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

[Campbell]

The bigger constraint on Story Now play is not setting design, but situation design. You can have a very detailed backdrop as long as you provide for flexibility in the immediate situations Player Characters find themselves in. What is of paramount importance is the ability to somewhat unfixed about NPC motivations, exactly what's going on at a particular location and what any particular faction might be to right this minute. As a Story Now GM you should first and foremost be concerned with providing the players with room to make decisions for their characters, so you want to give yourself room to keep things flowing and focused on their dramatic needs.

A good example of the sort of setting design that works well for Story Now play is Blades in the Dark. It gives some general motivations for some named NPCs, but no specific plans. It gives a general sense of a faction's influence but does not detail all their holdings. It provides highlights of various regions of the city. It keeps things flexible so you can keep the pressure on the characters and tailor the situation to fit what they are trying to accomplish.

For what it's worth this is why I don't consider many of the games I run Story Now. I tend to be guided by dramatic needs in scenario design, but a lot more fixed in terms of details of the scenario during play when I run games like L5R or Exalted. Particularly when it comes to NPCs.

 

[clearstream]

The bigger constraint on Story Now play is not setting design, but situation design. You can have a very detailed backdrop as long as you provide for flexibility in the immediate situations Player Characters find themselves in. What is of paramount importance is the ability to somewhat unfixed about NPC motivations, exactly what's going on at a particular location and what any particular faction might be to right this minute. As a Story Now GM you should first and foremost be concerned with providing the players with room to make decisions for their characters, so you want to give yourself room to keep things flowing and focused on their dramatic needs.

A good example of the sort of setting design that works well for Story Now play is Blades in the Dark. It gives some general motivations for some named NPCs, but no specific plans. It gives a general sense of a faction's influence but does not detail all their holdings. It provides highlights of various regions of the city. It keeps things flexible so you can keep the pressure on the characters and tailor the situation to fit what they are trying to accomplish.

For what it's worth this is why I don't consider many of the games I run Story Now. I tend to be guided by dramatic needs in scenario design, but a lot more fixed in terms of details of the scenario during play when I run games like L5R or Exalted. Particularly when it comes to NPCs.

Helpful insights! A kind of play I like is where I know the setting and the NPCs' means and motives, but have no plan for what happens. Nor do I know which NPCs are going to figure highly, or even if the roster is complete.

I am not characterising this as Story Now. Rich, unanticipated stories do emerge though. In a sense, what I am doing is assigning part of my cognition to operating as "player", so that it can join in the authoring-on-the-fly. Thus they stumble across things, get involved, get in trouble, wander places I haven't mapped yet, experience conflicts. These could amount to DMPCs only one has them at arms-length, so they are readily sacrificed or passed over if that is where the stream of emergent narrative courses.

 

[clearstream]

So...if you write down in a book, "If you aren't sure what happens, the referee will tell you what happens," suddenly it's a rule and not "DM decides"?

For brevity, let's set aside the matter of agreement by supposing all agree to the rule. The rule entails the following

It apparently separates you from referee, therefore you is the player.
If I as a player am unsure what happens, I turn to referee to decide. That would to my mind also cover cases where players are in disagreement.
If I as player am sure what happens, referee has no say. Here, players are assumed to be in agreement.

This rule would appear to me to be regulatory rather than constitutive. Meaning it guides us what to do in some circumstances, without being required for those circumstances to arise.

 

[pemerton]

The emphasis of competition among the players in the GNS entry is one of the things wrong with it. It ridiculously excludes all kinds of gamist play

From quite a way upthread:

Edwards has the following to say:

Gamism . . . operates at two levels: the real, social people and the imaginative, in-game situation.

1. The players, armed with their understanding of the game and their strategic acumen, have to Step On Up. Step On Up requires strategizing, guts, and performance from the real people in the real world. This is the inherent "meaning" or agenda of Gamist play . . .
   
   Gamist play, socially speaking, demands performance with risk, conducted and perceived by the people at the table. What's actually at risk can vary - for this level, though, it must be a social, real-people thing, usually a minor amount of recognition or esteem. The commitment to, or willingness to accept this risk is the key - it's analogous to committing to the sincerity of The Dream for Simulationist play. This is the whole core of the essay, that such a commitment is fun and perfectly viable for role-playing, just as it's viable for nearly any other sphere of human activity.
   
