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

[Ovinomancer]

I am not quite sure all have acknowledged that, but sure, I agree with you that this is the distinction. This is a thing that can happen in 5e, but the game is not designed to make sure it will. This is absolutely fair.

But I'd argue that it commonly happens, albeit obviously not to the frequency and degree people who prefer Story Now games would like. But in practice players tend to have great freedom in defining their characters, including their backgrounds, hopes, dreams, convictions and fears. And usually at some point some of these will be challenged in the play, either due the GM paying attention to these sort of things and making it happen, or the situation just emerging randomly.

And I do not at all argue that this makes 5e and Story Now games similar as overall experience, but that these specific moments still share a clear similarity.

If you're talking about moments of play that fit the Story Now agenda, they have to happen either by complete accident -- in which case they are passing -- or bloody-minded intent on the part of the GM. And I mean bloody-minded. This is because the structure of play in 5e will not cause these moments to occur just through following how the game tells you to play and provides means for you to play. The core loop structure of 5e -- mentioned on page 4 of the PHB and reinforced elsewhere -- cuts hard against Story Now play emerging. The mechanics of the game mostly point to simulationist resolution because they resolve at the task level and tell you if you succeed or fail at the task only. Inputs are only those that relate to the task, and outcomes are only about the task. Take climbing a wall, for example -- the only inputs here are the GM's assessment of the challenge of actually climbing the wall and whatever things the player can bring to bear (like climbing gear deployed or assistance from a fellow). The result of this check just tells you if the climbing task is successful. Anything downstream of this -- like say if you're climbing to get to the top of a cliff to stop a terrible ritual -- is not going to have anything resolve here (and shouldn't, given the inputs), but failing may invoke some other timekeeping loop that may result in an eventual failure to stop the ritual in time.

So what does all that mean? 5e's mechanics cut against Story Now play at worst, and at best have nothing to provide that aids Story Now play. To get to a consistent experience of Story Now play, you pretty much have to heavily houserule. You could have momentary Story Now play, if the GM is super duper keen and brings everything with that and the players pick up (or it's clearly communicated) so they can hold up their end, but this is a huge overhead on the GM with no support at all from the system, only hinderance. You might do it, but it will be inconsistent, will be constantly fighting with the system (and throwing incoherencies all over the place), and it's mostly not worth it when you could get a game that does this kind of play sooo much better. You might accidentally stumble into a few moments, but that's unlikely given how much the system pushes against Story Now.

And the reason I say it pushes against Story Now is that the system tells you that the GM Says. And the GM Says with very few restrictions. And, as I noted above, the mechanical resolution actually often relies on the GM's say to operate (picking a DC is entirely up to the GM, which puts pressure on the pass/fail envelope). And, probably most notably, the GM is not constrained much by the outcome of checks by the rules (individual GMs can do as they please -- I do, and always honor the result of checks). They can see a success but narrate an outcome that might hit success by the letter but certainly not the spirit and they would not be playing one whit incorrectly (there are a few instances in published APs I could point out where this happens and isn't being malicious).

So, yes, is it possible that 5e has Story Now moments? Sure. Is it likely? No, not without serious intent and effort, and then irregularly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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'.

But that only works if you conclude that the more important element is "how the world works" in a general sense rather than in a direct engagement sense. That was certainly not how the GDS Simulationists saw it, and even though much of my simulationism has peeled away over the years, I think I'm still with them on this: world sim and genre emulation are in terms of engagement, as different as chalk and cheese. The latter seems much more like the sort of thing done to structure story conceits for a character, just writ large, and do not bear any greater ground level engagement well.

In other words, there's a fundamental disagreement that goes along here as to whether the two things are more similar in a utilitarian fashion, or more different. I don't suspect that's resolvable, honestly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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'd like to join Ezekiel on this; my suggestion upthread that calling some of the less popular systemic and motivational approaches "more specialized" was not intended to denigrate them; as I've noted, D&D is not really my cuppa, and while I may not be all that interested in Story Now or some related approaches, the ones I do like are not necessarily any more common (certainly my choices of game are as or more off the mainstream as the ones Campbell cited). It was just a perception of what "specialized" could mean in this context that seems to have misfired in an unfortunate way.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yet... I have much more fun with 5e, and I am hardly alone in this. 4e was not popular, 5e is.

At the very least, I think this has to be said in context: 4e was not popular compared to other editions of D&D. Most other games could wish they had the popularity of 4e.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

But this is both very common, and not necessarily the whole point. That is, even if play is 'freeform', what does that mean in terms of the model of play that a game like 5e cultivates? Wouldn't it STILL be GM-directed? That is, the GM invents the situations, and those situations are what dictate 'what the game is about', right? Even in the case of situations and non-linear play it is perfectly possible, likely, even typical, that the GM will design these situations such that they don't produce significant disruption (at least that is unplanned by the GM) to the setting itself. And yes, that setup is almost always one where the GM designs what the possibilities of change are, along which lines they fall, etc. When I ran a big 2e campaign back in the '90s that's exactly how things were put together. There was a preordained threat to 'civilization' and there were various different interest groups/factions which might be tapped to provide resources to resist it, but they all had their own agendas. The players didn't have any choice in any of this, it was all preordained, and the sequence of events that would take place without their intervention was also plotted out. This seems like a fairly typical non-linear approach (though I admit the scope of my ambition was rather larger than average, thus also the spectacularity of its failing when the players went off on their own tangent).

