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

[clearstream]

Aha, here it is.

As above, your model sounds like it asks a different question. Mine asks, "What purposes are there for games?" Yours, if I've understood your most recent post (response below), is asking, "Why do people choose to play games?" In Aristotelian terms, I'm examining formal causes (in essence, "why tables are shaped like tables"), while you are examining final causes ("why tables get made at all," more or less.) Complements to one another. "Prestige" applies to all four of my categories, though I'd associate it more strongly with Score-and-Achievement due to the emphasis it puts on (eventual) success. Values-and-Issues, on the other hand, puts almost no emphasis on success, but rather on resolution, which is very different--more on that later.

Your "make-believe" also shows up everywhere (we give things fluffy names, after all), but it's weakest in S&A (many D&D/PF game postings call for "skirt-length backstory"--that's clearly not overly enamored with "make-believe"), but it's of paramount importance for Groundedness-and-Simulation. "Process" Sim, at least as I see it, is focused on clear, intuitive symmetry between player and character. Frex, most issues with "metagame" knowledge/mechanics arise there. S&A players rarely outright dislike metagame stuff, unless it's seen as producing unfair play, while "process" Sim fans tend to loathe anything "meta." (I'd argue this is an area that separates G&S from Conceit-and-Emulation play, as metacurrencies etc. seem fairly common in games that openly pursue a particular genre, e.g. "supers" games.)

Back to my contrast between Achievement and "resolving" Issues. This comes from both theory and observation of play. Achievement--the purpose or goal of Gamist Situation, aka Challenge--is about success, but "resolving" Issues does not require success. A "Pyrrhic victory" is generally not seen as an achievement (small a), even if it does theoretically get the job done, because the success is tainted by the overwhelming loss/cost/secondary failures. Likewise, if the party (say) defeats the demilich, but only because the last surviving party member did it the turn before they failed their final save and got permanently petrified, then technically the party Achieved something, and the group in theory can expect prestige for their "victory," but the clear loss in terms of Score will taint it. Likewise, many D&D DMs struggle with parties who are unwilling to retreat from combat--because that means admitting defeat in the here-and-now, a loss of Score and (at absolute best) a delaying of Achievement (or more likely an abandonment thereof).

By comparison, "resolution" of an Issue doesn't have to succeed or fail--merely getting to the other side of the conflict. I'm thinking of DW's Bonds, and how they're discussed in the End of Session move, which opens with (emphasis mine): "When you reach the end of a session, choose one your bonds that you feel is resolved (completely explored, no longer relevant, or otherwise). Ask the player of the character you have the bond with if they agree. If they do, mark XP and write a new bond with whomever you wish." That's totally unrelated to success, or even (small-a) achievement; instead, it's related to how important or relevant the bond is to the people involved. If its relevance has run its course, then it doesn't matter whether one side or another has actually done anything, the bond is done. Be it abandoned, successful, or failed, all of those "resolve" the current Bond. But a Bond can also be resolved simply by changing to something new: the "field" shifts from its original Issue to a new one.

As an example of that kind of play in my own player experience, I played a Paladin in a DW game. We had a halfling Fighter, who was a gruff, rough-and-tumble type, who saw my character's idealism and compassion as weaknesses that needed to be addressed; he took the bond, "<Paladin> is soft, but I will make them hard like me." Conversely, I took the bond, "<Fighter>'s misguided behavior endangers their very soul!" This set up an interesting dynamic, where both sides saw the other as mistaken, but hoped to improve them. As we played through the game, though, I revealed (after a roll of some kind, can't recall which) that my character became a Paladin after his wife was killed by an evil wizard; he had killed the wizard in retaliation and then dedicated the rest of his life to being a better person and helping others who had been exploited or hurt. I can still hear the player's voice when he said, "<Paladin>....you're one of the strongest people I've ever known." And in that moment, after months of my character being a stalwart shoulder (well...hip, the Fighter was a halfling after all) to lean on and risking his life to save others, the Fighter realized that what he truly wanted to be more like my Paladin. He went full CG (very C but also trying hard to be G), saving people, raising up the downtrodden. That was a lovely game and I'm still a little sad we had to stop like, 2-3 sessions before it would have wrapped up completely.

