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

[clearstream]

Could it just be that gamism is viewed more about following the 'game' process than rolling dice.

Sure, but how do you justify saying "gamist" or not turns on that one moment of play?

 

[FrogReaver]

Sure, but how do you justify saying "gamist" or not turns on that one moment of play?

If you are contrasting that style with a theoretical style where the GM determines failure on a whim I can see how that one moment of play would determine it. Process vs no-process.

 

[clearstream]

If you are contrasting that style with a theoretical style where the GM determines failure on a whim I can see how that one moment of play would determine it. Process vs no-process.

Ah, okay. Here we are contrasting "sure" with "roll". Which is more "gamist"?

Remember that the question I answered was how I might approach discovery of one piece of lore. Not travel. Not exploration. Not combat. That one decision point.

 

[clearstream]

The problem with 5e hexcrawling is:

* It doesn’t have a robust and integrated hexcrawling system/set of procedures. I listed a chunk of them upthread but not even close to the whole engine. 5e has the most bare bones possible. You have to invent a large swathe of procedures and then integrate them with the rest of the engine (which is fraught due to several confounds).

* To go along with those procedures all of the other integrated engine tech isn’t there to support/facilitate it; Daytime and Nighttime Wandering Monster procedures/tables that integrate with real logistical challenges around moving/light/encumbrance/info gathering, xp paradigm that is integrated with that exploration challenge environment.

5e spells are at-will, ubiquitous, and crazy powerful. Encumbrance is a nothingburger. I go gathering capability is potent.

---

The confounds and lack of game engine tech (constituent parts and their integration) are a huge thing to overcome.

Which is why you don’t see virtually any talk of this kind of play in 5e. You see a lot of GM-directed AP play + ignoring of things like encumbrance/light and logistical challenges (because 5e groups have so many means to just obviate Wilderness Crawl logistic challenges) + GM conception and extrapolation of setting/fiction/conversation inputs and milestone xp to pace GM story beats (rather than to incentivize Gamism).

Which is fine.

Totally cool. It’s just not Gamism it’s GM-directed High Concept Simulationism sometimes with a veneer of Process Simulationism. That play is what is wildly popular.

Reading this does make me wonder why you asked about how we established that one piece of world lore? When what you really wanted to know is where and how I might see qualities associated with "gamist" afforded!?

A fundamental question for me is whether you are envisioning a binary? (Is the play "gamist" yes / no.) I don't see it that way, but let's clear this up first. In your view, is each approach to RPG play simply "gamist" or not "gamist"?

 

[pemerton]

@kenada, I've worked through your post basically in sequence, even though some of what you say later perhaps helps address questions or ideas I raise earlier. I've left it in the time-sequence of my thoughts so that you can see how I reasoned through the issues.

Does protagonism need to be the ability to introduce the specific location (i.e., the safe has the documents), or is it sufficient to introduce that evidence exists, and then to use one’s plot and situational authority to compel the GM to provide for its discovery?

I'm not sure how you're envisaging plot authority working in the hands of the players. How are they able to dictate "now is the time for a revelation!" in circumstances where authority over the content/backstory is in the hands of the GM?

This is an inversion of the villain behind the mask scenario in Edwards’s discussion. Instead of finding out who the villain is by (owned by whom the PCs assume is the villain) taking off the mask, you are finding the incriminating mask in a safe. But if the mask is kept under the bed, then that is what the GM would need to provide when it comes time for the scene with the discovery.

I don't think I'm quite following the details of what you've got in mind - and obviously the details matter.

In the villain-behind-the-the-mask scenario, the GM uses situational authority to put the PC and masked villain in the same scene. The player declares an action for their PC to unmask the villain. And then I think Edwards is assuming that the default here will be some sort of fortune resolution (though I'm not very familiar with The Pool):

I totally gave up authority over the "top" level, plot authority. I let that become an emergent property of the other two levels: again, me with full authority over situation (scene framing), and the players and I sharing authority over narrational authority, which provided me with cues, in the sense of no-nonsense instructions, regarding later scene framing.​

We could imagine Apocalypse World working similarly - the player declares I tear off the mask (Seize By Force) and then the dice are rolled. What happens next will depend on the roll: emergent plot.

