D&D General Why the resistance to D&D being a game?

[Thomas Shey]

I’ve had many exchanges where I talk about the way I rule something in the game, and someone asks “why rule that way instead of this other way that I think is more realistic?” to which I’ll answer that I think my way creates a better gameplay experience, and they’ll respond that they care more about “simulationism,” or “immersion” or “verisimilitude” or some other such phrase over “gamism”. I think that’s the kind of thing OP is getting at.

I think what’s really happening there is not that my interlocutor actually rejects the notion of D&D being a game, nor that they don’t think the gameplay experience is important. Rather, they have different gameplay aesthetic preferences than I do, and are perhaps trying to express that using vaguely-defined D&D-forum-jargon.

I think you're being somewhat over-generous. Some people do seem to consider the gameplay elements of an RPG a necessary evil. You could say what they want is still a "game" but its only in the most broad meaning of the term.

 

[Ondath]

Tangentially, I'd kind of like to get the fMRI people across campus to take a look at the brains of folks with and without aphantasia when they game. (I don't have anything but short sketchy bursts of graphics in my imagination, but some other part of my brain must be keeping track of spatial things and the like).

I am absolutely aphantasic, I can only maintain very simple images in my head. Still, conveying TTRPG narratives only through verbal and textual descriptions in a setting of friends sat around a table (or worse, friends in a Discord call!) still immerses me more than video games. I can understand if that isn't the same for everyone, though.

 

[Imaro]

I've pointed to examples of commercially-successful games that appeal to multiple player constituencies more robustly than D&D does (even just by the act of having a built-in "difficulty" slider!). If you don't think they have lessons D&D can learn from, as the saying goes, that's, like, just your opinion, man. And, bluntly put, I have no reason to think you've a better tab on D&D's pulse than I. (It's certainly clear, and fair enough, that you seem to think likewise.)

Look again at WoW: What have the sales of WoW been? Sure, it's not its halcyon days, but it still does well enough. And yet it still manages to robustly support multiple disparate player constituencies, and has done since its inception. Some of these player constituencies are surprisingly niche. Someone else on this site pointed out (might have been Ruin Explorer) that, for instance, the "regular raiding" player constituency is something like less than 1% of the WoW player base. But raiding is still "a thing" that the game supports - quite robustly, if not as robustly as during the Burning Crusade/WotLK days.

The situations for WoW and D&D are not exactly identical, but the principle is there: different player constituencies with different needs can be supported in a robust way by a single game with a more-or-less unified mechanical schema.

So, what I mean is that "WotC should, with the same deliberateness and care as the likes of Blizzard Entertainment or Sony Interactive/Guerilla Games (the respective publisher and developer of Horizon Zero Dawn), ascertain who are the core player constituencies of D&D and how they want to play the game (including how they actually play the game as compared to how it has been designed to date), and then design the game so as to maximally appeal to these constituencies and their gameplay needs".

How well has D&D done this in the past, and how well is it doing it now? I'm not convinced they did a great job in the past (for instance, I think if WotC had done a better job of assessing what the greater part of player base really wanted, we would have got something closer to 5e a long time ago), and I'm not convinced they couldn't be doing a better job now. I'm willing to bet that Tome of Battle had more uptake among the 3.5 player base than, say, the puzzle rules in Tasha's, or the downtime rules and tool-use rules in Xanathar's, or even the social interaction and wilderness exploration rules in the 5e DMG has among the 5e player base, despite the difference in unit sales between that book and the others.

For instance, I'm confident that D&D would be a better game if, say, it undertook the approach to adventuring gear that I suggested upthread, as opposed to the approach that exists now (which I am confident asserting is largely ignored by most of the player base and is the bane of the remainder of the player base that wants something with more teeth) - although I am sure it would be an even better game if professional designers were to be the ones coming up with the approach.

Well you're sure of alot of things so no need to further discuss... since being sure means there's no room for a differing view.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I find this totally implausible as an explanation for the resistance to game-ish-ness.

Completely implausible.

Almost everyone I've ever even come across who truly hates "game-ist" RPGs and "game-ism" in general is a total and utter beer-and-pretzels type. There's a certainly a massive correlation between playing more hack-and-slash and older RPGs and hating gamism.

I've absolutely seen the people who'd just as soon be playing a freeform game and are not particularly hack and slash object to the gamish elements too. You probably don't see as many of them in D&D, because they often aren't that interested in the combat end anyway, and D&D is probably the wrong place to be if you don't, but its absolutely a thing.
,

So that absolutely flies in the face of any "pretentiousness" explanation. The people who tolerated the deeply game-ist 4E, best, for example, were people who'd played a lot of RPGs, generally speaking, and who realized that different RPGs were different, and not every every RPG was a simulation. But a lot of those people were quite keen on "storytelling" games and so on, which doesn't at all fit your explanation.

So it's definitely not that. If anything gamist and narrativist people tend to align, and those who think of RPGs a simulations who object to both of those.

Seriously, man, the poster you were responding to was not wrong, he's just focused on only one subset of people who resist gamish elements. There are a bunch of different people who, to one degree or another, resent the more gamey elements of many RPG, and they do so for pretty varied reasons.

