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

[TwoSix]

Look, if you have to start your post out with “I mean nothing insulting with what I’m about to say” you probably could’ve done something different. He could’ve left it at “childhood make believe” instead of picking a deliberately provocative way to word things as seemed to be common in that culture during the early forge period.

I’m glad we’ve moved beyond that nonsense, and most of the people involved have more thoughtful and interesting things to say from 1-2 decades later, even if there’s nuggets back there that are still interesting (I generally paraphrase things because I don’t feel the need to quote entire blocks, and can distill the essence).

That blog post is from 2020.

 

[The Firebird]

“Storygames” is terrible and doesn’t say anything and is implicitly dismissive in the way “hardcore gamers” derided video games like Gone Home as “walking simulators.”

It was the name adopted by some practitioners for a forum that was active for years. I don't mean it as an insult. The local narrative game club in my old city called themselves "story games --city--".

 

[zakael19]

Also, I'm not talking here about what was a one-time experience out of 43 years of play; I'm talking about the much more fleeting frustration of failure at a task (such as picking a lock) rendering you unable to move forward until-unless you come up with and implement a plan B (which itself might not work). Even this seems unacceptable to you, and I just don't get it.

You’re picking a concept of game-running apart by relying on an absurdist and constructed example.

We’ve said many times that people who actually run games this way would simply not set up the fiction so the scene hits a locked door in a vacuum. That’s already boring to start, before we get to failure.

 

[clearstream]

Narrativism includes the phenomenon of narrative immersion.

Game mechanics, by themselves, are too simplistic to paint the details that immersion requires, including the immersive interactivity when players spontaneously describe how they interact with the details of a scene. Mechanics, nevermind game mechanics, can never anticipate all of the possibilities that players might instigate. Too many possibilities can only be resolved by narrative adjudication without referencing mechanics directly.

If one forces players to limit every interaction to an assemblage of certain mechanics, that limitation itself dispels narrative immersion.

Simulationism is strictly mechanical, like writing code for a computer game. For a table top, its complexity and predeterminism forces tension against both gamist simplicity and narrativist possibilities.

The assertion that simulationism is strictly mechanical doesn't seem right to me, although I understand the tradition that informs it. If Tuovinen is roughly right then the aims of simulationism can be achieved without necessitating a "strictly mechanical" game with "complexity and predeterminism". FKR advocates furnished with their invisible rulebooks seem to testify to a less strictly mechanical pathway to an elevated appreciation of subject.

 

[zakael19]

It was the name adopted by some practitioners for a forum that was active for years. I don't mean it as an insult. The local narrative game club in my old city called themselves "story games --city--".

I don’t see it used much any more beyond people being dismissive, and I think as this thread has demonstrated in incredible detail that categorizing games is somewhat less useful then play or what we’re seeking to do.

@Micah Sweet is looking to play a game focused largely on simulating a complete fictional world and exploring that. I’d put him pretty far out on the extreme side of that position IMO. I don’t think that has much to do with what rules he picks for it, although clearly some will fight back.

 

[TwoSix]

The assertion that simulationism is strictly mechanical doesn't seem right to me, although I understand the tradition that informs it. If Tuovinen is roughly right then the aims of simulationism can be achieved without necessitating a "strictly mechanical" game with "complexity and predeterminism". FKR advocates furnished with their invisible rulebooks seem to testify to an elevated appreciation of subject.

And Tuovinen also discusses the utility of “rules-heavy” and “rules-light” to various flavors of Sun within the blog post.

 

[zakael19]

And Tuovinen also discusses the utility of “rules-heavy” and “rules-light” to various flavors of Sun within the blog post.

I think the most interesting game for me here is Errant, which draws a fun distinction between Rules and Procedures:

"Errant is rules light, procedures heavy...procedures are not rules, but neither are they vague, general guidance. They provide a framework to structure the game, and can be adjusted, deviated from, ignored, hacked, mangled, stolen, or seasoned to taste."

(Errant is probably the most interesting D20 game I've seen in that it tries to squarely tackle so many of the issues identified by various people here with classic D&D while sticking to a "roll a d20 and get a number" checks style of play)

 

[Lanefan]

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?

There's a huge difference between "winning all the time" because the game says I have to and "winning all the time" because of what I've done as a good player of said game.

Never mind that it's not about winning all the time but about reducing the odds of losing - in other words, it's about making that 10% difference that you mock as being so trivial.

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.

Of course. But you can take steps to reduce that risk and those steps should be mechanically rewarded. The bolded bit would indicate you agree with me on this.

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.

And this makes loads more sense than what I saw earlier, which implied that the roll couldn't be modified by anything the character did in the fiction. That it can puts to rest many of my concerns with at least that part of it.

 

[The Firebird]

I don’t see it used much any more beyond people being dismissive, and I think as this thread has demonstrated in incredible detail that categorizing games is somewhat less useful then play or what we’re seeking to do.

The group in question is still using it. But if you prefer, "Narrative Games" or "Indie RPGs" mean pretty much the same thing practically. I mean for advertising, for finding new groups, if people tell you they want this kind of game you get what they mean. I don't think it is exhaustive. But it's much more effective than GNS.

 

[TwoSix]

The group in question is still using it. But if you prefer, "Narrative Games" or "Indie RPGs" mean pretty much the same thing practically. I mean for advertising, for finding new groups, if people tell you they want this kind of game you get what they mean. I don't think it is exhaustive. But it's much more effective than GNS.

The problem is “OSR” and “traditional” are way too similar to each other to be 2 of the 3 categories; it’s roughly equivalent to categorizing mammals as “big cats”, “small cats” and “everything else”.