Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[loverdrive]

Okay, first a quibble: In the system you describe, actions don't have the same chance of success. Every third action has 100% chance, others have a 0% chance.

At any given moment, anything you can do has the same chance of success, that's what I meant.

But people who are bad at fighting sometimes have to fight regardless - and there's drama in that, surely.

Yes! And when backed against the wall, you can decide to fight, knowing full well that it'll create more problems than it will solve (or that this time, it'll actually work). Trying to apply your best stat is meaningless, so you might as well do something for drama.

Also, I gotta say, I would find that system extremely unsatisfying. People would be gaming it left and right, coming up with factitious actions to fail, so that they could succeed in the stuff they considered important. In fact, I'm not sure just what playstyle would enjoy that system, except apparently yours?

First, yeah, it will break if someone is trying to break it to make a point. But that applies to pretty much any RPG, and probably most other kinds of games as well.

Second, even if someone will try to game the system to always succeed (instead of utilizing it as an oracle to assist with creating a story), well, there's a GM who ultimately narrates what happens. And two thirds of the actions end up creating problems.

Third, most importantly, it's an example I made up in thirty seconds to illustrate a broader point. It can be replaced by a pure randomness (and that's more or less how PbtA games work), resource management (and that's more or less how Fate and Undying work), a game of poker (and that's more or less how Dogs in the Vineyard work), or anything else.

One of the reasons I started pondering this idea was a Scum&Villainy game I'm playing in. One day, I realized that everything I do — shooting people, lurking around, running surveillance and resort to things outside of my expertise when backed against the wall — I would do even if I didn't have more dice in Scrap, Skulk and Study than everywhere else. I'm reasonably sure that I, as a player, could sweet-talk the GM into accepting that fighting off 20 people isn't that big of a deal, but I, as a player, didn't want to see that on-screen, I wanted to see my gal struggle for a change.

This incentive structure with better chances at certain things depending on the fictional circumstances doesn't do anything for me. On the contrary, it creates plenty of situations where the thing I think is cool ends up being a suboptimal play, vastly outclassed by just drawing a gun for the umpteenth time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Oh good heavens yes! I have a degree in physics, and SF games can be hard for me. I want the orbital mechanics to be right! (Or, even more so, the stellar systems to be realistic - even though our understanding of planetary systems is in constant flux!)

One of the most obvious examples I ever saw of this was in the slightly obscure BRP derivative Other Suns that was out many years ago. Now, early BRP derivatives were sometimes pretty vulnerable to excesses in skill-splitting, but you didn't usually see three different programming skills and multiple mathematics skills. Understanding that Niall Shapero, the author, was a mathematician explained a lot about where he split and where he didn't.

That said, I think Diaspora brilliantly captures the feel of rightness in this kind of thing without actually providing it. It's a great example of what I've been saying, giving the feel of "simulation" without any actual numbers.

For some people nothing but the latter will do, though.

 

[Aldarc]

Or if you know (or at least think you know) how to somewhat-seamlessly merge the fantastic into the realistic. This has always been my goal in theory, though I've never got closer than a rather long way from it in practice.

That might be putting the cart before the horse, especially if you are coming at it from the D&D side of things.

 

[pemerton]

And there's the premise I'm disagreeing with. And as long as that's true, I don't see any value in any more back and forth on this.

It's a conclusion, not a premise.

I'm not sure that arguing about simulations here is helpful? It seems to be broadly accepted that "simulationism" isn't really about "simulating" anything, despite the name? I liked your (@AbdulAlhazred) phrase "commensurate with the fiction". While all styles of roleplaying so far as I know seek results commensurate with the fiction, the "simulationist" style seeks it for a distinctive reason. That distinctive reason, if we can encapsulate it pithily, is what that playstyle is all about.

EDIT: I do think that many sim players like to feel as if they were simulating the world. But as the old saying goes, there's a whole world within an 'if'.

My point didn't have to do with the mechanic, but the explanation of the mechanic in terms of "realism" - which on its face is rather absurd, but does make sense in terms of wanting the feel of realism, wanting the world to be independent of your desires.

To me, this seems to go back to what I've been saying upthread: that what distinguishes purist-for-system simulationism (RQ, RM, C&S, some approaches to Traveller; as well as the impetus in D&D play to turn hp into wound/vitality, to turn AC into damage reduction, to revise falling damage or the rules for being damaged by a point-blank shot from a crossbow, etc) is that it aspires to make the content of the fiction, or at least certain key parts of the fiction - rather local elements of the fiction that flow from action declarations - knowable by application of the mechanics without the need for participant decision-making.