 

[Cadence]

I am absolutely aphantasic, I can only maintain very simple images in my head. Still, conveying TTRPG narratives only through verbal and textual descriptions in a setting of friends sat around a table (or worse, friends in a Discord call!) still immerses me more than video games. I can understand if that isn't the same for everyone, though.

I totally prefer ttRPGs and describing/hearing what's going on to video games... I am just really curious how part of my brain is letting me keep track of it all without letting the more conscious part see them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I totally prefer ttRPGs and describing/hearing what's going on to video games... I am just really curious how part of my brain is letting me keep track of it all without letting the more conscious part see them.

It is kind of an interesting question. When TotM comes up, I've noted it'd be a complete nonstarter for me as a GM, and a problem as a player, because my spatial memory and imagination is pretty poor. The only game I've ever managed to make that work with was Scion 1e because distance and position was so close to totally irrelevant.

 

[Pedantic]

Immersion. I think we're defining immersion differently. I do not mean "able to imagine the fiction." I can't imagine engaging with this hobby without the capacity to do so. What I mean by immersion is "flow state" or "in the zone." Being lost in the activity, so hyperfocused that everything else falls away.

Flow (psychology) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Like sitting down to play a video game and blinking only to find it's three hours later. Or sitting down to read a novel only to blink and realize you should have gone to bed four hours ago. That's immersion, to me.

And the very act of playing a tabletop RPG literally prevents that from happening.

With a book you read the text and imagine what's there and just keep going. Read-imagine-read-imagine...until the book is done or you have to jump up to run to the bathroom to pee.

With a video game, the stimulus pops up on the screen, you react, press a button, and your avatar in the game fires a weapon or spell, hitting or killing the monster. The delay between in-game stimulus (monster on screen), to player reaction (oh no a monster), to player game response (press the button), to in-game character response (fire the weapon) is minimal. Fractions of a second. It's only because of this minimal delay that video games are immersive in the flow-state sense.

And it's because the delay between in-game stimulus and in-game character response are so long and involve so many steps that immersion in the flow-state sense is impossible, for me. I can't enter a flow state when the handling time of the game system is measured in tens or scores of minutes rather than seconds.

This is likely also why I prefer rules light games and FKR. The system gets the hell out of the way so I can immerse myself in the game world. It reduces the handling time of the game's mechanics to almost nothing or nothing.

What? No! That's abnegation, not immersion. Immersion is about embodiment, not flow.

I am right there with you, reading has always been a hyperfocus activity for me; I have a routine experience where I will put the book down and then suddenly jerk to attention when the narrative stops because I've disassociated the physical act of reading and the experience of story, and then I need a second to get my sense of reality recalibrated. That is (in some ways) a desirable state and a thing I go do for sure, but it's not what I'm talking about when I say "immersion" in the TTRPG sense.

I'm a little idiosyncratic on that front, in that I tend to think the desirable sort of immersion people are referencing in TTRPGs should primarily be discussed in mechanical terms, but I conceive of it as uniting the decision space between me, the player, and them, the fictional character portrayed through my choices. My thinking and decisions, thanks to the pressures of gameplay, become filtered to match that of some other entity (or at least, analogous to theirs). That's where the whole "explore a fictional world" thing comes in; some part of me is mirroring some part of this alien thing in an alien place, and through synecdoche I can experience some portion of that.

Reading is the opposite, it's an active suppression of my ego to experience narrative instead of experiencing being myself. Instead of vicariously experiencing the other, I replace my experience wholesale with something else. I suppose that's still vicarious experience, but of a totally different flavor. Videogames have the potential to do either of those things, though I would say they struggle to do either as fulsomely as a TTRPG or a book would.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think you're being somewhat over-generous. Some people do seem to consider the gameplay elements of an RPG a necessary evil. You could say what they want is still a "game" but its only in the most broad meaning of the term.

There definitely are people who genuinely feel that way, but I think those people are mostly playing FKR rather than D&D 5e.

 

[Cadence]

It is kind of an interesting question. When TotM comes up, I've noted it'd be a complete nonstarter for me as a GM, and a problem as a player, because my spatial memory and imagination is pretty poor. The only game I've ever managed to make that work with was Scion 1e because distance and position was so close to totally irrelevant.

I usually do ok with TotM with just the general feeling of the rough positions. It's almost like someone else is keeping track for me inside my head since I know what is closest to what and who is surrounding who - but I don't have any picture of the map or other characters.

It never occurred to me for a long time people actually really saw things in their heads. Then I had a friend once who didn't like hearing about anything gross since they would picture it -- and I thought that was strange... And so I don't think I ever put together TotM as meaning actually seeing it in ones head until just now.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

A random sequence of utterly unconnected events happens to you throughout the day and yet, by the end of the day, you will have formed a narrative about your day in your head that connects them all and gives meaning to meaningless events.

Do what now?
I have never done this. At all. Why would a day have a narrative or meaning? I am genuinely perplexed.

Yesterday, most of my coworkers, many customers, my wife, and a couple friends, all had the experience of especially rude and irritable people all day, like everyone was an a-hole that day. Not one of us suggested that this had any narrative or meaning. It was amusing that coincidence lined up that way, especially on a “blue super moon” day of all days, but that’s literally it. It was amusing. Not meaningful, just a kinda funny coincidence of timing.

Anyway, RPGs aren’t just games, and they are absolutely interactive storytelling.

Like their storytelling is the purpose, which is served by game mechanics.