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

[Thomas Shey]

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.

I thought that was possible, but figured it didn't hurt to use it to spin off my comments.

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.

To some extent, but very little of it is going to look much like any normal superhero setting, well, at all; its probably going to more like a "gods return" sort of thing. Unless you use the term very broadly, perhaps. The social matrix will be too different. As you say, its probably going to be pretty dystopian and I'd guess, even post-apocalyptic. The only commonality is that its got people with (probably) vast powers.

(I make the qualification because there's a big difference if your top end is Superman and your top end is Spider-Man. The latter can look like a number of powered special agent games I've seen).

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.

I completely agree (and I'm not aware of any version of that where the occupants consciously maintain it; that sort of reified setting would probably be--odd.)

 

[niklinna]

I completely agree (and I'm not aware of any version of that where the occupants consciously maintain it; that sort of reified setting would probably be--odd.)

"Well of course we all know Joe Schmoe is really The Amazing Electron, but we all let him think he's fooling us. Wouldn't want to hurt his feelings!"

"...in case he...you know...."

 

[Thomas Shey]

"Well of course we all know Joe Schmoe is really The Amazing Electron, but we all let him think he's fooling us. Wouldn't want to hurt his feelings!"

"...in case he...you know...."

Yeah, now picture a whole setting like that. The term "farce" comes to mind.

 

[Manbearcat]

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.

Good stuff.

This is a pithier way of expressing my post 1076 upthread.

I've found over the last 10 years that we (oddly) often get called out for not breaking down this stuff. Yet this post is at least the 2nd time this has been broken down in this thread. My guess is the count is higher than 2.

So here is a 3rd below.

What keeps getting missed (which you addressed above and I tried to clarify in my linked post) is in a High Concept Sim system, genre emulation is the method of causality (a means) AND because the experiential quality of exploring a system (world not game) governed by that causality (the end) is THE POINT OF PLAY, it (functional, color-heavy genre emulation) is an essential rider to a particular point of design and play; “let’s BE there.”

Genre tropes do different work in Gamism because the point of design and play is different. They constrain and inform the imagined space so players can leverage it to "distill skillfull play from less than (or Keep Score)." The point of play isn't “let’s BE there.”

In Narrativist games, genre tropes constrain and inform and align the table’s understanding of framing and move-space and consequences so they can get on with “aggressive protagonism vs aggressive opposition to it; what happens when those collide (to the protagonists…to the opposition…to the nature and order of the things we care about)?”

So a statement like “but Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark each have genre tropes too” is a misunderstanding (or lack of insight into) what work genre does in Blades in the Dark vs what work genre does in 90s White Wolf games (the poster child of High Concept Sim). Genre/drama/trope logic and the color-intensivity (both its presence and the time spent marinating in that color) of a White Wolf game does seriously different work than a game of Blades in the Dark because in the WW game it is there to support and inculcate play with "let's BE there" and "power fantasy within those tropes." Blades in the Dark has supernatural monsters, vampires, dark alleys in a deluge, trench coats, corrupt underworld etc etc...but the point of all of that stuff is neither about "let's BE there" nor is it about "power fantasy within those tropes." Precisely because Blades in the Dark (featuring principled, skillful GMing with players playing aggressively and to Best Practices) is aggressively Story Now with an intricate system that features a seriously high Gamism signal (because of its delivery of its successful design intent to distill skillful play from unskillful play), the genre tropes do very, very, very different work than the 90s White Wolf games; they do the 2nd and 3rd of my bolded sentence above. Any "let's BE there" is incidental/subordinate, color is backgrounded rather than foregrounded, and "power fantasy within those tropes" is 100 % anathema.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

How is "Genre Simulation" differerent from Edwards's "High-Concept Simulation"? (Not that you were obliged to use all of his terminology!)

Okay. I did some reading. And my answer is...not very much difference. There may be differences in particulars, but at a midrange focus it reads more or less the same. My issue is that Edwards abstracts so far away from things that the abstraction obscures rather than illuminates.