This is what creates the "feel" of realism or objectivity that you're describing. It imposes (at least) two demands on resolution mechanics: they must actually do the job, of generating outcomes without the need for participant decision-making; and they must generate fiction. The problem with (eg) hit points is that while they meet the first of these desiderata, they notoriously don't meet the second. That's why all the purist-for-system RPGs eschew D&D-style hp (and AC, and saving throws, etc, etc).

I see the subject matter of this thread, plot armor, minions, and presumably similar stuff if I can extrapolate from the OP a bit, as closely related to the 'sim' question. I personally think that if we sheer away answers to questions like "why would we not use minions" that amount to "they aren't good simulations of monsters" then we can analyze more fundamental aspects of the question, answers that get us closer to understanding the essence of WHY we choose certain patterns of RPG game design as well as play techniques.

Now, maybe not everyone wants to discuss what the differences might be between an answer like "minions don't simulate real creatures very well" vs "the fiction produced when describing combat with minions doesn't have the character I like" but I find it somewhat interesting. I find it interesting to ask which sorts of play these different alternatives favor and if there are, for instance, ways to have your cake and eat it too.

We know that high hit points, in D&D, correspond to two possibilities: you're a big lump of meat (a dragon, a giant slug, a huge dinosaur) or you're a skilled warrior (Conan, Aragorn, etc). Maybe a third possibility combines a bit of both, and/or magic (eg a Type V demon, perhaps a high level MU).

Similarly, in 4e there are three types of minion:

*The 1 hp represents feebleness or vulnerability (eg a Decrepit Skeleton);
*The 1 hp represents a lack of skill or thread relative to the protagonists (eg a mid-paragon Ogre minion);
*The 1 hp represents a type of "unluck" or "you're just set dressing" relative to the protagonists (eg an upper paragon frost giant minion mixed in among standard frost giants of much the same level).​

The first of these is conformable to the purist-for-system simulationist orientation - because the 1 hp generates an action resolution outcome (ie being cut down in a single blow, even if the blow is relatively weak) that reveals the intended fiction (ie this is, indeed, a decrepit skeleton).

The second is conformable to the purist-for-system orientation at the moment of resolution, for a similar reason. But it violates that orientation at an earlier point, because it makes the game statistical description of the creature depend upon a premise about how it will be used in play (eg vs mid-paragon PCs), and that is too metagame for the purist-for-system orientation.

The third is not conformable to the purist-for-system orientation at any point. It has the problem described just above; and even at the moment of resolution, the "dead in one blow" doesn't correspond to anything in the fiction - in the fiction the minion frost giant is as tough and sturdy as any other - but to a metagame decision about pacing, staging of the fight, etc.

I personally don't know of a RPG design approach that can allow for mooks that fill all three of the 4e minion functions and that will satisfy the purist-for-system orientation. I think that it would need to be approached from a different angle. Eg you can get the second minion function in a RM-esque game by setting up your offence vs defence rules in such a way that Conan-level PCs vs mooks have sufficient surplus offence bonus that they get crit adjustment "overflows" that render the mook liable to die in a single blow. (But I don't see any way, even with a different approach, to get the third function - the distribution of "insta-kills" will depend on the luck of the crit dice, which don't respect pacing and staging.)

 

[niklinna]

At one point I coined the phrase "principled illusionism" as an analogue to "imaginary naturalism", but it was still too "loaded" a term, as illusionism is seen as bad, and the worst kind of GM-ing generally.

But it's the right idea. D&D adherents of "living world" aren't at all interested in the full range of process sim proceduralism in the way GURPS or Runequest does it. They just want the illusion that the world "lives and breathes" outside the view of the characters.

 

[pemerton]

D&D adherents of "living world" aren't at all interested in the full range of process sim proceduralism in the way GURPS or Runequest does it. They just want the illusion that the world "lives and breathes" outside the view of the characters.

@niklinna's disturbing cat image prompted me to come back to this.

This is a hallmark of high-concept simulationism. If you'll indulge two ground-laying self-quotes:

a system like RM or RQ - and also at least some approaches to Classic Traveller - prioritises system, a mechanical process of resolution which itself establishes colour and "theme" in the sense of focusing on those issues of scale, kinetics etc that are mentioned.

