D&D 5E [+] Explain RPG theory without using jargon

[pemerton]

Some definitions, with glosses:

Gamist RPGing is RPGing aimed at winning. You win by overcoming the challenge, and/or by getting the prize. The challenge can be puzzle-solving (a lot of Gygax's D&D seems to have involved this) or clever wargame-y tactics (every old timer has a story about some clever thing they did to beat the various groups of humanoids in the Caves of Chaos) or just plain gambling (a lot of T&T play seems to be like this).

Narrativist, or "story now", RPGing is RPGing aimed at making a point via the play of your character. Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Zadie Smith, Chris Claremont and the writers of Days of Our Lives all have points to make (not in the RPG medium, of course), so this covers a fair bit of ground. It's harder to point to touchstone examples of this sort of RPGing than gamist RPGing, but a fair bit of Over the Edge play would fit the bill, and in more recent times Apocalypse World, Dungeon World and allied systems are reasonably well known.​

Now, a conjecture, with some reasons in its favour:

To win at something requires a stable baseline. That's why we have the phrase "moving the goalposts". To win by solving a puzzle, the conditions of the puzzle have to remain stable. (That doesn't have to mean there's a single answer, like most crosswords. The puzzle might be: here's a bit of rope, a pot of glue and a friendly dog - now work out how you're going to cross the ravine. The conditions of the ravine, the length of the rope, the strength of the glue, etc, need to be held constant.) To win a wargame requires holding the opposition constant. To win at a gamble requires fair dice and not changing the odds once the dice have been tossed and are falling through the air.

To make a point requires conversation, back-and-forth, responses to responses to responses. It requires no prejudgement. It requires other participants in the conversation picking up on what you have to say, playing with it, putting pressure on it, maybe building on it to see whether it holds up under stress or in new circumstances.

Stability and making a point are, at least it seems to me for the reasons just given, inconsistent.

Hence RPGing can't at one and the same time be both gamist and narrativist, as those terms have been defined above.

 

[iserith]

In light of post 2 which is a passive-aggressive hit-piece without the courtesy of @-ing the people being public attacked (note…not reported!).

If anything, I attacked myself since I used to be one of the people I was describing. But thread after thread the practical effect of bringing Forge jargon into the discussion is confusion, irritation, and division. At a certain point, however well meaning, that's on the people introducing it into the conversation.

This thread is just another example of what should have in my view been obvious long ago: Start with the Forge jargon in a D&D forum and the discussion will turn sour. It is inevitable. I've learned and improved on that score (if not as much in other areas). I invite others to do the same.

 

[Charlaquin]

Some definitions, with glosses:

Gamist RPGing is RPGing aimed at winning. You win by overcoming the challenge, and/or by getting the prize. The challenge can be puzzle-solving (a lot of Gygax's D&D seems to have involved this) or clever wargame-y tactics (every old timer has a story about some clever thing they did to beat the various groups of humanoids in the Caves of Chaos) or just plain gambling (a lot of T&T play seems to be like this).​

​

Narrativist, or "story now", RPGing is RPGing aimed at making a point via the play of your character. Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Zadie Smith, Chris Claremont and the writers of Days of Our Lives all have points to make (not in the RPG medium, of course), so this covers a fair bit of ground. It's harder to point to touchstone examples of this sort of RPGing than gamist RPGing, but a fair bit of Over the Edge play would fit the bill, and in more recent times Apocalypse World, Dungeon World and allied systems are reasonably well known.​

Now, a conjecture, with some reasons in its favour:

To win at something requires a stable baseline. That's why we have the phrase "moving the goalposts". To win by solving a puzzle, the conditions of the puzzle have to remain stable. (That doesn't have to mean there's a single answer, like most crosswords. The puzzle might be: here's a bit of rope, a pot of glue and a friendly dog - now work out how you're going to cross the ravine. The conditions of the ravine, the length of the rope, the strength of the glue, etc, need to be held constant.) To win a wargame requires holding the opposition constant. To win at a gamble requires fair dice and not changing the odds once the dice have been tossed and are falling through the air.

