@pemerton That helps. Some of the problems seem to be related to excessive levels of granularity that certain editions of D&D provide (and expectations of such detail regardless of its value). It seems like some of those techniques could still be leveraged provided that they are appropriate to the premise. For example, logistics might matter in a game of exploration (what’s out there in the unknown?), but maybe not at the level of granularity that D&D goes. Does it matter that we have X pounds or food or have enough rations for Y days of travel? It seems like the latter should be what matters.
@Fenris-77 Your examples help. I’ve run run Dungeon World before and tried incorporating it in the past. It clashed badly with Pathfinder 1e. Determining when I should make a move was one of the problems. In your approach, do you just consider the aggregate of rolls regardless of what they are doing? It sounds like it in your example (the wizard failed, the fighter and thief succeeded with consequences, and the cleric succeeded). Those were different rolls, but the aggregate in that turn is not complete succeed.
Let’s pivot the discussion a bit. Is there a right to dream (Simulationism)? That’s what I want (create the initial setting and situations, then play to see what happens when they meet the PCs). However, there’s this nagging thing in the back of my mind that says Simulationism might not actually be distinct from Story Now. I can’t remember where I read it though, and my search skills fail me. Superficially, the way I describe my agenda above sounds similar, but maybe it’s not? Again, thanks everyone for the conversation. It’s been helpful talking through these ideas to figure out what it is I’m trying to accomplish.
I would say that in my style of gaming conflict resolution is very much like a wargame. Preparation & Tactics matter greatly in the outcome. In fact one of the things about 4e that I hated was the way the game encouraged the PCs to just wade into the enemy. In my OSR games, doing such things means almost certain death. If you enter a large room, and see a lot of enemies, you fall back to a defensible position. At least at lower levels. This is less important at higher levels but tactics and position matter the strategy is just different.
All that stuff is desirable to me. I want people to succeed because they played well. I also coincidentally believe that such an outlook and approach is the best way to "be your character". You are seeing through your characters eyes and acting as your character. It's why I avoid most things that require the player to stop making decisions as their character. The decision process is what is important and I want it to be a character centric thing.
I agree with you, in the context that this is how and why I run my Pathfinder 2e games the way I do, they have the same energy in terms of player/character association-- I was heavily influenced by this article and Angry's discussion of the Murky Mirror.
Personally, I like a mix, I like instances where you can just wade into the enemy, but also instances where that ranges from 'desperate fight' to 'actually impossible' depending on the nature of the opposition-- PF2e has been interesting in this respect because the encounters often take good tactical play to win, even when we do wade in, its like 'combat as war lite' because in hard fights, when we are fighting the winner is still the person who stacks the deck the best, its just you can do that to some degree with in-combat options. Like, fighting creatures stronger than you usually means using spells to weaken their action economy, spells and other abilities to drop their AC so that you hit and crit more-- you have to play well, but its performed in a way that you also feel like a big damn hero a lot of the time, since you're still squaring up and going blow for blow, just creating openings for good tactical play.
On the other side, the way encounters are designed and difficulty is governed, its easy to set up encounters that combine and split-- if a low difficulty encounter is worth 60 exp of monsters, a moderate difficulty encounter is worth 80 exp a severe difficulty encounter is worth 120 exp and an extreme difficulty encounter is worth 160 exp, then its not hard to imagine how we might have an area, that if handled badly would result in an encounter at the higher end of that scale, but with good combat-as-war style play, be reduced or broken down into smaller chunks, if you divide and conquer, you could turn that into a few trivial/low/moderate encounters, instead of one big sever or extreme one.
I think at some point, when I'm ready, I'm going to start a new thread about this style of play, because I'm starting to piece together a vision of what it could be.
Honestly this thread is really helping me crystallize my new play style, as we discuss the interaction between player agency and all of these different elements. I'm starting to see where the borders really are, where the limitations are, and how they might be transgressed to make room at the table. To tie it all back into the original thread topic, what if we simply worked player establishment back in, but much like a Story Now game does, limited its scope to prevent it from interfering with the player-as-character in overcoming challenges element? What if we did the same for neotrad style backstory and character development?
This I think brings me to @kenada 's pivot, and look at a quote from the conclusion in the linked text.
So! Is there an expected, future metagame payoff, or is the journey really its own reward? Is Simulationist play what you want, or is it what you think you must do in order, one day, to get what you want?
