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

[Thomas Shey]

Looks like we got our wires crossed somewhere then, sorry about that. I've never once been talking about GDS Sim.

Well, I was referencing GNS Sim in my first poit, so the confusion might have been at my end. My point was that genre emulation and other sim elements only look like they belong together as long as you consider the distinction between the first and the rest trivial.

 

[niklinna]

I thought your original post referenced Dramatism, not Sim, though, which may make my response seem nonsensical.

It was about GNS High Concept Simulationism, which is where Edwards apparently exiled GDS Dramatism to. Hence my interest!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

AGENDAS:

Make Apocalypse World seem real
It’s in the details. It’s how you describe things, tastes, smells, sights, sounds, and touches. It’s making sure that, within the framework of the setting, there’s verisimilitude, that everything holds together and rings true. With this kind of game, you want players to go home thinking about it, to have the game have had an impact on them. They need to feel it.

Good, emulating the world, a making it feel real!

Make the player characters’ lives not boring
If their lives are boring, why not do something else with your time? This is interactive fiction. When we go to a type of fiction for an escape or enjoyment, we don’t usually want to see boring, dull things happen to our characters. We want to see them in situations they might not be able to handle, being challenged, confronted, and pushed. Do that here.

Yeah, like in Mad Max! I certainly wouldn't expect lives in apocalyptic world to be boring! Excellent genre emulation!

Play to find out what happens
This is the big one, for me. This is what this game is all about. This is the thing that I want to see surge into other games where the GM is traditionally encouraged to prep a ton of material beforehand, to tell their story, rather than the story of the characters. If you’re doing this correctly, you’re going to end up with questions about things. What happens if Cutter doesn’t give Bolt-Head what she wants? Who will fill the power vacuum left after Sadie killed Dog Head? This is a space where this game demands you don’t answer that question away from the table. You come to the session with the question in mind and the play at the table determines the answer. It’s different for a lot of people, and it’s very satisfying.

Here the second two principles are about decision making and eschew internal cause, so not sim. You seem to be confusing flavor with focus on internal cause.

PRINCIPLES:

• Barf forth apocalyptica.
• Address yourself to the characters, not the players.
• Make your move, but misdirect.
• Make your move, but never speak its name.
• Look through cross-hairs.

"Look through crosshairs. Whenever your attention lands on someone
or something that you own—an NPC or a feature of the landscape,
material or social—consider First killing it, overthrowing it, burning it
down, blowing it up, or burying it in the poisoned ground. An individual
NPC, a faction of NPCs, some arrangement between NPCs, even an
entire rival holding and its NPC warlord: crosshairs. It’s one of the game’s
slogans: “there are no status quos in Apocalypse World.” You can let the
players think that some arrangement or institution is reliable, if they’re
that foolish, but for you yourself: everything you own is, first, always and
overwhelmingly, a target."

This is clearly about emulating the burning, dying, dangerous apocalyptic world where nothing is certain. Very Mad Max. Totally in genre.

• Name everyone, make everyone human.

I'm not gonna quote long paragraphs of text for every one of these, but this is about making the NPCs real, giving them ambitions and gives some very genre appropriate examples. Supports genre emulation for sure.

• Ask provocative questions and build on the answers.

"Once you have the player’s answer, build on it. I mean three things by that:
(1) barf apocalyptica upon it, by adding details and imagery of your own;
(2) refer to it later in play, bringing it back into currency; and (3) use it to
inform your own developing apocalyptic aesthetic, incorporating it—and
more importantly, its implications—into your own vision."

More about building the feel of the apocalyptic world.

• Respond with f---ery and intermittent rewards.

And again a whole long text about how to make the world feel unreliable desperate and messed up. Very on genre.

• Be a fan of the players’ characters.
• Think off-screen too.
• Sometimes, disclaim decision-making.

Emphasis added to Principles -- the bolded ones are distinction not about simulationism, and engaging them directly counters simulationism because they are directing you to not engage in internal cause decision making.

A massive amount of this is about evoking the feel of the genre, and the few that directly are not do not in any way counter it. The whole game is super clearly and intentionally crafted to produce a visceral and real apoc fiction genre experience and is absurd to claim otherwise.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Good, emulating the world, a making it feel real!

