Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5648788" data-attributes="member: 42582">Overcoming challenges, though, isn't definitive of gamism in the Forge sense. After all, the aim of playin Burning Wheel is to overcome obstacles, and BW is pretty clearly a narrativist vehicle.The issue with 4e is whether your play group, in overcoming the challenges, celebrates the clever play that achieved it (this would be gamism, and [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] has posted a lot about playing 4e in this fashion) or enjoys the story/theme that is expressed thereby (I post a lot about playing 4e in this other fashion).I think 4e is limited in its support for really hardcore gamist play because (i) if you play it in this fashion then build can become overwhelmingly important, but build is pre-play rather than play, and (ii) in play, at least in my experience, it is not all that hard for the PCs to win. So it is the manner of winning that brings the interesting stuff with it. I would think that 4e gamist play would be more about showing of a "cool move" in a given context, rather than being the one to save the party from what was otherwise going to be certain death. (But [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] should feel free to correct me on this - I'm theorycrafting, not basing this on serious gamist play with 4e.) Mechanics that are "fun" on the game side are not, in my view, particularly indicative of any orientation in play. They're just indicative of smooth design.Gamism, in the Forge sense at least, has nothing to do with "playing a game". It has to do with playing a game competitively.The fact that 4e has more metagame mechanics, that don't bring their own modelling of the fiction along with them, is a different matter. I think <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21" target="_blank">Ron Edwards is right when he notes</a> that metagame mechanics can serve both gamist and narrativist agendas well, and that in several respects (including this one) narrativism and gamism have more in common with one another than either does with simulationism:Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things: *Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. This isn't an issue of whether Author (or any) Stance is employed at all, but rather when and for what. *Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion. *More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se. *Reward systems that reflect player choices (strategy, aesthetics, whatever) rather than on in-game character logic or on conformity to a pre-stated plan of play.Except they have a tendency towards boring encounters. Maybe I'm looking at too narrow a sample - but Thunderspire Labyrinth, for example, has cool circular paths in both The Chamber of Eyes and The Well of Demons, but as written no encounters exploits those paths. I had to rework the encounters pretty substantially to actually get the value that was there in the maps. Well this I disagree with very strongly. 3E is laden with simulationist action resolution mechanics, and with somewhat simulationist NPC and encounter-building mechanics. All of which are potential obstacles to narrativist play, for the reasons indicated in the quote from Edwards above.I've got no doubt that someone could play vanilla narrativist 3E. But I think it would be moderately hard work, and I think some drifting would be required. You'd probably want to tweak the XP system. You'd probably want to tweak the demographic rules, the monster design rules and the encounter-building guidelines. You'd probably want to look at the treasure distribution rules, and reduce the connection between treasure and monsters. You'd probably also want to reduce the simulationist orientation of the PC build rules. And you'd have to work out how to get conflict resolution out of a task-focused skill system (4e does this via skill challenges; BW does it via "Let It Ride"; 3E has no built-in mechanism for this).I'm sure there's other stuff that would get in the way too, but these are the main ones that occur to me.I didn't play 3E to any significant extent. I play 4e because it is different from 3E. If I wanted to play a simulationist game, or to drift a simulationist engine to narrativism, I would use RM or HARP.2E seems to aim at high-concept simulationist play, but unlike eg CoC or Pendragon has crappy mechanics for supporting it, and therefore produces (at least in my experience) railroady adventures and encouragement to the GM to "suspend the action resolution rules" (ie what I tend to think of as cheating) in the interests of the story. I see it as the edition of dysfunctional GM force.Gygax's AD&D seems to me aimed at exploration-heavy gamist play, with a lot of the action resolution to be handled by negotiation at the table, or by ad hoc mechanical systems, rather than via settled mechanics. The idea of the "skilled player", who is lauded in Gygax's PHB and DMG, seems to be someone who is good at "winning" in this sort of play (contrast this with Tunnels and Trolls, for example, where luck is so important - part of the idea of AD&D, and it's preference for negotiation over dice in many circumstances, seems to be to remove the importance of luck - it's an ongoing debate whether, in luck's place, it gives us gaming the GM!).As for drifting 4e to narrativism, it's trivial. All I had to do to get my current game going was to tell the players (i) build PCs that are legal by mechanics and backstory of the PHB, (ii) give your PC a loyalty to someone/something, and (iii) give your PC a reason to be ready to fight goblins. Once these PCs have been built, the sytem - in terms of its PC build mechanics, its encounter build mechanics, its monsters (both mechanical design, and integration into the thematic conflicts that are inherent in the default backstory), its action resolution - makes it completely straightforward to run a situation-and-character focused narrativist game. The prevelance of metagame mechanics, and the tight scene framing that the action resolution mechanics support, stops sim/exploration taking over. And the fact that building for theme also means building for mechanical viability, plus the fact (in my experience) that the action resolution mechanics are very forgiving of diverse approaches to resolving encounters (both on the players' and the GM's part), means that gamism doesn't take over either.I think I'm a better GM now than I was then. But if I tried to run a simulationist game now I'd be better than I was then. I don't think there's anything peculiarly difficult about running a non-simulationist, or non-Gygaxian game. In fact, when I was a teenager I couldn't run a Gygaxian/Pulsepharian game, although I tried, but I could run a vanilla narrativist game.</blockquote>

Verification