I think that where Edwards ends up going astray to some extent, is that the answer is "Both!" When we discuss simulation, the trick is that we're often looking for the full experience of the thing we're trying to do. This has to do with the inherent subjectivity of fun. Take baseball, some people play baseball so they can win and don't enjoy baseball when they aren't winning they only practice and play in games to arrive at the moment of victory, some people enjoy the event nature of a game win or lose and they attend practice to arrive at days when they have an actual game and to enhance it, but some people enjoy going to baseball practice intrinsically whether because its a social event, or because they like the feeling of incremental improvement they see in themselves, some people yet like all of the above, or certain combinations, or unlike watching it played! Some people hate fighting games for the amount of work that goes into really engaging with them, other people are present to fighting games because that process is where the fun is for them. Some people think the alchemy in Witcher is boring and gets in the way of fun, for others it heightens the experience because it makes them feel more like a Witcher.
So whenever we talk about Fun Now vs. Fun Later, as Edwards does in that essay, we're attempting to reach an objective sense of what fun is, so that we can just distill the experience to that thing. But since fun is inherently subjective, rather than objective, the best that Story Now games that try to cut to the fun can do, is prescribe what the fun is and then focus on that experience. Blades in the Dark makes a prescriptive statement that an in-and-out-of-game planning session for a heist isn't fun, and therefore isn't appearing in this game. In this context, the idea that some might recoil from its streamlining makes sense, after all for them, Harper ripped out part of the fun!
I think that the trick is that Simulation play as understood in OSR techniques (procedures that turn notions of 'exploring a world' into game play at the table through mechanics that help to simulate that world and present it, as a logical system) are simply another agenda of play, a 'thing we want to accomplish at the table' or a 'thing we want to experience.'
This brings me back a little to the idea of respect in differing game expectations, and thinking of tastes in inclusive ways rather than exclusive ways. If John thinks only the heist itself is fun, and Gary thinks planning and manually preparing the heist is the fun part, maybe the trick is just making sure John and Gary can respect each other as the game does both. In this context, prescriptive agendas of play just seem like a maladaption to the social conflict of Gary and John trying to chase the other's fun out of the game. Thats an overstatement of course, because prescriptive agendas have a place in creating games that don't have to worry about both John and Gary, and can artistically focus on their concept. But in the context of the gaming table, even that requires John and Gary to have respect for one another, after all, if the group is going to take a break from DND to play some Blades in the Dark, Gary is going to have to put their usual focus aside and the question becomes whether he can enjoy BITD's different way of doing things as an acquired taste, whereas maybe John is going to have to do the same when they both play in Justin's combat as war, hexcrawl sandbox where they don't get to skip to what John feels are the Juicy parts.
One might question why John, Gary, and Justin are playing together in this case at all, but I think that on a practical level, they just are-- its really hard to get everyone on the same page about what agendas mean and how they work, and what everyone finds fun in a game. @Campbell referenced this in their commentary on neo-trad play agendas showing up and misaligning with Story Now agendas. So I don't think its really a matter of should it happen, I think its a matter of doing the labor of reconciling differing play agendas, because even if you don't want to do that labor, you're just going to end up with the labor of policing and purifying your game tables instead.
Let’s pivot the discussion a bit. Is there a right to dream (Simulationism)? That’s what I want (create the initial setting and situations, then play to see what happens when they meet the PCs). However, there’s this nagging thing in the back of my mind that says Simulationism might not actually be distinct from Story Now. I can’t remember where I read it though, and my search skills fail me. Superficially, the way I describe my agenda above sounds similar, but maybe it’s not? Again, thanks everyone for the conversation. It’s been helpful talking through these ideas to figure out what it is I’m trying to accomplish.
I think the debate around what creates a believable and consistent world is at the root of our disagreements. We don't believe them and they are utterly unbelieving that their approach isn't as good as ours at producing a living world. We just don't agree on that fundamentally. For us it won't work. I'm sure of it. When you have groups with players that can't even name their characters in a good way you don't expect them to craft complex consistent fiction on the fly off the top of their head. And when a person does it poorly it ruins the game for everyone else.
