Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[pemerton]

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.

I agree with this, but with two caveats or glosses.

(1) I think, in a RPG, the "board state" has to include fiction (or at the very least point to some fiction) as well as statistical/numerical/geometric facts. Otherwise we're in boardgame territory. This is why all the classic purist-for-simulationist games move away from hit points: hit points are a statistical/numerical fact, but barely point towards any fiction. Some RPGing can handle that deferral of the fiction (ie until someone is reduced to zero hp, we don't really know what happened) but it's intolerable to the purist-for-system impulse!

(2) I think the connection between whatever they say about the world is true and the impulse to realism is more than coincidental. The first is easier to accept, it seems to me, the more that the second is satisfied. Thus, for instance, someone who accepts the first and then tries to apply it to D&D hp-based combat confronts the fact that this character is hit again and again with a sword, yet not dead nor even (it seems) set back in ability. Which suggests a type of absurd reality (if we ignore the impulse to realism) or else suggests that, in fact, what the mechanics are telling us is not true of the world, but rather (as Gygax set out in his DMG) is a type of "deferral" of the fiction until we sort the whole thing out. (Later on, the approach that Gygax described very clearly in his DMG, with reference both to hp and to saving throws, would be labelled "fortune in the middle". That idea of "in the middle" (of the resolution process) corresponds to my language of "deferral" of the fiction.)

*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.

This quoted sentence could be taken straight from the "right to dream" essay!

For instance:

Consider Character, Setting, and Situation - and now consider what happens to them, over time. In Simulationist play, cause is the key, the imagined cosmos in action. . . .

What makes [RPGs] Simulationist is the strict adherence to in-game (i.e. pre-established) cause for the outcomes that occur during play. . . .

To talk about [in-game time and space], let's break the issue down a little:

• In-game time occurs regarding the actually-played imaginary moments and events. It's best expressed by combat mechanics, which in Simulationist play are often extremely well-defined in terms of seconds and actions, but also by movement rates at various scales, starship travel times, and similar things.
• Metagame time is rarely discussed openly, but it's the crucial one. It refers to time-lapse among really-played scenes: can someone get to the castle before someone else kills the king; can someone fly across Detroit before someone else detonates the Mind Bomb. Metagame time isn't "played," but its management is a central issue for scene-framing and the outcome of the session as a whole.
• Real time is, of course, the real time of play as experienced by the people at the table. I think comparing between its flow and that of the in-game time is a crucial issue as well - when is a huge hunk of real time necessary to establish a teeny bit of in-game time, and vice versa?

. . .

[Consider] the Simulationist view of in-game time. It is a causal constraint on the other sorts. One can even find, in many early game texts, rules that enforce how in-game time acts on real time, and vice versa. However, most importantly, it constrains metagame time. It works in-to-out. In-game time at the fine-grained level (rounds, seconds, actions, movement rates) sets incontrovertible, foundation material for making judgments about hours, days, cross-town movment, and who gets where in what order. . . .

The causal sequence of task resolution in Simulationist play must be linear in time. He swings: on target or not? The other guy dodges or parries: well or badly? The weapon contacts the unit of armor + body: how hard? The armor stops some of it: how much? The remaining impact hits tissue: how deeply? With what psychological (stunning, pain) effects? With what continuing effects?

. . .

In [purist-for-system] design, there's no possible excuse for any imperfections, including scale-derived breakdowns of the fundamental point/probability relationships. The system must be cleanly and at the service of the element(s) being emphasized, in strictly in-game-world terms. A good one is elegant, consistent, applicable to anything that happens in play, and clear about its outcomes. It also has to have points of contact at any scale for any conceivable thing. It cannot contain patch-rules to correct for inconsistencies; consistency is the essence of quality.

As I see it, Purist for System design is a tall, tall order. It's arguably the hardest design spec in all of role-playing.​

As someone who has done a lot of purist-for-system RPGing (with RM as my principal game of choice), I regard the quoted essay text, as well as the quote from @Pedantic, as accurate analyses of how this sort of RPGing works.

