D&D 5E Fairy tale logic vs naturalism in fantasy RPGing

[Manbearcat]

Hmm...does this mean that Narr games are naturally predisposed towards faerie-tale logic, and Sim games towards causal logic? Faerie tales seem to be primarily about the imposition of consequence upon moral actions, usually through coincidence or some sort of deus ex machina. And narrative systems almost all have mechanical systems to provide that exact coincidence when called upon.

I think I would say the following:

a) Narr games are thematically contrived and mechanically built around addressing a premise.

b) The addressing of and the premise itself is typically meant to provoke emotion and/or ethos prioritization.

c) The mechanics resolve thematically relevant conflicts (which should be the only kind occurring during play) inherent to that provocation or prioritization.

d) Neither the game's initial state nor the GM's role subvert the player's position on their emotions, their ethos prioritization, or what the mechanics say about "how this all turns out." They aren't at tension with player or mechanical autonomy. Rather, they both embolden (through focused antagonism with legitimate neutrality) the player's journey through their character's evolution (emotion, ethos prioritization, what-have-you).

From a x logic perspective, Sorcerer is subtly different from My Life With Master is subtly different from Dogs in the Vineyard. All three are different again from Mouse Guard and Apocalypse World. However, the approach of thematic premise, the purpose of the conflict resolution mechanics, and the GM's role are all pretty similar.

I'm going to use "thematic" for the x above, I think (genre/drama can probably be subbed too). None of them use strict "naturalism" causal logic in the framing of scenes, in the evolution of play, and in the fallout of outcomes. Its all thematic logic. The PC build mechanics, the dice mechanics, and the reward cycles all feed back into this.

That doesn't mean there isn't reliable world physics in Dogs (falls from horseback can break hips or worse, stabs from knives suck, and where there is one member of a gang there is likely to be more), its just that scene framing/evolution/fallout and the fundamental play mechanics aren't prioritized as being an outgrowth from the tight constraints of earthly experimental science.

 

[Tony Vargas]

In the setting that 5e D&D captures

To the extent that 5e implies a specific setting, it's failed, but....

Apprentice Wizards are a thing, and they cook and clean for their education according to Volo's, so they're about as mundane as...I dunno...college students.

Depends on how many of 'em there are. If they're doing that at a Hogworts, sure. If Galen is the apprentice of the last wizard on earth, not so much. (OK, among other things... D&D's mechanical quantification of magic has always tended to render it more mundane.)

That they can evoke fire with a wave of their hands doesn't save them from being quotidian. That's just what the quotidian looks like in FR, just like the quotidian in Star Trek involves replicators and holo-decks.

From the inside, maybe.

Magic's just a thing you interact with - it's naturalistic, not the stuff of fairy-tales.

The game should strive to avoid coming down on one side of that stylistic divide, as much as possible. This thread illustrates why.

Well, D&D has always had pretty rich rules for swinging swords. It doesn't just rely on everyone's shared sense of how sword fighting works.

Has it?

Roll to hit.
Roll damage.
That was a minute of combat.

I'd say D&D has always had pretty abstract rules for sword-swinging. Central, but abstract, not rich.

 

[pemerton]

This does illustrate the tension between them in D&D, of course. Dungeon crawling is inherently kind of a fairy-tale logic (risk your life for wealth and glory!) that someone thinking naturalistically would never really do. But for some reason your character does! So you require a little bit of fairy-tale logic to even get out of bed! But then searching for traps, for example, is a place where D&D has always been very naturalistic (however exotic and fantastic its traps might be). There are triggers. There are areas of effect. There is a mechanism. Most of the time, you can't just say, "Due to my cautious and careful character traits, I find all of the traps."

I think that last sentence is a bit misleading - "fairy tale" logic is not equivalent to player fiat. It can (and in most RPGs does) turn on dice rolls, checks etc.

And there is a "due to my character traits, I find all the traps" element to classic D&D - elves find secret doors, dwarves new construction, etc, due to their elvish sight or their dwarvish famlliarity with underground settings.

Traps more generally I think are a site of deep tension in classic D&D. From the point of view of fiction, I think they're meant to evoke the sort of feel one finds in (say) the REH Conan story "The Scarlet Citadel":

How long he traversed it in utter darkness, he never knew, but suddenly his barbarian's instinct of near peril halted him short.

He had the same feeling he had had when standing on the brink of great precipices in the darkness. Dropping to all fours, he edged forward, and presently his outflung hand encountered the edge of a well, into which the tunnel floor dropped abruptly. As far down as he could reach the sides fell away sheerly, dank and slimy to his touch. He stretched out an arm in the darkness and could barely touch the opposite edge with the point of his sword. He could leap across it, then, but there was no point in that. He had taken the wrong tunnel and the main corridor lay somewhere behind him.