(BW is potentially different - the Adventure Burner discusses how to modulate a Masked Villains-wise check between the GM asserting or giving up content authority, ie in this case the power to decide who it is who wears the mask. The player has the potential to exercise content authority in the course of compelling the emergence of plot.)

In the incriminating-mask-in-the-safe scenario, how is the scene framed? The presence of the safe is (presumably) part of the framing; but the presence of the mask inside it normally wouldn't be (unlike the villain case, where the fact that the villain is masked would be part of the framing). So when the players declare that they open the safe - potentially thereby triggering the plot revelation - how do we determine whether or not the mask is part of the scene? You say "that is what the GM would need to provide", but I don't think I quite get what the that is, nor quite how you are envisaging the GM will provide it.

You are suggesting that if the players lack content authority (e.g., because the game is setting-centric) than the content must be known to them.

Not quite. I think that the stakes have to be known to them, and in setting-based stakes that typically means knowing the content in question.

In the villain-in-the-mask situation, the stakes are who is behind the mask? and when a player declares I tear off the mask they know that's what is at stake.

But as you can see from what I've said just above, I'm not following how you envisage the stakes being set in the safe case. @AbdulAlhazred's answer, upthread, was that it is established that of course the <whatever> is in <so-and-so's> safe. I get that. And can see how it would work in a 4e skill challenge, or Classic Traveller. But in that case, the stakes of opening the safe aren't Will I identify the villain? but Will I get the evidence of villainy that I need? The villain was identified at an earlier point in play.

So to bring things back around to the safe discussion, the players would have to know that so-and-so is up to no good, and this is because of the link from content to plot authority. They would not be able to exercise the latter without knowing, and if it is kept hidden, then the GM is seizing plot authority in that case (by making the decision about what is revealed).

I'm not sure if this is your own assertion, or if this is you trying to make sense of my assertions!

But anyway, I think I agree - I think you're describing here what I described just above with reference to AbdulAlhazred.

I don't know if it's the only way, given the unlimited possibilities of human ingenuity and imagination, but it seems the most obvious. The contrast would be the players opening a safe which is - from their point of view - essentially random, and finding the incriminating information just because the GM decided (prior when writing notes/prepping the scenario, or just now by way of improvisation) that the information is in the safe. (I note in passing that published adventures are replete with this contrasting case - the players are expected to search pockets, chests, tables etc on basic looting principles, and thereby find clues that are there as GM exercises of content authority and that help support a GM's exercise of plot authority, insofar as the GM is the one who decides to make the "revelation" take place, without the players having known that it was at stake or had any particular commitment to or engagement with it.)

I assume that the only thing that keeps the players from charging the castle immediately is the separation of what they know from what their characters know. If said villain is perceived as an upstanding member of the community, then the players would have to establish a link they could use to credibly make their accusations.

I don't know if that's what Vincent Baker had in mind, but it seems to fit. I've generally been having in mind that for whatever reason, the players are committed to having their PCs find this incriminating evidence.

I would speculate that the more backstory (as Edwards puts it) that one has prepped, the more one has to reveal up front to facilitate player control of plot authority, and so detailing ahead of time that the evidence is in the safe is probably a worse idea that having a mechanic to suggest there is evidence and then to situate it as appropriate (e.g., the PCs are searching the office, and “you find a safe where you think the evidence is” is as valid a response to the search fortune as “you find a ciphered letter at the bottom of a drawer”).

I think I agree. But I also think I'm starting to see elements of GM-as-glue here. I think this is where a BW-type approach (eg make a Perception check with the stakes clearly established), or a AW Read a Situation/DW Discern Realities approach, starts to show its strength for helping maintain player protagonism even though the GM still has principal content authority.

 

[Manbearcat]

Reading this does make me wonder why you asked about how we established that one piece of world lore? When what you really wanted to know is where and how I might see qualities associated with "gamist" afforded!?

A fundamental question for me is whether you are envisioning a binary? (Is the play "gamist" yes / no.) I don't see it that way, but let's clear this up first. In your view, is each approach to RPG play simply "gamist" or not "gamist"?

I was interested in a few questions based on (i) your prior postings and (ii) your exchange with @kenada :

1) What exactly is the "consequence resolution" you're envisioning?

