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

[EzekielRaiden]

Agreed. I have my own views about this manifesto, but @EzekielRaiden's objection is, in my view, groundless.

Per those principles:

There is no play--whatsoever--in rules. There is only play in the world. That was explicit: "Abstractions are, by their very nature, mechanistic. Non-playful."

I don't understand how one can "step away from play" and yet still be addressing the world. Yes, you are changing it outside the context of imagining yourself as your character. But that isn't what play was defined as.

Further, we have from point 2: "Outside of diegetic in-character actions, players cannot change the world. The world is sacred: it is apart and cannot be altered except by those forces from within the fictional world."

Yet point 7 is explicitly a way for players to do that. By definition, if we accept that we have "stepped away from play", that is not and cannot be a "diegetic in-character action". And yet now we have the players doing things that are not "diegetic in-character actions"...and the world is being changed.

It very much feels like multiple meanings of "change" and "play" (and probably a few other words) are being used quite fluidly here.

 

[pemerton]

Per those principles:

There is no play--whatsoever--in rules. There is only play in the world. That was explicit: "Abstractions are, by their very nature, mechanistic. Non-playful."

I don't understand how one can "step away from play" and yet still be addressing the world. Yes, you are changing it outside the context of imagining yourself as your character. But that isn't what play was defined as.

<snip>

It very much feels like multiple meanings of "change" and "play" (and probably a few other words) are being used quite fluidly here.

Here are some quotes from the Manifesto:

they [the GM] must adhere to the fictional world created before play begins. . . .

When you as GM are struck with the urge to alter the fictional world outside of your diegetic methods, resist the temptation! As you change the fictional world, you deny the other players at the table their chance to play and have genuine impact on the world. . . .

At each such turn, ask yourself: “Is this abstraction better for the game than simple play?” . . .

If you decide as a table of players to change your game, step away from play and change the world together. Decide what matters and what doesn’t to your play, and change the world based on those desires. . . .

Play in RPGs occurs at the fringes and margins of the abstractions: they are relevant and impactful, but not where the primary act of play occurs.

Your game should focus on play, not mechanisms.​

In my view it's neither ambiguous nor confusing. Play is about engaging the fiction. It's not spelled out, but the manifesto seems to assume a fairly conventional authority distribution, so the players engage the fiction by declaring actions for their PCs, and the GM engages the fiction by working out what happens as a result. Unmediated, freeform engagement with the fiction ("simple play") is elevated over mechanically-mediated play.

Further, we have from point 2: "Outside of diegetic in-character actions, players cannot change the world. The world is sacred: it is apart and cannot be altered except by those forces from within the fictional world."

Yet point 7 is explicitly a way for players to do that. By definition, if we accept that we have "stepped away from play", that is not and cannot be a "diegetic in-character action". And yet now we have the players doing things that are not "diegetic in-character actions"...and the world is being changed.

I think it's pretty clear that point 2 is referring to what players can and can't do in their capacity as players, in the course of play of the game. When play stops, and the participants form a committee to decide on changes to the world so as to change their play, that is not the players acting in the player role.

There are bits of the manifesto that I think are wrong. For instance, there is this:

All rules are abstractions of a larger, more complex fictional reality. They exist to ease complicated processes into something that can be more easily played with—and nothing more.​

This is a variation on, even a parody of, Baker's remark that

Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.​

But whereas Baker's remark is true, the Manifesto's statement is false, given that (i) it sets out some rules for play, and (ii) the rules it states are not abstractions of the sort it describes, and don't serve the purpose it attributes to rules. (Maybe some fine distinction could be drawn between "rules" and "principles". But I don't see the point, in this context at least.)

However, the manifesto's use of "play", though - and its injunction that non-"diegetic" changes to the world should be done collaboratively and outside of the context of play - are clear enough.

 

[Genghis Don]

Mod Note:

Watch your language, please. Efforts to circumvent the language filter will be treated like regular violations.

I had no idea what filter I was circumventing, or that there even was one. Knowing there is, now, I'll probably just leave*...and suggest you lot "watch your censorship & authoritarian tendencies, getting a machine to censor for you earns you the same total disgust & disregard it does when a person does it". More, even.

