Achievement of some kind, e.g. defeating the opposition, saving the innocent dragon from the evil princess, what-have-you, and the GM acts only enough to ensure that the metric(s) of Score have actual meaning to the players and that the Achievements are motivating enough to pursue.

I break up GNS "Simulation" games into two categories, what are called "process" Sim and "genre" Sim by others. In GNS "Simulation" games of the "process" Sim style, the GM acts only so far as to establish sufficient Groundedness, rooting the imaginary sensory/perceptual experience of play as (metaphorically) tangible as possible so that it feels like a living world that actually exists. The GM then turns the metaphorical crank of the world so that the Simulation of its future states proceeds (hence "process" Sim) logically and rationally from the initial data. From there, sufficiently comprehensive naturalistic reasoning on the part of the players should allow them to correctly predict and respond to the events in that world. In GNS "Simulation" games of the "genre" Sim style, the GM acts only so far as to establish a Conceit (or set thereof), the principal concept, theme, or tone that will color the experience of play, and to provide a milieu in which the players' Emulation of an appropriate genre, creator, style, etc. can occur.

I used the phrase "acts/acting only so far as to X" with a reason: if the DM/GM steps too far outside these limits, it tends to get a negative response from the players. A GM running a Groundedness-and-Simulation game that starts specifying too many rules outside of naturalistic reasoning will start to draw accusations of being "unrealistic," whether by injecting human-made conventions like tropes (which are a Conceit-and-Emulation thing) or by being excessively abstract in how the thing is handled (which is generally a Score-and-Achievement thing, as Scores are necessarily an abstraction.) A GM running a Score-and-Achievement game that expands the rules beyond what is needed, especially if so doing makes them particularly complicated and unbalanced, will draw criticism for weakening the game just to make it (metaphorically) "look" nicer.

To be clear, here, I don't actually think that this means these game-purposes are necessarily mutually exclusive. I don't even claim that they're jointly exhaustive; there may be other game-purposes I have never considered. Instead, my point is there is something of a "GM, stay in your lane!" element here, a "don't water down the X just to get some more (implicitly, unnecessary) Y" attitude. And the type of "GM, stay in your lane" thinking that tends to show up in D&D discussion is of a GNS Gamist nature, or failing that, a GNS Simulationist nature (IME, almost always "process" Sim, much more rarely "genre" Sim.)

When these game-purposes are combined, I find that usually this is done in one of two ways: either the purposes involved are already reasonably amenable to blending (e.g. "genre" Sim is pretty friendly with everything except "process" Sim IME), or the two purposes are engaged on different levels of play, and thus avoid getting in one another's way by being focused on different things (e.g. combat being very Gamist, but exploration being very "process" Simulationist--it's naturally difficult to do both things fully simultaneously, so they can coexist in their enclosed spaces.) If a game actually tries to combine two purposes in the very same activities, it does seem that this can lead to problems, as noted above, with players feeling dissatisfied by compromise rather than pleased by diversity.

Overall, I find "process" Sim/"Groundedness-and-Simulation" to be the most picky of the four game-purposes I've articulated, because all three of the others generally agree that some kind of human-made convention is acceptable. Groundedness-and-Simulation wants to minimize all human-wrought contrivance, wants to match player reasoning to character reasoning as close as one can get to 1:1; there will always be some contrivances, but they ought to be minimized as much as possible for this game-purpose. Again, this doesn't mean it is incompatible with the others, but I find it is the one most likely to raise a stink about divergence.

Score-and-Achievement bends relatively easily because "succeed more" is an easy fallback Score and "do something worth remembering" is an easy fallback Achievement, and, well, there's a reason we call them roleplaying games and not RP puzzles or RP performances--it's hard to totally divorce from having some measure of evaluation and growth. Conceit-and-Emulation, my term for "genre" Sim, blends relatively well because genres can sometimes rest almost purely on aesthetics, and because "let's play a/an <X> game" where <X> is "supers" or "cyberpunk" or "wild west" etc. is just really easy for most people to conceptualize. Values-and-Issues, GNS "Narrativism," is a bit harder simply because it's relatively new, but it can be done (with varying difficulty) if there's enough tools for the players to drive conflicts forward by themselves, rather than needing to rely on the GM to make it happen.

 

[niklinna]

Alrighty. Just remember, you asked for it!

I did! Thank you for sharing these thoughts, they're quite interesting.

