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

[Ovinomancer]

Perhaps try reading before hitting the reply button? My posts tend not to be very long or convoluted.

But yes, if simulationism "indicates an attempt to evoke, within the experience of playing the game, some specific effect or aspect," like the post I quoted says, then pretty much every RPG is that. Can't you claim that for example Apocalypse World isn't doing that? That is is not trying to evoke a certain vision of an apocalyptic world?

Wait, you chastise me for not following, and then agree that I had it right? So weird.

Yes, if you think that simulationism is everything, then it's useless as a category. However it doesn't do that. As for the quoted bit, you didn't highlight that as important to you in that response or any further response but instead were responding to that entire post which cannot be summarized by that snippet. Further, that snippet is an attempt to clarify a more general concept, not the specific definition under discussion. It's like if I took something you said that was related to the point you were making but then treated that snippet as the entirety of your argument. It's a strawman.

Simulation is the agenda of the players -- ie, what the players want most from play -- to experience the fiction for the sake of the fiction. Mostly this means that play has to have internal cause -- that actions in play have a traceable and clear connection into the fiction that results. That can be achieved in a few ways, as talked about in the essay, either by a clear and detailed process that generates the fiction in play. This is referred to as "purist-for-system" simulation, or process sim. Another option is to emulate a genre or story and make sure that play produces the desired effect for the players, which is called "high-concept" simulationism. An example of this is the WotC APs.

These are very distinct from an agenda to be challenged and to overcome the challenges in play through skill and luck. Or an agenda to have characters that are questions and play to see how those questions resolve. Neither of these is placing the experience of fiction for the sake of the experience foremost. Neither want to be told a story, or have the system tell them exactly how an action unfolds. They want different things than a simulationist agenda wants.

And, as has been mentioned, this is a categorization of people's wants. Games serve these wants in different ways, but like how you can use a wrench to hammer a nail, systems can be used to deliver more than one agenda. But you can look at how the system works and see how well it would support one of these agendas. 5e serves high-concept sim, doesn't do very much at all for process-sim (given it's system rarely produces fiction but instead offloads that onto the GM). It weakly delivers gamism because it's system intentionally reduces risk through it's damage and recovery systems. You can get to gamism, especially if you lean hard into the system it does have, and that works (I do it) but it requires leaning into the gamism which reduces the high-concept sim space (you have to accept some of the gamist conceits which have no good analog in any kind of consistent fiction -- no clear internal cause).

If you look at simulationism from the question of "is internal cause the important thing here" then it's much easier to see how it does do a good job of categorization and difference with the other parts of the model.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Or the science of patterns, but isn't mathematics not one tool or even one kind of tool, but many? As say a language is not murder mysteries or game texts. Mathematics is more the substance from which tools are crafted, just as wood perhaps was the substance from which your table was crafted.

To head off a (possibly quite interesting) dive down a long and twisty rabbithole, what question do you want to answer, and can you disambiguate somewhat more crisply by rephrasing your question?

I see "game," as a huge thing including ALL the possibilities (card games, guessing games, schoolyard games, computer games, roleplaying games, word games, board games, etc., etc., etc.) as being like mathematics, or like pens and paintbrushes. The category is vast, it (quite literally) contains multitudes.

I don't see how you can make an argument that "game" is like "hammer" as far as tools go. "Game" means so many different expressions, and those things cover such an enormous space of options, how could it possibly be the kind of thing where "the thing it is made for doing" and "the things people choose to pick it up for" are the same?

TL;DR: Pens write or draw. But people choose to use pens for the expression they intend. Surely that means what do pens do? differs from why do people use pens?

 

[Campbell]

Why retain the Threefold nature of the model? What is gained by hiding Story Now inside Dramatism? By associating it with a creative agenda it is a direct inversion of? You would just be repeating what you feel is a fundamental flaw in the Forge Big Model. It's hard to not see this as questioning its legitimacy.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think @niklinna referred to this upthread:

Talk to someone who participates in role-playing, and focus on the precise and actual acts of role-playing themselves. Ask them, "Why do you role-play?" The most common answer is, "To have fun."​

​

Again, stick to the role-playing itself. (The wholly social issues are real, such as "Wanting to hang out with my friends," but they are not the topic at hand.) Now ask, "What makes fun?" This may not be a verbal question, and it is best answered mainly through role-playing with people rather than listening to them. Time and inference are usually required.​

​

In my experience, the answer turns out to be a version of one of the following terms. These terms, or modes, describe three distinct types of people's decisions and goals during play. . . .​