*kidding, I know petty tyrants & dictator wannabees like you LIVE to ban anyone who crosses you in the slightest way

 

[Maxperson]

Yes, that's possible. It is also possible for many other things to happen. It's all contextual.

What if the house is on fire? Then is the failure to unlock the door the same as if the house was not on fire? Or would you say the consequences are then different?

That example is different in that the fire was happening and known before the attempt to pick the lock was even started, and will remain on fire whether the attempt is successful or not. Much like the failure at the buy milk check resulting in an annoyed spouse. That spouse was there when you left and would be there whether you succeeded or not. This is how traditional DMs run things, not how fail forward works as I've seen it used.

Following the above examples, in a traditional game the cook would be in that kitchen even if the pick locks check is successful.

When it comes to picking a lock, the overwhelmingly most likely thing to occur is that..............nothing happens other than failure. Guards coming around the corner right then is far less likely, as is someone across the street/alley noticing you right then, a dragon flying over head and noticing a nice tasty morsel, or any number of other "possible things" that happen with fail forward.

To quote someone who posted recently, "You can certainly play that way if you like… but stop saying that approach makes more sense."

This is not to say fail forward is worse than traditional play, only that it will often result in something that makes much less sense than "nothing much happens." Especially when it happens every single time you fail at something.

 

[AlViking]

See my edit.

But I can't imagine what a GM's job is, if not to make things happen. That's basically the definition, no matter how narrative, or non-narrative, the game is.

As DM I view my job as creating the world, populating it, deciding on what is happening and why. While doing this I think about options and opportunities for the players to pursue. From there character actions or inactions are reacted to and I determine if and how the world is changing based on what the character have done. What they want, what their goals are does not have any immediate impact on my decisions (although of course it does impact my planning for future options because I want to tailor my game to what the players enjoy). It is not my job to make things happen, I just provide a smorgasbord of choices for the players. The players are the ones who make things happen.

Might as well include @pemerton and @hawkeyefan for the rest of this so I don't have to respond to multiple people concerning picking a lock? In my game these are the things I would likely consider:

1. There is a small amount of noise, someone on the other side of the door may hear it.
2. It may trigger a trap or silent alarm if there is one (an investigation check may have revealed the trap or silent alarm but that's a separate set of actions).
3. It takes a small amount of time to pick the lock, a wandering guard or other threat may appear.
4. The lock may be unlocked.

That's it. Only #4 is dependent on the roll of a dice and subsequent success or failure. Any decisions they make, any action they take after attempting to pick the lock, success or failure, is completely up to them and the world will react to those actions. I don't influence or guide what happens next, I just make determinations of what will happen in the world based on what they do.

It's quite common for nothing to happen after a failed check. They fail to remember some historical event, don't recognize an obscure religious symbol so they don't gain some benefit. Other times they may fall off the cliff or fail to persuade the storekeeper to give them a better price, fail to bluff their way past the guards. But the result of the failure is tied directly to the attempt. They may take damage from a fall, not get a better price, get into trouble with the guards. All things caused directly by their failure.

Obviously other games work differently. Some people will find techniques from narrative style games useful in whatever TTRPG they play. But I am not running a narrative game and for me the techniques don't add anything. If they do for you and you're group, go for it. There is no one true way to play the game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, and what I wanted to question is how GNS stands in relation to us? Ignoring how and why it was developed to look at what work it could be doing today

That's fine; your phrasing simply seemed unaware of the prior-art element and that did not seem consistent with what I'd recalled from prior discussion.

 

[Enrahim]

The players then weigh up the choice between these two scenes, which in the fiction is the PCs weighing the choice between the two portals. Risk (the trap) is a major consideration in this, but they also make reference to elements of PC background. The more important the participants regard that background stuff to be - ie the choice made should conform to it or at least in some fashion fit with it - the more likely it is that their overall agenda is a "sim" one; whereas if the background stuff is more like a colourful fig leave placed over a discussion about risk and potential rewards, then it seems more likely the overall creative agenda is gamist.

I snip out this one, as this one alone made things really click for me in a major way! I am amazed how much more insight I have gotten just talking 3 days with you, than my past 2 decades of more passively trying to absorb the material!