Simulationism is about internal cause. This is about flavor. Making the world full of flavor doesn't mean that the way the fiction unfolds adheres to internal cause.

Yeah, like in Mad Max! I certainly wouldn't expect lives in apocalyptic world to be boring! Excellent genre emulation!

This is the wrong take. What this means is that you do NOT have play where the characters are doing mundane or normal things. Mad Max has many moments like this -- AW isn't about those moments. This is the "skip to the fun" part from 4e that was so strongly criticized. Again, looking at internal cause, this discards that because how you get from moment to moment isn't at all considered or really of interest. This actively discards internal cause as any part of framing scenes -- instead action, question, and putting pressure on dramatic needs is what's happening.

So, in the usual loop of almost every RPG, you have two parts that iterate -- setting the scene and resolution. This agenda addresses how you set the scene, and tells you to do so not because it makes sense from previous fiction, but instead to only do so by getting directly into the action. It's not about internal cause.

The second half, resolution, is what the next agenda quoted, "Play to find out what happens," talks about -- the one you didn't discuss above, instead quoting the "look through crosshairs" principle. Play to find out is absolutely not about internal cause, because the way that the system resolves things mechanically does nothing at all for internal cause -- roll 2d6 and you succeed on 7+ is not associated with any cause or effect consideration. Nor is the part of consequences happening on 9-. So, when considered here, play to find out is about not having any ideas about what could happen throughout play -- not just the resolution of an action or a combat or scene, but the entire session, the entire game, even. No plans, no pushing into a direction, and certainly no considering resolution from the point of view of internal cause. You have to discard this agenda point to be able to control how moves resolve and regain direction and internal cause over outcomes.

"Look through crosshairs. Whenever your attention lands on someone
or something that you own—an NPC or a feature of the landscape,
material or social—consider First killing it, overthrowing it, burning it
down, blowing it up, or burying it in the poisoned ground. An individual
NPC, a faction of NPCs, some arrangement between NPCs, even an
entire rival holding and its NPC warlord: crosshairs. It’s one of the game’s
slogans: “there are no status quos in Apocalypse World.” You can let the
players think that some arrangement or institution is reliable, if they’re
that foolish, but for you yourself: everything you own is, first, always and
overwhelmingly, a target."

This is clearly about emulating the burning, dying, dangerous apocalyptic world where nothing is certain. Very Mad Max. Totally in genre.

No, this is about how you are supposed to bring maximum pressure onto things the players have told you they care about and want to see in play. This absolutely discards internal cause, because you aren't bringing this pressure because some other event caused it, or it follows, but because this makes for exciting play and puts the question to the things cared about. It's totally not simulationist, which would instead be telling you to think about what has happened and present a logical outgrowth of that. This is not that.

I'm not gonna quote long paragraphs of text for every one of these, but this is about making the NPCs real, giving them ambitions and gives some very genre appropriate examples. Supports genre emulation for sure.

Agreed -- you seem to be under a strong misapprehension as to what simulationism is in this context, so probably best not to have to repeat.

"Once you have the player’s answer, build on it. I mean three things by that:
(1) barf apocalyptica upon it, by adding details and imagery of your own;
(2) refer to it later in play, bringing it back into currency; and (3) use it to
inform your own developing apocalyptic aesthetic, incorporating it—and
more importantly, its implications—into your own vision."

More about building the feel of the apocalyptic world.

No. This is about giving the players the power of input. If the player answers your question, you are bound to use that answer. This isn't just asking questions and picking what you like out of that and doing that. You have to honor the answers -- "use" the answers. Not consider them, use them. As such, player answers can totally obviate any sense of internal cause, and they must be used. This isn't about simulationism, it's about injecting more places for things to matter to the players and more questions to find the answer to.

And again a whole long text about how to make the world feel unreliable desperate and messed up. Very on genre.

No. This, again, isn't about that, it's about how the GM should be making choices for the game, and telling the GM to discard internal cause in favor of unreliability -- the exact opposite of an internal cause argument. It's saying ramp things up unexpectedly by adding complications or framing scenes where danger is sudden and surprising -- not danger that makes sense from what's going on or what's happened. Violates internal cause.

