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

[Ovinomancer]

So, then, let's discuss how a PbtA game

Right, one way of looking at it that I think captures what you and @Ovinomancer are saying: Monopoly and Checkers are both considered board games. I don't see any way in which we could talk about them as being on a 'spectrum'. They are simply distinct things, although they obviously share some traits and structure which does justify the top level categorization of 'board game'. Now, maybe you could find a way to incorporate some elements of one board game into another. You can certainly construct some taxonomy within the board game category too, and that might be useful in telling you which board games can likely borrow from each other.

Bingo. My usual go to is expecting play play Risk while actually playing Monopoly. Trying to invade Australia from Park Place to collect rent doesn't align at all.

 

[Manbearcat]

Ah. This seems to indicate you view "artfully switching" as something the game system wasn't designed for, and that the GM must improvise on the fly. That wasn't how I interpreted @EzekielRaiden's original comment, since they mentioned layering or embedding, which to me strongly implied something designed into the system.

In any case, some concrete examples would help a lot!

I agree. I’d need to know exactly what ER has in mind with what “artfully switching” (with layering and embedding) based on context-based agenda interests actually looks like. A play example with system should tell the tale if/how it contrasts with “coherently integrating” or if it’s meant to convey the same information.

My default orientation to reading that passage was that it wasn’t “system-directed”, but glad to be corrected (you’re all welcome for the elite rhyming skills)!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

See my post directly above as I address this.

I would dispute the “satisfied by artfully switching” claim. At least I’ll dispute it as anything approaching “best practices.” I’ve seen a sort of absence of intentful, clarified design (let’s say) fail over and over again precisely because “artfully switching” amidst a minefield of potential failure points is extraordinarily difficult. It often leads to some instantiation of “the great lieutenant refresh problem” I cited in my post above.

Last night, in the Stonetop game I run for @Ovinomancer and @hawkeyefan and two other players, we got through an enormous amount of content in 2.75 hours of gameplay (likely 3-4 times the content that your average D&D game resolves in the same time). No “social pixel-bitching.” No rancor (overt or passive-aggressive). Never a single need to “artfully switch between agendas.” This is because system coherently integrates Gamist and Story Now priorities, people understand the rules/procedures/principles, and all the stuff to make the above possible is deftly and functionally offloaded onto system (preempting any instance of conversation or experience dysfunction before it is made manifest).

Well what about the (as I've mentioned elsewhere) "layering" or "embedding" of these things in different steps of the process of play?

E.g., people speak of 4e as working (quite well!) as a "Story Now" game, and yet none of what they're doing seems to in any way detract from the really really "Gamist" elements involved in the actual process of playing through combats. From what I've been reading, it sounds very much like when actively engaged in a fight 4e play becomes very Gamist, but once the fighting is done (win, lose, draw, or retreat), the play returns to being "in the fiction" as Dungeon World would put it. That's embedding--like taking a quick dive, just long enough to accomplish something, and then returning to the surface.

I could similarly see a game being designed such that it has a (perhaps videogamey?) distinction between "overworld"-type and zoomed-in/"location"-type play. That's what I would call "layered," where the two layers are separate stances or processes. Each individually focused on its stuff, you switch between them as needed, as opposed to the above "embedded" relationship. If, say, "high" Gygaxian hexcrawl D&D had had a consciously Conceit-and-Emulation/"High Concept" Sim stance in the actual explore-the-hexes parts of play (e.g., trying to resemble pulpy action-adventure stories, opposed to the Score-and-Achievement/Gamist process of carefully managing your logistics, coordination, and SOPs), I don't see how that would have totally borked the remaining very consciously Gamist parts within the dungeons themselves. It'd just be a clear mode switch between the "overworld" layer, where Conceit is king, and the "dungeon" layer, where you're keeping Score.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@Manbearcat I don't disagree that any of that can occur--but frankly it doesn't look any worse than a lot of other ways for expectations and results being at odds. That seems more of an issue of communication breakdown (which, to be clear, is massive common in the hobby) than because there were different agendas at work. From past experience, that could have happened if only one was.