Point being, "resolving" Issues can look a lot like Achieving things, because both of them have some kind of conflict and work to end it. But Achievement is pretty specifically focused on success and tends to see even "success at great cost" as not great, while "resolving" Issues has no specific relation to "success" at all and may even embrace an "objective" (=Score) failure because the future Issues it could lead to are worthy of exploration.

Maybe the best way to put this is: "Solve a problem" is extremely abstract. Because you can "solve" a problem by just letting go, right? If you decide the problem isn't a problem anymore then it's solved. But that would be totally against the Gamist ethos--it would be even worse than surrender, it would be declaring that success (and thus Achievement) didn't even matter. If "Solve a problem" is where you want your model to be at, then it's going to capture literally almost all games--not just RPGs--in a way similar to how I described Narrativism upthread: every game can contain narrative to some degree, so defining "narrativism" to mean "games where narratives exist" is a bit pointless. Likewise, what games do not have any semblance whatsoever of "solve a problem"? It would seem to me that, just as nearly all games contain some amount of narrative (however shoestring), nearly all games (by dint of being "games") contain some amount of "solve a problem." The category is too broad.


I don't personally think so, no. I mean, they're related, but aren't "tell a story" and "make-believe" also related? It's hard to tell a story without engaging the audience's imagination in any way whatsoever. (I'm not so sure if the reverse is true or not, so I'll leave that aside.) The categories being related to one another isn't, in and of itself, a problem in my eyes. Others have already explained the reasons Edwards combined "process" Sim and "genre" Sim into one category, they do have things in common, even if (IMO) they end up going very different directions. But there are also parallels between some that are (usually) fundamentally at one another's throats, specifically "Gamism" and "process" Sim. Both care a great deal about rules (for very different reasons), put a premium on the decision-making process (but different kinds of decisions), tend to emphasize the character generation "minigame," and tend to evolve more by the proliferation of player options (again, for different reasons) than by the proliferation of new approaches or perspectives. Hence, even though they tend to pull in opposite directions, you can have fans of both types think a game (such as D&D) is in their camp and always has been and the other side has just been fooling itself about this. (See: the "meat points" debate, the fraught discussions of what is acceptable abstraction, etc.)


Oh, absolutely! That's why I use Achievement and not (as I called it) "prestige." Because while I do think there's a strong correlation between "epiphany"/"prestige" etc. and Achievement, I don't think they're always together. I, personally, don't really care much about prestige in general; it takes the right kind of environment to make me interested in that stuff. And epiphany (if you're meaning it in the sense I gave--I'm a bit confused there), while absolutely something a lot of fans of certain categories I've articulated would pursue, isn't something you can really manufacture. It has to arise naturally out of play. Trying to force it would ruin it, much like (say) overtly trying to make a character be super awesome and cool and badass is usually going to fail. That doesn't mean certain genres aren't associated with having that kind of protagonist and/or antagonist (consider shounen anime), but such things have to arise naturally from the process of actually telling the tale. You can't make people have a sudden dawning of understanding, but you can try to invite it through certain techniques. (This, incidentally, is one of the places Gamism and "process" Sim break: Gamism usually values transparency, wanting the rules to be straightforward, concise, and functional, while "process" Sim often actually values obscurantism, because if the rules are opaque, it is more feasible to feel that sudden moment of understanding where the pieces fall into place and you see how they really work together.)

I offered these things as suggestions since they seemed to be what you were going for, not because I wish to add them to my framework. They aren't part of my framework to begin with; it doesn't concern itself with why people care about Score and seek Achievement, just that those are purposes served by gaming.


Well then, see above for my concern with "solve a problem." It seems, to me, that "solve a problem" is in the same space as "narratives exist in it." How could you have a game where it never, at any point, for any reason, involves anything that looks like "solv[ing] a problem"?