My first reaction was: How would the participant's evaluation of the importance of the elements, when we just established that the creative agenda of play could be independent of the agenda of the players (ref the GM motivation for providing the stuff was irrelevant for determining if we were looking at a simulationistic "story time" scenario). Then I realized how to resolve that, and with that how I can imagine independently coming up with something that at the very least strongly resemble GNS back in the day if the right things had been brought to my attention. Let me walk trough my imagined thought process:

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Enrahim's dream of discovering GNS

The hot thing of the day is the Treefold model. This describes player motivation for singular actions in play in 3 neat categories. These categories are well recognized, and the main controversy is around to what extent actions could be motivated by several of these at once, or if they would always be competing.

However when looking on how these players play, something surprising is discovered: Trifold player motivation do not affect actual play as much as you would expect. The obvious example is D&D where players spend disproportional amounts of play time doing tactical choices despite having a self reported Treefold preference of Drama. Meanwhile players playing sorcerer spent quite a bit of play time agonizing over hard emotional choices, despite a stated preference for Treefold Game.

Intuitively it would seem like treefold Drama would be interested in dramtic choices over tactical choices, while it would be the other way around for treefold Game. Hence we come to our first obvious conclusion: system matters!. However I want more! I want to explore why and how system matters. But to examine this I need some words and concepts to be able to speak about it.

So a good initial conceptualization might be that the play sort of has a "mind of it's own" with an "agenda" that roughly matches the treefold model. This is motivated by the idea that people with different Treefold model motivaton typically will prefer a certain type of play. However as this new concept is explicitely a combination of player motivation and system, we cannot define our categories based on the Treefold model (like what type of play someone tending toward a motivation would prefer). Rather we need to look at properties on play itself, but tuned so that the "typical" game of that category matches an idea of what a "typical" member of a Treefold model would want; while trying to make it defined on recognizable patterns in play isolated.

Here we come to the first big problem: There is infinitely many possible taxonomies that fits these criterion. In particular when designing these categories there is going to be a trade-off between overlap between play category and preferred play for each Treefold category, and intuitive undestanding/recognizability of the category when looking at play isolatedly. In particular as opposed to the Treefold model, the categorization of play need to be artificially decided, rather than organically arising trough communal pattern recognition.

I manage to come up with one such way to categorize play that is consistent, and fit these design requirements, and try to share that with the world. Unfortunately the result is hard to describe, as it doesn't match up with any exactingly commonly recognized patterns. Nevertheless I manage to get quite a few sufficiently onboard that we can start reaping the fruits of this effort: Look at how system affect what kind of play is actually happening.

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A critique of GNS

How well do this match up with your impression of what actually might have happened for Ron Edwards? I feel this clarifies both the system design motivation of the CA concept, and how it is independent of but correlated to player motivation. As there in my example wasn't sufficient information to classify play, you couldn't use the definition to inform classification, but you could leverage that the categories are designed to be correlated with player mental state to inform likely classification.

This might also point toward why GNS has fallen out of favor. While it might have brought clarity to how some game design elements affect play, the well of improvement seem like have dried up with less to show for than what one might have hoped for initially. As such looking toward GNS nowadays might be more restrictive than useful compared to looking for designs not neatly addressing GNS concerns?

Moreover Treefold also hasn't aged well. Some of it might have been that those most engaged with it moved over to studying the GNS framework instead. But I think it has more to do with the problems related to the extent those categories were robust at all. The conception now seem to be that everyone seek a mix of Game, Drama and Sim; and actions can be motivated by several of these at once; so it is hard to see what value can come out of analysis at this level.

So as both the motivation for the concept (system design clearity) seem to have played out it's role, and the original justification for a psychological connection (alongside the justification for having 3 categories) have fallen apart, it is no wonder GNS are not very high on the agenda.