A massive amount of this is about evoking the feel of the genre, and the few that directly are not do not in any way counter it. The whole game is super clearly and intentionally crafted to produce a visceral and real apoc fiction genre experience and is absurd to claim otherwise.

Almost none of it is about evoking a feel -- because you get the same principles in Masks, which isn't about that, or in DW. Same conceptual things. Yet, people that try to use PbtA for high-concept sim find that the system does not work well at all, and that's after they misinterpret or discard the principles.

What you've done is come at the principles and not read what they say directly, but through the lens of what you expect. As such, you've added meaning where it doesn't exist, and failed to see it where it does. It's a hard shift -- I had trouble with it certainly. But the motivated lens you've used to look at this is showing very strongly in how you're not reading what's said and doing only that, but how you've assumed it must mean to do these other things you're familiar with.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Simulationism is about internal cause. This is about flavor. Making the world full of flavor doesn't mean that the way the fiction unfolds adheres to internal cause.

Nope. Process simulation would be that, but genre emulation absolutely is about the flavour.

What you've done is come at the principles and not read what they say directly, but through the lens of what you expect. As such, you've added meaning where it doesn't exist, and failed to see it where it does. It's a hard shift -- I had trouble with it certainly. But the motivated lens you've used to look at this is showing very strongly in how you're not reading what's said and doing only that, but how you've assumed it must mean to do these other things you're familiar with.

There is some vigorous projection going on there. I actually read the game holistically, without artificial constraints of ill-defined theories, trying to force it to fulfil just one arbitrary agenda. And that flavour absolutely has meaning. It is not there by accident. It absolutely is there to evoke a genre. Sure, the game is about the characters too, but characters in that genre. These things are not contradictory or conflicting. They support each other and are parts of a coherent whole.

 

[Gilladian]

I guess the other qualifier is "if at all" as it isn't guaranteed that any story with the name WILL result (I recall that my sister, @Gilladian, created at Cleric and immediately as the party entered their first dungeon giant wasps stung them all to death, story over). I guess in a sense there IS a story. I'm not sure it ONLY arose in retrospect though, as often something that happened would immediately feed back onto the evolving situation.

Right, so again, I'm not totally sure why one type is evolving and the other type retrospective, IMHO they're not really that distinct. In fact I would say that D&D (for example) is a 'fortune at the end' type of system where the story emerges as the dice are rolled, so to speak. While in fact many 'Narrative' (in the GNS sense) games employ mechanisms which may require that things are left unresolved until later. These generally use some sort of 'Fortune in the Middle' and then you get to tell more story and apply added factors that may change what comes next. Its all a bit fuzzy though, because there are potentially versions of D&D where this can happen too (IE exactly what hit point less meant may not be revealed until later, famously).
Anyway, I think that in general you can call RPGs a form of interactive fiction in which a story emerges as you play. I think the difference is more in terms of how much the story is central to the game process. In Narratively Focused games it is quite central, and there are processes in place which allow it to be managed in some sense. Game play itself will be ABOUT the story, whereas in D&D and similar games the story isn't a focus in any overall sense.

That was my first character EVER! Stung to death. It was a saga!

 

[Campbell]

Here are some relevant quotes directly from the game designer about Apocalypse World

In Apocalypse World, we play the game to find out what the characters make of their world. What they want to make of it, and, because Apocalypse World is a game about compromise, what they’re able to make of it in fact.

Apocalypse World’s Underlying Model​

Apocalypse World’s design is based on a model of conflict between characters. It holds that when your character’s vision, best interests, or survival instinct is at odds with someone else’s — the usual state of affairs in Apocalypse World — with time and given that both you and they have the means to pursue your interests, you’ll come into conflict and ultimately have to resolve it. You’ll resolve it either by setting the conflict aside and coming to an agreement, or by coming to violence instead.

Apocalypse World’s design elaborates this model into its systems of basic moves, supporting rules (like the rules for harm, barter, etc), peripheral moves, and playbooks. Every system and rule in the game is designed to clarify the conflicts between the characters, escalate them through consequential action toward agreement or violence, and ultimately resolve them one way or another.

