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

[Crimson Longinus]

All I say to that, is that it is worth considering what sort of experience the likely users of the product will have when they use it in a way they want to use it. If they walk away from that experience with positive feeling, then the product is doing something right. "I had fun" means a lot and shouldn't be dismissed.

 

[Thomas Shey]

All I say to that, is that it is worth considering what sort of experience the likely users of the product will have when they use it in a way they want to use it. If they walk away from that experience with positive feeling, then the product is doing something right. "I had fun" means a lot and shouldn't be dismissed.

I do have to note that this became less and less true as levels accrued, however. I'm not going to say no one every enjoyed the higher levels, but as noted, a lot of people never play any game, let alone D&D in one campaign long enough to see higher levels. If a game is working sort-of okay for a third of its supposed range, and then progressively worse for most people the longer past this, I think its understandable how it happens, and still shows the design isn't really very good (this isn't limited to D&D; the Dragon Age RPG (and as far as I can tell, its generic offshoot Fantasy AGE) worked reasonably for the first six levels and then became more and more problematic, most likely because the playtesting at higher levels became more and more sketchy).

I don't think its a coincidence that the number of people who played D&D 3e or Pathfinder 1e above about 12th level and still found it enjoyable drops off really, really fast in discussion; either they're not playing it at that level at all, or those that are aren't generally finding it all that great.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yeah, I definitely am not one of those "but D&D can do everything" people. It cannot. It is an action adventure game with some weirdly specific conventions. But I do think it can easily do very character driven play, as that mostly is not about the rules. Not Story Now of course, but still. Basically what you need for character driven is characters who have motivation to do stuff, and a GM that is willing to let them do stuff. Like sounds silly simple, but that's basically it. If you want more drama, then build characters with hooks for drama.

That's not quite sufficient for character driven. Character driven is where the game centers on the characters. If the characters are motivated, say, to plunder a dungeon and gain treasure, this isn't character driven because the play is actually centered around the setting -- exploring the dungeon created by the GM for the setting (or provided in a module). The characters are motivated to explore the setting. This is great -- it described my 5e games pretty well. Along the way, we can get character moments, but the organizing feature of play isn't the characters, it's still the setting.

For it to be character driven play, play has to organize around the characters, such that setting is introduce only as backdrop and as needed due to what the characters are about.

It's a rather large distinction in play. Doesn't sound large here, but the impact and effect is night and day noticeable (not that one is night and the other day).

 

[Ovinomancer]

Then why do you continue?



So I really don't like 3e. At all. But the truth is that a lot of that brokenness was theoretical. Yes, you could break the game if you did certain things. But most people simply didn't, and the game worked fine enough for them. And yeah, if it actually would have broken down during casual play so that people literally couldn't paly, it wouldn't have been popular. But that's not what happened. (I can attest to this. Played for years, didn't particularly like the game, but I cannot remember a single instance of 'the game braking.' Orks were killed for XP just fine, no issue there.)

I'm confused as to your arguments, here. You seem to have asserted that 5e is a good game because it is popular. But, for 3e, you aren't asserting it was a good game because it was popular (it was) but rather an analysis where you assume that some of the issues many of talked about (and are the reasons I will never, ever play a 3.x game or knockoff) are actually quite rare in the wild and not actually problems people had and that this means that is was a pretty good game.

I can't keep track of the rapid argument changes. Is popularity a measure of goodness for you or not?

 

[pemerton]

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.

I've not expressed such doubts. In fact I've posted that it's probably happening somewhere. What I've also said is that I see zero evidence of it in ENworld posts about D&D play, or about GMing advice.

Do you have actual examples to post about? Or that you can point me to?

 

[pemerton]

Perhaps stop talking about modules? They're not limited because of D&D, they're limited because they're pre-written modules. It is not relevant.

This isn't true.

I've already mentioned the Prince Valiant scenario The Crimson Bull. I'll mention it again. It's a published scenario that does not involve the GM establishing the PCs' dramatic needs.

Another published scenario of which the same is true is Robin Laws's The Demon of the Red Grove, in the HeroWars Narrator's Book. (I adapted this scnenario to 4e D&D.)

Another scenario that doesn't involve the GM establishing the PCs' dramatic needs, and that needed only one scene edit to work in Burning Wheel (as I also mentioned upthread) is the d20 module Maiden Voyage.

The fact that the majority of scenarios for D&D do presuppose the GM establishing the PCs' dramatic needs tells us something about mainstream D&D play, not about the published scenario form.

So your games do not have, say stated or implied premises, that might either explicitly or implicitly limit and guide what sort of 'judgments' the players will make? They do not have social conventions about how the shared time is used that might do the same?