Right, and articulating these issues in terms of a common terminology, taxonomy, and conceptual framework is the job of an analytical framework. I'd note that the way @Manbearcat breaks things out seems pretty coherent! I mean, it may not cover every nuance by any means, but it seems to me that simply requires digging down to the next level. I mean, think about it this way:

Process Simulation and High Concept Simulation, why are they in the same top level bin? Well, consider the similarities; both of these make 'what is a good game' subservient to 'how things work in the world.' Yes, in one the basis of how things work is intended to produce some kind of consistent 'cause and effect' sense to things (how the world works). The other is intended to conform the results to some model of how the world should 'look'.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Ah. This seems to indicate you view "artfully switching" as something the game system wasn't designed for, and that the GM must improvise on the fly. That wasn't how I interpreted @EzekielRaiden's original comment, since they mentioned layering or embedding, which to me strongly implied something designed into the system.

In any case, some concrete examples would help a lot!

So D&D has embedded such switching forever, to the point many just accept it as part of the game. And that switching is evident in 5e APs -- where you have "the plot" embedded in the game, with directions to the GM on how to ensure events happen (so HCS), but then it presents moments that are handled through the mechanics. Most obvious is combat, which I'll circle back to, but quite often you have DC checks to find secret doors necessary to be found or walls climbed or social encounters. These are accepted, because they're so common and have history, but they clunk in practice and you see complaints about them show up. Fail that check and the game stops because you've moved into a situation were you've actually shifted to purist-for-system and that's not aligning with the HCS. This is just within simulationism (and probably another knife in model that it doesn't separate these two things more clearly).

Combat, though, is a big one. No one seems to notice the sudden shift to gamism here, but they complain about the downstream effects all the time. How combats are too easy (they're their to support HCS, but being evaluated from a gamist perspective); hitpoint recovery makes everything too easy (same); I had a TPK and now have to figure out how to get the replacements embedded in the plot again (gamism result disrupts HCS agenda); and so on. Myriad issues are caused here.

BUT, it works okay often enough and many GM's put their thumb on the scale to prevent this. I, myself, take a pass over the adventure prior to play and smooth places that I recognize will cause problems (too little or too much) to provide a more even experience, thus prioritizing the HCS agenda by tuning the gamist toggles to a point that I think they won't cause issues. Still happens, though. In one of my last few 5e games, I went much more strongly gamist -- a hexcrawl -- where it didn't matter if PCs died or whatever, but I very much paid attention to communicating information so that the players could make reasonable decisions (ie, avoided purist-for-system agenda pushes to stay within gamism). These were conscious choices.

But every time I pick up 5e, one of the things I absolutely know is that the game will require toggling between agendas and that this will be the largest challenge I have GMing the game. And I think this is the telling point -- the mark of a great GM isn't really creativeness or acting ability, but the ability to expertly manage these toggles. This is the primary cognitive overhead of the 5e GM.

 

[Manbearcat]

Well what about the (as I've mentioned elsewhere) "layering" or "embedding" of these things in different steps of the process of play?

E.g., people speak of 4e as working (quite well!) as a "Story Now" game, and yet none of what they're doing seems to in any way detract from the really really "Gamist" elements involved in the actual process of playing through combats. From what I've been reading, it sounds very much like when actively engaged in a fight 4e play becomes very Gamist, but once the fighting is done (win, lose, draw, or retreat), the play returns to being "in the fiction" as Dungeon World would put it. That's embedding--like taking a quick dive, just long enough to accomplish something, and then returning to the surface.

I could similarly see a game being designed such that it has a (perhaps videogamey?) distinction between "overworld"-type and zoomed-in/"location"-type play. That's what I would call "layered," where the two layers are separate stances or processes. Each individually focused on its stuff, you switch between them as needed, as opposed to the above "embedded" relationship. If, say, "high" Gygaxian hexcrawl D&D had had a consciously Conceit-and-Emulation/"High Concept" Sim stance in the actual explore-the-hexes parts of play (e.g., trying to resemble pulpy action-adventure stories, opposed to the Score-and-Achievement/Gamist process of carefully managing your logistics, coordination, and SOPs), I don't see how that would have totally borked the remaining very consciously Gamist parts within the dungeons themselves. It'd just be a clear mode switch between the "overworld" layer, where Conceit is king, and the "dungeon" layer, where you're keeping Score.

Got it!