​

Collectively, the three modes are called GNS. Stating "GNS," "GNS perspectives," or anything similar, is to refer to the diversity of approaches to play. One might refer to "GNS goals," in which case the meaning is, "whichever one might apply for this act of role-playing." . . .​

​

Used properly, the terms apply only to decisions, not to whole persons nor to whole games. To be absolutely clear, to say that a person is (for example) Gamist, is only shorthand for saying, "This person tends to make role-playing decisions in line with Gamist goals." Similarly, to say that an RPG is (for example) Gamist, is only shorthand for saying, "This RPG's content facilitates Gamist concerns and decision-making." For better or for worse, both of these forms of shorthand are common.​

Upthread, I posted the following:

So, to ask whether or not D&D is (eg) gamist is to ask what sort of RPGing do D&D players, on the whole advocate or else to ask what sort of RPGing does D&D, as a RPG, emphasise?

I've already given my views on this upthread to quite an extent, but will consolidate here:

Classic D&D, by which I mean OD&D as I understand it, B/X, and AD&D as presented by Gygax in his rulebooks and the modules he wrote, is gamist. By that I mean that it is presented as a game to support beating the dungeon. Other activity - wilderness and town adventures - is also flagged, but that seems ancillary either to dungeoneering, or to building up an army and wargaming.

It is clear that, from pretty early on, there were significant numbers of D&D players who were interested in something other than gamism. There were simulationist intuitions, clearly, pushing towards both a greater amount of fidelity to the internal logic of the fiction, even at the expense of game play. You can see this emerging in Gygax's DMG - where he talks about living, breathing dungeons without addressing how these completely undermine the advice in his PHB on successful adventuring. There is a lot of it in Dragon in the mid-80s.

Later AD&D books seem to advocate simulationist play - the Survival Guides, for instance, and OA. The latter has clear high concept sim aspirations. For me, playing OA was a springboard into story now RPGing, but I don't think what I and my friends were doing was very mainstream. It involved leaning into the backstory-and-theme aspects of the PCs, and as a GM following their leads and not exercising the degree of strong control over setting and how situation should evolve that is more typical of D&D, and high concept sim, GMing.

As @Ovinomancer and @AbdulAlhazred have said (or at least implied), AD&D 2nd ed is a strange game. Its PC build and combat rules are basically the same as Gygax's, and these are broadly gamist - there is the luck of the dice in PC gen, and the wargame-y aspect of D&D combat. But the advice to player and GMs is about subordinating all that, and going with "the story" even when that means ignoring dice rolls. (There is also the same system for spell memorisation as in classic D&D, but the dungeon-expedition-followed-by-a-rest cycle that gives it teeth for skilful players is downplayed or missing, so it just becomes "how magic works in D&D".) So the advocated play is high concept simulationism although the core mechanics point in a different direction. That is the sort of play I mostly saw in the 90s among 2nd ed AD&D players. In my experience it was fairly easy for a player with gamist priorities, and a bit of skill, to "break" or at least significantly disrupt the play at a typical AD&D 2nd ed table.

3E isn't a system I played much of, so my knowledge of it is mostly by reading others' reports of play. The PC build system seems to support gamist play ("optimisation"), although at higher levels it suffers from there being a few optimal choices amid the myriad that are presented. The combat system is recognisably similar to the classic one: there is a reduction in the metagame character of saving throws, to make them "make more sense" (and hose fighters in the process) but I think anyone who is really into process simulation of the RQ/RM style must find 3E pretty disappointing: it still has hit points, to hit determined by level, and classes as the framework for PC building.

The existence of a skill system reduces its suitability for the sort of out-of-combat, mapping-and-traps-and-tricks gamism supported by classic D&D, but is easily reconciled with high concept sim because the GM gets to decide what happens next even on a success (ie it is task-based, not conflict-based). The modules that I have seem to sit on a thin line between high concept simulationism and gamism. I assume this is deliberate design, trying to appeal to both of the main D&D markets. A common focus of discussion in the 3E era was the tension between high-concept sim modules and PC build gamism (ie if you design the module so that every party has a chance, where's the reward for building a rogue trap-disarmer or cleric undead-turner? but if you design the module to reward those build choices, the story will break down for other sorts of party compositions). This is not a surprise given the AD&D 2nd legacy plus the design features of 3E itself.