2) How is it differentiated from Fail Forward (as that is what it looked like you were envisioning)?

3) How does it comport to 5e's action resolution order of operations?

4) And, because this thread is about "Is D&D Gamist(?)", I was hoping to use your responses as a springboard for subsequent conversation. That subsequent conversation would entail:

* What is the cognitive workspace inherent to your multi-layered 5e rulings (because they're multi-layered when it comes to GM role in mediation) because how you think and how that thinking is integrated with the rest of system is a huge tell on what play priorities that thinking is serving.

* How can the player's "move" be leveraged for subsequent (skillful) play?

* What play priorities does that leverage (or lackthereof if its ultimately just color) support?

---

So, to that end, I invite you to revisit the initial post 1966. There are a S-ton of questions. Its not a single question. Its a lot.

And again, it was just an opening to start a discussion on the matter to get to subsequent, collective introspection on these issues.

But what ended up happening was multiple posters (yourself included initially - though you resolved it later) stated that the exercise couldn't be performed "without context." Now that response alone tells me a lot. It tells me that yourself and the other posters are orientated toward a cognitive workspace that serves and demands Simulationism priorities. You can't engage with the exercise because you're running games based (in large part or wholly) on some formulation of GM conception of and extrapolation of setting + hidden or revealed backstory +fiction to date + causality.

So what I did next is I wrote a significantly detailed post using RC's game engine/procedures to not only (a) answer my own question but then (b) going that extra step (which is where the conversation would have gone next if my initial several questions would have been answered) to show how Gamism emerges and is leveraged in play to discern skillfulness of play.

I can do that because my orientation to running games and talking about games isn't tethered to GM conception of and extrapolation of setting + hidden or revealed backstory +fiction to date + causality. Its tethered to game engine/procedures and how that creates the playing of the game.

And I think this distinction illuminates why a lot of folks on ENWorld et al typically decline these types of conversations and say things like "this is all white room theory." Its because their orientation to thinking about play and actually running games is tethered to GM conception of and extrapolation of setting + hidden or revealed backstory +fiction to date + causality rather than game engine/procedures and how that creates the playing of the game.

My guess is this also explains why overwhelmingly people on ENWorld don't find any use in post-mortem of detailed play excerpts. Because they aren't talking about TTRPGs (and D&D in particular) as games/game engines/play procedures + the play that those things produce (or fail to produce). They see TTRPGs as the experiential quality of "being there" with respect to the simulation/setting/metaplot (if you're the player) or (if they're the GM) GM conception of and extrapolation of setting + hidden or revealed backstory +fiction to date + causality .

Finally, I think this neatly shows the divide on "system matters" vs "system (mostly or wholly) doesn't matter."

 

[pemerton]

They can also commit in advance to using the Core rules as written. Or do you see something preventing that?

I'm puzzled about what you mean by this, given your insistence upthread that there are many "Zs" that correspond to the single R of the core rules.

wording is used like "some kind of roll is appropriate." Does that mean roll? One DM might decide that "some kind of roll is appropriate" means "roll". Another might decide to wing it, case by case. That "maybe" depends on DM.

Who is using that wording?

The concern here to my reading is mainly one of skepticism about whether a DM can rule in a way that is principled, constrained by fiction/description/system. Is that right? There seems to you too much scope - too much leeway - for any constraints to be strict enough to suit your preferences.

As I read @Manbearcat's posts, he is saying that the principal constraint on the Gm is the Gm's conception of what makes sense in the evolving fiction, which is not much of a constraint at all.

Right. I might picture that conversation going like this

• The kind of world we're in is one that has dragons: they're definitely a thing. They're not a living next door thing! They're an - away on the lonely mountain over there - thing.
• The ranger asked at some point if the hills they skirted could extend into mountains running north. We thought they did, or maybe that's part of the map that isn't blank (part of my say, as DM).
• From previous sessions, they have knowledge or contacts pertinent to the whereabouts of dragons.
• Asking around, they get a few leads. One of those is there is a dragon in the northern range, and don't dragons always have a ton of gold?!
• The players get interested. I'm curious about what they're going to try. Dragons are pretty fierce, someone warns.

