On completely artificial restrictions

[AbdulAlhazred]

@loverdrive : I'm struggling to understand why that response was even relevant. Quite obviously a game isn't real. That's a big part of what makes it a game. You don't really make an interesting observation to say that it isn't real.

Your point seems to undermine itself when you write: "It's a tool that feeds into fiction..."

Right. So, your mechanics go a long way to determining the sort of fictions that you produce. The more disassociated your mechanics become, the harder of a time you will have to make the fiction that you produce seem like it isn't the story of a game or game universe. So yes, you are correct turn-based abstractions produce fictions that tend to have problems where you can see that in the fiction people tend to wait for other people to react. You can even see this for example in published authors. For example, Jim Butcher writes action scenes (especially in his early works) that read as if they were generated by a turn-based combat system. They read like fictions produced from something like a ttRPG.

You've certainly made a rather arbitrary assumption about what sort of fiction @loverdrive is after. I don't think its even warranted to start with, but even buying your argument about how mechanics work doesn't really make your point more than a comment on your own preferences. While there, IMHO, may be 'dissociated' mechanics, as an extreme, what would make them unsuitable as a generator of fiction, and why would that fiction necessarily have to have any certain character to it? It seems to me that people with limited ability to provide fiction produce less engaging fiction, but this is not really about RPGs...

Yes, obviously a fantasy universe isn't real, and yes obviously a fantasy universe where explicitly people can only make chess moves is self-consistent, but generally speaking a fantasy universe where the participants can only make chess moves isn't the fiction or fictional universe people were intending to generate.

Again, you make assumptions!

So there becomes a point where you have participants in the game who are saying, "I can't do the work to translate the fiction that we are producing into the fiction that I want, because the system is producing a fiction that has too many attributes of being produced by a game." For some people, that might even be turn-based. Most turn-based games have some rules in them to try to make them simulate non-linearity and if people abuse the rules to produce something like the elf fire brigade cannon to produce fiction that is obviously based on mechanics of a game and not implied universe, well then people will have problems with the rules and try to rectify it in some way. There is reason that many systems make mention of things like segments or impulses to try to make turn-based systems better resemble the reality of continuous action. Because people don't actually want to generate fiction that is obviously turn based when generated and put down to paper (as it were).

Yes, obviously people understand there can't be a perfect 1 to 1 mapping between the generated fiction and the desired fiction, but that doesn't mean that all mappings are equally effective and elegant.

While I don't think it is a radical notion to suggest that player's IDEAL of a narrative stemming from their play would lack highly 'gamey' character, I'm not sure this is directly tied to whether or not the game closely associates action mechanics and such with some specific in-game element or factor. It is equally likely that characterization, motive, etc. are the most important factors to a given player, or pacing, or degree of challenge that is conveyed (IE perhaps tension or suspense). I mean, sure, all other things being equal if the mechanic plainly relates closely to specific narrative causes and effects, that's cool. I'm just not going to ever believe that this is THE ONLY important consideration!

 

[Jd Smith1]

I think you have it backwards: what I need is a justification as to what the PC is allowed to do. For example slews of 5e talents which come with no explanation of why this effect is taking place.

 

[loverdrive]

Yes, obviously a fantasy universe isn't real, and yes obviously a fantasy universe where explicitly people can only make chess moves is self-consistent, but generally speaking a fantasy universe where the participants can only make chess moves isn't the fiction or fictional universe people were intending to generate.

Using chess queen movement rules might be great if you want to have stories in a high fantasy world where beings move like chess pieces, but not if you want stories in a world and milieu that emulate conventional high fantasy fiction. But to each their own.

Only if you try to pretend that tokens on the board moving like chess pieces has any relation to what the characters in the game world are doing.

Think about this way: let's imagine that a bunch of PCs are fighting in a mêlée with, say, a vampire. In Blades in the Dark, for example, that would be a group Skirmish roll. This roll serves a simple purpose: the result outlines the boundaries in which a new fiction must be created. On 6, GM must create a new fiction where the PCs succeeded at no extra cost. On 4/5, they must create a fiction where PCs succeeded, but something bad happened. On 1-3, PCs got their asses kicked.

This process has exactly zero relation to what is actually happening in the game world. PCs and vampire don't gather around the table, roll dice, for the losing party to submit to being beaten into a bloody pulp. It's an abstraction, it doesn't need to be translated into fiction, we're only after the results.

In the same way, there's no reason to try to translate every single move in a combat mini-game into something happening in fiction. Pieces moving on the board doesn't have to mean that characters are moving on the battlefield -- they might as well circle around each other, looking for an opening in the opponent's defence. The board will be put aside and forgotten when we'll get the results: who won and at what cost, just like nobody cares about specific movements one made to make dice roll on the table.