I've never heard of "story now" 3E play. It's probably no worse for it than AD&D, but I'm not absolutely sure of that: the steeper scaling in 3E compared to AD&D might generate pressure towards either GM curation (ie high concept sim) to keep things on track, or else gamism (with a focus on PC build, and making or finding the right magic items) to keep the PCs up to spec.

4e is, notoriously, not well-suited to process/purist-for-system simulation. I don't think it's well suited to high-concept sim either, as it gives players too many resources to make it easy for the GM to curate the events and the "story" of play.

I don't think that 4e, as presented in its rulebooks, is well-suited to the sort of gamist play one found in classic D&D, because of its emphasis on cutting to the action ("skipping the guards") and its use of skill challenges for resolving non-combat challenges. It can support a type of situation/encounter-oriented gamism. The XP rules, and general assumption of party play and party parity, mean that the win condition and real-world payoff is basically playing well and being high-fived by your friends for it.

The same features of 4e that support this sort of gamism - the encounter as a focus of play, the lack of rules that drag attention and play time away from the encounter, the intraparty balance, skill challenge non-combat resolution - all support story now play. In fact, I think skill challenges are better for story now play than gamist play, because from the gamist point of view they are rather weak - even half-hearted engagement with the fiction should enable the players most of the time to be making checks with reasonable prospects of success, and the penalties for losing are often rather light (eg surge loss, in a system that puts no especial weight on the adventuring day; or another XP-earning encounter). Whereas they are pretty good for story now play, as the concern for what it means to perform this action rather than that action introduces a new parameter into the choice of action declaration, and into the scope of GM-narrated consequences.

Rob Heinsoo mentioned the influence of indie RPGs from the start, and clearly DMG2 (and not just in the pacing and coauthorship bit written by Robin Laws) shows some awareness of the narrativist character of skill challenges.

The modules for 4e that I am familiar with - the HPE series - are not meaningfully different from 3E modules, and I think as presented are essentially incoherent relative to the game system. It's no surprise they're widely regarded as sucking.

5e seems to me to draw on the mathematical lessons of 4e to solve the PC build issues that plagued 3E. It is therefore, I suspect, less suited to "optimisation"-style gamism. (Are GWM and Sharpshooter exceptions? But no one is going to high five you for choosing those unless you're at a table isolated from the wider community conversation and you're picking up on them for the first time.) It is no better suited to classic D&D gamism than the preceding post-classic versions. Like 3E it can do combat-oriented gamism, but a lot of more "hardcore" players regard it as rather "easy mode"; and its out-of-combat resolution procedures make GM curation very straightforward.

So I think 5e is best suited for high concept sim, and as I posted upthread the "easy mode" aspect mostly solves the problem that untrammelled fortune mechanics can cause for high concept sim. It can also support gamism in the same way 2nd ed AD&D and 3E and even 4e did, but will probably need a bit more drifting/"amping up" given its default "easy mode".

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I've tried to talk about both what the system facilitates and what the player base, as best I can make sense of them as a mass, is doing; and in the end, I land close enough to @Manbearcat.

Probably my one point of difference from Manbearcat, and @Ovinomancer, is on 4e: the happy player base was probably more gamist than anything else, while the unhappy player base were those trying to make it play in a sim fashion; but as a system I think it facilitates a light/low-risk narrativism as well as it does gamism. I agree with @Campbell that is probably doesn't facilitate that as well as Sorcerer, BitD or AW facilitate their (higher risk, at least for the first and last; I don't know BitD well enough to judge its emotional exposure/risk potential) narrativist play. In particular, the sheer intricacy of the combat resolution system has the real potential to drag play away from the dramatic/thematic focus, and resisting that requires the GM to work hard in their encounter building and action declarations for monsters and NPCs, and also requires the players to build their PCs in ways that are coherent with their conceptions of their dramatic needs and trajectories.

But the support the system does provide for that sort of play is more than trivial, and I think is more than just getting out of the way, though it does that too.

I think your analysis is pretty solid, especially on 4e. I suspect that the REAL underlying issue that people have with GNS-style analysis is that there's an unacknowledged cognitive framework at work. When a lot of people talk about, for instance, 'Simulation' there's a taint of the 'common meaning' in there, that somehow we're talking about mechanics that take the place of 'the laws of physics' essentially. I mean, that MIGHT in theory be a kind of Simulationism (but I think it is in practice virtually non-existent in actual games). Likewise 'Gamist' was often commonly used to mean "any mechanical device which cannot be reconciled with realism." GNS, and I think GDS, etc. NEVER used these terms in that way (though probably if you were to dig far enough back into the early alt.rec.games posts you'd find that their earliest uses were probably along those lines).