Interesting looking post, and I'll answer in more detail later, It may help in interpreting my comments to know that I view games as tools.

To say that a thing is a tool is to say that there is a tool-user who knows the use of that tool and will use that tool, and to imply a purpose that is not solely the wielding, but the product of the wielding. It is to suppose an ability to obey and to interpret a proper use, without ruling out improper use. Two tool-users may disagree on how to wield a tool – one may be unaware of a use known by the other and they may differ in purpose – while being satisfied to agree upon the familial identity of that tool.

The function of a tool is contingent on how a tool-user uses that tool. As players wield game artifacts – tools – to fabricate mechanisms, they may determine properties of those mechanisms. The extent of such determination is variable, for example where some functions are handed over to computers.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Well, you're welcome to offer another description.

I mean I wouldn't try to shove everything Edwards tries to put under simulationsim in one basket to begin with. Coming up with any coherent descriptions for such an effort seems impossible.

To me, imaging pages of detail of military hardware, or pages of detail of different sorts of swords and polearms and how they might interact with different sorts of armour, seems like it is enjoying the fiction for its own sake. It is sheer imagination. I rarely do this for weapons, but have done it for castles (when I was quite a bit younger than I am now) and for religions (when I was younger, though not quite as young). It's imagining - enjoying a fiction - to no other end than the pleasure of imagining.

That's not necessarily even fiction! Guns and castles are real. And it is utterly absurd to conflate enjoying technical manuals of WWI tanks with enjoying Macbeth!

Nothing. There are some people who make furniture because they enjoy the process of woodworking. They may also end up enjoying what they make for its own sake, but that's not why they do it.

Then why mention it as defining feature of simulationism if it is present in other styles as well?

Dragonlance-style RPGing is a classic example of high concept sim. Someone has written/prepped a story. The story has a point. The players play through the story. They get to enjoy the story, including its point. The players of the game, in the course of their play, are not themselves engaged in authoring a story with a point. They are audience, not authors.

Then why mention having a point as defining feature of narrativism, if it happen in other styles too?

Story now play is about participants as authors.

Then don't obfuscate this by talking about the subject matter, as that can be shared with the other styles, if it is the method that is distinctive!

When you talk about the point being "explored via play" there seem to be two possibilities. (1) The player explores, via play, what is involved in being a loyal samurai or an honourable paladin or a cleric of Pelor, etc. That is classic simulationist play: the parameters of the role, and in this case the commitments the role involves, are established in advance (often by the GM) and the player experiences them. I see a lot of advocacy for this sort of play, especially in the context of GM's telling players what it means to be a cleric of a certain god.

(2) The GM establishes situations that test the meaning of being a loyal samurai, or an honourable paladin, or a cleric of Pelor, etc, and the expectation is that the player will make a call about that, thereby expressing some idea of their own about what loyalty, or honour, or religious devotion, demand, and when those demands might be disregarded in pursuit of some other end. Vincent Baker has a nice discussion of this sort of approach, in DitV pp 138, 140, 143:

The first logically always entails the possibility of the second. Even if the GM wouldn't intentionally engineer a situation that would test the commitment (though many would) such a situation may nevertheless arise due the events unfolding at the table. Is it incidental emergent narrativism then?

If that is how you're playing, then you are playing story now. I've done this in AD&D (ignoring the alignment rules, as I mentioned upthread). I've done this in Rolemaster. I've done this in 4e D&D. To be blunt, I've never seen anyone post about this sort of play in 3E or 5e D&D, but for all I know it's happening out there.

I mean, of course it is! Why on Earth would you doubt it? This has absolutely nothing to do with the system.

But not the resolution. That's the whole point.

It is exceeding common for campaign themes and character concepts to have open questions that need to be resolved in play. In fact, I have hard time imagining situations where this at least implicitly wouldn't be the case even if it wasn't clearly articulated.

