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

[Pedantic]

Relevant to earlier conversation about simulationism and sandboxes, I want to promote this manifesto (I guess you could call it) for "new simulationism" by Sam Sorenson that I found at the end of a recent post by Baker. It reminds me of things various posters have said or tried to get at in various ways in this thread, and it chimes with something I've said about neotrad that I think should apply to neosim too.

I have mixed feelings. Some of this is a basis for design and perfectly useful, some of it feels like it's written in response to narrativist critique, and some of it has nothing to do with any sort of design or even play advice.

Point 1 is useful, but has too many assumptions. Why should there be rulings? What is the "game" that exists separate from the fictional world that can clash with it? There's something there, but I would take it the other way; if the rules say a thing, then it must be pointing to a true, discernible and practical facet of the underlying fictional world (even if, as is called out later, through abstraction). If the mechanics produce a thing you do not wish to be true, then they must be changed. Alternately, if you wish something to be true, and can't model it mechanically, you must design new mechanics.

Points 2 and 3 I find perfectly clear and rings true with a lot of things I've thought and said. The GM inhabits several professionally separate roles and must not use the powers of one to achieve the aims of another, player and character decision making should be mechanically as close as possible, actions should generally be bounded in causality and so on.

Point 4 is written as a critique of the narrativist understanding of rules and less helpful for it. The question of when an abstraction is good and helpful, or even what understanding is being abstracted is elided here; no one is struggling with a 0 HP dragon. What does a wounded dragon look like and why? Should the mechanic change, or the understanding of damage?

Point 5 contains assumptions about what "unabstracted play" is that are unstated and I'm not sure I can understand without like, a lot of actual play context from whoever is making the claim.

Point 6 is clear in description, but I don't like "de-abstract" here, when it simply seems to me this is a reworking of what I was saying in point 1, that rules must be a model for the world, and when they fail to do so, the world is necessarily deformed. If you don't like an outcome or feel like a mechanic or system produces something you wish not to be true, then you have failed the design prompt and must write new rules.

Point 7 is drawing attention to a divide between rules, game and world that could probably use some more elucidation. World is clear enough, game appears to be the experience of players using rules to model the world? What I don't like here is the call to change rules through the course of play. Mixing up the processes of design and play is what gets TTRPGs into so much design trouble in the first place; embracing mid-play revision as inevitably necessary is a cop-out. It suggests you were playtesting, not playing.

Point 8 is incoherent to me. I do not know what "play" is from the context.

Point 9 is the essential point of disagreement with everyone else about what sim is and is for. Nice to see it stated again, but it's nothing new.

Point 10 isn't a design insight, that's just social advice slipped in here at the end.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think @hawkeyefan's point is simpler than you are making it out to be. It is not a point about game play; it is a simple point about cause and effect.

The burning building example is the same as my ringing phone and pouring rain examples:

*I wasn't able to open the door, and therefore was drenched by the pouring rain.​

​

*I wasn't able to open the door, and therefore wasn't able to pick up the ringing telephone.​

​

*I wasn't able to open the door, and therefore the people trapped inside the burning building suffered terrible injuries.​

These are all straightforward examples in which the inability to open the door means that something happens, which might have been prevented/avoided had the person who was trying to open the door been able to do so:

*Had I been able to open the door, I would have thus got inside out of the rain.​

​

*Had I been able to open the door, I would have thus got inside to answer the phone.​

​

*Had I been able to open the door, I would have been able to get the people trapped inside out of the burning house.​

These all illustrate how it is quite obvious that failing to open a door might have consequences that go beyond the door was not opened.

What implications, for game design and game play, follow from that simple observation is a further question.

I'm not denying any of that. I am talking about my preference for how all these things are represented. The act of opening the door is represented by a die roll. That's all the die roll represents. All that other stuff is part of the setting and largely represented by GM and player interaction. If any of it leads to something best represented by a roll (ie, there is a reason to engage the representational mechanics I prefer to use), then we use them.

 

[Maxperson]

Okay but like...what do we DO with that?

Because now that means discussing 5e is genuinely impossible. There is no such thing as "5e". There are a million different games which are fundamentally and inherently completely distinct from one another, because this game-as-artifact makes every table a totally unique specimen, incomparable, incommensurate.

Like, doesn't this literally kill the very concept of a game discussion forum stone dead?

No. It means that there are at least three different discussions to be had. What is 5e, the core books. What is 5e with the added rules like Xanathar's, Tasha's, etc. And what is 5e at home with settings included. The latter would fit into the same category as home rules and homebrew stuff.

 

[Micah Sweet]

"simulationist": is the style which values resolving in-game events based solely on game-world considerations, without allowing any meta-game concerns to affect the decision. Thus, a fully simulationist GM will not fudge results to save PCs or to save her plot, or even change facts unknown to the players. Such a GM may use meta-game considerations to decide meta-game issues like who is playing which character, whether to play out a conversation word for word, and so forth, but she will resolve actual in-game events based on what would "really" happen. [EDIT worth here reading Sorenson's take on new sim which was linked from Baker's post.]

This is my Platonic Ideal of play (by which I mean, what I strive for as a DM but will never truly reach).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Common sense in life. Forget play for a minute and think about how things work in the real world.

