Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

I would like for you to do the same intellectual work that you are expecting others to do. We have had many discussions you have been a part of where the distinctions I am speaking to have come up, in extensive detail. I am asking that you attempt to understand what matters to other people to the same degree you expect others to do so when it comes to the distinction between process simulation you are looking for and sort of play experience engendered by 2d20 games for instance even when those distinctions do not matter to them personally.

At the very least I hope you can see how there is very little difference between the way you see The Forge's treatment of sim priorities and the way I view the way you speak about games you personally do not care for as if they were the same thing.

I do not want you to stop contributing. I would just ask that you show the same consideration (when it comes to distinctions that matter to other people) you are asking for (when it comes to distinctions that matter to you). It's fundamentally up to you how you choose to engage, but I believe we can all do better on that score (myself included).
To be fair, I never tried to create a category system to cover every kind of gaming "fairly", and then have it proliferate to the point where a number of folks seem to treat it as the standard model. I'm just talking about things I like and things I don't like.

But fair enough. As I've said before, I very much want to run a Star Trek Adventures campaign (a 2d20 game) in part to see how that kind of narrative-focused game sits with me. I love Star Trek, so I thought that would make it easier. I started a thread on the subject, actually.
 

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Speaking as a guy who has done a fair bit of scientific modeling, it's definitely true that no model can ever capture reality. With cleverness, hard work, and luck, though, you can model a particular aspect of reality in a way good enough for the purposes you need it for.

In much the same way that an RPG character isn't an actual person, of course RPG worlds aren't anything like as overwhelmingly detailed as the actual world. But obviously we can manage to get by for the purposes we want the game worlds for!

No doubt we can do better. If there's one thing I know about models, it's that they can always be improved. And the best improvements aren't incremental, they come at you from left field and make things drastically better. If you're lucky, you get one or two of those in a lifetime. Likewise, there have been some genuine improvements in RPG design over the decades - in sim games like any other. I personally would say that 5e's dis/advantage system is a genuinely elegant improvement, whatever else one might say about 5e.
Sure, we can build models, but we need data, both to parameterize the model and to validate it. This is the thing with 'process sim' as a game agenda, there simply is no such data, its an entirely made up fantasy world, even its 'laws' are not fixed in stone. And I agree, we can create VERISIMILITUDE on a small scale within instances of play, or subsystems in a game. My example earlier was F1 Racing. I bet you can create a somewhat abstracted system of some sort that produces outputs that 'feel like' they might plausibly show up in racing news. I'm not against that (or actually any agenda in particular) at all! I just think that looking at that through the lens of 'simulation' is a pretty limited choice!
 

IIRC, 13th Age mooks have ok-ish damage and to hit, but much less hit points for their level. And extra damage from killing one carries over to the next one. Was there a 1e rule about the less than 1hd monsters and high level characters where you could take out a bunch of them? The ones in 13th Age don't all have to be low level though.
There was such a rule in 1e, but only for fighters.
 

Sure, we can build models, but we need data, both to parameterize the model and to validate it. This is the thing with 'process sim' as a game agenda, there simply is no such data, its an entirely made up fantasy world, even its 'laws' are not fixed in stone. And I agree, we can create VERISIMILITUDE on a small scale within instances of play, or subsystems in a game. My example earlier was F1 Racing. I bet you can create a somewhat abstracted system of some sort that produces outputs that 'feel like' they might plausibly show up in racing news. I'm not against that (or actually any agenda in particular) at all! I just think that looking at that through the lens of 'simulation' is a pretty limited choice!
I agree that "verisimilitude" is a far more appropriate and achievable goal than "realism". I question how much "realism" is even desirable to strive for in an RPG. No matter how hardcore the gamer, do they really want their guy to have a big chance of dying to infection after every fight? I'm guessing not.

However, this is starting to feel like a different topic. Maybe start a new thread?
 

I will say the same thing to you, the chance to look at something like this in a whole new way is not insulting, its GOLD. Take advantage of it.

So, being told about a whole new way to look at something is not at all much like having the epiphany of looking at a thing in a whole new way. It sounds like you had the latter, which is great! But simple assertions of this whole new way don't generally give others the same epiphany.