<snip>

I don't believe there realistically can be situation where such incentives do not exist at all. Now what amount of such one feels detrimental to their enjoyment is a matter of taste. I for example have on many occasions expressed my distaste for alignment and other such dictated 'objective' moral standards that limit how the players can make their own moral assessments. But some people are fine with such limits, and I in turn am fine with some limits you might not.

Upthread I mentioned the bounds of good taste. This is not what is at issue when (to quote myself) "social cues or signals or pressures, or there are overt directives in the rules of the game itself, . . . dictate answers or responses to questions of value that the fiction of the game might generate".

When such things are taking place, we don't have story now. Because we are not getting authorial contributions from the participant players that express their judgements by way of their play.

I'm not suggesting that there are not people who are fine with such cues, signals, pressures and directives. In fact I'm very confident that most RPGers are very happy with them! But for the same reason, I'm very confident that the majority of RPGers are not playing "story now".

What does it mean to 'change the setting?' I feel it is very common to have games where the character's actions have a significant impact. Now perhaps one can argue that it is common to set up things so that the PCs are so positioned that they do not so much make a choice about the change, but it is merely their success or failure that dictates the change or lack thereof (I.e. typical save the village/kingdom/world thing) an I agree that situations where the players can take more initiative and genuinely make choices between attempting to achieve various outcomes is far more interesting.

Saving the kingdom is not changing the setting! Especially in context where the GM has a back-up/deus ex machina device ready to hand to make sure that if the PCs fail in their attempt to save the kingdom.

Confining the PCs' actions to villages, in a setting context in which it is established, or at least implied, that villages are a dime-a-dozen, is also a way of reducing the capacity of the players to change the setting via their play.

I'm sure there is D&D play going on somewhere where the players, via their play, have a large and lasting impact on the setting - on politics, religion, cosmology, etc. But again, all I can say is that I do not see a lot of evidence for it. Most GMing advice that I see that touches on this issue seems to be aimed at helping a GM minimise the impact of the players on the setting (using guards, or religious sanctions, to respond to certain behaviours; kings or nobles who won't dain to truck with mere adventurers; high level adventures where the basic story elements are no different from low level ones except that giants or dragons replace kobolds and gelatinous cubes). Where change does take place, it seems most often to be along pathways conceived of and opened up, or even encouraged, by the GM.

EDIT: This post is a good articulation of the point I was trying to make in the preceding paragraph:

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

 

[pemerton]

I am merely trying to pin-point where the difference lies.

I've told you. I've posted actual play examples. You haven't responded to them.

In my Prince Valiant game, in the course of 14 sessions, the PCs saved a noble family, settled a peasant revolt (prompted in part by the fact that the players helped a rich abbot against Robin Hood-types), founded an order (aided in part by the friendship with the abbot), formed a warband, left Britain to the mercy of Saxons while travelling across Europe, took control of a Duchy (with the aid of a different peasant revolt), received gifts from the Emperor in Constantinople, and are currently at war in Cyprus. The players are the ones who made the choices about who counts as a villain and who an ally; who is worthy of helping and who not; to convert the undead and lay their bones in a reliquary rather than try and destroy them; etc.

In basic structure it's standard scene-framed play. It's not as visceral as what (eg) @Campbell's preferred approach to character driven play, but neither is it as purely situation-driven as The Dying Earth defaults to. The situations combine generic tropes and themes of knight-errantry with particular elements that are likely to speak to or engage with the players' evinced concerns for their PCs.

In the context of my 3 points, (i) the players have changed the setting via their play of their PCs - a new order, new alliances with Constantinople, control of a Duchy (by way of marriage) and a gift from the King of France, etc; (ii) the players chose their PCs' dramatic needs - to found a warband, to save a PC's marriage, to convert rather than kill; (iii) the players chose their evaluative responses/judgements, expressed via their play of their PCs - sometimes loyal, sometimes expedient, sometimes merciful, generally not overly radical. There is no worldly nor any cosmological process that "judges" what count as right or wrong answers, or that tells them which peasants and bandits deserve sympathy and which are varlets. The players make their own calls, and play flows from that.

That is what relatively low-risk "story now" play looks like.

Here is an example of higher risk "story now" play, from a single session of Burning Wheel (I was the player):

My PC is Thurgon, a warrior cleric type (heavy armour, Faithful to the Lord of Battle, Last Knight of the Iron Tower, etc). His companion is Aramina, a sorcerer. His ancestral estate, which he has not visited for 5 years, is Auxol.

At the start of the session, Thurgon had the following four Beliefs - The Lord of Battle will lead me to glory; I am a Knight of the Iron Tower, and by devotion and example I will lead the righteous to glorious victory; Harm and infamy will befall Auxol no more!; Aramina will need my protection - and three Instincts - When entering battle, always speak a prayer to the Lord of Battle; If an innocent is threatened, interpose myself; When camping, always ensure that the campfire is burning.