If you forget to pick up milk at the store, no milk may not be the only consequence. Maybe your spouse will he annoyed with you. Maybe your kids will go without breakfast in the morning. Maybe one of them will be so hungry they can’t concentrate and they flunk a test.

Who knows exactly what could happen? But for any failure there are a number of possible consequences. This is just the way the world works.

To then apply this to gaming, I would say that limiting yourself to just “the lock doesn’t open” as the only consequence of a failed pick lock attempt is actually far more artificial than having the GM come up with a consequence.

You can certainly play that way if you like… but stop saying that approach makes more sense and describing others as involving “unconnected” things. Your take is the one that’s more unconnected.

Yeah, the real problem here is the richness of the world being described being vastly, almost unimaginably, less than reality. In principle the direct action focused approach seems reasonable. The game simply resolves the 'thin' action description and everything else ramifies out from there in a vast web of interactions. But none of that exists! Even just in terms of a door and a lock we are left with only an approximate description. Is the lock visibly damaged, did the attempt make noise? Were there bystanders, and might they report the characters? These are only a few of the immediate questions. The issue of the larger narrative is a whole other level, the 'thick' description. But we can't get to whether or not the map was perloined except by a long process of GM decisions.

I see all this as ultimately tied back to a style of GM ownership of all fiction. By atomizing the narrative into these tiny and specific bits players have no real grip on it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, the real problem here is the richness of the world being described being vastly, almost unimaginably, less than reality. In principle the direct action focused approach seems reasonable. The game simply resolves the 'thin' action description and everything else ramifies out from there in a vast web of interactions. But none of that exists! Even just in terms of a door and a lock we are left with only an approximate description. Is the lock visibly damaged, did the attempt make noise? Were there bystanders, and might they report the characters? These are only a few of the immediate questions. The issue of the larger narrative is a whole other level, the 'thick' description. But we can't get to whether or not the map was perloined except by a long process of GM decisions.

I see all this as ultimately tied back to a style of GM ownership of all fiction. By atomizing the narrative into these tiny and specific bits players have no real grip on it.

Darn those terrible GMs! Anything less than a true democracy at the table right?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that's a cart before horse problem. If people don't have a somewhat shared terminology for nearly any of this how can you even ask questions about preferences when 2 participants may answer they have a preference for X but understand X to mean totally different things? (You need the horse of shared terminology/language/meaning for the cart of factorization to be useful).

So, then how do you propose to explain how babies learn to communicate? Clearly your description is not fully adequate?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Which makes it rather sound like - 'anything the player desires to find upon picking the lock he should find on a success'. And if that's not what you are saying then it's not clear why this supports your actual position instead of the 'finding anything he desires on successfully opening the lock' position that no one apparently holds?

IME RPGs have plenty of structure around who gets to decide what, and how. This is a sort of slippery slope here.

 

[AlViking]

Darn those terrible GMs! Anything less than a true democracy at the table right?

Typical "I don't like this way of playing so I'm going to invent all the reasons it's terrible". No explanation of why a different approach would resolve the issues and not just be a different approach with different issues. Anything a GM describes is a total failure of course because there's no way they can let the players know that the characters are attempting to pick a lock in clear sight of several people walking by and we don't have access to a Star Trek style holodeck so we lose details that are not relevant to the task at hand.

Maybe someday we'll have an AI that can take every possible permutation into play but until then we will have to live with a few pounds of fatty matter to describe the world of shared imagination. There will never be a perfect solution, we should just let people play the games they enjoy and run them how they want.

 

[hawkeyefan]

In the fiction, the PC may very well connect the two events (although they may very not be). In play, in regards to the action being taken, they absolutely are not.

You just can't answer the question directly, huh?

Forget gameplay for a moment.

If in real life, if someone was trying to open the door of a burning house, and they failed to do so, and people inside were burned... would you describe these events as "unconnected"?

It's a yes or no.

IRL, if a building is on fire and someone is inside I would break a window if if the door was locked and I didn't have the key. If the building is on fire stealth and damage to the building by me is a non-issue.

What this has to do with the discussion at hand I do not know.

What it has to do with the conversation is that some folks are claiming that any outcome other than "you fail to open the door" is unconnected to the attempt to open the door. That when a GM says "you failed to X, so now Y happens" is somehow "unconnected" to the attempted skill. That it feels "artificial" to them.

So I am trying to show that there are consequences that are in fact connected to failed skill. That viewing a skill as a binary pass/fail in and of itself with no further impact on the fictional situation is far more "unconnected" than anything that's been suggested.

In a situation like that I might try a different approach such as booting the door in.

Yes, of course... but let's say you then fail to boot the door in. Then people in the house are burned.

Are your attempts to open the door or to kick it in unconnected to the people being burned?

Again, it's a yes or no.

Can everyone not see that there is a difference between direct and indirect consequences? And that arguing about exactly where the line between them lies is going to be pretty pointless?

I don't know if it's the difference between direct and indirect consequences that's in doubt here. It seems to me far more basic than that.

It's more that a failed skill may have consequences beyond "I failed to do X". This seems an incredibly obvious fact to me, for the reasons I've stated... yet several folks are disagreeing. I don't think we need to even get into the nuance of direct vs. indirect consequences. We just need to establish that there may actually be consequences.