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 relates to my point above about the tensions between "the impulse to realism" and "treating what the mechanics say about the fiction as true".

My views on this are basically the same as the designers who created RQ, RM, C&S and similar games. I regard the fiction in which "hits" in the D&D sense are taken literally to represent being stabbed by a sword as too silly for words. And so if I want a resolution system that supports a purist-for-system approach I use one that doesn't have that implication - eg RM as I've mentioned several times now.

Conversely, when using hp I adopt a non-purist-for-system, fortune-in-the-middle approach. My own view is that 4e D&D is the apogee of this approach as far as D&Disms like hp, saving throws, classes as the core of PC build, etc are concerned.

 

[pemerton]

Don't forget my single favorite combination, the gnomish thief-illusionist! Good grief, I had so much fun with that!

I had a player, way back in my AD&D days, who loved that combo!

 

[loverdrive]

Is it of the essence of a game that one gets better at it?

Designers and scholars, way more knowledgeable on the topic than me, are yet to agree on what a "game" even is and how it differs from "play", so I can't speak with any certainty on what is an "essence of a game". I don't know, and, frankly, don't care.

For me, for a game to feel like a game, it must involve skill. A skill, for me, is something that one can improve at. I acknowledge that other factors can make improvement impossible or prohibitively hard, but still.

Blades in the Dark, when devoid of all the storytelling, will be a very weak game that has no substance to it (unlike, say, GURPS, which would still work even if nobody at the table gives a damn about any of the characters as people), but I still enjoy it greatly, and I'm not alone at that, so this doesn't seem to be a problem.

 

[Lanefan]

The real advantage of demi-humans, and really specifically elves and half-elves, is simply multi-classing. AD&D MCing is so huge, unless you just have really crap ability scores, its ALWAYS advantageous to be 2 classes. It takes about 2x the XP to advance, but that just puts you one level behind, and in return you get to CAST SPELLS IN ARMOR!!!!! I mean, I can be a wizard that can also melee, what could be better? The various 'elf bonuses' are just icing on the cake. I mean, honestly, its just basically "I can be a fighter/magic-user". Fighter/Thief might be OK too, but its not really 'wow better'.

Ah, you've hit some of the things we scaled back on, in order to make it all work a bit better.

First, we allowed humans to multi-class like demi-humans, as the dual-class system as written was kind of absurd. Second, we ruled that armour interferes with arcane casting even if you otherwise know how to use it, so if you're a F-MU wearing armour you have to doff said armour before you can cast anything (exception: very expensive and rare enchanted armour that allows the wearer to cast while wearing it).

We also ruled that a F-T in anything heavier than leather armour can't do much thieving.

In short, a multiclass character gets the better of the classes' saving throws and weapon-use abilities but has to adhere to the worse of the classes' armour requirements.

 

[Lanefan]

Did I not say someone would bring up "magical elf-game" in an attempt to discredit a simulationist point of view?

How exactly am I doing that when I say I'd like to seamlessly merge the fantastic into the realistic?

 

[Lanefan]

I had a player, way back in my AD&D days, who loved that combo!

We have one now, in the game I play in. Fortunately, perhaps, the Gnome's player is otherwise the polar opposite of a hard-core optimizer and thus this Gnome hasn't completely taken over the world.

Yet.

 

[Aldarc]

Did I not say someone would bring up "magical elf-game" in an attempt to discredit a simulationist point of view?

How exactly am I doing that when I say I'd like to seamlessly merge the fantastic into the realistic?

I'm at a loss here, Micah. I'm not sure if your comment here is directed at me or not. But I would quibble here anyway by pointing out that you did not say this. As per your original post:

As soon as you call it "realism", the phrase, "magical elf-game" comes out, and someone claims your entire argument is irrelevant.

Your wording here in this part regarding the "magical elf-game" involves "realism" rather than the validity of the "simulationist point of view," though maybe you view the terms as being analogous ones, as you then pivot to a belief that simulationism is under "attack."

I really don't understand why this attack on the concept of simulation as a hamestyle is happening. What exactly did the bad simulationists ever do to deserve being told what they want is impossible? I don't recall anyone trying to argue that narrative concerns were a pipe dream and should be abandoned.