The idea as I understand it with GNS "Narrative" play, is that the DM takes a back seat in terms of the narrative action, in the same way that in a gamist game, the DM takes a back seat in terms of the gameplay action. Hence it is considered a faux pas, at least among most D&D gamers I know, for the DM to unilaterally declare what the PCs choose to do, and unless the players are definitely okay with it, it is generally frowned upon to "force" things to end up where the DM wants them to be. (Even for folks who don't share my opposition to fudging and railroading, it is generally accepted that doing any of those things in outright defiance of what players are trying to do is...unwise, shall we say.)

You clarify what you're getting at below, but at first this tripped me up, and sounded to me more like an issue of authority/control over the PCs, rather than GNS Narrativism/Gamism as such. Little-n narrative action is easily construed to mean all the stuff that goes on, and I think the GM has as much charge over NPC/world actions & events as PCs do over theirs (more, according to some ). But I think what you meant are the specific value-laden choices the players must make in GNS Narrative play. Those are the point of GNS Narrativist play, and the jobs of the GM and players in that regard are distinct. (Edit: You did in fact say that in the earlier post, but I figured it's worth continuing to emphasize.)

The term "back seat" doesn't really work for me, although it feels close to the mark. But, the GM can very much be in full charge of the narrative events confronting the players...it's just that their job is different. But then you get right to that.

In a GNS "Narrative" game, the players are the ones choosing the Value, the goal, the purpose of play, and deciding how to deal with the Issues that result from pursuing that goal, with the GM acting only enough to frame the scenes sufficiently that the players actually do have Issues to deal with. In a GNS "Gamist" game, the players are evaluating their own performance by some metric of Score, e.g. surviving combats or collecting treasure etc., in order to obtain Achievement of some kind, e.g. defeating the opposition, saving the innocent dragon from the evil princess, what-have-you, and the GM acts only enough to ensure that the metric(s) of Score have actual meaning to the players and that the Achievements are motivating enough to pursue.

Yes, it's for the players to present their values, the GM to challenge them, and the players to agonize over whether and how to fit action to their character's values (and again to be clear, in GNS Narrativism, that's the primary interest in play). I can't think of a game where the players routinely present moral dilemmas for NPCs to work out...maybe that's a type of play I haven't encountered yet!

Similarly for Gamist play, the GM most definitely is in charge of the NPC's actions in a conflict. But the spotlight and attention is on how the PCs address the challenge. So, in that sense I can underrstand "back seat".

I think it's worth pointing out again that both can occur in a single scene/encounter, where a combat might feature embedded decisions over who to kill or capture or let escape, or which innocents to rescue or allow to perish (to use an extreme but common example). Whether to engage in the combat in the first place can also be a value-laden decision point. But, usually, those decisions are more tactical or expedient, and more importantly, the individual moments are clearly one or the other, and the emphasis and priority held by individual participants can vary. Also, the specific example I gave, is common and generic—that is, it is likely not based on player-presented values but on trope.

Going further along that line here, however, would be a huge tangent, albeit critical to some of the disagreements I see about the GNS model....

I break up GNS "Simulation" games into two categories, what are called "process" Sim and "genre" Sim by others. In GNS "Simulation" games of the "process" Sim style, the GM acts only so far as to establish sufficient Groundedness, rooting the imaginary sensory/perceptual experience of play as (metaphorically) tangible as possible so that it feels like a living world that actually exists. The GM then turns the metaphorical crank of the world so that the Simulation of its future states proceeds (hence "process" Sim) logically and rationally from the initial data. From there, sufficiently comprehensive naturalistic reasoning on the part of the players should allow them to correctly predict and respond to the events in that world. In GNS "Simulation" games of the "genre" Sim style, the GM acts only so far as to establish a Conceit (or set thereof), the principal concept, theme, or tone that will color the experience of play, and to provide a milieu in which the players' Emulation of an appropriate genre, creator, style, etc. can occur.

Yep, makes sense to me.

I used the phrase "acts/acting only so far as to X" with a reason: if the DM/GM steps too far outside these limits, it tends to get a negative response from the players. A GM running a Groundedness-and-Simulation game that starts specifying too many rules outside of naturalistic reasoning will start to draw accusations of being "unrealistic," whether by injecting human-made conventions like tropes (which are a Conceit-and-Emulation thing) or by being excessively abstract in how the thing is handled (which is generally a Score-and-Achievement thing, as Scores are necessarily an abstraction.) A GM running a Score-and-Achievement game that expands the rules beyond what is needed, especially if so doing makes them particularly complicated and unbalanced, will draw criticism for weakening the game just to make it (metaphorically) "look" nicer.

I agree that this is a combination of agendas that's much more likely to actively clash, rather than compete for time & attention.