<snip>

Whereas high concept/genre sim is quite different: the point of the PC build rules, for instance, isn't to produce mechanical elements of character that feed into a resolution engine: it's to produce characters with clear (and often colourful) descriptors which can then be fed into setting and/or situation. And there is a significant expectation of human operator intervention to make sure that those descriptors and that colour are respected in the outcomes of play. Every CoC or D&D module that has advice to the GM on what to do if the players miss a necessary clue, or every bit of advice about not rolling the dice and just going with what "makes sense" for the character, is something that would be out of place in purist-for-system play but is part and parcel of high concept sim play.

There is no mystery as to Edwards's choice of nomenclature: he uses simulationism to refer to RPGing that prioritises exploration over metagame goals. And both purist-for-system and high concept simulationism do this.

The paradigms of the first are RQ, RM, C&S, or a certain approach to Classic Traveller. Exploration is focused on the systems, and what it tells us about characters and/or setting.

The paradigms of the second are CoC, much AD&D 2nd ed, much original WoD, etc. Exploration is focused on the characters, situations and GM story/metaplot.

The techinque for generating a "living, breathing" world is to have a significant amount of GM decision-making, both in framing and content introduction, and in resolution, that make the situation and setting (including NPCs) highly salient.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I've pondered about decoupling outcomes from the fictional situation quite a bit, but never really had an opportunity to crystalize it into words, and it seems reasonaly relevant to the thread, so why not do it here.

I've come to a conclusion that I, contrary to what I thought, actually don't give a single quack about leveraging fictional positioning. From micro-details to ubiquitous things like "my character is good at fighting and this is a fight", I sincerely don't care.

I prefer for all actions to have the exact same probability of success, as this allows for greater flexibility in character expression — if you don't have to worry whether [X] will work, you can role play freely.

I, honestly, feel kinda dumb — this is completely obvious, but it occured to me only recently.

More than that, the basic flow of any RPG looks like:

1. Player states what they want to happen
2. A rough outline of an outcome is decided using the rules
3. Someone describes what happened "on-screen", filling in any missing necessary details

First, a whole bunch of "game" can be packaged into step 2. Of course, when it's just rolling dice, meaningful gameplay must be created elsewhere, but even something as simple as bidding in Undying already works great. Now I'm working on an RPG that uses a fighting minigame for that purpose, and I'm generally happy with the results (well, the fighting minigame at this moment sucks, but still)

Second, the outline being rough gives an opportunity to resolve any situation while maintaining consistency, and, again, gives more freedom for expression. If it's not "you succeed at the task at hand and the new fiction must reflect that", but "you end up in a more favourable position than before", it's much easier to work with.

I'm hesitant to delve into this too deeply as I'm not sure I entirely understand. Dungeon World, for example, has no 'difficulty ratings', there are modifiers, so you your fighter will do STR based stuff with greater narrative impact than INT based stuff, presumably. However, the play loop is described as 'start and end with the fiction', so contrary to your 1, 2, and 3 above it looks more like:

0. Situation is established (this may already be established, or the GM may need to do something here).
1. The player describes, in fictional terms, what they are attempting to accomplish.
2. The GM decides if this is a 'move', and if so the mechanical part of the appropriate move is resolved (dice get thrown).
3. Depending on whether or not the move is successful, the GM will say what happens next (bad thing) or the player's declared action will go forward successfully, and the GM may get to describe some complication/trouble, or the player may need to choose between costs.

Once 3 happens, then things go back to either 1, if the situation is still ongoing in this scene, or 0 if some further impetus is required (either a complete reframing by the GM, or a simple GM move or question directed at a character). Frankly I would read the Stonetop rules, though they are a draft they are worded a bit more clearly in terms of relating matters to the above process (though DW and I'm sure AW etc. all do a pretty good job).

What I wonder about is if your apparent separating out of the 'rules part' and the 'fiction part' is really the best approach. This is basically how D&D combat generally works in most games, people invoke character abilities, make attacks, etc. and do all the 'dice stuff' AND THEN retroactively introduce some fiction, which is sadly elided in probably a majority of cases. I mean, OK, long combats filled with lots and lots of dice rolls with fiction that is pretty lackluster (I swing my sword) doesn't prove really rewarding to the DW-like kind of approach perhaps, but maybe the conclusion should be that DW does it better than D&D!

But I feel like I might be missing some part of what you are trying to say, or perhaps this post represents a less fully-formed position. I'm interested to hear.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not entirely sure the difference between a task resolution and conflict resolution actually exist, to be honest: it's just a matter of scope.

Regardless, it's not important here. I'm talking about both.



Imagine a hypothetical system:

1. There's a player who controls a single character, and at any moment they can declare that their character does something ("I hit him with my sword!", "I kiss her!", "I flap my arms like a bird and fly!")
2. There's a GM who resolves each of these actions as follows: every third action succeeds and the character ends up in a better position, all others create more problems than they solve.

