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

[pemerton]

Right. So who opens the safe will affect the contents of the safe. But the characters presumably don't think this is the case, yet the players know it to be so. This sort of system causes almost complete disconnect between the decision making process of the players and the decision making process of the characters. Hell, why would the characters even debate who opens the safe? They certainly cannot know it would in any way or form affect the contents! In universe it would make perfect sense for one character to say "Go ahead, you do it, you're good with locks. But I sure hope it's those papers in there rather than just some pointless gold you're always after!"

This obviously doesn't bug you, and good for you. But it would bug me massively.

Your whole framing here seems to rest on an unarticulated assumption that makes no sense to me. The assumption you're making is something along the following lines: that resolution is independent of the significance, to the characters, of what is taking place in the fiction. That assumption is false, as far as Burning Wheel is concerned.

You're positing two PCs. You've said nothing about what their relationship is. Nor their Beliefs. You're now positing that one is opening the safe at the request of the other. How does that relate to the two characters? Did the second PC acquiesce in the request? Were they persuaded? Threatened? Do they have a Belief about helping their friend? Or thwarting their frenemy? Or something else? And what intent has their player stated, in relation to their action of opening the safe?

The last time I had a BW PC search a place, it was Evard's tower.

Aramina had the Belief I'm not going to finish my career with no spellbooks and an empty purse!. Thurgon and Aramina, travelling along the Jewel River, debated what their destination should be. Aramina, being learned in Great Masters-wise, believes that the abandoned tower of Evard the Black lay somewhere in the forest on the north side of the river, and wanted to check it out. Mechanically, I succeeded in a Great Masters-wise test for Aramina.

After some time, Thurgon acceded to Aramina's desire that they investigate the tower. Thurgon's Beliefs included I am a Knight of the Iron Tower: by devotion and example I will lead the righteous to glorious victory and Harm and infamy will befall Auxol no more! (Auxol being his family estate; Thurgon has a Relationship with his mother, and an Affiliation with his family). The characters met Friedrich, a former knight of Thurgon's order who poles his skiff along the river (successful Circles test for Thurgon), and he took them to the tower. A demon was also there (maybe waiting for them? - this was the GM's decision about framing) and Thurgon fought it to a standstill. When Thurgon entered the tower and searched it, a Scavenging check failed. Thurgon found things he didn't want to find - old letters that suggested his mother was Evard's daughter. Aramina had swooned while fighting the demon (due to the tax of attempting to cast a spell) and so didn't know about the letters, which Thurgon subsequently burned. She found spellbooks in the tower, but as best I recall the GM didn't even ask for a test to find those: all the action had already been resolved (finding the tower, the demon, the letters).

That sort of interweaving of the PCs' Beliefs and Relationships is key to GMing Burning Wheel. The GM's principal job is to apply pressure on them. A player's principal job is to pursue them: as p 269 of Revised puts it, players "must use their characters to drive the story forward - to resolve conflicts and create new ones. Players are supposed to push and risk their characters, so they grow and change in unforeseen ways." In the case of the safe, each character has a reason for being there, be that finding the dirt, honouring a promise, helping a friend, or maybe betraying one. Those are the considerations that will inform players' declarations of intent, and that the GM will have in mind in narrating consequences.

It is not just colour, it affects the odds massively. In fact GMs determination of the difficulty affects things way more steeply in BW than in 5e D&D, and it is far easier to make things virtually or literally impossible. Why on Earth would such a huge impact be given to simulationist measures such as safe quality, which has basically nothing to do with what you're actually intertest about, that being the beliefs and desires of the characters?

Right, good point. I was really thinking mostly about BW where the difficulty drawn from simulationist considerations has a huge impact.

All I can do is repeat that they are not simulationist concerns. The reason for using "objective" DCs is not to explore the fiction for its own sake. It is to establish the colour of the setting and situation. The Adventure Burner explains this (p 264):

[T]hese obstacles create setting. When a player acts in the game, he needs a difficulty for his test. The obstacle is the number; but it's also the object of adversity in the fiction. Obstacles, over time, create a sense of space and logic in the game world. When a player repeatedly meets the same obstacle for the same task, he knows what to expect and he knows how to set up his character to best overcome this problem, or he knows enough to find another way around.​

Some things are harder than others. And this colour then generates decision-making in the resolution system - FoRKing other skills, getting help, using gear, spending Fate and Persona, spending time practising to get better, etc. That's part of the point of the system.

 

[FrogReaver]

Your whole framing here seems to rest on an unarticulated assumption that makes no sense to me. The assumption you're making is something along the following lines: that resolution is independent of the significance, to the characters, of what is taking place in the fiction. That assumption is false, as far as Burning Wheel is concerned.