Eero Tuovinen wrote an essay on GNS Simulation wherein he provided the following definition (which he, at least, seems to think is what Edwards would support): "Simulationist play attempts to experience a subject matter in a way that results in elevated appreciation and understanding." I say this definition is too broad, because "elevated appreciation and understanding" is too abstract—e.g., why doesn't the deep learning of clever strategy count as "elevated appreciation and understanding"? Instead, I move to separate the act of elevating, so that something can be appreciated, from the act of examining, so that appreciation may be elevated. The former is Emulation, the latter, Simulation.

This is not a trivial difference. When one holds up a Conceit and seeks to portray it faithfully, there is a normative push involved. Keep the Conceit, even if you must do illogical (or, as mentioned upthread, even farcical) things, so that the Conceit holds even in defiance of its rational consequences. It is not desirable that one should have to do so, but if it's needed, do it and don't look back. When one pursues Groundedness-and-Simulation, a wholly different normative push applies: be faithful to reason and consequence, no matter where they might lead. Again, this may result in undesirable elements, like disappointing anticlimax or frustrating gameplay, but genuine G&S again says "do it and don't look back."

This reads, to me, like a conflict no less problematic than the conflict between "Story Now" and Gamism. The more committed you are to faithfully following naturalistic, rational consequence, the less committed you must be do faithfully portraying an archetype despite its (neath guaranteed) flaws. Unlike Edwards, however, I do not hold that these game-purposes are so wholly antagonistic as to be mutually exclusive (though, in fairness, it seems he wasn't nearly as committed to this as he is portrayed; in the "Right to Dream" essay he talks about Hybrids and other mixed experiences that do not have to be "incoherent," which others had presented as an absolute impossibility in this thread).

I think this, in truth, is the error that forced him to lump these two together. They have some similarities (my approach expects there to be similarities between any pair of game-purposes one might wish to examine), but because he could not so stridently claim that C&E is incompatible with G&S, he was forced to conclude they had to be the same, and that false dichotomy (either they are mutually exclusive or they are one unit) weakens the theory.

The "High-Concept" is what I call Conceit. The Conceit is elevated so that it may be appreciated (Emulation). Purist-for-System or "process" is a mix of both halves of Groundedness-and-Simulation. Groundedness means defining the starting terms, the metaphorical ground floor, the facts that are just known to be true, and then one engages in the act of Simulation by applying naturalistic, rational reasoning to that Ground to determine what else must also be true.

Or, perhaps to phrase it differently, both G&S and C&E are "explorative," but in ways that are utterly at odds. G&S explores in the way one explores uncharted territory, making a map as one goes, finding joy in discovering the unknown. C&E explores in the way one explores a piece of art or music, picking apart its subtleties, and finding joy in more fully understanding the work. The two are similar. But "exploring" the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor or Frankenstein is extremely different from "exploring" an uncharted wilderness to find buried treasure.

 

[clearstream]

Again, I believe that in Edwards's Story Now, something needs to be at stake for the character (or player), and now in the decision to spare the kobolds or not. C1 knowing in the moment that there will be a specific future consequence, such as losing the support of their order, may suffice, but ideally for Story Now some bigwig of that order will be present on the scene (for example), and the screws can be turned further if that bigwig has just been shown to be not at all innocent. Maybe they show up and just whack a human NPC on the blatantly false assumption they've been collaborating with the kobolds.

I don't dislike your bigwig, I just see them as optional. What counts is the inner conflict of the character. Where you like bigwig, I like saddling them with ongoing consequences. S-N doesn't turn on that. Stylistically, I read a lot of "like a stolen car" etc professions of high-octane action. I'm as partial to a slow burner. Start with the furnace turned down, not up. It's still a furnace.

For C2, nothing is at stake so there's no Story Now going on. Their decision may lay the ground for a later Story Now-type moment, however, as you indicate.

W2 is more interesting to me than W1. Suppose a character is LG. They've thought about the L part, but not the G. I moot that making a discovery about what it is to be good, and that going on to produce conflicts should also count. As it feeds in to future Nows. Character commitments have to originate at some point in time. The location of that point in time is never Now. Discovering a commitment that will go on to feed into conflict should count, or you need to say that S-N is disapplied to all points in the game where characters discover new commitments. Discovering new commitments isn't S-N, is where you land.

