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

[Thomas Shey]

I am curious if GDS can explain why 2e doesn't really work. GNS IMHO seems to explain why it was not working for us rather well.

Can you elaborate on in what way it "didn't work"? I can speculate (note my comment about being simultaneously more Dramatist oriented while not really having the support for it) but it'd be easier if I was clearer on what you were referring to.

(Thanks for the commentary, by the way; while I have some AD&D2 material, my active participation in D&D between OD&D and D&D3e is minimal (I ran one play-by-post on a local message board, and that's it) so my feel for the changes is not as strong as someone who actually played through them).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You're dissing the edition that had Planescape?!

Yeah, well, for example:

The (IIRC 4th level) PCs are brought into the presence of the 11th level wizard who is their enemy (but he doesn't know it yet, though he's had them disarmed, he's not stupid). The PCs suddenly attack! They're only 30' away from the wizard, and a couple of them rush forward and engage him, using the grappling rules. By the end of the surprise round the wizard is dead and a major pillar of the meta-plot has been destroyed... This is the kind of issue you get with 2e! I mean, OK, I could have fudged. The game gets in the way of itself. For one thing it posits a rule-based approach to NPCs which has no consideration for their story function, even though it claims to be a game focused on story. In 4e, for example, this wizard would simply be a solo or an elite at least, and if he was much higher level, then combat would be effectively precluded as a viable option. It just isn't fit to purpose. In fact, when we played it as '1.5e' it worked OK, you could use the existing 1e exploration rules to fill in missing stuff (I don't even think we realized 2e was missing that stuff for a long time) and the slightly improved 2e classes, monsters, and combat rules. It makes a mildly better dungeon crawler type of game that way. As Jeff Grub attempted to tell us it was supposed to be played? Nope, doesn't work well at all, unless you follow the 'fudge stuff' advice, which is BIZARRE as it basically tells you the very rulebook you are holding in your hands doesn't work! Its almost an absurdist kind of thing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Incidentally, part of the above is why I separate these categories. G&S design seeks to enable, as much as possible, such rational analysis, hence upthread someone mentioned wanting to play something that's like a "supers" game (which would normally be C&E), but instead ends up more like a deconstruction of a "supers" game, seriously examining the (often negative) consequences that would be expected in a world where superpowered individuals exist. C&E design instead proposes a tone or theme, and seeks to take what actions are necessary to portray or fulfill that thing. A "G&S supers" game would be designed to examine the consequences and results of living in a world where superheroes exist. A "C&E supers" game would be designed to portray classic superheroes, encouraging superheroic behavior and, if necessary, actively enforcing classic supers tropes (e.g. secret identities are mostly kept secret, catching someone falling off a building won't break their spine, etc.)

Just an aside, as supers was my jam for many years, so I've thought about it a lot: I think there's distinctly a third case possible here (though it may just be a case of reading too much into your terminology), and that's a setting that has supers but not superheroes; that is to say people with superpowers exist, but the trend toward them working into anything resembling classic superheroes never happens. As such, the result doesn't seem to me to be a deconstruction (which tends to focus on decontextualizing the whole thing such as you see in The Boys) as paring down the premise and seeing how a less stylized setting engages with it. The distinction is that the question is answered, instead of "You'd probably get much darker, morally conflicted, and hazardous superheroes" as "You wouldn't get anything that looked like superheroes at all beyond people have superhuman powers". Deconstruction in a game tends to happen when you assume some of the conventions in place, but not all. When you don't assume any of them, something else occurs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is very informative and enlightening for me with regard to Edwards's distinction of Process Simulation vs. High-Concept Simulation (which term I recently asked you about vs. your Conceit-and-Emulation!).

It also shines light for me on how & why some have been talking about "emulation" or "evocation" instead.

I mentioned this earlier, but one of the distinctions from where I sit is that "simulation" of a setting involves representing traits of the setting that the occupants can acknowledge and to some extent at least, understand. Genre emulation (outside of things that are just selections of place, time and rest state) involve representing things the occupants not only don't acknowledge, but for the most part, out of semi-comedic fourth-wall-breaking, would outright deny.

(To make it clear, there are some muddy in-between cases, where the occupants can recognize them to some extent, but not to the extent actually practiced.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

Why should a play mode (creative agenda) care about genre? The two are independent qualities, like color and shape.

GDS Sim did. It was incapable in its pure form of engaging with the more stylized genres, because it would require acknowledging metagame concerns.

(Gamism and Dramatism not so much, though there was an argument you'd struggle with some genres with them in some cases.)

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yeah, well, for example:

The (IIRC 4th level) PCs are brought into the presence of the 11th level wizard who is their enemy (but he doesn't know it yet, though he's had them disarmed, he's not stupid). The PCs suddenly attack! They're only 30' away from the wizard, and a couple of them rush forward and engage him, using the grappling rules. By the end of the surprise round the wizard is dead and a major pillar of the meta-plot has been destroyed... This is the kind of issue you get with 2e! I mean, OK, I could have fudged. The game gets in the way of itself. For one thing it posits a rule-based approach to NPCs which has no consideration for their story function, even though it claims to be a game focused on story. In 4e, for example, this wizard would simply be a solo or an elite at least, and if he was much higher level, then combat would be effectively precluded as a viable option. It just isn't fit to purpose. In fact, when we played it as '1.5e' it worked OK, you could use the existing 1e exploration rules to fill in missing stuff (I don't even think we realized 2e was missing that stuff for a long time) and the slightly improved 2e classes, monsters, and combat rules. It makes a mildly better dungeon crawler type of game that way. As Jeff Grub attempted to tell us it was supposed to be played? Nope, doesn't work well at all, unless you follow the 'fudge stuff' advice, which is BIZARRE as it basically tells you the very rulebook you are holding in your hands doesn't work! Its almost an absurdist kind of thing.