I don't think that "realism" and "simulationism" are analogous terms. Likewise, others who are sympathetic to the "simulationist point of view" like @Thomas Shey and @Pedantic, if I (hopefully) understand them correctly, have also made this distinction between the two. Thomas Shey said that "verisimilitude" is the preferred term for this reason, while Pedantic said that "realism" is often orthogonal to "simulationism." And it's with "realism" in relation to "magical elf-game" that I shared my contentions about rather than the "simulationist point of view" with hard takes like:

IMHO something has to give when trying to do both. That's fine if you know where and when you want to sacrifice the realistic in favor of the fantastic and/or the fantastic in favor of the realistic.

My own contention with simulationism as a term has more to do with the point that I made earlier here, which you seemed to like, has more to do with its multiplicity of distinct understandings in conversation than its validity or lack thereof as a playstyle.

To be clear here: my ability to enjoy dramatic/narrative or gamist play doesn't stop me from enjoying simulationist play any more than enjoying MMORPGs keeps me from enjoying ARPGs or JRPGs or even farm simulators and survival games. I likewise don't have a one true way that I prefer or need to play TTRPGs, which I understand can be infuriating to people who would like to put me into the trouble-making narrative/dramatic roleplayer box.

Moreover, my own comment to Lanefan about putting the cart before the horse with trying to "merge the fantastic into the realistic" was NOT an attempt to discredit the simulationist point of view or invalidate it in anyway. Instead, my message was more about the approach of merging these things when it comes to D&D. My own opinion when it comes to D&D is that rather than trying to merge the fantastic into the realistic is the reverse: i.e., merge the realistic into the fantastic.

 

[Micah Sweet]

How exactly am I doing that when I say I'd like to seamlessly merge the fantastic into the realistic?

I was referring to what you responded to, not your post. Sorry for the confusion.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm good.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm at a loss here, Micah. I'm not sure if your comment here is directed at me or not. But I would quibble here anyway by pointing out that you did not say this. As per your original post:

Your wording here in this part regarding the "magical elf-game" involves "realism" rather than the validity of the "simulationist point of view," though maybe you view the terms as being analogous ones, as you then pivot to a belief that simulationism is under "attack."

I don't think that "realism" and "simulationism" are analogous terms. Likewise, others who are sympathetic to the "simulationist point of view" like @Thomas Shey and @Pedantic, if I (hopefully) understand them correctly, have also made this distinction between the two. Thomas Shey said that "verisimilitude" is the preferred term for this reason, while Pedantic said that "realism" is often orthogonal to "simulationism." And it's with "realism" in relation to "magical elf-game" that I shared my contentions about rather than the "simulationist point of view" with hard takes like:

My own contention with simulationism as a term has more to do with the point that I made earlier here, which you seemed to like, has more to do with its multiplicity of distinct understandings in conversation than its validity or lack thereof as a playstyle.

To be clear here: my ability to enjoy dramatic/narrative or gamist play doesn't stop me from enjoying simulationist play any more than enjoying MMORPGs keeps me from enjoying ARPGs or JRPGs or even farm simulators and survival games. I likewise don't have a one true way that I prefer or need to play TTRPGs, which I understand can be infuriating to people who would like to put me into the trouble-making narrative/dramatic roleplayer box.

Moreover, my own comment to Lanefan about putting the cart before the horse with trying to "merge the fantastic into the realistic" was NOT an attempt to discredit the simulationist point of view or invalidate it in anyway. Instead, my message was more about the approach of merging these things when it comes to D&D. My own opinion when it comes to D&D is that rather than trying to merge the fantastic into the realistic is the reverse: i.e., merge the realistic into the fantastic.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood you. The phrase, "magical elf-game" makes me see red, as its almost always used dismissively, and simulation as a playstyle is definitely being questioned in this thread as to its legitimacy (and often in the style of the Forge, which I strongly dislike in large part because of its stance against simulation). I also prefer the term verisimilitude to realism.