Even as he thought this, he felt a faint movement of air; a shadowy wind, rising from the well, stirred his black mane. Conan's skin crawled. He tried to tell himself that this well connected somehow with the outer world, but his instincts told him it was a thing unnatural. He was not merely inside the hill; he was below it, far below the level of the city streets. How then could an outer wind find its way into the pits and blow up from below? A faint throbbing pulsed on that ghostly wind, like drums beating, far, far below. A strong shudder shook the king of Aquilonia.

He rose to his feet and backed away, and as he did something floated up out of the well. What it was, Conan did not know. He could see nothing in the darkness, but he distinctly felt a presence​

As well as this sort of thing, classic D&D traps also involve jets of flame, more-or-less unlimited arrows (see eg ToH), and other things that are hard to explain in naturalistic terms.

But the 10' pole, stop-and-search-at-every-door routine does naturalise them. Which createas a tension, I think, between the dramatic/story function they initially might have fulfilled, and the non-dramatic, Advance Squad Leader style of play that they engender. Different styles of post-classic D&D, I think, resolve this tension in different ways.

 

[pemerton]

Hmm...does this mean that Narr games are naturally predisposed towards faerie-tale logic, and Sim games towards causal logic?

isn't this entire thread basically reiterating something we already knew, i.e., simulation and narrative are often at odds at each other in RPG gameplay?

I think both these posts over-generalise a bit. (Assuming that by "simulationism" and "narrativism" we've got in mind, broadly, the Forge terminology.)

There can be fairy-tale logic in what the Forge calls a "high concept" sim game. Some CoC games might evince this, for instance. But most of the time the fairy-tale logic will probably be managed and enforced by the GM rather than by the mechanics - eg this sort of fairy-tale COC game is likely to be one where "We didn't roll the dice all evening!"

And I think there can be naturalism in a narrativist game - Burning Wheel is an example, I think. That's not to say that BW is free of contrivance - it sets out to deliver dramatic/thematic play of the sort [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] describes, and so it has to have contrivance. But the contrivances are framed within a naturalistic context rather than a fairy-tale one, I think - or, at least, that's how I play it. It's therefore closer to a historical novel than to my traditional D&D experiences (eg it has miserable, suffering peasants rather than the invisible-but-for-welcoming-back-the-king good folk of Gondor). And a consequence of this is it is far grittier, with much more PC failure, than D&D tends to have. D&D generally has no GM advice on how to narrate failure, because success is the assumed default; whereas how to narrate failure is the most important element of BW GMing advice, because (in a naturalistic world) failure is a frequent consequence of trying to do hard/heroic/dramatic stuff.

BW uses a number of player-side mechanics to try to combine the naturalism with non-GM control - stuff that, in typical ENworld terminology, would be called "player narrative control" - eg players can (within mechanical limits) determine who their PCs old friends are and when they bump into them ("circles" attribute); what the relevant backstory is that might influence some important pending scene ("wises" skills); etc.

 

[pemerton]

I'd say D&D has always had pretty abstract rules for sword-swinging. Central, but abstract, not rich.

By "rich" I meant detailed, mechanically engaging. In AD&D, for instance, beyond what you describe there is initiativve, rules for distance (which interact with the rules for ranged attack) and for closing that distance (which include the rules for charging), rules for breaking off melee (and suffering a parting shot), etc.

Even Moldvay Basic, which is lighter than AD&D in this resepct, has rules for range, for initiative, for fighting withdrawals, etc.

And the interaction between hit and damage rolls, and the hp mechanic, is itself rather rich. It's a long way from "make opposed sword-fighting checks to see who wins and who loses." Which is an option in BW.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

This does illustrate the tension between them in D&D, of course. Dungeon crawling is inherently kind of a fairy-tale logic (risk your life for wealth and glory!) that someone thinking naturalistically would never really do. But for some reason your character does! So you require a little bit of fairy-tale logic to even get out of bed! But then searching for traps, for example, is a place where D&D has always been very naturalistic (however exotic and fantastic its traps might be). There are triggers. There are areas of effect. There is a mechanism.

Dungeon crawling doesn't need to rely on fairy-tale logic. You can contrive a premise from which it would arise naturally and make sense. Shadowrun is the obvious example of a setting where dungeon crawling is a believable profession.

Once you cross the line, and just accept that something doesn't make sense and you should go with it anyway, I think that's a dangerous place to be from an RP standpoint.

 

[chaochou]

Now you've got me thinking about what kind of traps one would find in a fairy-tale world. The first thing that comes to mind is the Cave of Wonders: "Infidels! You have touched the forbidden treasure!" And then the floor turns to lava! Maybe in fairy-tale logic every trap is triggered by some character flaw or failing?