Yes, literally anything you can think of, regardless of how reasonable, awesome or silly it is, has the exact same chance of success at a given moment.

Yes, your character being, say, good at fighting and bad at math doesn't influence whether they'll succeed or fail at all.

Yes, nothing is stopping your character from solving a mathematical equation of the Universe, ascending to the godhood and reshaping reality to their liking.

But if you have created a character who is good at fighting and bad at math, why would you do that instead of expressing a character you have created by acting consistently with the character concept?

Well, yes, you would be responsible for constructing your own vision of what the character was both good at and interested in doing (goals/drives/needs). In the above described process it would also require cooperation by the GM to produce outcomes you both found consistent with the vision. That would mean you'd want some sort of document which describes the character in a way you can both understand. Maybe it might involve some 'ability scores' that measure your most core strengths and weaknesses, and some sort of statements about your motives, personality, and areas of expertise! The GM can now use that to decide which actions get the 1-in-3 success treatment, and which don't, and what sort of consequences might be appropriate given the character's nature.

I mean, you are treading very very close to narrative style games here, but I don't see any reason to NOT include some sort of mechanics that give the GM a more objective assist in declaring the favorable and not favorable outcomes. Or maybe even some meta-game currency that lets the player assert "Hey, this time is one of the one in three!" or something like that. But I'm not sure where you really want to go with this, as what you describe above doesn't quite seem interesting without some more development.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's right, these 'prices' are just, at most, random numbers, or even numbers invented by the GM. Lets say the GM decides a war starts with the Azlan Hierate, then maybe he says "Oh, pharmaceuticals are being bought up by the Imperial Marines for use in military hospitals." This is not some sort of example of the "law of supply and demand" operating, even in a simulation. It may be an ILLUSTRATION of what the law of supply and demand MIGHT produce, but it is ACTUALLY just a ruling by the GM. We can then ask "why did the GM introduce this fiction, and thus this ruling?" but that answer CANNOT BE "the natural laws of the setting produced this outcome." At best the descriptions of the Imperium, the Azlan Hierate, the political situation in the Spinward Marches, etc. indicates that such a ruling by the GM is commensurate with the fiction.

I just argue that the word 'simulation' is a misnomer here, entirely. Calling a couple rolls on a random table 'simulation' deprives the term of any substantive meaning at all.

What I am arguing is that most of the factors which would go into a substantive simulation, one that is not merely a string of random numbers, are entirely unspecified. We don't know, in Traveller, even the most basic facts about the economies of any of the worlds in the Spinward Marches (or any other classic Traveller setting). For that matter, even assuming we know a few facts, your random tables don't even take those into account!

My point is there isn't any correct or incorrect output, given the lack of any knowledge whatsoever of the economic factors involved there simply IS no right or wrong answer! Again, this tells me that the term 'simulation' is somehow not appropriate. A simulation must simulate something, it is an analogy of an actual system to which it bears some sort of, however passing, resemblance. Here we have a complete void of detail, an absence of the thing to be simulated. So this is my contribution to the "what word should we use instead of 'simulationist'" debate. I'm not sure, but I think we do need a word. Even 'emulate' seems odd, as it implies there is something to copy the characteristics of.

Exactly! This is my point entirely. There is an underlying agenda. I simply propose that, given the weakness of any concept of simulation of an imagined world, such an agenda MUST have controlling force on what the results are (or else you simply have a system with no design at all, which I guess is possible).

We understand you don't find the conclusion, and I agree wholeheartedly with @pemerton's analysis here, agreeable. I am, however, not seeing any actual substantive counter-argument.

I mean, technically, I could imagine someone with enough wealth buying the supercomputer time required to run some sort of geological plate-tectonic simulation algorithm to develop a map of a fantasy world. I could see them then further employing the use of a fairly competent climate simulation, and I suppose there may even be ecological simulations that can take some plausible array of species and tell you how they might be distributed and describe the energy flow across their ecosystems, producing a fairly naturalistic world, etc. To some degree this world could then be said to have the character of a simulation. If the GM then runs some weather forecasting model and says "its raining today" I am fully prepared to call that simulationist. Heck, I'm not that much of a stickler, I'll agree its fairly simulationist if they just randomly pick a weather result from a table derived from typical outcomes suggested by the climate simulation for that area, season, etc.