Miniatures stylized to resemble characters moving on a board stylized to look like the vampire's mansion ≠ characters fighting in the vampire's mansion.

I've never been in a real fight, thankfully, but I used to practice Muay Thai and boxing, and I feel like a mini-game where you can entrap the opponent conveys the feeling of fighting (and thus immerses me in the game wordl) way better than a mini-game that, technically, allows pieces to move in a manner more accurate to what happens in the Shared Imaginary Space, but degenerates into nothing more than trading attack actions.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Only if you try to pretend that tokens on the board moving like chess pieces has any relation to what the characters in the game world are doing.
SNIP

Let me talk about this from a subjective perspective instead.

Me and my table of players are old. We enjoy traditionalist games where we focus on roleplaying, the social pillar, intrigue, conspiracies etc. But we also enjoy good old-fashioned combat encounters now and then, so that's a component in our gaming, preferably played out on a grid.

In a typical combat encounter, a player might say "I'm gonna run around that car and shiv the dude hiding behind it". The player then count squares to see if he got enough movement, moves his token, and it's time to roll dice. This is a gaming situation many of us recognize.

Now, if one applied your suggestion about the characters moving like chess queens instead, I would have to reply to the player "sorry, your character Bob the Bruiser can only move in straight lines, so you can't turn right to reach the hiding baddie".

Bobs player would most probably tell me to feck off. Now, would it be possible to use chess queen movement rules? Shure. Would it be fun? Possibly, even though I personally doubt it. Would it hinder suspension of disbelief for players used to traditional style grid based movement and lessen their fun? Absolutely, at least for the gamers at my table.

Yes, traditional grid based movement and combat is just a tiny bit more anchored in simulationist gaming than chess queen movement would be. And finicky simulationist aspirations most of us old folks got tired of in the eighties. But I don't really see what further arbitrary combat restrictions would add to a game, more that making it more gamey and removing parts of the game - such as traditional grid based movement rules - that has become transparent to many of us and thereby letting us focus on the parts of the game that we enjoy.

If you and your friends find fun in putting further arbitrary restrictions, such as chess queen movement, on your gaming - good for you! But I can't see what good or fun it would add to my table.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Only if you try to pretend that tokens on the board moving like chess pieces has any relation to what the characters in the game world are doing.

Think about this way: let's imagine that a bunch of PCs are fighting in a mêlée with, say, a vampire. In Blades in the Dark, for example, that would be a group Skirmish roll. This roll serves a simple purpose: the result outlines the boundaries in which a new fiction must be created. On 6, GM must create a new fiction where the PCs succeeded at no extra cost. On 4/5, they must create a fiction where PCs succeeded, but something bad happened. On 1-3, PCs got their asses kicked.

This process has exactly zero relation to what is actually happening in the game world. PCs and vampire don't gather around the table, roll dice, for the losing party to submit to being beaten into a bloody pulp. It's an abstraction, it doesn't need to be translated into fiction, we're only after the results.

In the same way, there's no reason to try to translate every single move in a combat mini-game into something happening in fiction. Pieces moving on the board doesn't have to mean that characters are moving on the battlefield -- they might as well circle around each other, looking for an opening in the opponent's defence. The board will be put aside and forgotten when we'll get the results: who won and at what cost, just like nobody cares about specific movements one made to make dice roll on the table.

Miniatures stylized to resemble characters moving on a board stylized to look like the vampire's mansion ≠ characters fighting in the vampire's mansion.

I've never been in a real fight, thankfully, but I used to practice Muay Thai and boxing, and I feel like a mini-game where you can entrap the opponent conveys the feeling of fighting (and thus immerses me in the game wordl) way better than a mini-game that, technically, allows pieces to move in a manner more accurate to what happens in the Shared Imaginary Space, but degenerates into nothing more than trading attack actions.

Now I have a good understanding of how you are thinking about the relationship between fiction and mechanics. It's a bit idiosyncratic but it makes sense, and it's pretty closely related to the way things like PbtA treat mechanics. One difference between that and your chess-like example is that PbtAs 'close the loop' quickly. Once your move triggers you return to the fiction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Let me talk about this from a subjective perspective instead.

Me and my table of players are old. We enjoy traditionalist games where we focus on roleplaying, the social pillar, intrigue, conspiracies etc. But we also enjoy good old-fashioned combat encounters now and then, so that's a component in our gaming, preferably played out on a grid.

In a typical combat encounter, a player might say "I'm gonna run around that car and shiv the dude hiding behind it". The player then count squares to see if he got enough movement, moves his token, and it's time to roll dice. This is a gaming situation many of us recognize.

Now, if one applied your suggestion about the characters moving like chess queens instead, I would have to reply to the player "sorry, your character Bob the Bruiser can only move in straight lines, so you can't turn right to reach the hiding baddie".

