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

[clearstream]

That's like saying that if you miss in combat, it's actually a hit.

If I understand correctly, it's a change to the information and/or decision space. In past threads that's sometimes been overlooked. I imagine its import varies player to player.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

...okay?

Game design is not the same as game teaching. I understand that the people who enact rules (or laws) may or may not be perfect. I don't really...care? Not for this, anyway. My concern is categorizing what we make games for. Hence, why I have said every time "game-(design-)purposes". Because it's about the purposes we put into design. I find that many designers have...an extremely, indeed overwhelmingly lax attitude about this.

Or, to use your analogy there, they've blown off teleology entirely in writing their laws, and thus get confused when those laws lead to problems regardless of the quality of those who enforce them....unless those people functionally re-write the law constantly to not produce stupid results.

I think we need a middle ground here. As an engineer I need to understand the requirements for a thing, and the wider context of its use. However what I really really need to do, is make it actually work! Translated to RPGs, what I see is a world full of games that are appallingly bad at explaining their workings, both in terms of why and how. D&D manages to get away with this due to network effects, basically. It's still a problem. Other games generally fail to catch fire, as you kind of need tribal knowledge to really make them work. Of course the industry has gotten better about this, to a degree.

 

[Lanefan]

Because like I said, the GM will never be able to provide the amount of information that would be available to the character. For the character, there is no cypher through which the world is filtered.

That's where the player's imagination has to step up, taking what the DM describes and fleshing it out into a more complete scene. Most of the time, any conflicts between the DM's imagination and the player's are going to be utterly trivial, e.g. the DM might imagine the bartender as being clean-shaven while the player imagines a mustache and goatee, or the DM imagines the wagon covers as being off-white while the player sees them as a draker shade of gray. Who cares, as long as the generalities agree.

The only time this conflict of imagination matters is if-when it's about something significant enough to maybe affect play, at which point the player should ask for clarification.

 

[Lanefan]

That's like saying that if you miss in combat, it's actually a hit.

It's more like saying that if you miss in combat, in order to slay your foe you're going to have to attack at least once more.

 

[Enrahim]

It's clear that you're frustrated, but I'm struggling a bit to work out what I'm missing.

Yes. And just to clarify - I think we are almost 100% aligned. The frustration was in that I felt like I had failed in conveying my message, and I couldn't determine why from your responses. This extraordinary post however gives me some solid holds to make a guess. I think I have identified some different assumptions we have without expressing them that could explain the confusion:

First is that I read Touvinen as proposing a formulation of sim that covered different ground than before. This as opposed to just clarifying the old concept. In particular I interpreted this as making some cases previously falling under the nar umbrella to be shifted into this new sim concept. This would invalidate earlier discussions related to the boundaries between nar and sim. As you are pointing to those sources in your analysis I assume now you are interpreting it as rather an attempt at clarifying the sim concept while preserving the same scope?

Unrelated to this we are also seemingly interpreting differently what the GM story hour say about the GM in particular. I guess we both share the understanding that this section describes how a spesific technique can support sim play? The way I understand that is that in this description sim play is presumed understood, and hence it do not in any way try to define sim. "The GM decides what play will be about, but the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness." I think is the crucial formulation we might be reading differently. You seem to read it as "In any situation where GM decides what play will be about, and the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness, we have a sim game"? I read it as "If you have a sim game, then a technique to consider is that the GM decides what play will be about, but the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness".

The important difference is that with my reading we can have a game where the GM decides what play will be about, and the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness, but that is incoherent! This is the situation I have tried to be exploring - so if you have implicitely assumed this could not be the case from your reading, it is no wonder if you have been confused.

I have also identified some other unexpressed assumptions I have been using that I am not certain you are sharing. So I will try to list them explicitely here:
1: Creative agenda is primarily defined on singular actions.
2: To talk about play as a whole to follow a creative agenda, all participants must follow that agenda (make actions with that agenda)
3: If the various players follow different agenda play is rather described as incoherent.
4 The GM is a participant in play per point 2 and 3.
(There are some subtelties related to hybrid play, and that 2 is of course never pure, but this is the simplified mental model I am working under when I have been making unnuanced claims like I have done in this reply chain)

So the spesific example I have been looking at is how the incoherent situation where a GM is joining with a narrativistic creative agenda, but the players are joining with a different agenda. That might on the surface look very much like "story time" - the coherent sim mode. The difference would just appear in cases where the agendas are put under stress. The standard failure mode here is that the GM start introducing elements because the GM themselves think it makes cool story, rather than for them to be interesting to engage with. NPCs that take over the narrative and outshines the PCs is possibly the best known of these.

And this is where the difference between homebrew and prepublished become critical. If you run Dragonlance, noone can suspect you for just pushing your own ego unless you happen to be Hickman. This is not so obvious with a homebrew setting. It could be that you honestly are curious to see what the players would do with it. But it could also be that you just want to show off the cool stuff you have made and gather feedback. One of these I consider "story time" in the sense described by Touvinen, the other I do not understand as "story time" but rather a ticking bomb of incoherence.

 

[FrogReaver]

I rather cynically refer to this as "using a wrench as a hammer", but even my comment acknowledges that you can force a system to handle things its not really designed for.

Sure but I think what we are trying to get to is what about those games make them designed for that. Why does that particular design work good for X and other designs work good for Y. Where X might be narrativism and Y simulation, or really anything else.

 

[Pedantic]

If I understand correctly, it's a change to the information and/or decision space. In past threads that's sometimes been overlooked. I imagine its import varies player to player.

Combat is actually an interesting counter point, precisely because it's always a timer. Assuming a standard battle without extra win conditions, you're trying to get the opponent's HP down before some threshold before the party's. Assuming some standardized DPR and that PCs can't do anything fun with breakpoints, each action that you miss and don't apply damage is another tick against the party's HP.

I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen a game that does away with PC side HP altogether, and abstracts the party's cohesion as a clock, that's simply set at the start and ticked up with each round and/or enemy action. There's probably an interesting answer to the healing problem in there somewhere.

Anyway, if you have imminent time pressure on any situation, then you never need to introduce new complications, because each action declaration has an understood cost immediately. Perhaps there's a model of play that drives aggressively toward such tense situations with limited action space; some kind of modified scene framing (situation framing?) that requires the GM to set a clock before the players are called on to roll.

You'd hopefully get something a little like skill challenges, without adhoc action design and more specific victory conditions.

That's sort of what I shoot for with a Take 10/20 model filling the space outside those situations, and with less principled pressure on putting the PCs in them.

 

[Faolyn]

If I understand correctly, it's a change to the information and/or decision space. In past threads that's sometimes been overlooked. I imagine its import varies player to player.

It's "nothing happens." For all we know, the answer was correct, but it needed to be sung, or said in a particular language. Therefore, it's not actually useful information at all, and it's certainly not "something happens that moves the game along."

 

[Micah Sweet]

Do they really need to? I mean, we can take from context what people mean in cases like this.

You don't need to say the word to present your opinions as objective. That's my point.

 

[Pedantic]

It's "nothing happens." For all we know, the answer was correct, but it needed to be sung, or said in a particular language. Therefore, it's not actually useful information at all, and it's certainly not "something happens that moves the game along."

Perhaps some reframing of what part of the game loop is actually being engaged is relevant here. Players basically do two things: ask the GM for more information about the situation and declare actions that take them to a new situation. Should some of these failures be viewed more as part of the first activity rather than the latter? Or heck, is the roll sometimes determining which of those two activities the PC gets?

You could imagine a modified fail forward type rule that doesn't require the situation change, but does require the GM to detail more about it.