So that is the crux of it. They can talk till they are blue in the face but people like me aren't believing it. We don't experience it that way and it doesn't work for us. So all the times we've criticized the game in some way only to produce an extreme backlash that we are all wrong in our description of the problem, just confirms my view that there is something different about the way we perceive roleplaying in some fundamental way. If you want to call it Simulationism vs Narrativism, so be it but I won't because that just opens another whole can of worms.
Obviously more collaborative approaches aren't going to work if you don't have people you can effectively collaborate with. Even in a less collaborative environment (I run some sandbox games and gamist OSR as well) I really would not want to run a game for folks I could not trust on a creative level because at the very least they need to create interesting characters to play and come up with creative solutions to problems they face at the table.
I would never suggest that everyone should play the sort of games I really enjoy or that they somehow missing out. The alchemy at the table is critical. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not. That's true for any creative endeavor.
Personally, Story Now games do work for me, they just hit differently such that they couldn't replace other kinds of games, Edwards dream of a world in which I just engage in a series of tightly designed, low buy-in, fun-now-rather-than-fun-later games just doesn't sound that appealing to me, like something would genuinely be lost. I'll enjoy them in their own right though, especially as games that don't take as much time or effort as my regular games.
A big part of the debate though, is that my viewpoint on them having their place but not necessarily being able to replace other games is treated with contempt by adherents to Edwards thinking and the Story Now Indie RPG Movement. I know that someone is going to take issue with that, but I realized it when I found these posts by Edwards, where he kind of breaks down and says the quiet part out loud.
I wasn't exaggerating when I discussed him using supremacist tactics:
He uses intentionally offensive jargon but claims that those who take his language seriously are in the wrong, forcing his defenders to normalize it under the pretense that he means something different, which we now identify as a primary tactic of the alt right. People like me who identify this are likely to be viewed as unreasonable or hyperbolic, while he's given the benefit of the doubt for his language. The use and protection of this language makes the spaces where Game Design being discussed deliberately less welcoming to his ideological opposition.
He identifies those who haven't bought into his thinking as damaged and dirty, and discussed those who have as being on a path of awakening in terms real supremacists do. Those who don't adhere are compared to children who can't consent to sex, and he insists that they need Story Now games as a form of therapy to be able to do so again. This is a common tactic of colonizers, establishing that the peoples they're colonizing are as children who need to be taught before they can be considered to have the rights of adults, a common justification most of us would know as 'the white man's burden' or as a facet of the spread of Christianity into Indigenous cultures, though here it's obviously used outside a racial or religious context.
He insists that in reality everyone knows he's right, and they just won't admit it, and that this psychological self-deception is intended to protect their illness and the status quo itself, a common refrain the right uses against defenders of multiculturalism. Insisting that everyone else is just too scared to tell it how it is, or just too brainwashed.
The Alt-Right Playbook Series by Innuendo Studios, and their Autopsy of Gamergate Series breaks down a lot of these techniques and comes highly recommended for navigating today's political climate and the presence of the alt-right in spaces like the RPG hobby too, so its worth it outside the context of Story Now gaming-- its a big part of what was happening in the OSR movement in terms of conservatism, here I'm more focused on Ron Edwards tactics, rather than purpose.
But don't believe me? Compare:
More specific to your question, Vincent, I'll say this: that protagonism was so badly injured during the history of role-playing (1970-ish through the present, with the height of the effect being the early 1990s), that participants in that hobby are perhaps the very last people on earth who could be expected to produce all the components of a functional story. No, the most functional among them can only be counted on to seize protagonism in their stump-fingered hands and scream protectively. You can tag Sorcerer with this diagnosis, instantly.
[The most damaged participants are too horrible even to look upon, much less to describe. This has nothing to do with geekery. When I say "brain damage," I mean it literally. Their minds have been harmed.]
I’m more interested in keeping the present 300-year-old culture-germ in America unharmed, than in trying out any experiments in “social justice” … Some people may like the idea of a mongrel America like the late Roman Empire, but I for one prefer to die in the same America that I was born in. Therefore, I’m against any candidate who talks of letting down the bars to stunted brachycephalic South-Italians & rat-faced half-Mongoloid Russian & Polish Jews, & all that cursed scum! You in the Middle West can’t conceive of the extent of the menace. You ought to see a typical Eastern city crowd—swart, aberrant physiognomies, & gestures & jabbering born of alien instincts.