The above needs to be kept in mind when parsing earlier criticisms of 4e during the 'wars' period. 4e did a very specific type of Gamist play fairly well, that is simply an endless series of almost-disconnected tactical combats. You could tie them together, maybe add a quest goal here and there, and toss in a few fairly action-oriented SCs if you wanted, all of which mostly amounted to basically "test your chargen skills and tactical play against the GM", and in that light even leveling up was simply a mechanism to generate greater tactical variety, at each level the monsters and typical abilities change a bit, creating a varying set of challenges. The 'treadmill complaint' is easily understood in this context as simply being a reaction to the lack of illusionism about what progress means in D&D. Its right up front, it means very little. Gygax probably would have at least really groked that part in the sense that in a gamist sense leveling in 4e is just pure 'score' (which also evokes video games, another complaint).

It is only when you start pushing into the more narrative methods of play that you, IMHO, really start to get some use out of a lot of elements of the system. Its possible to do that a little bit, or a lot.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Why retain the Threefold nature of the model? What is gained by hiding Story Now inside Dramatism? By associating it with a creative agenda it is a direct inversion of? You would just be repeating what you feel is a fundamental flaw in the Forge Big Model. It's hard to not see this as questioning its legitimacy.

I don't think there is any particular need to retain the threefold. It's merely that GDS is an already existing model that is being contrasted with GNS. But any new model shouldn't of course feel the need to be arbitrarily bound by any predetermined number of categories.

 

[clearstream]

I see "game," as a huge thing including ALL the possibilities (card games, guessing games, schoolyard games, computer games, roleplaying games, word games, board games, etc., etc., etc.) as being like mathematics, or like pens and paintbrushes. The category is vast, it (quite literally) contains multitudes.

I don't see how you can make an argument that "game" is like "hammer" as far as tools go. "Game" means so many different expressions, and those things cover such an enormous space of options, how could it possibly be the kind of thing where "the thing it is made for doing" and "the things people choose to pick it up for" are the same?

Hammer was only to attempt to find a simplifying analogy. It was by no means intended to be the final and complete statement as to the sort of tool I intended. I like your thought about abstract tools, I just hoped to narrow it more.

TL;DR: Pens write or draw. But people choose to use pens for the expression they intend. Surely that means what do pens do? differs from why do people use pens?

Is the thought here that a roleplaying game is a neutral vehicle for play (we can write anything with a pen)?

But far more importantly, is there a way to reword your question to more crisply disambiguate between

• What purposes are there for roleplaying games?
• Why do people choose to use roleplaying games?

If roleplaying game is correctly inserted that way?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Wait, you chastise me for not following, and then agree that I had it right? So weird.

On the second try. It took the whole diversion about animals to get there. But that's fine, and my jab was perhaps unnecessary.

Yes, if you think that simulationism is everything, then it's useless as a category. However it doesn't do that. As for the quoted bit, you didn't highlight that as important to you in that response or any further response but instead were responding to that entire post which cannot be summarized by that snippet. Further, that snippet is an attempt to clarify a more general concept, not the specific definition under discussion. It's like if I took something you said that was related to the point you were making but then treated that snippet as the entirety of your argument. It's a strawman.

Simulation is the agenda of the players -- ie, what the players want most from play -- to experience the fiction for the sake of the fiction. Mostly this means that play has to have internal cause -- that actions in play have a traceable and clear connection into the fiction that results. That can be achieved in a few ways, as talked about in the essay, either by a clear and detailed process that generates the fiction in play. This is referred to as "purist-for-system" simulation, or process sim. Another option is to emulate a genre or story and make sure that play produces the desired effect for the players, which is called "high-concept" simulationism. An example of this is the WotC APs.

These are very distinct from an agenda to be challenged and to overcome the challenges in play through skill and luck. Or an agenda to have characters that are questions and play to see how those questions resolve. Neither of these is placing the experience of fiction for the sake of the experience foremost. Neither want to be told a story, or have the system tell them exactly how an action unfolds. They want different things than a simulationist agenda wants.

