D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Micah Sweet]

Speaking of which, I did find this - from the introduction to the blog - interesting:

You’re reading a rpg theory article about a rather specialized topic; even if you’ve played roleplaying games for years, it’s possible that the ideas and concerns expressed in this article are things you have never yet considered yourself. “RPG theory” is a form of art theory, an attempt by practitioners of roleplaying to understand, verbalize and model what happens during the activity. Although roleplaying is a pretty young art form, it already has let’s say three or four distinct schools of theory, and a bevy of specialized vocabulary. RPG theory is useful for hardcore hobbyists, but it takes as much study as any other art theory to get any insights, and those insights are generally of a sort only useful for veteran practitioners. Theory is something you move on to when you’ve exhausted the immediate development potential in your everyday play and want to develop your skills and understanding further. If you’re happy with your gaming, I propose that the time for RPG theory is not yet; come back to it when you’ve grown dissatisfied and are seeking solutions.​

​

My specific RPG theory topic here goes back to the early ’00s; I’ll be restating and commenting upon a few parts of an influential rpg theory scheme called the GNS theory. .. . . This Ron Edwards fellow whose work I’ll be commenting on here is Ron Edwards, my rpg guru, a powerful game designer and the single most important theorist in the history of rpgs. You could do much worse than studying his work. Ron currently works out of Adept Play, a sort of combined blog-forum thing. I haven’t followed his work in real-time recently (I am frankly a bit intimidated by Ron, and don’t want to be a pest), but I have no doubt whatsoever that you’re making a grave mistake by reading my stuff instead of his.​

That last sentence is disarmingly modest! But as a whole this framing is pleasingly honest. It's not an "I like what I like" essay.

Sounds like a request to get people off the thread if they're happy with their current play.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Since we're talking about fail forward, that's not an option.


We've explained this: it's not interesting or fun. It does nothing but stall the game. It accomplishes nothing useful.


But does a little but of frustration actually make the game better? Or is it just what you're used to?


Not an answer. For me, reading it over and over again, hoping to catch mistakes, just locks me more and more into a single way to run the adventure and makes me less able to improvise when the players go their own way.


Or it can lead to anger or boredom. Was everyone having fun in those two and a half sessions? Was everyone happy to see that they repeatedly failed to solve what you called a simple puzzle?

It accomplishes the goal of "nothing happens" being a logical outcome in some circumstances, and wanting said logical outcome to be possible in play.. Since that goal isn't important to you personally, it seems irrelevant.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's just it - the way this is being presented, it sounds very much like the GM not only won't reward you for smart play but by the rules of the game, can't.

Presented by whom?

Further, by your logic, the exact same thing happens in D&D. You can't ever meaningfully eliminate the chance of missing on attacks, hence, you're never rewarded for clever approaches in combat. You can't ever do more than a tiny shift (usually about a 10 percentage point shift--meaning if you'd fail 2/5ths of the time before, WOWZERS BATMAN, you now fail a bit less than 1/3 of the time!) In fact, I'm almost certain you specifically were one of the people who railed at Fail Forward because it would mean perfectly winning the game all the time forever.

Now you're saying it's unacceptable because it doesn't let you perfectly win the game all the time forever?

Dungeon World play is a conversation. If the conversation reveals that a roll shouldn't happen, a roll won't happen. E.g. if the player were to (say) do a bunch of preparation that included bribing the locksmith to give her a master key for the locks, well, no lock picking will happen. Likewise, if they took a risk and paid off the staff of the house they intend to rob to leave a door or window unbolted, boom, no roll needed at that point, because they already took some kind of risk elsewhere. Or if she visited previously while pretending to be a collector of fine china (recall Holmes trained Watson to do this on his behalf!), she could examine locks in a free moment, which would provide a bonus when she uses that knowledge later.

You can't cut out the risk. There will always be risk something doesn't go quite according to plan.