If you don't think there's a difference between the GM and/or the game system telling you what the answer is (who the villain is, what the right thing to do is, etc) - whether expressly, or via the myriad informal cues that can be generated in RPGing (like "don't split the party" or "don't generate intraparty conflict" or "follow the GM's hook or we'll have no game this evening") - and the players establishing their own answers via play, then I can't take this any further. Story now RPGing is premised on exactly that difference - the difference between authorship and audience, as it can be uniquely experienced in the context of RPGing.

Things like "don't split the party for a long time so that other people have to sit for hours watching you to play solo" or "don't generate intraparty conflict to the point that the characters can no longer work together if you want to keep playing these characters" are simply practical parameters that people might adopt to sensibly use their possibly very limited gaming time, and I wouldn't extrapolate from them any great creative agendas. Any game probably has some such practical limits.

Taking GM's plot hooks might be about this as well, though one I have seem more often is that if the players want to take the game into drastically new direction, it might be polite to do it in the end of one session rather than in a beginning of a new one so that the GM has time to prepare. How necessary such practices are of course depends on the GMs improvisational skills and how prep heavy the system is. As a GM I generally prefer systems that are not terribly prep heavy exactly for this reason as I don't want to be tied to my prep and want to be able to let the game go into any direction the players want to take it.

But yes, beyond such practical considerations there indeed is a question of how much and how can the players influence the trajectory of the play. And this of course is a spectrum, not a binary, so that's why it feels odd to me for you to ask whether I see the difference. I see the spectrum, I see no stark dividing line.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If the overall issue with the Threefold Model is lumping too much in together, I think the obvious solution is to expand, rather than contract.
The reason why I am so adamant about keeping High Concept Play and Story Now play separated is that in terms of why we are playing they are near opposites.

Absolutely fair. And when people are dividing things into these baskets, they're by necessity doing so via their own personal lens. What differences they see as important, which as incidental. But yeah, a lot of criticism seems to be related to there simply being too few baskets so in any arrangement some people feel that their laundry got mixed!

When I am playing a character focused game with a High Concept agenda, I'm leaning into the narrative we are creating together. I am embracing tropes, making decisions based on what I think makes for a more compelling narrative, embracing drama for the sake of drama, building scenes with other characters where my character struggles in the appropriate ways. I am playing tropes, genre and a narrative outcome. Games like Smallville or Hillfolk (when played according to their text) typify this sort of play.

When I am playing a character focused game with a Story Now agenda, I am doing almost the exact opposite. I am advocating for my character and doing so as hard as possible. I am not leaning into drama for its own sake. Instead, I am playing with a sense of curiosity and vulnerability about how this character would respond to the situation at hand. I follow the fiction. I do not lead it. I embrace the tension of the moment - the anticipation of where things might lead. I keep the story feral.

The thought process and aims could not be more different. Even if sometimes the resulting fiction looks superficially similar.

Oh, I think I get this! The former is more author stance "what would make a good story" and latter more method actor, immersive "what would my character do?" I have a friend who feels like you do, that these two things are super different, to the point that they're inimical to each other. I don't quite feel that way, albeit I see the difference in focus. But I can do both at the same time, and would even have hard time solely focusing on one. But ultimately these are very subjective things and we must just accept that people's brains are wired differently. And that also means that the category arrangement in any model will be by necessity somewhat subjective as well.

But this makes me to think. A lot of people have emphasises how in Story Now the players are co-authors, that they have more control over the narrative than in a traditional game. But to me having that would make more sense with the first stance you describe...

 

[Campbell]

Creative Agendas (as defined by the essays) are not a what or a how - they are a why. In this moment of play what are we striving for? Adopting a creative agenda is an act of will. It is not something you do on accident. It's also something players do - not game mechanics. Some game mechanics may promote or hinder a given creative agenda, but they don't like have an agenda - players (including the GM) do.