You're positing two PCs. You've said nothing about what their relationship is. Nor their Beliefs. You're now positing that one is opening the safe at the request of the other. How does that relate to the two characters? Did the second PC acquiesce in the request? Were they persuaded? Threatened? Do they have a Belief about helping their friend? Or thwarting their frenemy? Or something else? And what intent has their player stated, in relation to their action of opening the safe?

The last time I had a BW PC search a place, it was Evard's tower.

Aramina had the Belief I'm not going to finish my career with no spellbooks and an empty purse!. Thurgon and Aramina, travelling along the Jewel River, debated what their destination should be. Aramina, being learned in Great Masters-wise, believes that the abandoned tower of Evard the Black lay somewhere in the forest on the north side of the river, and wanted to check it out. Mechanically, I succeeded in a Great Masters-wise test for Aramina.

After some time, Thurgon acceded to Aramina's desire that they investigate the tower. Thurgon's Beliefs included I am a Knight of the Iron Tower: by devotion and example I will lead the righteous to glorious victory and Harm and infamy will befall Auxol no more! (Auxol being his family estate; Thurgon has a Relationship with his mother, and an Affiliation with his family). The characters met Friedrich, a former knight of Thurgon's order who poles his skiff along the river (successful Circles test for Thurgon), and he took them to the tower. A demon was also there (maybe waiting for them? - this was the GM's decision about framing) and Thurgon fought it to a standstill. When Thurgon entered the tower and searched it, a Scavenging check failed. Thurgon found things he didn't want to find - old letters that suggested his mother was Evard's daughter. Aramina had swooned while fighting the demon (due to the tax of attempting to cast a spell) and so didn't know about the letters, which Thurgon subsequently burned. She found spellbooks in the tower, but as best I recall the GM didn't even ask for a test to find those: all the action had already been resolved (finding the tower, the demon, the letters).

That sort of interweaving of the PCs' Beliefs and Relationships is key to GMing Burning Wheel. The GM's principal job is to apply pressure on them. A player's principal job is to pursue them: as p 269 of Revised puts it, players "must use their characters to drive the story forward - to resolve conflicts and create new ones. Players are supposed to push and risk their characters, so they grow and change in unforeseen ways." In the case of the safe, each character has a reason for being there, be that finding the dirt, honouring a promise, helping a friend, or maybe betraying one. Those are the considerations that will inform players' declarations of intent, and that the GM will have in mind in narrating consequences.


All I can do is repeat that they are not simulationist concerns. The reason for using "objective" DCs is not to explore the fiction for its own sake. It is to establish the colour of the setting and situation. The Adventure Burner explains this (p 264):

[T]hese obstacles create setting. When a player acts in the game, he needs a difficulty for his test. The obstacle is the number; but it's also the object of adversity in the fiction. Obstacles, over time, create a sense of space and logic in the game world. When a player repeatedly meets the same obstacle for the same task, he knows what to expect and he knows how to set up his character to best overcome this problem, or he knows enough to find another way around.​

Some things are harder than others. And this colour then generates decision-making in the resolution system - FoRKing other skills, getting help, using gear, spending Fate and Persona, spending time practising to get better, etc. That's part of the point of the system.

It always feels more like you are talking past rather than truly understanding and engaging the criticism.

I mean we even have a concrete example of what we are talking about. A PC opens a safe with whatever 'skill' is fictionally appropriate for his stated method of doing so and he has the purpose of finding incriminating evidence on a particular NPC. The player rolls and succeeds with no complication. He both opens the safe using his method and gets incriminating evidence. The safe opening is tied to the skill used in the check but that's only tangential because this a conflict resolution check about the players intent for papers being found and finding those papers has absolutely nothing to do with the skill used to open the safe and absolutely nothing to do with any skill the PC has (other than perhaps 'Luck', if that's a skill in the game).

As always this assumes a few things not stated but that shouldn't be controversial.
1. The papers weren't already established as being in the safe via some process that alrady occcured.
2. The player is in a conflict resolution system and not a task resolution system.
3. Etc.

 

[pemerton]

Right, good point. I was really thinking mostly about BW where the difficulty drawn from simulationist considerations has a huge impact.

I can't comment on BitD. But in Apocalypse World characters are rated by their degree of affinity/skill in different areas: Hard, Cool, Hot, Sharp, Weird. It's a deliberate feature of the system that sometimes a character with -2 Cool (a possibility for a starting Hardholder) will have to Act Under Fire (and thus will need to roll 9+ in order to avoid a hard move from the GM); or that a character with -2 Hard (a possibility for quite a few playbooks) will need to Seize something/someone By Force to get what they want.