To be clear, here, I don't actually think that this means these game-purposes are necessarily mutually exclusive. I don't even claim that they're jointly exhaustive; there may be other game-purposes I have never considered. Instead, my point is there is something of a "GM, stay in your lane!" element here, a "don't water down the X just to get some more (implicitly, unnecessary) Y" attitude. And the type of "GM, stay in your lane" thinking that tends to show up in D&D discussion is of a GNS Gamist nature, or failing that, a GNS Simulationist nature (IME, almost always "process" Sim, much more rarely "genre" Sim.)

Yes. I think GNS Narrative play can co-exist with either, too, but not that it necessarily does.

When these game-purposes are combined, I find that usually this is done in one of two ways: either the purposes involved are already reasonably amenable to blending (e.g. "genre" Sim is pretty friendly with everything except "process" Sim IME), or the two purposes are engaged on different levels of play, and thus avoid getting in one another's way by being focused on different things (e.g. combat being very Gamist, but exploration being very "process" Simulationist--it's naturally difficult to do both things fully simultaneously, so they can coexist in their enclosed spaces.) If a game actually tries to combine two purposes in the very same activities, it does seem that this can lead to problems, as noted above, with players feeling dissatisfied by compromise rather than pleased by diversity.

Yes, this makes a whole lot of sense. I also think it's one of the main sources of confusion and angst over the GNS model. Its lumping/splitting may not match what some people would like, but it does make the important distinctions.

Overall, I find "process" Sim/"Groundedness-and-Simulation" to be the most picky of the four game-purposes I've articulated, because all three of the others generally agree that some kind of human-made convention is acceptable. Groundedness-and-Simulation wants to minimize all human-wrought contrivance, wants to match player reasoning to character reasoning as close as one can get to 1:1; there will always be some contrivances, but they ought to be minimized as much as possible for this game-purpose. Again, this doesn't mean it is incompatible with the others, but I find it is the one most likely to raise a stink about divergence.

This fits too, and I find it interesting that you talk about mapping player reasoning to character reasoning in this context, which is widely regarded as a story/drama/narrative thing. But again, both you and the GNS model put that under Simulation, not Narrative. I shared my key insight on that too.

Score-and-Achievement bends relatively easily because "succeed more" is an easy fallback Score and "do something worth remembering" is an easy fallback Achievement, and, well, there's a reason we call them roleplaying games and not RP puzzles or RP performances--it's hard to totally divorce from having some measure of evaluation and growth. Conceit-and-Emulation, my term for "genre" Sim, blends relatively well because genres can sometimes rest almost purely on aesthetics, and because "let's play a/an <X> game" where <X> is "supers" or "cyberpunk" or "wild west" etc. is just really easy for most people to conceptualize. Values-and-Issues, GNS "Narrativism," is a bit harder simply because it's relatively new, but it can be done (with varying difficulty) if there's enough tools for the players to drive conflicts forward by themselves, rather than needing to rely on the GM to make it happen.

Yes, tools and explicit support for player-driven values-and-issues narrativism (all deliberately lowercased) would help a lot. We've both hinted at that several times in this specific exchange and in many upstream posts.

To get back to measures of evaluation and growth, you just helped me with another insight. I've always bristled at classes, xp, and levels, but I really enjoy games with playbooks, which superficially look a lot like classes. Classes, though, tend to be much heavier, and in defining what a character can do, usually in a more Gamist frame and in contrast with many other specific features, implicitly define to me what a character cannot do. They prompt in me a more literal reading that way. Playbooks, perhaps because their sparseness, don't prompt the same reaction and I find myself being much more imaginative and free in my role-playing. Not perhaps on topic, but the discussion yielded that, so thanks!

Edits: Minor clarfications.

 

[Hussar]

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

Not as I understand it. If the game ties race to class, in such a way that choosing Race X for Class Y only provides a mechanical advantage, then that is very much not a narrative game. You choose a Dex Race to play a Dex Class. Which has pretty much nothing to do with anything outside of the mechanics of the game. It's about as Gamist as it can be. It's not really Sim play because it's so incoherent (why does this race get this bonus but this other race that is physically almost identical not get the same bonus?) .

So, in that sense, I do disagree with @EzekielRaiden in that I don't find race/class to be sim - well, potentially High Concept Sim maybe - particularly. The Race/Class combos are gamist buttons that you press, not particularly for any sort of simulation of anything - to me all the things that @EzekielRaiden talks about are simply post hoc justifications bolted on to spackle over the fact that these are purely gamist concepts.