 

[Campbell]

When it comes to playbooks versus classes they just have fundamentally different design purposes. The underlying design purpose of classes is niche protection. The idea being that players should have to work together, using varied skillsets to overcome a challenge. Playbooks were designed for a fundamentally different set of situations. Apocalypse World is not a team sport or a challenge based game. It's common that most player characters will end up having to roll for almost every basic move so even though there are capability differences you are still capable in every area. Playbooks also lean a lot more into who you are then what you can do.

 

[Umbran]

Because it fails to capture the unique appeal of those play spaces and combines things that are nothing alike.

If you require your game to exclude others, that's a "you problem" not a game problem.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This again shows how criticizing GNS for lumping too much under Simulationism misses the mark. Mode/style of play isn't the only level on which we can discuss coherence and conflict.

I don't think the fact its not the only one doesn't make it a valid one. Its not only that it lumps too much in, but that it lumps in a couple of major categories that all evidence I have are considered outright contradictory by probably the majority of people. I don't think its asking too much of a model to not do that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do find that certain mental turn very interesting. It seems to me that a lot of people are very sensitive to the possibility that they are being told not "what they can do," but rather "what they are allowed to do." That is, "can" is "you definitely have this option, which others may or may not be able to mimic or replicate," which says nothing about what cannot be done, whereas "allowed" is "in theory anyone could do this, but you have been given permission to, and anyone without permission cannot do it, even if they might really want to." The latter enables by removing presumed denial. The former simply enables, without any implication of further capacity or denial. I find there are a lot of folks who (IMO unfairly or even irrationally) leap to seeing that "allowed, and thus others are disallowed" framework, in ways that rather limit their potential gaming options. Had I some magic bullet for such feels I would use it.

This is a persistent problem when discussing feats or feat-like structures in games. Frequently, such structures will be designed as special traits (learned or natural) that allow you to do certain things in a fashion that is easier or more useful than the fashion that might be assumed with such an action otherwise (a trait that allows climbing done one handed for example). But if you're not careful, people will read such things as being necessary for doing the thing at all, and thus complain about it on grounds of either gating access to things it seems anyone could do, or forbidding the GM from permitting certain actions at all without the trait, when that's rarely what's intended.

 

[Thomas Shey]

*This is probably why when I tell people that characters aren't subject to permanent, irrevocable, random death in my game, they think it must be "boring" or that the players "always win." They're so used to death being the ultimate metric of Score—how long did you survive?—that talk of doing anything else immediately makes them question how it is possible to still have any Achievement in the game.

This is clearly from people who've never watched people with a competitive streak play a superhero game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, I agree. It's interesting to observe that there can be incompatibilities within an agenda.

It only looks odd if you expect an agenda by itself to do all the heavy lifting. Agendas are, in the end, issues in taste of what sort of experiences you prefer in play style, but they (for the most part, given my note about stylized genres) don't actually tell you anything about what sort of genres you prefer; you can have a gamist or a dramatist player who both really like or dislike SF games. And this applies to other slices of preference.

That's the essential point I wanted to make. If gamist is about challenge, it is equally gamist to prefer low challenge as high. Challenge is a very, very general term though, and there isn't anything like the deconstruction of narrativism to say what in game will amount to effective and engaging rather than ineffective and unengaging challenge. Nothing about what gamism needs to be.

You do have to look at the reasons for that preference, however; someone who prefers low challenge because they want that sense of power and success is doing something a bit different from someone who wants it because higher challenge interferes with their ability to focus on characterization. The first is still very much focused on a game-centric element, while the latter is essentially trying as much as possible to keep that element in the background.

Regarding the discussion about what is needed--well, the problem is, as I referenced in my PF1e/2e example, you have to look at what the concerns actually are. And there are pitfalls in looking at the published game system and drawing too much conclusion from it. As noted, in the OD&D days, while there was an enormous gamist lean-in, much of it had nothing to do with system but was ad-hoc GM/player interchanges that could just as easily have been done in a game with no mechanics at all. I have some opinions about the virtues and pitfalls of low-mechanics gaming but they'd be a massive sideshow to this thread.