And off they go. Chances are that yes, they do find a dragon's hoard. It didn't just spring into existence arbitrarily, but it wasn't there before we focused in on it. And suppose alternatively that a dragon just wouldn't follow? Then no, in that case there wouldn't be a dragon hoard. Or then again, I could possibly have dragon and hoard pencilled in (part of my say, as DM). That's probably on a parabola that matters in some way to the big picture; and could just fade away, if players go in another direction.

Who determines what leads are gained by "asking around"? Who answers the question as to whether or not this dragon has a ton of gold? Who decides the alternative, that a dragon just wouldn't follow? Presumably if the players are conjecturing that a dragon with a hoard might be in the mountains to the north, they are happy that it follows!

The bolded part was consequence is known going in.

<snip>

As a separate consideration, one can think about who must know and who may know which consequences? DM must know, in order to make the call. Players may know, and what they know may be incomplete.

If we're discussing how the participants in a game play that game, and we posit that a particular game move depends on something being known, I don't see how addressing which player has to know it is separate. It's fundamental! I mean, you couldn't explain the game hangman by saying The word is known before guesses are made without also specifying who it is who knows what the word is.

I think it will go like this

• We earlier established that there is a mountain range to the north
• The kind of world there is, it's perfectly reasonable to speculate there are dragons in those peaks
• To resurrect Jo, the party are hoping to claim at least 1000gp (individual creatures of CR 11-16 are pretty sure to have that)
• Ranger is (implicitly) directing the group to say more about that: they're demonstrating interest in that direction
• As DM, I must respond to that direction, the conversation probably goes through a series of steps

Asking that question brings it into the conversation and makes it something we must now decide. There are two parts to that

1. What is going to be true?
2. What does the ranger know about what is true?

As DM, my say is to decide if there is a dragon, following all that has gone before. Sure, I think, there's a dragon up there somewhere. So now all I need to rule on is what the ranger knows about that?

So, as I read this, what you are saying is that The player of the ranger says, more-or-less in character, "We should check out if there are any dragons in those northern mountains!" and this obliges the GM to consider what to tell that player about what their PC does or might know which the GM does in part by exercising authorial power in respect of the setting.

As @Manbearcat said, that just seems straight-up-and-down simulationist play. I don't really get why it's taken dozen of pages to get a clear statement of this.

 

[pemerton]

As the character exits in the world and affects the world they obviously are connected. But I think the differentiation is pretty clear. In the real life you control what you do, but you do not control what exists in the reality external to you except via affecting it by your actions.

This is true in the typical RPG fiction to: the character doesn't control what exists in the reality external to them.

The question at issue, though, is in the context of a RPG who authors what bits of the fiction?

In the case of the documents in the safe (or the secret door), there are at least two aspects of authorship at issue:

(1) Who decides whether or not this moment of play has the potential to resolve the question Do we - the PCs - get the incriminating information we are looking for?

(2) To the extent that (1) depends on some decisions about content/backstory (ie what documents are in which safes), who gets to decide that?

Reflecting on the sorts of influence a person can exert over the world they live in won't, of itself, answer either (1) or (2).

Is it right that you see protagonism as all or nothing? There is no degree or modality to protagonism?

Edwards says the following, in the course of trying to explain what is distinctive about protagonism in story now RPGing:

the character's predicament is how Premise is seen/felt in full, and what he does, and what happens is how a theme is realized. . . .

Bangs are not represented by many of the fight scenes or clues in traditional role-playing. Throwing mad hyenas at the player-characters is not a Bang if the only result of the fight is to wander into the next room. Nor is a clue a Bang at all if all it does is show where the next clue may be found. A real Bang gives the player options and requires his or her decision about how to handle it, which in turn reveals and develops the player-character as a hero.​

So in any given moment of play, either the following elements are present, or they are not:

* The situation in which the PC finds themself is one in which "premise"/"theme" is present/expressed;

* The player is making a decision for their PC;

* The outcome of that decision will in some sense resolve or realise or express something about the premise/theme that is reflective of what the player has brought to the situation.​

In the context of the current discussion, the most obvious way in which a player may lack protagonism is if the player doesn't know what is at stake - for instance, doesn't know why the GM is calling for a roll to be made.

Something I hope to understand along the way is if in your view there is no protagonism without player-fiat? And no protagonism where there is information hidden from players?