2. The in-game characters, armed with their skills, priorities, and so on, have to face a Challenge, which is to say, a specific Situation in the imaginary game-world. Challenge is about the strategizing, guts, and performance of the characters in this imaginary game-world.
   
   For the characters, it's a risky situation in the game-world; in addition to that all-important risk, it can be as fabulous, elaborate, and thematic as any other sort of role-playing. Challenge is merely plain old Situation - it only gets a new name because of the necessary attention it must receive in Gamist play. Strategizing in and among the Challenge is the material, or arena, for whatever brand of Step On Up is operating. . . .

Competition is best understood as a productive add-on to Gamist play. Such play is fundamentally cooperative, but may include competition. That's not a contradiction: I'm using exactly the same logic as might be found at the poker and basketball games. You can't compete, socially, without an agreed-upon venue. If the cooperation's details are acceptable to everyone, then the competition within it can be quite fierce. . . .

So what is all this competition business about? It concerns conflict of interest. If person A's performance is only maximized by driving down another's performance, then competition is present. In Gamist play, this is not required - but it is very often part of the picture. Competition gives both Step On Up and Challenge a whole new feel - a bite.

How does conflict of interest relate to Step On Up and to Challenge? The crucial answer is that it may be present twice, independently, within the two-level structure.

• Competition at the Step On Up level = conflict of interest regarding players' performance and impact on the game-world.
• Competition at the Challenge level = conflict of interest among characters' priorities (survival, resource accumulation, whatever) in the game-world.

Think of each level having a little red dial, from 1 to 11 - and those dials can be twisted independently. Therefore, four extremes of dial-twisting may be compared.

1. High competition in Step On Up plus low competition in Challenge = entirely team-based play, party style against a shared Challenge, but with value placed on some other metric of winning among the real people, such as levelling-up faster, having the best stuff, having one's player-characters be killed less often, getting more Victory Points, or some such thing. Most Tunnels & Trolls play is like this.
2. Low competition in Step On Up plus high competition in Challenge = characters are constantly scheming on one another or perhaps openly trying to kill or outdo another but the players aren't especially competing, because consequences to the player are low per unit win/loss. Kobolds Ate My Baby and the related game, Ninja Burger, play this way.
3. High competition in both levels = moving toward the Hard Core (see below), including strong rules-manipulation, often observed in variants of Dungeons & Dragons as well in much LARP play. A risky way to play, but plenty of fun if you have a well-designed system like Rune.
4. Low competition in both levels = strong focus on Step On Up and Challenge but with little need for conflict-of-interest. Quite a bit of D&D based on story-heavy published scenarios plays this way. It shares some features with "characters face problem" Simulationist play, with the addition of a performance metric of some kind. Some T&T play Drifted this way as well, judging by many Sorcerer's Apprentice articles.

Things get more complex than this, because different roles for GM and players lead to combinations of the above categories within a single game. For instance, players can cooperate as a party and compete with the GM, for instance, given a rules-set that limits GM options (a combination of #1 and #2). This shouldn't be confused with cooperating with one another, cooperating with the GM, and competing against the GM's characters (#4).​

Maybe there's more that could be said about win/lose, challenge, and competition in gamist play, but I think that's a good start: we have the real-world step-on-up level, which may or may not involve competition (contrast, eg, D&D tables where players show off their builds - low competition at the step-on-up level - with tables where they compete to have the highest-level PC - high competition at the step-on-up level); and the in-fiction challenge level, which also may or may not involve competition (contrast, eg, D&D tables where the players have their PCs cooperate to beat the GM's encounters, with ones where the PCs compete with one another to grab the best magic items).

I think Edwards is well aware that competition is not essential to gamist play.

 

[pemerton]

If it is at least sometimes "incoherent," why call them by the same name? Wouldn't it be clearer to call them by different names, since they at least frequently (even if not always) contradict each other?

"No myth" story now and setting-based story now are incoherent. They're both forms of story now.