Great post and I agree. My only contributions would be to add the following:

* It is of absolute necessity that if you're building a game engine that functionally toggles in the way you're depicting that it be designed such that INTENT IS ABUNDANTLY TRANSPARENT AND PROCEDURES ARE ABUNDANTLY CLEAR AND THE WHOLE THING FREAKING WORKS. The reason why Torchbearer works despite having extremely different subsystems/zoom is because intent and procedures are transparent and clear and the whole thing freaking works.

* In my opinion (and I've expressed it many times), 4e accomplishes successful integration of Gamist and Story Now priorities because of transparency, intraparty balance, PC : Team Monster/Obstacle balance, fantastic integration of the various moving technical and thematic parts, coherent incentive structures, and hyper-functionality (related to all of the prior stuff). This is why the combat engine ISN'T just a Gamist subsystem. There is so much depth and dynamism and reliability of the combat system that a GM can trivially (assuming sufficient skill of course) frame techincally demanding and decision-space-and-outcome-dynamic combat with a huge diversity of micro-goals and macro-goals that may have nothing to do with or only something to do with "ablating Team Monster HP to 0 to achieve Win Con."

And while Skill Challenges are nowhere near as technically engaging/rewarding as the conflict resolution systems of (say) Dogs in the Vineyard or MHRP, they're still technically engaging and enormously supportive of Story Now priorities.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What is the goal of a taxonomy? Is it to describe, depict and analyze games? Is it to engage in a sort of elaborate virtue signaling, placing games (and gamers) either inside or outside the in group and establish a pecking order?

All you do by treating games like RuneQuest, B/X and Apocalypse World as divergent is cut off those communities from the larger one, increasing tribalism. Honestly the kind of attitude I am seeing on display makes me feel incredibly unwelcome here. Despite efforts to improve the model we are using for discussion I am getting continually rebuffed and told some of my favorite games and modes of play are unworthy of discussion and representation.

Then I apologize profusely, because that has never been my intent, but I have clearly contributed to it. That I had some other intent is neither excuse nor justification for causing anyone to feel driven out. I'm sorry.

I have always tried to examine these things because, in this context, I feel it is enabling and empowering to give something a name. For a lot of things--particularly when a person's identity is tied up into it, as is often the case with gaming--giving something a name permits it greater legitimacy. E.g., I know someone who is ace, and when they discovered that "asexual" was a thing it was an enormous weight lifted off their shoulders because, in having a name, it wasn't just a nebulous "something doesn't sit right" feeling of discomfort and alienation, it was "oh, THAT'S what I am, okay." Obviously gaming theory is gonna be rather different from orientation, I don't mean to make a strong comparison between these things, just giving an example of a "it has a name, it's something and not an unidentifiable non-thing" stuff that was helpful to a friend.

My intent, with my taxonomy, is to give each thing equal weight and recognize each thing as perfectly cromulent, regardless of any other characteristics it may have. In so doing, my hope is to help others articulate the tools and approaches that facilitate such design, so that if they value any given "game-purpose," they can feel emboldened to tackle that design effort. If I'm extremely lucky and don't shoot myself in the foot (or bore everyone to sleep before they get to the end of it), then it might contribute to someone making a great game, and that seemed a worthy pursuit.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Seeing as I am invoked. Rather than ignoring a now vigorous form of RPG (more often on indie channels than mainstream) it seems okay to me to say that this form wasn't available to Edwards to study, and so GNS theory might be largely or completely silent on it.

That indicates that we can draw outside the lines, without suggesting that we can't find a great deal of value for understanding RPG inside them. I've come to feel that is a strong but also unnecessary source of disagreements. We can appreciate the creative agendas and if we like adopt them, without insisting (if anyone does) that they are the only possible agendas or that their contents cannot be reviewed, relocated or rearranged in other ways too.

There can be purist Story Now. And a wonderful myriad of worthwhile variations, inspired by GNS or products of parallel inspiration. What counts as a game is famously vague (Wittgenstein suggested unresolvably, a view that later game studies has sustained) and we're very conscious of the confound of rules and interpretation. There's every reason to suppose that purposes for play or agendas for decisions are equally and unresolvably diverse.