This is what is meant by incoherence. This doesn't mean that it's gibberish, but rather that the goals of play do not align -- they do not cohere. This leads to conflicts, which require one agenda to win out over the other. In D&D, this is often handles by the Rule Zero, which tells the GM they can decide which wins at any given moment (usually Sim over Gamism).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I feel you have simply build impossible standards for genre emulation. By these standards, genre emulation is not a thing that can actually ever happen in an RPG or probably in a movie either. In any game there always is some other function too, hell, even in movie the trappings support the mood and plot. And that you could change the flavour of one thing and the game would still function is an absurd standard too. You can practically always do that, if we do not care that the end result is thematically jarring.

My point is that Shoggoths, being a thing from another genre (cosmic horror) don't belong in an apocalyptic Mad Max-esque milieu, and if your AGENDA is to simulate that genre, then adding a Shoggoth is working against your agenda. OTOH it isn't working against a Story Now agenda at all. Its quite possible to have a genre type simulation though, I'm not sure what bar I'm setting too high. You would simply make all of your choices in play primarily with that in mind. Depending on how precisely defined the genre is, and given certain setting/color possibilities to go with it that you might also want, then your leeway on what can be admitted to the fiction grows or shrinks.

Where these things come into conflict is just that it may become difficult or impossible to uphold both of 2 agendas at the same time. One will take precedence over the other, right? I mean, its hard to provide a single specific example WRT genre based sim vs story now play, because it would be rare to have some genre where something MUST happen now, where the genre absolutely demands a very specific element. I guess we could imagine a Star Trek game. If it is heavily into genre (which I would expect from this kind of specific milieu) then there's a transporter, right? Its possible that the existence of this device, as it impacts plot, might thwart some point being addressed in a story now fashion. In that case there would be a bit of a conflict. Now, maybe you can introduce one of Trek's many hackneyed plot devices to remove the transporter from consideration for a bit. You can, however, see how this is a bit of an agenda conflict. I note it because it seemed like it was rather problematic in the plotting of the series too, in much the same way! Time and time again the writers had to invent some reason why it was 'offline'.

 

[Hussar]

/nope

I made my saving throw. Not going to try. This is going over my head now and getting a bit too technical for me. Y'all have a good time.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Just an aside, as supers was my jam for many years, so I've thought about it a lot: I think there's distinctly a third case possible here (though it may just be a case of reading too much into your terminology), and that's a setting that has supers but not superheroes; that is to say people with superpowers exist, but the trend toward them working into anything resembling classic superheroes never happens. As such, the result doesn't seem to me to be a deconstruction (which tends to focus on decontextualizing the whole thing such as you see in The Boys) as paring down the premise and seeing how a less stylized setting engages with it. The distinction is that the question is answered, instead of "You'd probably get much darker, morally conflicted, and hazardous superheroes" as "You wouldn't get anything that looked like superheroes at all beyond people have superhuman powers". Deconstruction in a game tends to happen when you assume some of the conventions in place, but not all. When you don't assume any of them, something else occurs.

In this case I was simply using a phrase used earlier in the thread, someone (I think maybe Crimson Longinus?) said that that sort of thing, a deconstruction of superheroes, was more like their taste. They may have meant what you refer to.

That said, I think there's an argument to be made that "there are just some people who have powers" is still a deconstruction, just a different one. I can't see "the world has people with superpowers" happening in a way where those superpowered people don't form a different social class, because that's how pretty much every social class forms, a coincidental asymmetry of power or influence that becomes self-perpetuating. Perhaps it would be more like a "kratocracy" (lit. "rule by the strong"), but...that sounds to my ear like a dystopian "there are no heroes!! Only villains we like and villains we don't!!" deconstruction.

But even if we grant that you can make a thing like that, it would seem to still fall under what I call G&S and contrast against what I call C&E. It would be treating a given idea as an immutable fact of the world (there are people with superpowers) and then extrapolating the world that would result from that fact. This would, as you say, almost surely not look anything like superhero stories, which have an encoded morality to them (for good or for ill) and a strong set of genre conventions, possibly one of the strongest sets around which is why it gets used as a toy example so frequently, which the people in these settings either consciously maintain, consciously ignore, or are somehow completely oblivious to.

 

[pemerton]

But that's the thing. It is both. It absolutely is both. There definitely if advice to pepper everything with crazy apocalypse flavour. And this in any way or form doesn't harm the other functions of the rules, they enhance each other. And that's the beauty of it, it is ingenious, and I really don't understand why people need to bend over backwards to deny this due some ideological commitment to imaginary agenda purity ordained by some theoretical model.

So maybe the way in would be to ask what other reason they might have for doing that?

Genre emulation is closely related to what Edwards calls "karaoke RPGing". His critique of "karaoke", from the point of view of narrativist/"story now" play, is this: "why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?"

AW uses certain post-apocalyptic tropes - hardholds, motorcycles gangs and car nuts, weird cults on the burnflats. In this way it is like any other RPG - RPGs as such involve the creation of shared fiction, very often along genre lines.

But AW does not set out to use the results of someone else's musings with or about genre as the material for the participants' experience. The goal is not to have the participants walk away and say "That was just like being in Mad Max!" They may do that, they may not, but that's not the point. And we can see this in the mechanics: no one gets mechanically rewarded or advantaged because they have their PC do "just what Max would do".

Contrast, say, CoC or Trail of Cthulhu which do aspire to produce play experiences that are just like being in some sort of cosmic horror mystery/detective story, and which won't work if the players don't have their PCs do the sorts of things that a HPL protagonist would do.