My question then becomes, what would actually be gained in terms of play by doing this? I mean, I once created a fairly realistic-sounding weather table for parts of my campaign world. It just wasn't that interesting! I even generated a bunch of weather for a whole year and whenever the PCs went outside I'd look up the weather, but basically it was boring and trivial after about 3 sessions of play. It would matter to real people, but it didn't serve the purposes of game play very well. I don't think my hypothesized realistic geology, ecology, and climate proposed above would particularly suite game play better than 'World of Greyhawk' or whatever either. In fact it might be worse!

What exactly is your end goal here? There are many gamers who enjoy the challenge of simulating as much of a world as they can. Are you trying to convince these people to give up on something they find fun? Where's the benefit, other than saying, "my playstyle is a real thing, and your's isn't "?

 

[Pedantic]

I'm not sure that arguing about simulations here is helpful? It seems to be broadly accepted that "simulationism" isn't really about "simulating" anything, despite the name? I liked your (@AbdulAlhazred) phrase "commensurate with the fiction". While all styles of roleplaying so far as I know seek results commensurate with the fiction, the "simulationist" style seeks it for a distinctive reason. That distinctive reason, if we can encapsulate it pithily, is what that playstyle is all about.

EDIT: I do think that many sim players like to feel as if they were simulating the world. But as the old saying goes, there's a whole world within an 'if'.

This treads dangerous close to illusionism again. You're just dancing around "those people want to be lied to" again, and that's where it usually turns insulting. There has got to be some way to make whatever this point is without suggesting that it's flawed.

I agree, but I will go ahead and raise one of my usual objections to "realism."

I tend to find that there are those who appeal to "realism" who have widely divergent understandings of what makes something "realistic" when it comes to simulating anything with the rules or game processes.

So part of my contention lies with that selectivity process, which comes across as trying to turn a subjective perspective of realism into a sort of objective truth about what is "realistic." This is even excluding the introduction of things like "magic," "cosmologies," or the "supernatural" into the equation that should render the application of our understanding of realistic physics null and void.

So that subjective selectivity when applying "realism" sometimes feels more like post hoc justifications of personal biases than anything else. Why is realism important for game elements A, B, and C but not these other game elements X, Y, and X that should and probably would have large ramifications on A, B, and C?

Moreover, more problematically, I find that sometimes appeals to "realism" often entail a desire to sneak in unsavory things under the banner of "greater realism" (e.g., sexism, racism, etc.). The obvious example here being F.A.T.A.L., which branded itself as the most realistic game.

This undoubtedly reflects my own biases, but I will admit that as a result of my time in this hobby, appeals to "greater realism" often shoot up a bunch of red flags for me because of things like this. I am aware that there are people who want more "greater realism" who don't share such unfortunate prejudices; however, I find that "realism" is often where I find that the subjective prejudices of the designer/GM often intrude in the game space in unpleasant ways.

Edit: This is one reason why I think that I would personally favor a move away from an appeal to "realism" as a term to something else that is a little more cognitive or self-aware of its fictive or subjective nature: e.g., imaginary naturalism.

I think realism is actually orthogonal to the simulationist impulse. People often like it, but it isn't a necessary part of the system. @pemerton put it well here:

This is what creates the "feel" of realism or objectivity that you're describing. It imposes (at least) two demands on resolution mechanics: they must actually do the job, of generating outcomes without the need for participant decision-making; and they must generate fiction. The problem with (eg) hit points is that while they meet the first of these desiderata, they notoriously don't meet the second. That's why all the purist-for-system RPGs eschew D&D-style hp (and AC, and saving throws, etc, etc).

Mechanics create fiction without recourse to any player stating what occurs. They take in the existing board state, a declared action, and output a new board state*. Thus, whatever they say about the world (and as importantly, whatever incentives they create) are true. The impulse to "realism" comes up when they mechanics produce an outcome someone finds dissonant and wants to change the underlying mechanics to avoid it...but that's an attempt to create a specific kind of resulting fictional world, not a comment on the process. Hitpoints can support a lot of fictions. but not ones where getting stabbed by a sword is particularly lethal. You can imagine a wuxia or xinxia derived setting where all adventurers are assumed to be engaged in body cultivation, and just regenerate regularly until they run of qi, for example. Fundamentally, the rules are designed to produce a game, and the game plays however the rules allow it to and a setting follows.

The fiction is a projection of the mechanics. It isn't important that HP are a terrible model of real-world injury (or even more book-narrative takes on injury), it's necessary that whatever the setting has to say about injury aligns with HP, once they're the given mechanic.

*This is cycle is actually the biggest constraint on rules design in that kind of system, specifically because it requires temporal consistency and a strict relationship between the decision to act and the action.