So, I don't think Thousand Year Old Vampire actually presents that much of an issue. I think it is at least reasonable to consider it a game, as it is certainly a pastime, it involves elements of following a rule or process, utilizes specific devices, and involves specific types of participant inputs which contribute to an outcome. Understandably there isn't a 'score', but this is also mostly true of other RPGs, so I don't think it excludes TYOV from being an RPG. It has a somewhat unusual allocation of WHERE it locates its 'open-ended nature', which I think is a fairly significant feature of most RPGs (IE the trait of allowing for fairly arbitrary responses in which fiction plays a key part). Yet TYOV DOES have an open-endedness, you can write pretty much any journal entry which explicates the prompts and follows from previous fiction. So it is a sort of 'fortune first' kind of design, prompts are generated, and then at the end fiction is generated which conforms with the mechanical state changes required by the prompts. It is a bit unusual in the sense that its a fairly passive process, the player is writing the fiction, but not actively leveraging the fictional position as they might in more typical RPGs. I think it is less different than people might first think though in that you DO leverage game state, your fiction cannot reference resources you no longer possess for instance (IE you cannot explain the latest state change by alluding to your employment of a resource you have already given up in a previous turn).

So, what is the agenda, that's the question.

1) Is it gamist? I guess you could play to see how long you can stay alive, but in that case the fiction is pointless and the game is just an exercise in taking a random walk, it has exactly the skill demands of Chutes and Ladders. So, its a lousy game, IMHO and I'd not consider that to be a focus.
2) Is it Narrativist/Story Now? Well, STORY does seem to be the POINT in that the object of the game seems to be to produce a journal or experience the production of a journal, though you could see the journal as more of a 'focusing device'. You could simply imagine to yourself what happened at each step, but if you don't write it out nothing really crystalizes it. I think that's because of the solo nature of the game, the journal acts a lot like what happens when you share fiction in a standard RPG, it becomes canon and acquires a more concrete nature which can be the springboard for the next turn. But in a GNS sense is it focused on dramatic needs and driven forward by them? Maybe in terms of the genre, yes. That is, your 'PC' is a Vampire, and has the motives and needs of such. I assume one of the principles of play is to RP "I am a Vampire" as I don't see anything in the game structure which otherwise forces you into that. So, we might consider the possibility of this game being a kind of 'setting driven' story now game.
3) Simulation? Well, it certainly doesn't seem to be much of a 'process sim'. OTOH in a sense it has some of this character where the inputs of the system are these absolutes. There's no real sense in which the fiction feeds back into the mechanics though, its all 'boxes to cloud' leftward arrows. However, the game does produce mechanical outputs which clearly work to introduce prompts to generate trope-appropriate fiction. Again, the principle of play "I am a Vampire" comes in here in a rather obvious way, the premise is quite explicit as far as I can see. So we seem to have a kind of High Concept/genre type of focus.

So, I'm not seeing where GNS has some huge problem with TYOV. I mean, @Manbearcat, @Ovinomancer, or @pemerton may well disagree with me in how I interpret things, which may speak to a level of difficulty grasping GNS, but it seems capable of talking about this game at least. Nor do I see some major hole in the analysis, personally. At most perhaps it points at the division between High Concept Simulation and Story Now sometimes being a bit hard to parse, or even subjective. Perhaps they often form a sort of variation by degree, where at the extreme end you have some quite purist Story Now play, and at the other the focus has shifted almost entirely onto some premise that is not really character centered and less laser focus on character advocacy as a driving principle.

Finally, I differ from Pemerton in that I think it IS useful to look at outliers. Not so much in terms of 'can I construct a framework that handles this' as in terms of 'how general is this one'. So, I might not try to devise a theory of RPG agendas/play/design/whatever with TYOV in mind, but I feel perfectly comfortable analyzing it with an existing one and considering what that tells me about the power of the abstraction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I understand that differences in degree can effectively become differences in kind when large enough. I also understand that intentionally aiming for something as one's main objective is rather different than merely using that thing as a supplementary ingredient or accidentally stumbling upon it. But one should still be able to admit the similarities. I find the doubt @pemerton expresses about there being moments in 5e play when the characters' dramatic needs are challenged or where the players can makes significant impact to the direction of the emerging story utterly baffling. Of course there are such moments! And for illustrative purposes "look at that thing that occasionally happens in your vanilla game, it's like that except more and almost all the time" might work way better than "No, mate, they have nothing in common."