And, as has been mentioned, this is a categorization of people's wants. Games serve these wants in different ways, but like how you can use a wrench to hammer a nail, systems can be used to deliver more than one agenda. But you can look at how the system works and see how well it would support one of these agendas. 5e serves high-concept sim, doesn't do very much at all for process-sim (given it's system rarely produces fiction but instead offloads that onto the GM). It weakly delivers gamism because it's system intentionally reduces risk through it's damage and recovery systems. You can get to gamism, especially if you lean hard into the system it does have, and that works (I do it) but it requires leaning into the gamism which reduces the high-concept sim space (you have to accept some of the gamist conceits which have no good analog in any kind of consistent fiction -- no clear internal cause).

If you look at simulationism from the question of "is internal cause the important thing here" then it's much easier to see how it does do a good job of categorization and difference with the other parts of the model.

I think I'll just repeat my earlier question, answering of which might help to illustrate what the difference is in practical terms: How would Apocalypse World need to be different to be a high concept simulation of brutal and chaotic apocalyptic world? Because I have hard time seeing why it would need to be any different. Sure, it is not process sim, but the game definitely is intentionally build to support and evoke themes and genre of the setting. It's not an accidental side product, it is by design.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I think your analysis is pretty solid, especially on 4e. I suspect that the REAL underlying issue that people have with GNS-style analysis is that there's an unacknowledged cognitive framework at work. When a lot of people talk about, for instance, 'Simulation' there's a taint of the 'common meaning' in there, that somehow we're talking about mechanics that take the place of 'the laws of physics' essentially. I mean, that MIGHT in theory be a kind of Simulationism (but I think it is in practice virtually non-existent in actual games). Likewise 'Gamist' was often commonly used to mean "any mechanical device which cannot be reconciled with realism." GNS, and I think GDS, etc. NEVER used these terms in that way (though probably if you were to dig far enough back into the early alt.rec.games posts you'd find that their earliest uses were probably along those lines).

When discussing or explaining these conversations with my friends who play RPGs, but don't spend a lot of time discussing them online, this is definitely a huge stumbling block for the 'why do these things exist/why are we supposed to care about them?' of GNS and GDS.

 

[Ovinomancer]

On the second try. It took the whole diversion about animals to get there. But that's fine, and my jab was perhaps unnecessary.



I think I'll just repeat my earlier question, answering of which might help to illustrate what the difference is in practical terms: How would Apocalypse World need to be different to be a high concept simulation of brutal and chaotic apocalyptic world? Because I have hard time seeing why it would need to be any different. Sure, it is not process sim, but the game definitely is intentionally build to support and evoke themes and genre of the setting. It's not an accidental side product, it is by design.

No, it uses the genre to provide a backdrop. There's a reason why the structure of AW is used in so many genre adaptations to get to different kinds of character drama. Masks isn't about creating superhero fiction, but is a superhero game because it wants to explore the characters that occur in teen superhero stories. The genre isn't the point, it's the enabler.

So, to ask how you could use AW to do high-concept sim? You'd have to change the rules of the game by canning the principles and agenda of play (which are not suggestions, but actually telling you how to play the game). Since all that is left now is a list of moves and the 2d6 resolution mechanic, you can easily adapt this into a high-concept sim because the GM can take over all of the authorities over resolution and backstory and present the story they want to see played. And, you can see this exact thing happen in the threads where people are talking about doing exactly this with AW or DW (mostly DW because it's at least close to D&D and so gets more uptake attempts). And you can see that, even when you do this, the results are almost always unsatisfying.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, it uses the genre to provide a backdrop. There's a reason why the structure of AW is used in so many genre adaptations to get to different kinds of character drama. Masks isn't about creating superhero fiction, but is a superhero game because it wants to explore the characters that occur in teen superhero stories. The genre isn't the point, it's the enabler.

This is not a distinction that makes any sense to me. They both happen, they both are present. Which you consider to be 'the point' is purely a value judgement, an a lot of people would shrug and say 'both' are not even see them as different things.

So, to ask how you could use AW to do high-concept sim? You'd have to change the rules of the game by canning the principles and agenda of play (which are not suggestions, but actually telling you how to play the game).

Why?

Since all that is left now is a list of moves and the 2d6 resolution mechanic, you can easily adapt this into a high-concept sim because the GM can take over all of the authorities over resolution and backstory and present the story they want to see played. And, you can see this exact thing happen in the threads where people are talking about doing exactly this with AW or DW (mostly DW because it's at least close to D&D and so gets more uptake attempts). And you can see that, even when you do this, the results are almost always unsatisfying.

Why you need to change the rules at all? Aren't you by playing Apoc World creating an experience in living apocalyptic world and in very thematic and genre appropriate way?