Maybe the issue is not quite knowing how the roll works? DW is a 2d6+mod system. If the total result, counting all modifiers, is 6-, you fail. This is universal. All rolls (excluding damage, of course--so all rolls about success) fail if the total is 6 or less. All rolls (same caveats) that total up at 7-9 are a partial success. All rolls that total up 10+ are full success. That means getting even a single +1 has a dramatic effect, much more significant even than a +2 or +3 in D&D, since the difficulty is nonlinear. Going from +0 (most common result is complication, failure is much more likely than outright success) to +3 (success is the most common result, and now outnumbers both failure AND complication) is a huge deal. And if you were somehow to get more than +4 to a roll, outright failure is genuinely off the table.

So, frankly, your argument here is ridiculous. No. Preparation does matter. A lot. But that preparation will almost always be, itself, a roll where you took a risk on some other thing or things, or where someone else took a risk to help you. Sometimes, preparation might obviate the need for a roll at all. Sometimes, it formally does give you a bonus (e.g. Discern Realities gives +1 forward--that is, +1 to your next roll--"when acting on the answers", meaning, when you first take an action which acts upon what you learned).

If you can give me even a single example where someone said preparation cannot matter and will never be rewarded, I'll grant your claims. Until then, this is the equivalent of someone saying that because preparation cannot eliminate the possibility of failing when rolling a d20 in D&D, then preparation is worthless and GMs rewarding player choices is impossible.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Since we're talking about fail forward, that's not an option.


We've explained this: it's not interesting or fun. It does nothing but stall the game. It accomplishes nothing useful.


But does a little but of frustration actually make the game better? Or is it just what you're used to?


Not an answer. For me, reading it over and over again, hoping to catch mistakes, just locks me more and more into a single way to run the adventure and makes me less able to improvise when the players go their own way.


Or it can lead to anger or boredom. Was everyone having fun in those two and a half sessions? Was everyone happy to see that they repeatedly failed to solve what you called a simple puzzle?

Does everyone have to be happy with the game all the time?

 

[Enrahim]

Summarize?

Summarising a huge very technical post like that without grossly oversimplifying will be a very tall order. But I will give it a try partly to also try to organise my own new thoughts.

The main thesis is that the defining aspect of the simulationistic mode is that its play reward loop is dominated by curiosity being satisfied. This as opposed to naritivism which has self expression as the key part of the reward loop, and gamism that has ambition.

So a key aspect to discuss the simulationistic mode is to look at what the player's are curious about. Different techniques are good for different kinds of curiosity. Among those potential techniques are world simulation, and genre emulation.

End of summary, adding some examples of my own.

For instance it you wonder what would happen if the greek and roman pantheon met, you likely would look at how to do genre emulation of ancient myths. However if you are curious about what would have happened if Alexander the great with his peak army suddently was time shifted to year 0AD then you might rather want to look for some solid world simulation to help you figure out that.

If you have ideas for what would be really cool if Alexander had done in that situation and want to explore those, then maybe you would want to look into narativistic techniques.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You don’t get to make that determination for them.

They don't get to declare universal truths either.

Whether or not they feel like it is D&D, it is. Their feelings are irrelevant to the identity of the thing.

 

[FrogReaver]

They don't get to declare universal truths either.

Whether or not they feel like it is D&D, it is. Their feelings are irrelevant to the identity of the thing.

Sorry but you don’t get to decide the objective identity of the thing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Maybe so. I was thinking about how to get around dividing them on qualities relating to realism and immersion (not that I think either mode of play necessarily excludes an element of the other.) Some options that came to mind were what might be counted proper subjects, and how play is oriented toward those subjects.

Narrativism seems to choose (or often choose) as its proper subjects problems of the human condition. The orientation looks like dramatic resolution of connected premises.

Simulationism can focus on human condition (so admittedly that part's wrong) but typically seems interested in something beyond that. Or perhaps is interested in the human condition only in the context of or how it plays out given something beyond it (Planescape could fall into that.)

Play is often about what we do in and how we are affected by the subject. The appreciating and elevating isn't achieved through contemplation alone, but through pretending to inhabit it. As others (e.g. @FrogReaver) attempted to get at, something is going on where it matters to pretend that subject exists independently of characters. Would exist even if characters did not.

The above isn't, I would say, well thought out. More mulling over various observations and worries.