High risk story now like BW is incoherent with low risk story now like The Dying Earth. If you set out to get the BW experience using The Dying Earth it will just fail. You might try and use Burning Wheel to get The Dying Earth experience, but the absence of the tagline system will hurt, and Duel of Wits doesn't quite do the job that Persuasion does in The Dying Earth.

@Campbell and I have often discussed a phenomenon he drew my attention to: that Burning Wheel (and Prince Valiant, and 4e skill challenges, and the way I run Cthulhu Dark) are all sensitive to intent, and thus in a certain fashion to "character concept", in a way that Apocalypse World is not (because it is not "say 'yes' or roll the dice", but rather "if you do it, you do it"). These produce different, incompatible experiences.

Lots of approaches to RPGing are not consistent, in the sense that you can't experience all of them at once.

Being a human is incoherent with being a gorilla, but we're all primates. Flying is inconsistent with driving, but planes and trucks are both vehicles; but trucks aren't vessels, whereas both planes and ships are; but planes typically have wheels whereas ships don't!

I think you are looking for a type of narrow univocality of labelling that was not Edwards's purpose, and that is not common in other taxonomic frameworks.

The reason that high concept sim and that purist-for-system sim are both sim is because both focus on heightening exploration as the main priority of play. That's it. Even within high concept sim games, there is incoherence in that I can't at one and the same time have the exploration of situation that is typical of CoC and the exploration of setting that is typical of much Forgotten Realms play. Or if I foreground character, as in Pendragon, then setting will tend to be backgrounded; whereas foregrounding setting (again, as in FR) will tend to background character (a typical setting tourism adventure doesn't care who the PCs are).

That's before we get to incoherence of colour: I can't get the colour of D&D and the colour of Traveller in the same game, for instance.

 

[pemerton]

I assume you do not intend anything significant in dropping the "shared" part of authorship on-the-fly, i.e. you were rephrasing only to emphasise the conflicting temporality. Right?

Correct in that context. In my reply upthread to @Manbearcat about metaplot (post #1510) I reintroduce the way in which sharing is significant from the perspective of "story now" RPGing.

Can you expand on your thought here, as it does not seem to follow from the above.

I assert that "vivid and inhabitable", as a property of a RPG setting, is independent of whether the setting is pre-authored (shared or otherwise) or authored in the course of play (shared or otherwise).

I took you to be implying that a setting can be "vivid and inhabitable" only if (or at least normally only if) it is pre-authored.

when Edwards uses the term "Narrativist", is that always a synonym of "story now"?

Yes, at least in the 2003 essay and the "setting dissection" essay. (I can't speak to his current usage.)

Assuming he's not inconsistent - and I don't think he is - it follows from his comment about improvisation that it is possible to have "story now" and hence "no the plot", and the "openness" of resolution that I posted about upthread, while also having an established setting.

I know it is very common to associate "story now" play with "no myth" play - on these boards that is @AbdulAlhazred's default, I think, and probably also @Ovinomancer's, but while that is probably the most typical approach (exemplified eg by AW and DW) it is not the only one. But it doesn't follow from the possibility of setting-heavy "story now" play that any old setting will do, or that "story now" imposes no demands on how setting is presented and used in play. Edwards talks about this both in the 2003 "nar essay" I've been quoting from in this thread, and in the setting dissection essay. My post upthread about metaplot draws on what he says to explain how setting heavy "story now" works, and what demands it imposes. The most important one is sharing.

The post I responded to implied to me that it was overlooking the worldbuilding in Stonetop. Both Stonetop and LotR have a great deal of worldbuilding, e.g. the former has 229 pages worth. I pointed that weight of text out only to emphasise that it is not the worldbuilding that is genuinely at issue. It was very much my point that 229 pages or even more of pre-authored worldbuilding presents no obstacle to "story now".

We are in agreement so far as I can work out

Well, I don't know Stonetop except by reputation, and so have no view on whether or not its 229 pages present an obstacle to "story now" RPGing. The mere fact of there being setting doesn't; but as I posted upthread and reiterated just above, there are particular demands on how setting is presented and used that are imposed by "story now" RPGing. And I don't know if Stonetop satisfies them.