To make a point requires conversation, back-and-forth, responses to responses to responses. It requires no prejudgement. It requires other participants in the conversation picking up on what you have to say, playing with it, putting pressure on it, maybe building on it to see whether it holds up under stress or in new circumstances.

Stability and making a point are, at least it seems to me for the reasons just given, inconsistent.

Hence RPGing can't at one and the same time be both gamist and narrativist, as those terms have been defined above.

This is like the third definition of narrativism I’ve seen so far. Is it playing to find out what the characters would do when push comes to shove, or is it playing to make the characters feel like protagonists, or is it playing to make a point?

 

[Hussar]

Again, explicitly not true. "Few" is just as wrong as "no". Designers and players have always been inventing and reinventing RPG theory since at least the mid-to-late '60s, and pieces of it go as far back as 1812. The conversation did not start with The Forge. The Forge did not invent these tools. It's entirely repetitive of what's gone before, it simply supplied new names to some very, very old concepts. The Forge is certainly the first place many modern gamers had heard about these concepts, but in no way did The Forge invent them nor was RPG theory deficient prior to The Forge. "Those who don't study the past are doomed to repeat it." Gamers ignored their past, The Forge simply repeated what was already there.

Well, if they are simply repeating what was stated before, then why are you having such difficulty understanding it? Why the insistence that it must be reduced to the level that a six year old can understand?

If these theories are so widely discussed and understood then the Forge stuff shouldn’t be problematic at all.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think the largest issue we face in these conversations is that for the most substantial chunk of players what The Forge called High Concept Simulation (exploration of character and setting for its own sake) takes such a large and predominant role that it practically defines what roleplaying games are for that chunk. To the point where much of that audience only really processes other play agendas almost entirely through the prism of character and setting exploration. The model basically has no explanatory power because all the play they have ever experienced or will ever want to experience fits solidly within a single quadrant of the model.

In terms of typical play this includes Pathfinder, D&D 5e, Vampire, Shadowrun. Even some games many consider "narrative" games like FATE, Night's Black Agents, Swords of Serpentine, Dune all solidly fit here.

It's such a monumentally large part of the play space (in terms of play time but not conceptually) compared to the games that aren't so focused on exploration for its own sake that it can easily feel like the model does not adequately capture the diversity of their play.

I don’t imagine you mean it this way, but this sounds an awful lot like “if you disagree with the model, you must not understand it.” I promise you, I do understand narrativist play.

 

[niklinna]

Right, but isn’t them working in concert contrary to what the theory claims?

Could be! I've said several times I doubt whether that particular claim of the theory is true, and I'm trying to reason that out in this back and forth with you.

No, I know gamism doesn’t just mean mechanics. The point is, I do want there to be a way to measure progress or something you can “win” at, because that provides a goal for players, which obstacles can be placed in the way of, to generate conflict. The desire for victory drives the revelation of character. Gamism and Narrativism, intrinsically linked, working in concert to make (what I find to be) more compelling gameplay than either on its own.

There can be a distinction between you as player progressing your character (typically such things as XP, levels, more power), and your character as embedded in the fiction progressing (for example, more wealth, more allied NPCs, upholding values/vows, learning new spells). It's this shift in perspective that decides whether the agenda is Gamist or Narrativist. And in this realm, at any rate, I think there's room for them to align. XP could be a proxy for you to measure your character's in-fiction sense of their power and status in the game-world. In early D&D, gold earned (wealth) was explicitly linked to XP. That is, it could go either way from the typical.

Well, character death is also a mechanical consequence, but to your underlying point that Narrativist dilemmas don’t have to involve mechanical consequences… I know. That’s why I don’t think Narrativism as described in GNS adequately captures the kind of dilemmas I’m interested in. Yet, the dilemma is the driving factor for me. Ergo, GNS fails for me as a model.

If a dilemma has to be framed in terms of mechanics (XP, loss of character ability, change in stats) related to decisions based on the fiction, and strictly-fictional consequences (a friend turning on your character, your character being branded an outlaw) won't do, GNS doesn't really get into that.

You lost me. What I said I want is the very nut of narrativist play, but you can easily see why someone would classify it as pure simulationism? And those things fall directly into one another but feel very different from each other?

The moments fall into one another, not the agendas. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

But isn’t one of the central claims of GNS that this would be incoherent??