Edwards language is a lot lighter, but the full posts on Brain Damage above, specifically the second one reinforce its presence. You can see a similar contempt, and the overlap in word usage, it honestly wasn't until I quoted it that I noticed they both described their targets with the 'stumped' verbiage. Ugliness ("too horrible to look upon, much less describe") and 'wrong psychology' are freely conflated.
The point is, that I think that Edwards Ideological framework, and the fact that we think in terms of it, makes it difficult to discuss Story Now without attempting to police other styles or place Story Now on a kind of ontological pedestal. The radicalization and creation of a community that doesn't play well with others (in the microcosm of RPG Game Design) is very much the point of his framing. It gives it a missionary character where adherents treat their opposition with paternalistic contempt-- they aren't equals or peers, but problems to be solved.
That sounds awfully paternalistic of you - gaming on easy mode, a classic dodge. Another classic - of course we can't discuss story now because story now fans are all unfriendly radicals. Yeesh. That might work if everyone was one thing or another, but that's not most gamers. Edwards isn't some kind of supreme leader that speaks for anyone else either. I don't like his opinions or his theory set, but I do like many story now games. For a guy who seems to be against them or us thinking, your posts can be awfully divisive in their characterization and rhetoric sometimes.
I think the debate around what creates a believable and consistent world is at the root of our disagreements. We don't believe them and they are utterly unbelieving that their approach isn't as good as ours at producing a living world. We just don't agree on that fundamentally. For us it won't work. I'm sure of it. When you have groups with players that can't even name their characters in a good way you don't expect them to craft complex consistent fiction on the fly off the top of their head. And when a person does it poorly it ruins the game for everyone else.
I think part of the conversation is pedagogical in nature. I can see how that can be patronizing. At the same time, just like I agree with Edwards that “sandbox” is kind of a nebulous and ill-defined term, I also understand the same can be said of “living world”. It’s incredibly broad and can mean different things depending on what you are trying to do. Is it a setting with a rich history? Internal consistency? Does it have moving parts that operate in the background until they come crashing together (into the PCs or the vice versa)? Does it operate more at a status quo? Is the important thing really that the PCs’ actions have consequences, and it’s the fact that the PCs can change the world through what they do what makes it living?
I think the source of this conflict is that there are different ideas (possibly or probably beyond what I posited above) that are viewed as intrinsic to that mode of play, and anything else just doesn’t resonate. It’s like neo-trad play for me. It doesn’t resonate on such a fundamental level that I simply don’t grok it. If someone told me we were going to play an OC campaign, I’d have to bow out. I already have a tendency to cause problems in trad campaigns (and I’m pretty sure I’ve broken at least one), so it’s only fair I don’t screw up people’s character arc thing they want to do. So, I think I understand how a Story Now approach to a living world would not resonate.
I’ve been on both sides of the table in Story Now games with that approach. I’ve run Dungeon World, and we’re playing Scum and Villainy. Our Dungeon World game was fun, but the created setting was incredibly gonzo. I actually felt like everything got screwed up and proffered a restart, but my players seemed to be enjoying it. In retrospect, I should have had a firmer hand in curating things. I think it would have been more fun for me. I think that’s more akin to the “setting-centric” approach described in the essay linked earlier. We were doing something character-centric, and it felt bad to me. In our Scum and Villainy game, there’s an established setting, so we’re adding details instead of fleshing it out. Because of the implied constraint (consistency with the established setting), it’s easier for players to make contributions that are more appropriate for the setting.
While it’s true I want to do most or all of setting creation in my Worlds Without Number game because it’s something I enjoy doing, the practical reality is that my players don’t seem to be equally enthusiastic for it. In our Scum and Villainy game, I am the primary driver of setting contributions. How that works is I say something, and it becomes true (with curation from the GM). For example, I was hurt after our last mission, so I say I’m going to Hello Nurse (a medical clinic where every treatment comes with a happy ending), and now that’s a thing that exists in the setting. When we were looking for jobs, I reached out to one of the people who served under me when I was in the military who had joined the Vigilance (basically the Jedi). Now she is someone who exists, and we have a new contact.
So that is the crux of it. They can talk till they are blue in the face but people like me aren't believing it. We don't experience it that way and it doesn't work for us. So all the times we've criticized the game in some way only to produce an extreme backlash that we are all wrong in our description of the problem, just confirms my view that there is something different about the way we perceive roleplaying in some fundamental way. If you want to call it Simulationism vs Narrativism, so be it but I won't because that just opens another whole can of worms.