 

[pemerton]

The bigger constraint on Story Now play is not setting design, but situation design. You can have a very detailed backdrop as long as you provide for flexibility in the immediate situations Player Characters find themselves in. What is of paramount importance is the ability to somewhat unfixed about NPC motivations, exactly what's going on at a particular location and what any particular faction might be to right this minute. As a Story Now GM you should first and foremost be concerned with providing the players with room to make decisions for their characters, so you want to give yourself room to keep things flowing and focused on their dramatic needs.

As I'm sure you know I'm a big fan of Paul Czege on keeping NPC motivations unfixed and flexible for just the reasons that you posit.

But I think in setting-heavy "story now" some NPC motivations can be treated as fixed, and therefore serve as a social analogue of (say) terrain. I'm thinking especially of eg Sauron in a LotR/MERP game, or Orcus in a 4e game. Where the relationship with a NPC is itself the focus of play, though - say Frodo's relationship with Galadriel, or Gollum/Smeagol - then I think the Czege approach becomes important even in setting-heavy play.

I'm not really setting out to disagree with you (though I have in a small way). What I want to convey, in this post and my previous few about the setting/"story now" relationship, is that very blanket statements like "setting is bad for story now" or "setting is no obstacle to story now" are not helpful. It's like saying that dice mechanics, or metagame mechanics, must help or must hinder "story now" RPGing. That is, it's far too blunt as a generalisation.

Story now imposes certain demands - no "the plot", openness of resolution, no manipulation of mechanics or fiction by the GM to blunt conseqences etc - and these then feed through into setting in all sorts of ways. For instance, the point about NPCs seems to me mostly about "openness of resolution", which is why I say it applies to NPCs where the relationship with them is the focus of play, but not necessarily to Sauron or Orcus. Unless one is playing a game where the redemption of the villain is at issue, in which case building an answer into the setting would be fatal for "story now" play.

 

[Manbearcat]

Manbearcat said:
It’s both.

1) Its a rule…

2) …that GM decides.

I’ll leave the implications upon play of said rule as an exercise for the reader…

That analysis seems pretty friggin' useless, not gonna lie.

@pemerton wrote a response to this that I agree with. Over the years I've talked about this subject a lot (what is sufficient to constitute "system" and "a game"). I don't know if you were involved in those conversations. I thought so, but perhaps not. So what I wrote above was not intended to be analysis. As I said, I've belabored this issue to the ground in the past. It was basically an assertion of what I feel is self-evident.

But I'll give a go at some analysis by way of creating a game.

I'm going to call this game "(Not) Apocalypse World."

Procedurally, lets do this. Take damn near everything out.

Take out the structure of play (including the move loop and conversation structure and Threat creation and deployment), every facet of the Agenda but one, the Principles, the Best Practices, the Playbooks, Gear and Crap, Harm and Healing, all of the moves and the structure for making custom moves.

All that stuff. Now keep the following:

• Make (Not) Apocalypse World seem real.

• Always say what the rules demand (we've got one rule - see below).

• Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and
undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions
about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else.

That's it.

Those are your "rules." This is your "system." We've taken Apocalypse World and we've stripped out everything that makes it Apocalypse World.

Looks terrible right? I agree. I would never, ever, ever run this. Its a razor's edge from Calvinball and the odds of it degenerating to Calvinball are not small.

But its still constitutes "system"...it just so happens that "system's say" is entirely "GM's (unbridled...unconstrained...unstructured...not principally informed) say." Doesn't this game look an awful lot like a complex, intricate system with all kinds of PC build and action resolution widgets and interactions that caveats hard with a "oh yeah...the GM can ignore or change rules/outcomes at their discretion if they feel like it leads to a better game"...except it dispenses with the illusion that all of that other stuff (PC build and action resolution etc) brings about actual, verifiable, insured-against-(overt or covert)veto, capacity to evolve the gamestate in a manner desired by the non-GM participant?

 

[clearstream]

@pemerton wrote a response to this that I agree with. Over the years I've talked about this subject a lot (what is sufficient to constitute "system" and "a game"). I don't know if you were involved in those conversations. I thought so, but perhaps not. So what I wrote above was not intended to be analysis. As I said, I've belabored this issue to the ground in the past. It was basically an assertion of what I feel is self-evident.