BW likewise has different degrees of character aptitude, more finely grained: all characters have six stats (Agility, Speed, Forte, Power, Perception, Will) and at least two attributes (Health, Steel; some characters have more - eg Thurgon has Faith), and some skills from a selection of dozens (for me, the skill list is reminiscent of the Rolemaster list).

Even the "litest" system I know, Cthuhlu Dark, modulates the difficulty of resolution rolls by reference to PC attributes (add one die to the pool if the task is humanly possible, and another if falls within your PC's occupational expertise).

Where BW differs from AW and Cthulhu Dark is in also modulating the difficulty of tasks by reference to elements of the fiction beyond the character's aptitudes.

Vincent Baker discusses this possibility in relation to AW (p 268):

Here’s a custom threat move. People new to the game occasionally ask me for this one. It’s general, it modifies nearly every other move:

Things are tough. Whenever a players’ character makes a move, the MC judges it normal, difficult, or crazy difficult. If it’s difficult, the player takes -1 to the roll. If it’s crazy difficult, the player takes -2 to the roll.

Several groups in playtest wanted this move or one like it. All of them abandoned it after only one session. It didn’t add anything fun to the game, but did add a little hassle to every single move. So it’s a legal custom move, of course, and you can try it if you like, but I wouldn’t expect you to stick with it.​

In Burning Wheel, the modulated difficulties are part of the fun of the game. It is intended to be a gritty game (as declared by the author on p 19 of the Revised rulebook. BW also has many ways to add to dice pools - advantage dice from circumstances or gear, Help, FoRKs, artha - that AW does not.

 

[pemerton]

I agree that the 1981 Streetwise can be interpreted in the same way as the 1977 version. I'm not sure about other parts of the rules that might reflect on exactly how much authority this text is giving to the Referee, as I have only ever played with the 1977 rules. I don't see anything in either write up however which permits or advises the Referee to turn a SUCCESSFUL Streetwise check into a type of failure by making the information bad. In fact I would assume that when @pemerton mentions a hard move, the most logical one would be something like directing the PCs into a police sting instead of an actual weapons dealership! I would consider this to be pretty similar in scope to the flexibility of scene framing and move making in, say, Dungeon World, where such a move would be a pretty standard outcome of a bad Supply move.

I quoted up-thread the Traveller game text that permits and advises the Referee to make information bad. My post #2062. (The second spoiler.)

As I've already pointed out, the stuff you quoted is from the 1981 rules, not the 1977.

And @AbdulAlhazred is right about the sort of hard move I think is low hanging fruit here!

 

[soviet]

In some narrativist-facing games, having a high rating in a particular skill is less about measuring their observable ability in that activity within the gameworld and more about their ability to use that activity to make things happen in the story. The two things are orthogonal. My character might be visibly much stronger than yours in the gameworld, and we will reflect that trait in our general narration, but in a conflict I am a Clark Kent type and rely on my Clumsy Wholesomeness score. Your character is a fierce and independent single mom who might look small and non-threatening but in a crisis her Inner Strength trait comes out and she's lifting cars off children and smashing robbers to the ground with her brick-filled purse. The numbers are defining the character's approach to problems as a protagonist rather than their actual capabilities as a person.

 

[pemerton]

Is there no glue holding characters more or less near the same location? If there isnt what stops the game from becoming 4 separate games where each player takes turn with the DM resolving their game?

Here's Paul Czege 20 years ago:

although roleplaying games typically feature scene transition, by "scene framing" we're talking about a subset of scene transition that features a different kind of intentionality. My personal inclination is to call the traditional method "scene extrapolation," because the details of the Point A of scenes initiated using the method are typically arrived at primarily by considering the physics of the game world, what has happened prior to the scene, and the unrevealed actions and aspirations of characters that only the GM knows about.

"Scene framing" is a very different mental process for me. Tim asked if scene transitions were delicate. They aren't. Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently. More often than not, the PC's have been geographically separate from each other in the game world. So I go around the room, taking a turn with each player, framing a scene and playing it out.​

I can't link to Ron Edwards's "setting dissection" essay, but this is from it:

• Not all types of characters described in the character creation options are OK. They need to be characters who would definitely be at that location, not just someone who could be there. They have something they ordinarily do there, and are engaged in doing it.

• All characters, player-characters too, have lives, jobs, families, acquaintances, homes, and everything of that sort. Even if not native to that location, they have equivalents there.

• Player-characters do not comprise a “team.” They are who they are, individually. Each of them carries a few NPCs along, implied by various details, and those NPCs should be identified. It is helpful for at least one, preferably more of them to be small walking soap operas. . . .