Aramina's had three Beliefs - I'm not going to finish my career with no spellbooks and an empty purse! - next, some coins!; I don't need Thurgon's pity; If in doubt, burn it! and three instincts - Never catch the glance or gaze of a stranger; Always wear my cloak; Always Assess before casting a spell.

<snip>

Thurgon decided that they would head east

<snip>

This was heading into the neighbourhood of Auxol, and so Thurgon kept his eye out for friends and family. The Circles check (base 3 dice +1 for an Affiliation with the nobility and another +1 for an Affiliation with his family) succeeded again, and the two characters came upon Thurgon's older brother Rufus driving a horse and cart. (Thurgon has a Relationship with his mother Xanthippe but no other family members; hence the Circles check to meet his brother.)

There was a reunion between Rufus and Thurgon. But (as described by the GM) it was clear to Thurgon that Rufus was not who he had been, but seemed cowed - as Rufus explained when Thurgon asked after Auxol, he (Rufus) was on his way to collect wine for the master. Rufus mentioned that Thurgon's younger son had married not long ago - a bit of lore (like Rufus hmself) taken from the background I'd prepared for Thurgon as part of PC gen - and had headed south in search of glory (that was something new the GM introduced). I mentioned that Aramina was not meeting Rufus's gaze, and the GM picked up on this - Rufus asked Thurgon who this woman was who wouldn't look at him from beneath the hood of her cloak - was she a witch? Thurgon answered that she travelled with him and mended his armour. Then I switched to Aramina, and she looked Rufus directly in the eye and told him what she thought of him - "Thurgon has trained and is now seeking glory on his errantry, and his younger brother has gone too to seek glory, but your, Rufus . . ." I told the GM that I wanted to check Ugly Truth for Aramina, to cause a Steel check on Rufus's part. The GM decided that Rufus has Will 3, and then we quickly calculated his Steel which also came out at 3. My Ugly Truth check was a success, and the Steel check failed. Rufus looked at Aramina, shamed but unable to respond. Switching back to Thurgon, I tried to break Rufus out of it with a Command check: he should pull himself together and join in restoring Auxol to its former glory. But the check failed, and Rufus, broken, explained that he had to go and get the wine. Switching back to Aramina, I had a last go - she tried for untrained Command, saying that if he wasn't going to join with Thurgon he might at least give us some coin so that we might spend the night at an inn rather than camping. This was Will 5, with an advantage die for having cowed him the first time, against a double obstacle penalty for untrained (ie 6) +1 penalty because Rufus was very set in his way. It failed. and so Rufus rode on and now has animosity towards Aramina. As the GM said, she better not have her back to him while he has a knife ready to hand.

The characters continued on, and soon arrived at Auxol,. The GM narrated the estate still being worked, but looking somewhat run-down compared to Thrugon's memories of it. An old, bowed woman greeted us - Xanthippe, looking much more than her 61 years. She welcomed Thurgon back, but chided him for having been away. And asked him not to leave again. The GM was getting ready to force a Duel of Wits on the point - ie that Thurgon should not leave again - when I tried a different approach. I'd already made a point of Thurgon having his arms on clear display as he rode through the countryside and the estate; now he raised his mace and shield to the heavens, and called on the Lord of Battle to bring strength back to his mother so that Auxol might be restored to its former greatness. This was a prayer for a Minor Miracle, obstacle 5. Thurgon has Faith 5 and I burned his last point of Persona to take it to 6 dice (the significance of this being that, without 1 Persona, you can't stop the effect of a mortal wound should one be suffered). With 6s being open-ended (ie auto-rolls), the expected success rate is 3/5, so that's 3.6 successes there. And I had a Fate point to reroll one failure, for an overall expected 4-ish successes. Against an obstacle of 5.

As it turned out, I finished up with 7 successes. So a beam of light shot down from the sky, and Xanthippe straightened up and greeted Thurgon again, but this time with vigour and readiness to restore Auxol. The GM accepted my proposition that this played out Thurgon's Belief that Harm and infamy will befall Auxol no more! (earning a Persona point). His new Belief is Xanthippe and I will liberate Auxol. He picked up a second Persona point for Embodiment ("Your roleplay (a performance or a decision) captures the mood of the table and drives the story onward").

Turning back to Aramina, I decided that this made an impact on her too: up until now she had been cynical and slightly bitter, but now she was genuinely inspired and determined: instead of never meeting the gaze of a stranger, her Instinct is to look strangers in the eyes and Assess. And rather than I don't need Thurgon's pity, her Belief is Thurgon and I will liberate Auxol. This earned a Persona point for Mouldbreaker ("If a situation brings your Beliefs, Instincts and Traits into conflict with a decision your PC must make, you play out your inner turmoil as you dramatically play against a Belief in a believable and engaging manner").