But I'll give a go at some analysis by way of creating a game.

I'm going to call this game "(Not) Apocalypse World."

Procedurally, lets do this. Take damn near everything out.

Take out the structure of play (including the move loop and conversation structure and Threat creation and deployment), every facet of the Agenda but one, the Principles, the Best Practices, the Playbooks, Gear and Crap, Harm and Healing, all of the moves and the structure for making custom moves.

All that stuff. Now keep the following:

• Make (Not) Apocalypse World seem real.

• Always say what the rules demand (we've got one rule - see below).

• Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and
undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions
about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else.

That's it.

Those are your "rules." This is your "system." We've taken Apocalypse World and we've stripped out everything that makes it Apocalypse World.

Looks terrible right? I agree. I would never, ever, ever run this. Its a razor's edge from Calvinball and the odds of it degenerating to Calvinball are not small.

But its still constitutes "system"...it just so happens that "system's say" is entirely "GM's (unbridled...unconstrained...unstructured...not principally informed) say."

Doesn't this game look an awful lot like a complex, intricate system with all kinds of PC build and action resolution widgets and interactions that caveats hard with a "oh yeah...the GM can ignore or change rules/outcomes at their discretion if they feel like it leads to a better game"...except its removed the illusion that all of that other stuff (PC build and action resolution etc) brings about actual, verifiable, insured-against-(overt or covert)veto, capacity to evolve the gamestate in a manner desired by the non-GM participant?

Am I right in supposing you allude to DM-curated RPGs like 5e here? I feel that could overlook a couple of things at play

1. The deontic consequences of what have been called exogenous rules (aka tacit principles)
2. The constitutive worth of all those "PC build and action resolution widgets and interactions"
3. The regulatory worth of rules guiding to proceed in a certain way

Those are all interesting in themselves, but there is a further concern that is more fundamental

• The matter of agreement to any rule

It's irrelevant what rules we have, unless we agree to follow them. Agreement is never located in a rule, it must pre-exist a rule for that rule to take effect. An example I've used before are these rules, governing our interlocution

1. Agree with whatever @clearstream says
2. Agree with rule 1

Even though rule 1 and 2 specifically say that they are about agreement - agree with @clearstream - agreement to them is not located in them. You'll decide on other grounds to go along with them (or more probably, not.)

In a game like AW a GM can still choose to not agree to any rule, running the game how they like. If the players enjoy it, perhaps they'll go along. The group are still relying on a mixture of the deontic consequences of tacit principles, and the worth they see in what is constituted by and guided toward by the AW rules.

In a game like 5e a DM is expressly empowered to apply, reinterpret, modify, or disapply any rule. If the players don't enjoy it, perhaps they'll move on. The group are still relying on a mixture of the deontic consequences of tacit principles, and the worth they see in what is constituted by and guided toward by the 5e rules.

System matters because folk have in mind their tacit principles, and are capable of discerning differential worth in what is constituted and guided toward. In grasping and upholding a system, they do so in order to - and typically in that way that does - secure the play they aim to enjoy. In my experience, and in play I read about or view, cases of 5e Calvinball have been equal in number to cases of AW Calvinball, which is to say none of either.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think I may have missed some, but I'm sure people will chime in about this then.

If it is at least sometimes "incoherent," why call them by the same name? Wouldn't it be clearer to call them by different names, since they at least frequently (even if not always) contradict each other?

Especially since, as AbdulAlhazred has said, it's actually quite possible for Gamist and Narrativist to get along perfectly fine so long as they stay out of each other's way?

@pemerton did the work here. To reiterate, if we are looking at ways to get around, we can consider things like land, sea, and air. These impose clear and different needs that are often incompatible with each other (seaplanes are mediocre planes and terrible boats, for instance). But, inside a category, we still have a wealth of diversity whole maintaining the overall goals. A fighter plane is incoherent design with a passenger jumbo jet. A bicycle is incoherent design with a Formula 1 raceway. But a fighter and a passenger plane are still clearly air vehicles and share crucial design features not needed for land or sea.