This reminds me why I have come to dislike overarching 'threat to the world' storylines. They wrap everything around themselves. Hard to have fun player initiated heists, hard to even worry about your insignificant personal woes; the world is at stake, man, whatcha gonna do?

Though I have a funny story regarding an unusual course such a scenario took from years ago. Perhaps it was accidentally very Story Now in a sense? It was an Exalted campaign I was running and a Deathlord was trying to blow up the world. The motive of the Deathlords is basically to end suffering by euthanising the entire world. The PCs somewhat unsurprisingly were not going to let this happen. So one of the player characters had dragged her wife (who was originally just a random NPC but the player decided their character madly falls in love with her) into the 'final battle' with the Deathlord. In the ensuing battle the wife gets killed (I don't remember how, probably due random. The wife was a competent warrior, but not nearly as tough as the PCs.) So at the crucial moment where the characters are just about to stop the bad guy from activating his doomsday thing, he makes some sort of classic villain speech, addressing the character whose wife was killed. "Now you know my pain, join me and we can end all the suffering forever!" (Or to that effect.) So the character, who is utterly heartbroken, actually agrees, joins the bad guy, the world gets blown up, the end. On the one hand it was pretty cool, but the other players weren't terribly pleased.

(I have a bad habit of accidentally making weirdly convincing bad guys. This is not the only time when the PCs have gone during a villain monologue: "You know what, he actually has a point!" )

In any case, what we were talking about? I think I lost the plot... But yes, the GM introduces the situations for the PCs to react. Then again, in Story Now GM frames the scenes too (though there tends to be some more limitations about how they should do it there.) And the framing of course always contextualises and informs the direction the play will take. It also matters how much the play revolves around the PCs reacting to things the GM frames and how much around the things PCs just initiate. Like can the PCs just randomly decide to rob a Baron's treasure vault or buy a ship and become pirates (Why both my examples are about crime?) Sure, in D&D these both still would be contingent on the GM having put rich barons and ships in the world, but at this point we can hardly call things "GM directed." And I don't think it is unusual for game to contain both more plothooky and more self-initiated situations.

I think the reference to modules was simply illustrative. This is a SUPER common form of play. The GM introduces a 'quest giver' in some form. The structure of the game/adventure/story arc is thus set, both in terms of what it engages and in the expected motivations and actions of the PCs.

This is the same thing Campbell was referring to? Yes, dramatic need could be linked to a 'plothook.' But they don't need to be. Perhaps some are and some aren't.

Sure, and my tastes on this differ somewhat from Pemerton's too. The point isn't that anyone posits a game where the participants are utterly free of non-fictional constraints. The question is what does the game expect of us? If it expects the PCs to subordinate any sort of personal agenda/character to other considerations then it is less focused on character's dramatic needs as articulated by the PLAYER and more on something else, which might still be dramatic needs (probably is if things are going OK) but doesn't have players deciding what they are (and even Story Now allows for 'setting' to provide motives, it just requires that players be given freedom to be protagonists, that is decide how they engage those needs). It is thus a critical difference where the focus of play comes from, not so much whether there are 'table constraints'.

Sure. I just feel that 5e play doesn't need to be, and often isn't, nearly as constrained than implied.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Obviously cannot speak to other people's 4e play; however I would say that combats are NOT divorced from SN considerations in the way we played. That is, the scenarios that came up in combat were entirely built out of SN-type considerations. Flowing in the other direction choices and mechanical interactions also tie closely into SN. 4e facilitates this greatly by things like keywords, the clear articulation of improvised actions (and the fully generalized rules structure around it that lets you invent basically any 'power' on the fly) and all the ways that character build options and such flag things. So, if a player is in a combat and says "Oh, yeah, my Paladin of Olorin definitely wants to stop that gate from opening, because..." then doing it 'just happens' and its quite easy for the GM to say "OK, here's a way to model that in mechanics that dovetails with the rest of combat, and we can articulate risk, etc."

So, I didn't experience a ton of disconnect between a purely 'tactical' gamist combat mode vs some other mode where the SN stuff happened. In fact, our play evolved to where there was either an SC, a combat, or some kind of connecting scene (DMG2 has a nice discussion of this). IMHO this is a great strength of 4e as a system that, for example, 5e somewhat lacks (it has parts, but it broke some fairly significant things).

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.