If someone identifies as a gamer of type X, suggesting they look at X a whole new way is asking them to question their identity. That's a thing people usually resist. They usually won't question who they are unless they have a more driving need than, "someone on the internet said I should."

This extends far beyond gaming, by the way - it applies any time you address things people take as part of their identity, and that's part of why we have no-politics and no-religion rules here.
 
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No no! Don't take it like that! When you understand that there is a whole new way to look at what you have been doing, that's when you achieve a whole new and more interesting view of it. Take the opportunity and run with it.

And again, you're now coming across as the other side of the coin Bloodtide is doing. You're better than that. Be so.
 

I will say, if somebody's into the sim aspects, it's kinda weird to knock the sims they like for being imperfect to capital S Simulation, simulation's aspirational, and that's cool. I see it as a really good way to complicate things for the characters at my table, even if the only DM i ever played for who really ran it that way made a game I found tedious (there was a lot of fresh-rolling new characters like Bob, who is just Bob spelled backwards, which felt like I was expending rifle division chits in a war game) but in playing PbtA, i somewhat missed not having the ability to mine a game system's process to give me fresher scenarios and ways for things to go wrong. I, perhaps because of my lacking library of understood fiction, struggled to keep up with unique things to happen to players.

That being said, I always consider death to be on the table in a combat situation (I play GURPS, so it often is), but I try to be favorable to the player any time i run against being honest to my world. Unless i'm running a strict dungeon delving game, I think it works better for the games i'm trying to run to have my players use their characters less tactically, and for better or worse, putting death on the table tends to have my players play more cautiously than is interesting some of the time. In my time GMing, it works better if players are more comfortable taking risks.
 

In fairness, I've yet to encounter any who specifically want Mook Foes, which I take to mean foes that put up little or no real opposition. IME even those (fortunately few!) players I've seen who more or less want Auto-Success still want worthy opponents who need some in-character effort to take down.

I should note that this is at least a narrow view of mooks in games. As an example, I know of a number of superhero games where the equivelant will fold up quick if you attack them, but where they're quite capable of causing you a lot of trouble if you ignore them (its very common for the difference between mooks/henchmen/etc and full opponents to be far less pronounced on the offensive end than the defensive end. This goes all the way back to Bushido, which had three potential tiers of opponents, ones that took the full normal damage for type, ones that had a flat 10 hit points, and ones that had 1. While it was easy to take down the latter, they didn't necessarily hit any less hard than the first; they'd probably be less dangerous because they didn't last long, but you could not be blase about them.

So there can be some considerable gap between mooks-as-speedbumps and mooks-as-hazard. They just aren't full-blown opponents.
 

IIRC, 13th Age mooks have ok-ish damage and to hit, but much less hit points for their level. And extra damage from killing one carries over to the next one. Was there a 1e rule about the less than 1hd monsters and high level characters where you could take out a bunch of them? The ones in 13th Age don't all have to be low level though.

Yeah, another example within the fantasy sphere. Being overly casually about 13th Age mooks does not seem to be what one would consider a good idea. You can mow through a lot of them, but you ignore them at your peril.
 

While I agree that simulation can never be perfect, I'm a whole lot more optimistic than the quoted post that it can be done well enough for rock'n'roll.

The goal isn't necessarily to simulate the fantastic reailty to a T, it's instead to simulate it to the point where the GM and players are all on the same page in feeling like the characters are inhabitants of an actual world or setting that exists beyond them and could in theory exist without them e.g. if their characters all got plane-shifted to a different world or setting.

Put another way: if as either player or GM I feel the game world is real enough that I could go outside, look at a star, and picture that game world orbiting around that star (perhaps incorporating "magical" physics we've yet to discover here on Earth) then we're good to go. :)
See, we probably differ more in how we are labeling things than anything else, IMHO. I do think it's worth sometimes backing up and seeing where we can strip away assumptions or limits to our thinking by using alternative taxonomy and process models. I am one who favors overt usages. So when I see a 99.9% gamist kind of play where people then explain it in terms of realism it bugs me, and I think some opportunities exist for greater clarity. Now it may be that this 'curtain' is itself part of the agenda, I don't know, I don't recall really ever playing quite that way.
 

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