I suspect the key is the question of who is empowered to introduce these dramatic needs and how or when they are focused on. 5e, as a system, doesn't really provide any pathway by which the players get to do that. The GM owns the fiction, even character backstory. There is not really a strong call for the GM to focus on handing off to players on any of this, and definitely no substantive mechanics which do that. It is absolutely POSSIBLE, but we have all definitely acknowledged that.

 

[clearstream]

So, I don't think Thousand Year Old Vampire actually presents that much of an issue. I think it is at least reasonable to consider it a game, as it is certainly a pastime, it involves elements of following a rule or process, utilizes specific devices, and involves specific types of participant inputs which contribute to an outcome. Understandably there isn't a 'score', but this is also mostly true of other RPGs, so I don't think it excludes TYOV from being an RPG. It has a somewhat unusual allocation of WHERE it locates its 'open-ended nature', which I think is a fairly significant feature of most RPGs (IE the trait of allowing for fairly arbitrary responses in which fiction plays a key part). Yet TYOV DOES have an open-endedness, you can write pretty much any journal entry which explicates the prompts and follows from previous fiction. So it is a sort of 'fortune first' kind of design, prompts are generated, and then at the end fiction is generated which conforms with the mechanical state changes required by the prompts. It is a bit unusual in the sense that its a fairly passive process, the player is writing the fiction, but not actively leveraging the fictional position as they might in more typical RPGs. I think it is less different than people might first think though in that you DO leverage game state, your fiction cannot reference resources you no longer possess for instance (IE you cannot explain the latest state change by alluding to your employment of a resource you have already given up in a previous turn).

So, what is the agenda, that's the question.

1) Is it gamist? I guess you could play to see how long you can stay alive, but in that case the fiction is pointless and the game is just an exercise in taking a random walk, it has exactly the skill demands of Chutes and Ladders. So, its a lousy game, IMHO and I'd not consider that to be a focus.
2) Is it Narrativist/Story Now? Well, STORY does seem to be the POINT in that the object of the game seems to be to produce a journal or experience the production of a journal, though you could see the journal as more of a 'focusing device'. You could simply imagine to yourself what happened at each step, but if you don't write it out nothing really crystalizes it. I think that's because of the solo nature of the game, the journal acts a lot like what happens when you share fiction in a standard RPG, it becomes canon and acquires a more concrete nature which can be the springboard for the next turn. But in a GNS sense is it focused on dramatic needs and driven forward by them? Maybe in terms of the genre, yes. That is, your 'PC' is a Vampire, and has the motives and needs of such. I assume one of the principles of play is to RP "I am a Vampire" as I don't see anything in the game structure which otherwise forces you into that. So, we might consider the possibility of this game being a kind of 'setting driven' story now game.
3) Simulation? Well, it certainly doesn't seem to be much of a 'process sim'. OTOH in a sense it has some of this character where the inputs of the system are these absolutes. There's no real sense in which the fiction feeds back into the mechanics though, its all 'boxes to cloud' leftward arrows. However, the game does produce mechanical outputs which clearly work to introduce prompts to generate trope-appropriate fiction. Again, the principle of play "I am a Vampire" comes in here in a rather obvious way, the premise is quite explicit as far as I can see. So we seem to have a kind of High Concept/genre type of focus.

So, I'm not seeing where GNS has some huge problem with TYOV. I mean, @Manbearcat, @Ovinomancer, or @pemerton may well disagree with me in how I interpret things, which may speak to a level of difficulty grasping GNS, but it seems capable of talking about this game at least. Nor do I see some major hole in the analysis, personally. At most perhaps it points at the division between High Concept Simulation and Story Now sometimes being a bit hard to parse, or even subjective. Perhaps they often form a sort of variation by degree, where at the extreme end you have some quite purist Story Now play, and at the other the focus has shifted almost entirely onto some premise that is not really character centered and less laser focus on character advocacy as a driving principle.

Finally, I differ from Pemerton in that I think it IS useful to look at outliers. Not so much in terms of 'can I construct a framework that handles this' as in terms of 'how general is this one'. So, I might not try to devise a theory of RPG agendas/play/design/whatever with TYOV in mind, but I feel perfectly comfortable analyzing it with an existing one and considering what that tells me about the power of the abstraction.

You may be overstating the role of fortune in TYOV, but have you played Artifact? Do you have any similar take on that RPG?