Bobs player would most probably tell me to feck off. Now, would it be possible to use chess queen movement rules? Shure. Would it be fun? Possibly, even though I personally doubt it. Would it hinder suspension of disbelief for players used to traditional style grid based movement and lessen their fun? Absolutely, at least for the gamers at my table.

Yes, traditional grid based movement and combat is just a tiny bit more anchored in simulationist gaming than chess queen movement would be. And finicky simulationist aspirations most of us old folks got tired of in the eighties. But I don't really see what further arbitrary combat restrictions would add to a game, more that making it more gamey and removing parts of the game - such as traditional grid based movement rules - that has become transparent to many of us and thereby letting us focus on the parts of the game that we enjoy.

If you and your friends find fun in putting further arbitrary restrictions, such as chess queen movement, on your gaming - good for you! But I can't see what good or fun it would add to my table.

IMHO you are still conflating the mechanical resolution system with the fiction. Suppose the grid doesn't represent the world AT ALL. In fact let's use poker hands instead. The players play a hand of 5 card draw and the winner gets to describe one move in the fiction. At some point one player has all the chips and they win. Now describe how you beat your opponent.

 

[niklinna]

Let me talk about this from a subjective perspective instead.

Me and my table of players are old. We enjoy traditionalist games where we focus on roleplaying, the social pillar, intrigue, conspiracies etc. But we also enjoy good old-fashioned combat encounters now and then, so that's a component in our gaming, preferably played out on a grid.

This sounds like you simply do not want what @loverdrive is describing.

In a typical combat encounter, a player might say "I'm gonna run around that car and shiv the dude hiding behind it". The player then count squares to see if he got enough movement, moves his token, and it's time to roll dice. This is a gaming situation many of us recognize.

Now, if one applied your suggestion about the characters moving like chess queens instead, I would have to reply to the player "sorry, your character Bob the Bruiser can only move in straight lines, so you can't turn right to reach the hiding baddie".

Bobs player would most probably tell me to feck off. Now, would it be possible to use chess queen movement rules? Shure. Would it be fun? Possibly, even though I personally doubt it. Would it hinder suspension of disbelief for players used to traditional style grid based movement and lessen their fun? Absolutely, at least for the gamers at my table.

It isn't one applying @loverdrive's suggestion—it's the whole table agreeing to give it ago. Of course if you impose such a blatantly arbitrary restriction out of nowhere on somebody used to less-dissociated* mechanics, they're gonna be unhappy. As for "would it be fun?", @loverdrive has already stated that it was lot of fun for their group.

A bit more generally, these were explicitly labeled as experiments, to poke at the invisible walls delimiting their gameplay and see what effect that had. Some of them turned out to be more engaging and fun; others did not. I strongly suspect that, regardless of that kind of outcome, the exercise gave @loverdrive's group ideas for play using the baseline rules they might not have thought of otherwise.

* Remember, all game mechanics are dissociated to some degree, which is part of @loverdrive's point.

Yes, traditional grid based movement and combat is just a tiny bit more anchored in simulationist gaming than chess queen movement would be. And finicky simulationist aspirations most of us old folks got tired of in the eighties. But I don't really see what further arbitrary combat restrictions would add to a game, more that making it more gamey and removing parts of the game - such as traditional grid based movement rules - that has become transparent to many of us and thereby letting us focus on the parts of the game that we enjoy.

Making it more gamey—or at least recognizing how gamey the game is—seems to be a major part of the point. It's examining the premises of play: Making the transparent (that is, invisible) become visible for purposes of analysis and appreciation.

You could alter grid-based movement in a different way, ditching the "all directions on a square grid are measured by squares", and making a diagonal move cost 1.5x, or ⎷2 if you really wanna get precise. It's still fiddling with what are essentially arbitrary game rules imposed by using a grid in the first place. You could go full freeform and have players measure their movement with strings. And yet you still have turn-based play with each player moving and acting completely independently of the others in serial fashion. That's pretty unanchored and pretty gamey. But folks enjoy it, as you said, and most people rarely think about how artificial and nonrealistic turn-based combat is, it's so common.

A more simulationist "arbitrary" rule change might be this. Every round is split into two phases. In phase 1, all combatants move, essentially simultaneously, without knowledge of how the others are moving. (Obviously, this has practical problems in face-to-face tabletop play, which is why such a system isn't regularly used, but it could be done, and would certainly be straightforward to implement with a virtual tabletop.) In phase 2, all combatants perform whatever actions they want.

You'd have to play this out to really see what impact it has, but some are obvious. You could move to where a foe is with the intent of smashing them, but when you get there, they are gone. This is a thing that can happen in real combat, but it basically doesn't happen in full turn-based combat. You might have a situation where it looks like two combatants would cross paths, in which they should "obviously" be able to engage together in that moment, but these rules don't allow it (you could make a further change to do just that, of course, it's a nested, iterative process after all).