What I'm suggesting in W2 that it is as much a part of S-N play to discover (decide, introduce, whatever) commitments, as it is to test them.

Either way W1 alone is sufficient to make the case I was making.

I'd like to reiterate that these modes of play are momentary, and that saying a game or a player is GNS Narrativist is really a shorthand for "features/prefers primarily* moments of GNS-Narrative play". I believe it's possible to embed Story Now moments in otherwise primarily GNS High-Concept Simulationist, or other, play—but you want to know which is which, the specific ways in which they differ, and how much of each all the folks at the table prefer.

I'd have to go back and reread the definitions. Although I'm not too sure that I feel they're lines I need to draw inside.

 

[clearstream]

@Manbearcat I had a thought as to how to better get at what I mean with decides v. random.

What's most important to S-N? Resolution of premises or inner conflicts. Players can't experience the doing of it if it is forced.

How we resolve certain elevated moments when things could go either way is orthogonal to those needs.

The Now refers to the people, during actual play, focusing their imagination to create those emotional moments of decision-making and action, and paying attention to one another as they do it. To do that, they relate to "the story" very much as authors do for novels, as playwrights do for plays, and screenwriters do for film at the creative moment or moments. Think of the Now as meaning, "in the moment," or "engaged in doing it," in terms of input and emotional feedback among one another. The Now also means "get to it," in which "it" refers to any Explorative element or combination of elements that increases the enjoyment of that issue I'm talking about.

1. Focusing on single Techniques to define Narrativism will not yield understanding. For instance, Drama resolution is not in and of itself Narrativist. Nor are the common use of improvisation, trading of narration, and overt Director stance, in and of themselves, Narrativist play.

Here I believe Edwards is not ruling out D for Drama. He's ruling it in.

Is Fortune the only resolution method for conflict resolution? The answer is emphatically no. The two main alternatives are apparently Karma + Resource management, which I consider to be underdeveloped at this point, and highly-structured Drama, which may be investigated through Puppetland, Soap, and to a lesser extent Universalis.

(I haven't played those three games so my comments don't relate to them.) DFK are all viable. Authority can be divided a great many ways, but what's crucial for D is that the say of more than one participant is heard. It may be that ownership of the resolution moves around the group by some regulatory rules or principles. It may be that some subset of the group listen to what is said and say something that follows. It's not all or nothing - some Karma can be in play, too.

Someone is making decisions all the time. There is no exit from that, even when roll is used to resolve certain elevated moments when things could go either way. Because all through - continuously - there are things that can go either way.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

That's completely circular, mate! "I assume X is my sole apex agenda, I can change Y without affecting X, which proves X is the sole apex agenda!" It's like, "We can change lyrics without changing the music so that proves the song is primarily about music."

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'.

This exactly demonstrates why "Genre/setting for it's own right" is an absurd standard (and this equally applies to high-concept sim even if the thing emulated was not some pre-established genre but something made for the game.) You just argued that a thing that constantly happens in Star Trek is a genre conflict for Star Trek! Yes, there are story reasons for why the transporters don't always work, but there are always other consideration in a media or a game. "Setting/genre/etc on it's own right" is not thing, except perhaps in some bizarre travel guide to the setting which you enjoy completely passively.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Someone is making decisions all the time. There is no exit from that, even when roll is used to resolve certain elevated moments when things could go either way. Because all through - continuously - there are things that can go either way.

Surely, though, this leads to two things:

1. If decisions are being made all the time, then whether there are decisions isn't an interesting thing to analyze. We know that answer, it is "yes, always."
2. Since we know there are always decisions, it becomes interesting to ask what is being decided (or decided about), and why, and perhaps even by whom.

"Why," of course, has multiple possible answers, hence my reference to Aristotle's theory of causes earlier. My game-purposes, being a design thing, are "formal" causes, the form or concept which motivates game-making. Player motives, on the other hand, are "final" causes, the end-point or destination which motivates game-playing. (In the classical example, the "formal" cause of "table" is a design which features a flat surface large enough to be useful and sufficiently-supported to not break, while the "final" cause of "table" is the things a person would want a table for, e.g. dining.)