In terms of my three points, (i) I changed the setting - Xanthippe is ready to join with Thurgon in liberating Auxol, (ii) I chose Thurgon's dramatic needs (around his family and his heritage) and I chose Aramina's dramatic needs (around her self-doubts, her resulting cynicism, and her relationship with Thurgon), and (iii) I chose the responses - to Rufus, to Xanthippe, and in Aramina's case to the miracle. There was no system imperative or GM imperative establishing right or wrong choices or attitudes, or predetermining how the interactions between the various characters would go.

This is what "story now" play looks like, for me at least. The players are in the driving seat; the GM frames and facilitates. That faciliation includes presenting the players with circumstances that require their PCs to make value-laden choices. And there are not "right answers" - as I quoted from Vincent Baker (DitV) upthread, I think in reply to you, the GM does not "play god" or impose their own judgements. Play results from the cycle of framing, choice, action and consequence which in turn leads to new framing built upon those consequences.

If you are playing 5e D&D in this sort of fashion, you could tell us about it!

 

[Ovinomancer]

The problem with relating Story Now play is that any example is done Story After -- and it seems like you could have gotten that same thing with another agenda. But, that's the thing, everything that happened happened in the moment of play, and then the next moment of play, with nothing expected or planned. That something occurred is the most trivial analysis. HOW it occurred is the big difference.

 

[pemerton]

Trying to invade Australia from Park Place to collect rent doesn't align at all.

It's also a couple of centuries too late - Britain already did it.

 

[pemerton]

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.

What is a "gamist element"?

When I say that 4e supports "story now" play, I am using the phrase in Ron Edwards's sense, to describe an agenda. So it would not make any sense to talk about "story now" or "narrativist" elements involved in actual play, as an agenda is a motivation for, and an aspiration for, play, but is not an element of play.

So the only point I can make sense of in the neighbourhood is that the same system components and techniques of 4e that make it suited to gamist play, also make it suited to "story now" play. This is not a surprise! To quote Ron Edwards from two essays written nearly two decades ago:

Step On Up is actually quite similar, in social and interactive terms, to Story Now. Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things:

• Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. This isn't an issue of whether Author (or any) Stance is employed at all, but rather when and for what.
• Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion.
• More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.
• Reward systems that reflect player choices (strategy, aesthetics, whatever) rather than on in-game character logic or on conformity to a pre-stated plan of play.

Which is a really long-winded way of saying that one or the other of the two modes has to be "the point," and they don't share well - but unlike either's relationship with Simulationist play (i.e., a potentially hostile one), Gamist and Narrativist play don't tug-of-war over "doing it right" - they simply avoid one another, like the same-end poles of two magnets. Note, I'm saying play, not players. The activity of play doesn't hybridize well between Gamism and Narrativism, but it does shift, sometimes quite easily. . . .

Author Stance may be considered the default for Narrativist play only in the sense that it needs to be in there somewhere. Narrativist play doesn't have to be exclusively in this Stance, nor does it even have to be employed more often than the others. The only requirement is that it be present in a significant way. Narrativist play is very much like Gamist play in this regard, and for the same reason: the player of a given character takes social and aesthetic responsibility for what that character does. . . .​

​

Looking at earlier games from a Techniques perspective, a shift to Narrativist play within the larger Gamist context is apparent in some Tunnels & Trolls, as discusssed in "Gamism: Step On Up". . . .​

​

Just as in Gamist play, the big gorilla of the five Explorative elements is Situation. . . .​

​

As I've tried to show at various points so far, Gamist and Narrativist play are near-absolute social and structural equivalents, sharing the same range for most Techniques save those involving reward systems. They differ primarily in terms of the actual aesthetic payoff - what's appreciated socially and aesthetically. That difference is extremely marked. Happily, therefore very little if any chance exists for these modes of play to come into conflict with one another - a group simply goes one way or the other.​

Playing 4e well, especially in combat, requires good technical skills. This generates a "gravitational" pull towards a gamist agenda, but that pull can be resisted in various ways: (i) if the technical elements reinforce other aspects of what's at stake in play ("story" elements, "dramatic needs"); (ii) if the GM's choice of opponents, and play of those opponents in the combat, does similar reinforcing. And of course (i) and (ii) are related - my two poster children for this are the Deathlock Wight (MM) and the Chained Cambion (MM III).

Provided that the gravitational pull is resisted, there is no incoherence in story now play requiring strong technical skill. This is a big contrast, for instance, between Burning Wheel and Prince Valiant: both support "story now" play, but BW also demands technical skill from the players. But it has many elements in system and principles to make sure the resulting gravitational pull towards a gamist agenda does not prevail. (Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic tries to be like BW in this regard; I'm not as sure that it fully succeeds, though it gives it a red hot go.)