Yeah, that would be cute. I think there have been a few implementations of this concept. You can actually do it in 4e as well, by simply using the quest architecture and linking it to the SC system. So, you could make a 'framing SC' that is pretty high level, like "cross the continent" and then all the stuff that would be checks in that become encounters/challenges. Completing the framing SC signals completion of the quest. 4e itself never really suggests this kind of thing directly, but it is a pretty straightforward 'hack'.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And I of course am not saying that popularity is the only measure, but I feel it would be equally wrong to say that it is of not value and has no correlation with the quality at all.

I mean, I think I can say pretty unequivocally that quality and popularity have no consistent correlation--neither positive nor negative. Because if popularity were applied to food, then the only restaurant would be McDonald's (or perhaps Taco Bell?), the only beer would be Budweiser, and the only cheese would be mozzarella. If only the most popular movie genres were made....well, actually, it wouldn't be that much different from what we get now. The poor response to things like the sequel trilogy for Star Wars or the glut of dubious-quality live action Disney remakes or the glut of dubious-quality superhero films....doesn't bode well for it. Or the never-ending problems with Windows as an operating system, despite its absolute dominance. Or...

I could go on. Popularity, quite often, has literally nothing to do with having high standards of quality. It's often to do with things completely unrelated to quality, like consistency (Bud Lite tastes the same everywhere for a reason, Windows is the standardized business operating system), market penetration (McDonald's and Coke are some of the only things present in nearly every nation on Earth), nostalgia, extant time investment, conspicuous consumption, simplicity (McDonald's again, WalMart), or a host of other potential things.

Sometimes things become popular because of their quality. I could beat the dead horse further, and I originally had a lot more said about it, but I think I've made my point. Sometimes quality directly leads to popularity. But I would say more often, quality is irrelevant--hence, no correlation. It's other characteristics or circumstances that make popularity happen or not happen.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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

No, and to be clear I have not personally played TYOV either, though I've read through a number of journals. I'll play TYOV once I get my hands on a copy, hopefully soon, as I have some ideas... hehe. Maybe I should look at Artifact as well, but probably not this month...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Mostly in the sense of plot weaving / adventure hooks. The GM using it as a means to bring in other preplanned story elements that are not directly related or deciding where they want things to go ahead of time. I fully expect that in certain games. It's just part of the fundamental difference in forms of play in my experience. So, I have learned to invest a little less emotionally in the tension of those moments.

Yeah, what I always seem to experience in 5e play is that stuff just comes in out of left field from the perspective of my character. Like, why am I even part of this adventure, given my motives and personality? Or, "gosh bother, this thing I have no primary interest in is interrupting my life and putting my plans on hold." We could think of that as an issue of people at the table, but when I play Dungeon World with the exact same people (and the same GM) it never happens. It CANNOT happen, except in terms of "Oh no, I can't finish building the castle that will keep my family safe because Earth Giants are coming and I failed to get the Spade of Colossal Digging!" Whatever the GM throws my way, it is directly speaking to whatever my character is or does or cares about. So, I expect that SYSTEM is a significant factor here.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I mean, I think I can say pretty unequivocally that quality and popularity have no consistent correlation--neither positive nor negative. Because if popularity were applied to food, then the only restaurant would be McDonald's (or perhaps Taco Bell?),

Someone made McDonalds comparison in other tread. Is McDonald's' food of poor quality given its price? Especially if we count ease of access and use among things we asses? Probably not.

the only beer would be Budweiser, and the only cheese would be mozzarella. If only the most popular movie genres were made....well, actually, it wouldn't be that much different from what we get now. The poor response to things like the sequel trilogy for Star Wars or the glut of dubious-quality live action Disney remakes or the glut of dubious-quality superhero films....doesn't bode well for it. Or the never-ending problems with Windows as an operating system, despite its absolute dominance. Or...

And yet even the films you mention we see that quality matters. Some big and expensive action blockbusters based on established franchises get panned, some are loved. Yes, Marvel films have quality. It is not random that they're well liked.

I could go on. Popularity, quite often, has literally nothing to do with having high standards of quality. It's often to do with things completely unrelated to quality, like consistency (Bud Lite tastes the same everywhere for a reason, Windows is the standardized business operating system), market penetration (McDonald's and Coke are some of the only things present in nearly every nation on Earth), nostalgia, extant time investment, conspicuous consumption, simplicity (McDonald's again, WalMart), or a host of other potential things.

Simplicity, consistency, these are all certain kind of quality. They're things that have value to the consumer. Hell, even successfully evoking nostalgia is a kind of quality.

Sometimes things become popular because of their quality. I could beat the dead horse further, and I originally had a lot more said about it, but I think I've made my point. Sometimes quality directly leads to popularity. But I would say more often, quality is irrelevant--hence, no correlation. It's other characteristics or circumstances that make popularity happen or not happen.

As a bit of an elitist snob this was somewhat painful to write. But I still stand by it. Yes, sometimes success and popularity can be a fluke, but it is absurd to think that there is no correlation.