• Note that sometimes the player-characters wind up in the same culturally-acknowledged “group” and sometimes they don’t. Either way is fine. . . .

• Simply utilize screen time for everyone, switching around, using events from scenes as consequence and visual effects for later scenes. Don’t try to force characters together for no reason; remember, they don’t have to “team up.”​

The last time I ran a session of Cthulhu Dark, the two PCs crossed paths a handful of times but barely interacted. The "glue" was some shared events and adversaries.

 

[pemerton]

In some narrativist-facing games, having a high rating in a particular skill is less about measuring their observable ability in that activity within the gameworld and more about their ability to use that activity to make things happen in the story.

Agreed. Burning Wheel tries to straddle both, by using a more "traditional" approach to PC build (stats, attributes, skills) but a "story now" set of principles around framing and resolution, and also inviting players to commit their artha (Fate and Persona) where the stakes are high.

 

[FrogReaver]

In some narrativist-facing games, having a high rating in a particular skill is less about measuring their observable ability in that activity within the gameworld and more about their ability to use that activity to make things happen in the story.

Sure. I'd just add that in some instances the activity being done to 'make things happen' in the story has the result fictionally follow from being successful at the activity. Beating a bad guys face with a purse full of bricks using your inner strength with the intent of knocking him out till police arrive would be a good example of an activity where all the results directly followed from being fictionally successful at that activity.

However, one could use inner strength to bust open a safe with the intent of finding incriminating evidence against a particular NPC. In this case only part of your results directly follow from being fictionally successful at the activity. The part where you open the safe. What papers are in it doesn't fictionally depend upon your inner strength.

That's the difference I'm talking about.

The two things are orthogonal. My character might be visibly much stronger than yours in the gameworld, and we will reflect that trait in our general narration, but in a conflict I am a Clark Kent type and rely on my Clumsy Wholesomeness score.

Clumsy Wholesomeness is an interesting example. I'm not quite sure the kinds of X you could fictionally justify doing with clumsy wholesomeness. Which I think is what's making it so hard to analyze.

Your character is a fierce and independent single mom who might look small and non-threatening but in a crisis her Inner Strength trait comes out and she's lifting cars off children and smashing robbers to the ground with her brick-filled purse. The numbers are defining the character's approach to problems as a protagonist rather than their actual capabilities as a person.

Sure, but those approaches can either lead to results that all follow from being fictionally successful at that activity or as shown above, maybe one fictional result follows from the success of the activity and the other doesn't.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, but if there's nothing at all in game that says 'reward', how reliable is it? How much can we say that the game itself is even a part of it? I mean, if 'gamism' is just "I enjoy this part of the game and get a thrill out of doing this thing that isn't easy to pull off" is there ANY play (I'm sure there is SOME SOMEWHERE) that doesn't hit that at least part of the time? I think I want a bit higher bar, like there is some real intention there. Someone said "we're putting this into the game to create a situation where you need to really exercise some skill to succeed." At that point why wouldn't you also provide SOME sort of token that signifies that success?

You're missing my point. The game part of it doesn't move. What moves is the payoff. You're still using the game systems to move toward that reward, and the value in getting at it is that you do so well. But "enjoying doing this thing well" is the gamist part no matter what the payoff is, and the payoff varying doesn't say anything about how successfully you do the thing the game provides--its just the payoff.

Now, if you want to argue different parts of the game are actually supported by the system and other parts are ad-hoc, I wouldn't argue with you; I still maintain that "playing the GM" is a different kind of game than most people are trying for, and in my opinion, usually a lesser one. But the nature of the payoff isn't directly connected with those different "games".

I also think that games which don't really provide these kinds of built in reward systems show it. Traveller is a great example of a game, very classic, rather successful, but it never even held a candle in that dept to D&D. Why?

There are two easy answers to that have nothing to do with your premise; 1. First, once D&D had acquired its first impetus, I don't think anything was going to dislodge that. No possible system design, reward structure, or much of anything else was going to do that. 2. Other SF games with much more D&D like reward structures haven't done much better, usually worse. There's some useful discussion to have about genres and engagement (which I've seen some of even around here) but without that discussion this is comparing grapes to cheese and asking why a given group prefers one over the other.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I look at it this way, I'm not obliged to play in games where idiots are present . Yes, they existed in the past, probably still do, but no game system can do more than give you some ways to handle them that may or may not work. Sometimes a boot in the keister is the only solution! lol.

I simply think such people are too common and in some areas sufficiently inescapable that unless you're heavily in the NGIBTBG view to a hardcore degree, shrugging such things off is overly blithe.