My reason for bringing up the Right to Dream is that I’m trying to avoid incoherence. I think I’ve stumbled into that in the past. We have done exploration games where I dialed in on a story thread that seemed interesting to the players, and then the feedback after the campaign is there was less exploration than they expected. I did what I thought they would like, but it apparently undermined the agenda. I’m trying to avoid that. I have been trying to work out principles to keep me honest, but it would be really helpful if someone had already done that thinking. Unfortunately, the discourse around the Right to Dream is pretty lacking.
Take the essay I linked. It frequently quotes Gygax because he writes some nice things, but the role-playing game itself is not about those things. Edwards variously identifies AD&D as Step On Up or incoherent. There’s some stuff on High Concept Simulation, but it feels like a grab bag of classic games. It also suggests that the Right to Dream can be about things like coping with childhood trauma, and then spend several paragraphs talking about reality simulation. That’s a frequent issue I see when trying to find other discussions on it.
That feels wrong to me. The idea I’ve had is it’s game as science experiment. You take an initial situation, setting, plot, or whatever; and then you add PCs to it. After things go in motion, you need to let them play out without interference. Inspired by the idea of the impartial referee in OSR play, I think you need to disclaim any attachment to outcomes. Where Story Now expects you to be a fan of the characters, you need to be a fan of the experiment and its integrity. Based on that, I’d posit that the Right to Dream should be considered something distinct from Story Now even if it overlaps quite a bit (e.g., a story emerges through play even though that’s not necessarily the point).
Update: I also want to add that I’d like to know that what I do is a thing. I can’t imagine that it’s particularly unique. There’s overlap with OSR, but I feel like there’s also some divergence.
That sounds awfully paternalistic of you - gaming on easy mode, a classic dodge. Another classic - of course we can't discuss story now because story now fans are all unfriendly radicals. Yeesh. That might work if everyone was one thing or another, but that's not most gamers. Edwards isn't some kind of supreme leader that speaks for anyone else either. I don't like his opinions or his theory set, but I do like many story now games. For a guy who seems to be against them or us thinking, your posts can be awfully divisive in their characterization and rhetoric sometimes.
Did you feel like responding in any kind of useful way or just levelling unsubstantiated charges of bigotry? Or you could double down again and pick a yet more loaded term to insult people with. I don't think calling people bigots is particularly useful, not set next to some of the already insulting things you've posted.
Dude, stop. This thread has gone on for 10 pages where I've had people trying to insist to me that styles of play I value are just psychological tricks that I'm playing on myself, interrogate my play of Story Now games to try and put my in my place by insinuating I must just be doing it wrong, moving goalposts in regards to terminology to ignore the substance of my posts, and in one case, trying to insist that a game I was referring to must actually be like Fiasco rather than an RPGbecause it didn't fit their narrative, who I asked if they were ok, because no one who has ever looked at the rules text for KoB could possibly believe that and I chose to assume there was some good faith explanation for the disconnect.
I literally substantiated my commentary on Edwards ideology, its right there, there are links and quotes! I didn't even say anything about you believing his stuff, I brought it up because he's being continually cited as a source of vocabulary and theory. I'm asserting that his framework is systemically problematic and leading to a breakdown in the discussion, not that you're some kind of bigot, and now I'm being attacked for it because what, you identify with the movement as a whole, and it couldn't possibly have problematic elements? The dude is one of the cofounders of the community where the movement was sparked.
I play these games too, we're on session 12 of my current Masks campaign, playing almost every week for more than 6 months, and before this I've been playing it off an on since 2016, I have a copy of Blades in the Dark now sitting on the shelf nearby because these discussions inspired me to check out another lauded Story Now game to cross compare with Masks. I wasn't insinuating its gaming on easy mode, the games being accessible and not requiring the same degree of prep as my Pathfinder campaign; where I produce maps, encounters, and treasure parcels and such weekly; is described as a selling point, Edwards discusses low-buy-in in the essays that have been linked here!
What made you think that your posts are even vaguely appropriate?
That might work if everyone was one thing or another, but that's not most gamers. Edwards isn't some kind of supreme leader that speaks for anyone else either. I don't like his opinions or his theory set, but I do like many story now games. For a guy who seems to be against them or us thinking, your posts can be awfully divisive in their characterization and rhetoric sometimes.