I'm afraid I don't understand. The situation posited is precisely an example of the three agendas in conflict, that is, being incoherent. Your desire to face such situations is outside that (which is why I called it a meta-agenda).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This is like the third definition of narrativism I’ve seen so far. Is it playing to find out what the characters would do when push comes to shove, or is it playing to make the characters feel like protagonists, or is it playing to make a point?

Are those different things? They don't seem so different to me.

 

[Hussar]

Players in exploration focused games are not doing something all that dissimilar from going through escape rooms. I personally consider that a form of puzzle solving. We have to leave room in discussion for contextual meaning. Otherwise we have to create even more jargon to clarify our intent.

At the end of the day telling people how they are allowed to talk about stuff and what they are allowed to talk about has a chilling effect on open discourse. Forcing people to jump through elaborate hoops to participate is not good for the culture of this community.

On the flip side, most arguments are caused by the participants not using language the same way. Fundamentally failing to communicate. Insisting on agreed upon terms before discussing something is basic to all forms of criticism.

Insisting that a person can use whatever language they want and it is up to the other person to correctly guess their meaning doesn’t work.

But it sure works for dragging discussion on interminably without any sort of resolution.

 

[Hussar]

So essentially, what I'm gathering from this thread, is that the GNS terminology isn't just mildly misleading, it's an outright detriment to understanding the theory. If I understand this correctly…

1. "Narrativism" has nothing to do with producing narratives and everything to do with putting characters on the spot, forcing them to make tough decisions, to find out "who they really are" (i.e. the same reason that your college creative writing professor told you that every story must have a central conflict). "We explore feelings, not dungeons," to mangle an aphorism. It would be better called dilemmaism (plus something, something, no pre-planned outcomes).

2. "Simulationism" has nothing to do with game-worlds being simulations (i.e. game rules as the "physics" of the fictional world) and everything to do with ensuring that game outcomes match expected genre tropes. A game designed to produce any satisfying three-act narrative isn't narrativism, it's simulationism, because it's simulating the general framework of a story. (But games that aim for, e.g., horror movie tropes or four-color supers comics also fall under this umbrella.) This agenda would be less opaque if it were outright termed genre emulationism.

3. "Gamism" is actually the agenda that prefers rules that are tight, predictable, physics-like simulations of the game-world. They don't have to hew to our reality; they just have to be verisimilitudinous enough that the participants can suspend disbelief. But rules have to put constraint on the fiction — because you can't have honest challenge if the world is unpredictable and arbitrary. We could perhaps facetiously rename this agenda to rules-not-rulingsism; but I think the more prosaic rules-as-physicsism would be less inflammatory while still being accurate enough to get the point across. (OSR-style D&D would land firmly in this camp most of the time, only drifting into simulation to the extent that some of its mechanics — like hit points, or XP-for-treasure — are deliberate attempts to replicate sword & sorcery tropes.)

My tongue-in-cheek tone aside, how am I doing?

Not sure about anyone else, but I have no problems with this. Seems pretty on the mark.

 

[Manbearcat]

If anything, I attacked myself since I used to be one of the people I was describing. But thread after thread the practical effect of bringing Forge jargon into the discussion is confusion, irritation, and division. At a certain point, however well meaning, that's on the people introducing it into the conversation.

This thread is just another example of what should have in my view been obvious long ago: Start with the Forge jargon in a D&D forum and the discussion will turn sour. It is inevitable. I've learned and improved on that score (if not as much in other areas). I invite others to do the same.

You’re convincing no one with this.

There is one person on ENWorld who uses OODA Loop with regularity.

One < cue Johnny Dangerously>

And OODA Loop is not Forge “jargon.”

So you outed yourself straightaway. And you didnt @ me. And while you meant it to be personal, it’s cool. I didn’t take it personally. Now a lot of folks did on my behalf and let me know about it (I didn’t even know about the thread until they told me about the shot you took). No big deal as far as I’m concerned.

But you know what you did. Don’t walk it back. You said what you said. Just wear it now.

@Umbran I’ll just self-report this post because it’s definitely getting reported by someone who doesn’t like (the utter reality of) what I’ve just written.