Information being hidden from a player is, in itself, no bar to protagonism. Consider the example of the masked villain: the player doesn't know who the villain is, but exercises protagonism in seeking to unmask them. But information being hidden from a player is the most common way to hide what is at stake from the player, and that is definitely at odds with the exercise of protagonism.

Players don't need to exercise fiat to exercise protagonism beyond (i) establishing their own orientation towards premise/theme, and (ii) declaring actions for their PCs. Look at Apocalypse World, for example - it uses a range of devices to ensure that the GM's exercise of situational and content authority does not impede player protagonism, the most obvious two being (i) the use of questions whose answers are binding on the GM, and (ii) the strong teeth of the player-side moves Go Aggro, Seduce/Manipulate and Seize by Force.

 

[clearstream]

So, to that end, I invite you to revisit the initial post 1966. There are a S-ton of questions. Its not a single question. Its a lot.

Okay, I re-read #1966. I don't see there what you see there, but I can trust as to your intent. It doesn't seem super-fruitful to hash over it. Let's go on from where we are.

1) What exactly is the "consequence resolution" you're envisioning?

I feel one can fairly show that the upshot of 5e RAW is that (for ability checks) you roll on account of consequences, not "really" to resolve the task (if there are no consequences, the task auto-resolves.)

• Certain? Don't roll.
• Impossible? Don't roll.
• Uncertain (solely)? Don't roll, multiply time by 10.
• Uncertain and meaningful consequences? Only now ought we roll.

What's clutch is the meaningful consequences; without them, don't roll. When must we know the meaningful consequences? Going in, because we use them to judge if we will roll.

2) How is it differentiated from Fail Forward (as that is what it looked like you were envisioning)?

I feel the possibility of outright set-backs and failures (where that is meaningful) make this not fail-forward. The game state isn't necessarily propelled forward, it could possibly revert.

3) How does it comport to 5e's action resolution order of operations?

Ability checks are fundamental to 5e, even combat starts with an ability check. An ideal view might be that the concepts that apply to ability checks, ought to apply everywhere (for avoidance of doubt, that is not the case.) The ludic resolution cycles in 5e are

• events between short rests
• events between long rests
• events between dawns (magic item refreshes)
• in combat, events (moves, actions, minor actions, reactions, interactions) per turn
• encounters per level (implied by encounter rules)
• short rests per level (implied by encounters per level)
• long rests per level (ditto)

The events I am talking about are game events: updates to game fiction and state through applying rules. An ability check is one such event. Outside of combat, there's no fixed quota of ability checks per cycle (arguably, not even inside.) There is a fixed range for quotas of class feature uses and HD, per rest cycle, if encounter rules are followed. There are also - oddly - fixed quotas between food and water consumption, hexes that can be travelled, and magic item refreshes.

NOTE EDIT
As for orders of operations (restricting ourselves to core)

• combat has an order of operations
• ability checks follow various orders of operations (the main one is touched on above)
• downtime activities follow various orders of operations
• character generation follows an order of operations
• there are quite a few less commonly used sub-systems, that have unique orders of operation (e.g. chases)

4) And, because this thread is about "Is D&D Gamist(?)", I was hoping to use your responses as a springboard for subsequent conversation. That subsequent conversation would entail:

* What is the cognitive workspace inherent to your multi-layered 5e rulings (because they're multi-layered when it comes to GM role in mediation) because how you think and how that thinking is integrated with the rest of system is a huge tell on what play priorities that thinking is serving.

* How can the player's "move" be leveraged for subsequent (skillful) play?

* What play priorities does that leverage (or lackthereof if its ultimately just color) support?

I'll stop here, because I think what comes next depends on your answer to my earlier question. In your view, is each approach to RPG play simply "gamist" or not "gamist"? Are you envisioning a binary? (Is the play "gamist" yes / no.)

 

[Campbell]

@clearstream

I think you are focused entirely focused too much on the dice roll here. When we speak about conflict or task resolution we're fundamentally talking about how do we collectively get from player says their character does X to fallout of that action. What guides that process? What decisions need to be made? By whom? What guides that decision making process? What are the constraints on those decisions? That's all part of the resolution process.

The dice roll doesn't resolve the task or conflict. We do. The fundamental question is 'how do we do it?'.