Not quite a trap, nor in D&D - but in Glorantha there was a thing called Hungry Jack, a giant pumpkin head thing which emitted a sort of siren song for miles around and if you heard Hungry Jack you felt compelled to walk towards it, an intense personal pull, a black hole of hunger drawing you in, closer, closer, closer, closer and then he ate you. The hero who defeated it willingly ran towards it and jumped in its mouth. Pure fairytale logic!

Glorantha has, or certainly had, a wonderful mythic fairy story atmosphere. It's probably well within the topic of this thread to point out that the frustration with the otherwise excellent Runequest (sim) was it's setting was built around myth, legends and heroes but the system handled their stories very poorly, something which the later HeroWars (nar) did with great style.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think both these posts over-generalise a bit. (Assuming that by "simulationism" and "narrativism" we've got in mind, broadly, the Forge terminology.)

"Simulationism," "Verismilitude," "CaW," whatever new labels you put on it, it's still the same 'realism' that was debated back in the day. And, as then, the only time time it ever comes up at the table is when one player is having his character do something awesome and another interrupts with "that'd never work, because [middle-school physics]."

I'll take the 'fairy tale logic,' thank you, and the only things I want to see 'simulated' in my fantasy RPG is the tropes common in fantasy narratives.

By "rich" I meant detailed, mechanically engaging.

In light of that clarification, my assessment remains unchanged.

 

[innerdude]

I'm trying to think of an example where the reverse of [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s original hypothesis is true----where "fairy tale" logic actually increases GM fiat, or GM control, rather than giving more narrative control to the players.

One area that seems to be the case is the creation of "McGuffins." In literature, McGuffins are part and parcel of "fairy tale" logic---that one ring you've heard of, that one witch's brew, that one strand of magical hair, that one lamp that releases the djinni . . . . Anything that symbolizes, "You can defeat the enemy that troubles you, but first you must find/collect/restore/destroy the Ancient Artifact of Mythic Properties!"

Yet McGuffins inherently play against player narrative control, because they assume that the characters in the game world, as expressed by the game's mechanics, will be incapable of defeating/destroying the antagonist. In early D&D, especially BECMI, this was probably true. (Prior to 3e, the only D&D I had ever played was BECMI). I doubt a 9th-level party of the "classic" 4 BECMI character classes would have a realistic shot at defeating a BECMI red dragon.

The entire first "adventure path" of Dragonlance plays off this stereotype---you can only defeat the black dragon Khisanth with the blue crystal staff. There's no assumption that a character, expressed mechanically, can go in and simply use the stuff on their character sheet to defeat an enemy of that scope.

I think 4e stands in an obvious contrast to this, as it posits quite heavily that if the GM has prepared a level-appropriate encounter, a group of five 4e PCs should be able to go in and defeat it simply with the stuff on their character sheet. Yet this is neither "fairy tale" logic nor "naturalist" logic, it's the logic of a game identifying a suitable challenge to be defeated. It's the logic of, "If I have prepared the correct set of feats and abilities, the group should be able to defeat this challenge, assuming we understand the nature of the challenge appropriately."

In fact, the more I think about it, if there's "fairy tale" logic to D&D at all, it arises from this third impulse---the need to create a suitable challenge to be defeated. It's not really about any sort of impulse, or drive to give players "narrative control." Fairy tale logic simply makes it easier to craft appropriate challenges, because you don't have to "logic" your way in to why a particular challenge exists.

 

[innerdude]

The only difference is what premise the GM is making his decisions based on. In this case, the questions that the GM's decision are trying to answer are either, "What makes this world seem more alive?" or "What turn of events creates an interesting fairy tale?"

I saw this back on the first page of the thread, and really, this sums up the entire thing. In a roleplaying game, I personally find the "What makes the world seem more alive?" question more compelling than "What creates an interesting fairy tale?" As [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] said, a "fairy tale" can potentially explore aspects of the characters, but part of my problem with fairy tale logic even in this regard is, if my character doesn't exist within a reality that can be relatable to my own experience, then any exploration of my character is less valuable and impactful. Without a grounded reality surrounding it, discovering things about "honor" and "bravery" and "self-sacrifice" with my characters tend to end up much like a reading of a Grimm's Fairy Tale ---- shallow and unfulfilling.

The historical D&D "drift" into more sim/naturalist directions is an indicator to me that more players than not preferred the first question. Those who preferred the second question probably have found themselves drifting further and further afield from "D&D" the longer the years pass---with Forge-ist narrative games, Fate, Apocalypse Engine, Cinematic Unisystem, Coretex+, et. al.---into something that specifically aims to produce a gameplay experience divergent from D&D.