Well, as I've argued previously in various other threads, I don't divide things in this way. I don't claim my game-(design-)purposes are exhaustive either. There might be other paths I've failed to consider. But these ones are how I see it:

• Score & Achievement: What maps closest to "gamism". There is some kind of metric which measures success, whether "you must reach this height" or "you must finish this quickly" or otherwise, and clear results or events which you can wear like a badge of honor if you reach them (e.g. "I beat the Tomb of Annihilation" or "my group defeated a Tarrasque").
• Groundedness & Simulaiton: What maps closest to what I call "hard" "simulationism", that is, simulation in the "rules-as-physics" direction. There is an establishment of ground rules and understandable, cognizable world which does not change unless for established reasons, and play is driven primarily by posing situations or events and then responding to them through creative application of abilities and tools (e.g. materials, gear, allies, etc.)
• Concept & Emulation: This is the "other" kind of "simulationism", which never sat right with me as being lumped with the above. Here, instead of setting a ground floor, this establishes genre conventions which will be upheld (or possibly critiqued), in order to explore an idea, a concept, a social construction, etc., so that play can proceed by bringing to life a particular group or class of stories.
• Values & Issues: What maps closest to "narrativism". Players and GMs alike define what things matter to them, what drives their character(/the world's inhabitants, for the GM), what pushes things toward uncertain moments, and then play occurs by asking, and finding out, why and how those uncertain moments resolve, and in doing so, what subsequent uncertain moments result, generally with the idea that both characters and world will be changed by this process of resolution.

No two of these game-(design-)purposes is incompatible with any other in the abstract. All of them can prioritize "realism" or "verisimilitude". Though G&S is obviously the most interested in that goal, it is neither exclusive to it, nor always the most important thing for it. Even G&S makes concessions to the inherently abstract nature of gaming, and may, under circumstances narrower than the others, even make sacrifices of "realism" in the name of making something feel more grounded/natural/etc. despite actually being less.

V&I is the newest kid on the block, though its roots trace back to pretty early on in TTRPGing--it just only got attention and intentional development in the past like 20 years. S&A is unequivocally the oldest (having evolved out of wargaming), but G&S came right on its heels and has been frequently in tension with S&A ever since (and, ironically, both often lay claim to the mantle of "realism"--but they mean different things by "realism", one of the reasons I strongly dislike that term.) C&E is, in my experience, unfairly treated like a mere subset of G&S, when in fact the two are usually quite different in both goals and execution, only being similar at a very high degree of abstraction--at which point most of these game-(design-)purposes are fundamentally similar.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sorry but you don’t get to decide the objective identity of the thing.

And they do?

4e is D&D. Objectively, it is. This isn't my decision. It's the decision of the people who are legally entitled to make things called "D&D".

If you don't like that, well, I'm sorry, your opinion is factually invalid. You can still have factually invalid opinions. Lots of people do.

The claim is particularly risible when 4e has far^100 more similarities to any other version of D&D than it does to any other TTRPG...except the ones consciously made by 4e creators or 4e fans trying to specifically emulate it.

But go off, bud. Tell me all the ways 4e is somehow an alien from Mars masquerading as D&D. Tell me how the opinions of all the people who loved the Fourth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons are all wrong, because other people think 4e cannot possibly be D&D.

 

[FrogReaver]

Summarising a huge very technical post like that without grossly oversimplifying will be a very tall order. But I will give it a try partly to also try to organise my own new thoughts.

The main thesis is that the defining aspect of the simulationistic mode is that its play reward loop is dominated by curiosity being satisfied. This as opposed to naritivism which has self expression as the key part of the reward loop, and gamism that has ambition.

So a key aspect to discuss the simulationistic mode is to look at what the player's are curious about. Different techniques are good for different kinds of curiosity. Among those potential techniques are world simulation, and genre emulation.

End of summary, adding some examples of my own.

For instance it you wonder what would happen if the greek and roman pantheon met, you likely would look at how to do genre emulation of ancient myths. However if you are curious about what would have happened if Alexander the great with his peak army suddently was time shifted to year 0AD then you might rather want to look for some solid world simulation to help you figure out that.

If you have ideas for what would be really cool if Alexander had done in that situation and want to explore those, then maybe you would want to look into narativistic techniques.

I view genre simulation as the more general term. ‘Real Word-like’ would just be one specific genre or aspect of a genre.