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At first glance a defense of (almost) GNS
One thing that is striking though is that despite being constructed GNS make sense in a way I feel GDS don't do anymore. Those GNS literate appear to be able to take a birds-eye view of most of the common practices of play and identify which GNS category they appear in consistently. The big problem is that this require a holistic approach. You cannot look at any single random period of play in order to deduce what GNS category play belongs it. This make this classification scheme extremely hard to teach, and the opportunity for collecting reliable data is relatively low. There are also odd-ball play that is hard to classify even with a holistic view. In light of this the fact that there appear to be strong consistency possible at all points toward that it is measuring something more fundamental than GDS. Such fundamental phenomena usually do not emerge on a fuzzy holistic macro level, but arises from a connection to some simpler and easily recognizable phenomena. I previously believed that phenomenon was the Treefold trinity. But that notion was no longer consistent with your previous insight.

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A new suggested approach to defining a GNS.
I hence propose the following theory:
1 - Find a trio of easily recognizable categories of play. For instance play around "What is the context?" "What shall I do?" "What happens?".
2 - For the trio chosen assume that for most groups one of these categories will tend to dominate playtime.
3 - Categorize large scale play according to which category dominates according to 2.
4 - Assign these large scale category label G, another the label N and the last the label S.

I got a hunch that fine tuning the questions in 1 will produce GNS exactly. Indeed I think GNS might not be so strongly defined that only one set of questions will produce it, but actually several different sets could cover various different interpretation of GNS.

The obvious problem here is that this process seem to allow us to create any arbitrary theory as long as 2 holds; and depending on the threshold for "most" and "dominate" 2 could be made statistically extremely likely even on completly random distribution.

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A new proposal for a fundamentally sound GNS

So I think in order to have a categorization that actually is well justified it need to be funded on something recognizable as fundamental. I propose as a possible such fundamental concept being the modal verbs. In the form "What xxx we do?", "Can, may, might, would" maps to Sim, "should" maps to narrativism while "will and must" maps to gamism. This would explain why sim has been hard to grasp, as it covers many forms. Also it explains how narrativism and gamism stand out, as both of those ask questions where the answer to them is a clear call to action showing the direction of progress; while those on the sim side are passive and un-commitive. I am curious how well this proposed model matches established GNS.

 

[Maxperson]

"There is some other description, beyond 'the lock is now open'" says nothing whatever about the player having the freedom to invent whatever they want as that some-other-description. All it says is that the state of play has changed in some way more than LITERALLY ONLY "the lock is now open".

Like what? In the moment that they successfully pick the lock, what has changed other than the lock is now unlocked?

So...if the lock was on a safe, they opened the lock so they could get to whatever was in the safe. That doesn't mean the player has any control whatsoever over what the safe contains. Maybe they already know that it should contain the documents they're looking for, or the Desert Rose ruby, or the last of the Orbs of Dragonkind, or the phial of chimaera-flu cure, or whatever else. If the lock is on a door, the some-other-description will be whatever lies beyond the door; just because you've opened the door doesn't mean you have even the slightest bit of control over where the door leads!

Those things only change the game state once the characters open that safe, not when they successfully open the lock. When they succeed at opening the lock, nothing has changed other than, "The lock is now unlocked."

 

[AlViking]

Forget the game for a moment.

If you are trying to unlock the door of a burning building, and you fail to do so, and someone inside is then badly burned… you would describe these things as unconnected?

That’s the question I’m asking. It’s not about rules or play priorities.

If it's not about game rules but real world? Then I can guarantee that my attempt to unlock the door did not cause the building to catch on fire. When I attempt to open the door and find I cannot, I will evaluate my other options and decide what to do from there. If it was my house I'd call 911 before I even try to open the door, when I couldn't open the door I'd smash open a window so I could reach in and unlock the door or run around back and break a window there. One possible reaction to my opening a door or smashing a window could be to make the fire worse because I've now provided more oxygen. I would have caused that flareup and possible backdraft because it's directly related to my providing fresh air.

My failure to unlock the door did not cause the fire.

 

[Umbran]

*kidding, I know petty tyrants & dictator wannabees like you LIVE to ban anyone who crosses you in the slightest way

Mod note:
Right, because we all know that pre-emptively calling moderators names absolves you of responsibility for your own actions!

If you had bothered to read the site rules, which are linked on the bottom of every single page, you'd have known about the limits on language use, and how we manage discussion of moderation.

In the end, you chose to come here. If you can't handle the low bar we put on behavior, that is about you, not about us being tyrants.