With my game-purposes taxonomy, the thing-being-decided(-about) is the first part of each pair, the concept or focus. Then, the act of making or testing those decisions (and dealing with their consequences) is the second part of each pair. Values-and-Issues is design geared around having players decide about Values (choosing what things they are willing to seek despite difficulty), and then Issues are where those decisions get tested (conflicts that must be "resolved" somehow, whether through success, failure, abandonment, complication, etc.) Conceit-and-Emulation is design geared around embracing a Conceit, some core theme or tone (deciding a theme to explore, as one would explore an artwork) and then taking action to Emulate related works or genres, to manifest or portray that theme in a (hopefully) satisfying way.

This might show that people want...not necessarily mixed ("incoherent") creative agendas in the GNS sense, where one is trying to actively do (say) C&E truly simultaneously with G&S, but that they are generally not entirely satisfied by exclusively following one and only one of these taxonomies with no variation. They may flock to a game because of some main focus, e.g. GURPS is frequently cited as a "purist-for-system" Sim game (and from what little I know of it, I would definitley put it in G&S) or D&D as a fairly strongly Gamist game (what I call S&A), but most people seem interested in seeing at least a little of a second game-purpose, sometimes a third or even all four. Hence you have people who will make openly S&A-related arguments (e.g. the brouhaha over silvery barbs, or before that, bless at release), but then the very same people will advocate the use of illusionism or (sparing/cautious) fudging, which at least on the surface is a clearly C&E thing.* And then, again, sometimes the very same people will argue that "hit points" have to be physically rooted, because the name of the spells that restore them refers to "curing" things and the characters are aware of needing to have something restored to them that they have lost, which is about as purely Groundedness-and-Simulation as one can get (spell names and character behaviors are the Groundedness that must be reasoned from; Simulation thus mandates that the HP-related behaviors of characters must be physically rooted, regardless of what consequences this may have).

I think the big revelation that GNS gave, and the reason why whenever it comes up there's always either someone wanting to talk about it or (at least as common if not more common) someone denying this idea, is that Values-and-Issues play IS a design-worthy game-purpose, and that there are players who wish to experience the concepts, situations, and moods fostered by such design. (This, Clearstream, would be an example of a point where I start from one of my game-purposes, V&I, and then extrapolate plausible player-motives that might exist in relation to it, intentionally stepping beyond the limits of my taxonomy.) Rather, IRL, this developed reversed from my phrasing: there were players who felt their needs were not being satisfied, so they talked about what they were wanting, and then extrapolated back from that to what kinds of design would proactively support their interests, ultimately articulating their concept of "Narrative"/"Story Now"/Values-and-Issues design.

It is possible that there may still be other, undiscovered game-purposes out there. I've no idea what they might be, as my efforts are meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, but I find the thought exciting.

*It's possible I may just not be seeing the other ways to view it, but fudging and illusionism seem to openly defy all three of the other game-purposes. It defies G&S by being not grounded--it's an artificial manipulation of the world. It defies S&A by invalidating the scoring metric and (thus) devaluing the Achievements (the success is not earned by skill, but dispensed by the DM). And it defies V&I by deprotagonizing the players. Yet it fits beautifully in C&E, because the Conceit is (more or less) Pulp Action, and Emulating that requires trimming out "unacceptable" results.

 

[clearstream]

These strike me as characteristics that should show up regardless of the design purpose for the game. Other than maybe "collection," but even then. That is, I can't really see a way to argue that (for example) tempo wouldn't apply to all possible purposes, whether or not my list is comprehensive.

I'm thinking specifically of flow as a purpose*. As a player may seek to define skill and display it, they may seek to find flow, experience and evince it. We could say that skill can show up in any game, so I am not confident that purposes is being parsimoniously adhered to.

As @EzekielRaiden and others have helpfully noted, I keep getting tripped up as to what each model is addressing. So I would love to see a cleaner definition of "purposes" so as to be able to confidently exclude say flow from among them, and include metrics of grading success... which on surface seem to me on the same layer as tempo. Perhaps the answer is found in the binary, but I would rather let @EzekielRaiden speak to that.


[EDIT *So by way of example, the binary would be Tempo / Flow.]