All this is just examining @loverdrive's finger in fine detail when they're pointing at the moon, however. It's the intent behind the "arbitrary" mucking with rules that matters.

If you and your friends find fun in putting further arbitrary restrictions, such as chess queen movement, on your gaming - good for you! But I can't see what good or fun it would add to my table.

You could have just said this bit!

Edit: Fixed a typo.

 

[Celebrim]

Now I have a good understanding of how you are thinking about the relationship between fiction and mechanics. It's a bit idiosyncratic but it makes sense, and it's pretty closely related to the way things like PbtA treat mechanics. One difference between that and your chess-like example is that PbtAs 'close the loop' quickly. Once your move triggers you return to the fiction.

There is a big difference between a system using fortune in the beginning and producing a transcript of play by pure narration, and a system using fortune in the middle and producing a transcript of play through process of play.

In one situation we know that a character hid behind a pillar to get cover because we know a priori that they must have done something to succeed and we chose "hid behind a pillar" from free narration because we had authorial permission at that moment. In the other system we know that a character hid behind a pillar because they choose that as a literal move within the fiction as it was being constructed, and we won't know until after the move how it impacted the chances of success.

You seem to be arguing that we can play a system that produces a transcript of play through process of play and then afterwards ignore the transcript of play and narrate it how we wish. And I suppose you could do that. No one is going to stop you. But you'll end up with two whole transcripts of play, which won't agree with each other. And only one of those transcripts will be produced by the game. The other is optional and occurs wholly outside of the game. This from my experience means that the latter is highly unlikely to occur, and that in fact the transcript produced by the process of play will dominate because the other transcript is useless unless you are really attempting to novelize your game into a piece of literature - which is a wholly different process than the game.

 

[loverdrive]

Now I have a good understanding of how you are thinking about the relationship between fiction and mechanics. It's a bit idiosyncratic but it makes sense, and it's pretty closely related to the way things like PbtA treat mechanics. One difference between that and your chess-like example is that PbtAs 'close the loop' quickly. Once your move triggers you return to the fiction.

Some PbtA games have pretty elaborate moves (Undying immediately comes to mind), but yes, pretty much.

I like games that demand skill, and I like storytelling games, but if skill being tested is navigating fiction, it hinders the storytelling possibilities. The solution I've found is to replace dice with a skill-based resolution rather than luck-based one, while keeping all the storytelling stuff jntact.

Which, when put that way, sounds ludicrously mundane.

 

[John Dallman]

To use a videogame example: JRPGs normally don't even try to pretend that two parties actually stand around, not moving, and swing their swords at the air in front of them, somehow dealing damage to the enemies. Yet it doesn't stop people from being immersed in Final Fantasy.

Aha, the difference in our viewpoints is becoming clearer.

To me, computer games, be they JRPGs, Doom 3 or original Space Invaders, are a completely different form of story from a TTRPG. The things in a TTRPG that can be meaningfully derived from them are limited to images, not plots or mechanics. Trying to base TTRPG gameplay on them is analogous to trying to adapt an oil painting into a Looney Tunes cartoon.

I don't like term "immersion" in general, mostly because I profoundly don't understand it. When someone describes what immersion is, I always have to wonder: "isn't this just... enjoying the game?".

It's the experience of being, subjectively, within the game, seeing it in the mind's eye, thinking, feeling and acting as the character. When you're playing that way, you want the game abstractions to relate fairly closely to things happening within the game reality. If they don't, you get dumped out of immersion, which is subjectively unpleasant and wastes time.

You'll appreciate that in this style of playing, steering the narrative in ways that aren't done through character actions is rather difficult to think about, and not helpful to the experience.

...the way I see it, combat in 5e (or any other game with a dedicated combat sub-system) is just an extended resolution mechanic. "Disarming a trap is resolved by rolling dice" isn't any less detached from what actually happens in the gameworld than "a violent confrontation is resolved by a game of chess".

A GM who is being supportive of immersed play will frequently describe a fair amount about such a trap, enough to let the player imagine it in a fair amount of detail. One has to be aware that the player and GM have substantial shared ignorance, and not try to go too far in this. However, reducing that shared ignorance, by learning about lockpicking (or safe-blowing, or archery, or the many other things that characters do that are outside everyday experience) can enhance play no end. Yes, this is a way of playing that rewards player skill and experience. So do most kinds of game outside TTRPGs.

Seeing your mate wearing his anime T-shirt instead of the Dark Lord of Dark Darkness, I think, does more to break the illusion that you are "there" than any mechanic possibly could, so there's must be something else.

Once one is immersed, that T-shirt is hardly visible and certainly insignificant.