Furthermore, Apocalypse World’s designed to foster and preserve unity of interest between the players even while it creates and escalates conflict of interest between their characters. When your character, through force of action and the workings of the game’s rules, is getting their way in a conflict with my character, it doesn’t mean that you’re getting your way over me in the game. No: we’re working together to choreograph our characters’ conflict.

Before I move on from Apocalypse World’s basic moves, let me go back for just a minute to permissions & expectations, to tie the bow.

Apocalypse World’s designed to heighten and escalate the conflicts between the characters, while avoiding or peacefully resolving any conflicts that might develop between us as players. In other words, it’s designed so that we keep collaborating enthusiastically together as players, even when our characters are at odds. In fact, even when they’re locked into intense, bloody, escalating conflicts with each other.

You can think of it as fight choreography. Our characters are in conflict, fighting on opposite sides, but you and I, we’re on the same side, working together to choreograph their fight.

In Apocalypse World, all of the systems are designed to work together to make this happen, and each system approaches it in its own way. The foundation of them all, the basic moves too, is this single principle:

When your character escalates a conflict, you give the other player the choice. When somebody else escalates a conflict against your character, they give you the choice.​

You won’t be able to unsee it!

Q: Vincent, are you talking about genre again? I should choose the arenas of conflict that suit my game’s genre?​

A: I guess so!​

But it’s worth pointing out that Apocalypse World’s arenas of conflict – honest negotiation, negotiation in bad faith, implicit violence, nonviolent physical striving, explicit threats of violence, etc – there’s nothing post-apocalyptic about them. They represent a super-genre, or a narrative structure not a genre of elements. They’re the arenas of conflict of a blood-and-guts ensemble drama-thriller, or something. I dunno.

But yeah, choose the arenas of conflict that suit your game’s genre, you won’t go wrong.

3. They work by a pretty strict principle. The principle is: fictional causes have real-world effects. Real-world causes have fictional effects. Dremmer (fictional) goes to throw your character off a building (fictional). You (real) roll to act under fire, and come up with an 8 (real). What’s the fictional effect?

At the end of the session (real), which other character knows your character better (fictional)? That player (real) changes a number in their playbook (real).

Remember the roller coaster? The purpose of the real-world stuff is to keep the fictional stuff in motion. When a real cause has a fictional effect, that’s what holds the roller coaster up. When a fictional cause has a real effect, that’s what keeps the roller coaster from disconnecting, spinning off into insolidity.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Here are some relevant quotes directly from the game designer about Apocalypse World

Which explain the logic behind the mechanics. None of which changes the fact that the game is filled with flavour and will evoke the genre excellently. Like c'mon, open the book basically any point, the whole writing style, all the examples, they're geared to get your imagination going in certain direction. It is not an accident, it is very well done and I don't really understand why anyone would want to deny it. Accepting that it emulates a genre and intentionally so doesn't any way deny the other merits of the game; far from it.

 

[Campbell]

No one is saying that any game is just about one thing. We are saying that when push comes to shove you have to choose what you are going to prioritize. In damn near every case Apocalypse World chooses Visceral Protagonism and making players choose between violence and compromise over genre concerns, building a satisfying narrative or internal causality.

That's all coherency is - having a consistent set of priorities so that players know what is fundamentally expected of them.

There is a reason the agenda is Make the Apocalypse World feel real. The underlying context is to provide players with a visceral sense of their surroundings and to make things feel like they have an internal causality to them despite the fact that they emphatically do not.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No one is saying that any game is just about one thing. We are saying that when push comes to shove you have to choose what you are going to prioritize.

Only if they conflict in the first place! And I claim that in this case they do not! Or at least the game is very much designed to make it so that it naturally produces genre appropriate action, and written so that it nudges the participant to think in genre appropriate terms, so that such conflicts do not even arise. This is commitment to evoking the genre.

I think think that this whole "but it must be primarily be about this one thing" simply is a fallacy. Things aren't and they don't need to be. Things can be holistic gestalts whose parts support each other.