Or, to put it another way, if you look at that table in the 5e DMG where they talk about non-standard races as classes - that table tells you everything you need to know to play that race in D&D, yet tells you absolutely nothing about those races. I mean, using that table, I could play an Aarokocra character without actually knowing what an Aarokocra is. I know it's something that flies - since it has a fly speed, and it has claws. That's it. Since it's Dex or Wis race, I know that I'm not supposed to make an Aarocockra wizard.

Again, I have no idea what this race is, (well, I do, but, work with me here) but, I can absolutely play it with no problem using nothing but that table. I can then completely invent an "Aarokocra" to justify those bonuses after the fact - it's a bat/flying dinosaur humanoid right?- and dive straight into play.

I remember talking to a fellow DM years ago, a few years after 3e released and he told me that he didn't have a Monster Manual when he started play and this was before online SRD's, so, he used zombies because the zombie stats were in the PHB. Everything he used in the game was just a variation of zombie stats. And the game worked fine.

That's how little importance simulationist play is in 3e.

 

[pemerton]

I base it on tens of thousands of player self-reports praising how functional they find 5e is for them to play.

This seems like an argument that the way MCU makes films is more "functional" than the way Ingmar Bergman makes films, because the former have more viewers extolling their virtues.

This is why, upthread, I made the point that Edwards is not offering a theory of the commercial success of RPGs.

I note that for a wide range of players with diverse priorities, the game continues to function successfully, satisfying their differing needs.

<snip>

the game designers had motive for belief that D&D would be more functional - "the RPG experience work better over the long haul" - if different kinds of players were present together in a session.

This also seems to be a description of a commercial strategy and commercial success.

I imagine that Palladium has sold more RPGs, and had more hours of those RPGs played, than John Harper's Agon or Vincent Baker's In A Wicked Age. Am I therefore obliged to conclude that Palladium's RPGs are "more functional" and "more successful" as RPGs that Agon or In A Wicked Age?

Nor for me is it a matter of popularity: you have to go deeper than a simple count of purchases. Read the words of players enabled by 5th edition to enjoy RPG together. Look at the many kickstarters offering intriguing 5e mods. And so on.

This is not going beyond commercial success.

 

[hawkeyefan]

This seems like an argument that the way MCU makes films is more "functional" than the way Ingmar Bergman makes films, because the former have more viewers extolling their virtues.

This is why, upthread, I made the point that Edwards is not offering a theory of the commercial success of RPGs.

This also seems to be a description of a commercial strategy and commercial success.

I imagine that Palladium has sold more RPGs, and had more hours of those RPGs played, than John Harper's Agon or Vincent Baker's In A Wicked Age. Am I therefore obliged to conclude that Palladium's RPGs are "more functional" and "more successful" as RPGs that Agon or In A Wicked Age?

If by functional you mean “seemingly slapped together by a group of spastic monkeys on cocaine” then yes, Palladium is much more functional!

 

[pemerton]

You speak of subjecting 5e to the discomfort of theoretical analysis. Ironically, it is the theoretical analysis that is discomforted.

In what way? 5e is a RPG that straddles the line between characters-face-problems simulationism, and low-competition cooperative gamism. This is evidenced by its design in itself, by the design of the APs that WotC sells, by the general tenor of discussion around the game.

How is theory discomforted by that?

 

[pemerton]

If by functional you mean “seemingly slapped together by a group of spastic monkeys on cocaine” then yes, Palladium is much more functional!

Sure! But now we're not talking about popularity, or the number of people who attest to the pleasure the game has brought them, but design elements.

I'm happy to talk about how 5e is designed. I've already done so in this thread. It adopts 4e's solution of the maths issues that are endemic in upper level AD&D and throughout 3E. By doing this, it is able to adopt 3E-style PC build without the game breaking. It reproduces a slightly stripped down version of the 3E/4e take on classic D&D combat. Out of combat it adopts an approach to PC build closer to 4e than 3E, but to resolution closer to 3E than 4e. In doing all these things it squares a lot of circles. More gamist play groups can step up the challenge (it's common to see posts/threads about running games based on "deadly+" encounters). More simulationist groups won't have their story or character experience disrupted by PC deaths or TPKs (because of the tightly tuned and rather forgiving maths) and won't have non-combat resolution produce disruptive outcomes (because the GM is in charge of what those are).

In all these ways it's a clever design. I don't see how that makes it more functional or more successful, as an RPG, than (say) Classic Traveller, or Agon, or Wuthering Heights, or Burning Wheel.