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

[Micah Sweet]

I think at this point you know what I mean. You're being unnecessarily pedantic here in order to claim that you don't do a particular thing that you do.

Like, when you say that you decided to ask the players what to do after the attack the players didn't respond with "we attack back." If they had, that would have triggered combat. Because there's no way you can tell me that if the PCs had chosen to attack, you would have said no to them and not let them attack. And it's almost certain that the attack would mean calling for initiative and attack rolls.

And by the way, doing something as the GM, then asking the players what they want to do, is one of the core principles of narrative games!

Neither you nor your games are going to be tainted by accepting that you don't just call for die rolls out of lolrandom nowhereness, that instead something happens in the game that prompts the die roll, and that something comes about from the game's narrative. Seriously. Narrative games don't have cooties. Get over it.

The long and the short of it is, the GM principles, agendas, and moves that are listed in PbtA and similar games are taken from what GMs do in tradgames, but just explained and codified. The end.

Does that mean you think there are no differences in gamestyle, just whether or not they write down definitions of what they're doing?

 

[Enrahim]

I think at this point you know what I mean. You're being unnecessarily pedantic here in order to claim that you don't do a particular thing that you do.

Like, when you say that you decided to ask the players what to do after the attack the players didn't respond with "we attack back." If they had, that would have triggered combat. Because there's no way you can tell me that if the PCs had chosen to attack, you would have said no to them and not let them attack. And it's almost certain that the attack would mean calling for initiative and attack rolls.

And by the way, doing something as the GM, then asking the players what they want to do, is one of the core principles of narrative games!

Neither you nor your games are going to be tainted by accepting that you don't just call for die rolls out of lolrandom nowhereness, that instead something happens in the game that prompts the die roll, and that something comes about from the game's narrative. Seriously. Narrative games don't have cooties. Get over it.

The long and the short of it is, the GM principles, agendas, and moves that are listed in PbtA and similar games are taken from what GMs do in tradgames, but just explained and codified. The end.

Nope. They look at what seem to go on in trad game, think they can codify it to produce the same behavior, and miss that the codification actuactually prevents the process that is actually going on in trad games.

You get something that looks deceptively similar in play 99% of the time. But the codified process feels very differently to a GM actually running trad games with the mindset I have described. It also produces different results in the 1% edge cases.

The 1% edge cases might be "pedantic". The different feel absolutely isn't. You normally cannot observe mindset.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Does that mean you think there are no differences in gamestyle, just whether or not they write down definitions of what they're doing?

To me, this is more about what we call things rather than how people actually play.

It seems odd to expect players to fit neatly into subjective boxes like “simulationist” or “narrativist.” The reality at the table almost always blurs those lines.

So where exactly do we draw the line? When does a player shift from one box to another? If I mix elements of both, am I just lacking deep introspection? Or am I just a casual because I don’t ascribe to either?

It feels like we’re trying to understand why people enjoy the hobby differently, but doing so through labels and categories that rarely fit cleanly.

Maybe the only real way to resolve this debate is to share actual play experiences. But talking about labels is easy, so… carry on.

 

[Enrahim]

But if there is no such thing as "a simulation(istic) game", and no such thing as "supporting simulation(istic) play", then what on Earth have people even been talking about?

Folks here have repeatedly asserted fundamental ideas, whether directly, or as a required element of some other argument, such as:

1. Some rules are better for "simulation" than others, whever we take "simulation" to mean. Hence, some rules achieve the goals of "simulation" more fully than others.
2. There are some rules or processes which are fundamentally incompatible with "simulation".
3. "Simulation" sometimes requires an entire systemic-level design, otherwise a particular game may be incapable of such play.
4. Even given an appropriate system foundation and a lack of incompatible elements, one system may have more point 1 rules than another.

If these things are to be taken seriously, it necessarily implies that rules can support or fail to support some particular type of play-experience referred to as "sim"/"simmy"/"simulation"/"simulationism"/"simulationistic"/etc., that some systems are better for it and others worse, that some playstyles may accept systems which contain fewer such rules and others might require more, etc.

Do you disagree?

Like...this is arguments coming FROM heavily pro-sim folks. These things were points I had understood I was granting to fans of sim, not things I was asserting myself!

The troubleling thing with the conversation is that while 1 and 2 might be right, trying to nail down anything more spesific is so extremely contextual that the conversation stalls on trying and failing to define an aproperiate context. The big one is what we aim to simulate. An airplane simulation are not particularly supported by tables for effect of diseases, while a war simulator probably have little use for an skill for providing sharp art critisism.

Another dimension is that the entire simulation entusiast sphere is split into the mechanics vs rulings lairs dating back to the kriegspeil/free kriegspeil split. Those in the first lair would typically put simulation mechanics in category 1, while the other might rather say they hamper simulation (though maybe not go as far as claiming them to be fully incompatible like category 2 suggest). And this gets even harder when the majority of the players liking simulation isn't even aware of this split, and happily mix stuff from both lairs.

It doesn't help when you have the fact that the simulation in it's own is generally not an end goal in itself, but rather itself being a central support for a wide range of experiences. So even in the same scope of simulation, a technique that strictly speaking supports the simulation can hurt one of the experiences the simulation is supposed to support. This phenomenom is hard to isolate, and hence conversations could be quick to bundle such techniques (unprecisely) into category 2 rather than cathegory 1.

That means it seem relatively easy to get an agreement that 1 and 2 exist, and similarly it sort of follows that 4 should make sense (Edit: however counting type 1 techniques is good metric. Even a system with technique A and B might be worse than one with only technique A if there are some unfortunate interactions between A and B. I am sceptical if a metric between category 3 systems purely in terms of "simultionism" can make sense. This is why find the idea of a "simulationistic game" silly, as simply the absence of forced simulation breaking mechanics seem like a very low bar to pass to me. This is generally not the criterion used with the classifications I have seen attempted)

3 I have not seen much evidence for, and I think the proponets for that is a small minority.

However actually concretising 1 and 2 beyond "existence" tend to fail due to the above problems. Actually I find it quite amazing how fail roll could be narrated as success without complication seemed to be universally recognised as category 2 among the self proclaimed sim fans in this thread (I don't count myself among them) - but if you look at it the key rationale for this classification differed even among them.

This is why I say that these attempts have not been fruitful. It is not denouncing the abstract concept that some techniques might be better for sim than others. It is descriptive of the state of the discurse I have seen.

 

[Enrahim]

I totally agree. The fact that people completely ignore the fact that D&D in no way supports any "simulation-like" activity because at no point do D&D mechanics EVER simulate anything.

Let's work it from the other direction. Let's take something that is 100% simulation. MS Flight Simulator (and various versions thereof). That is a simulation. That is a game that is attempting to recreate as much as possible the feeling of flying an airplane. Every single aspect of that game is in service to that goal. I don't think anyone would disagree here.

Now, if you looked at something like Intellivisions 1980 game Biplanes - that's completely NOT simulating anything. It's not a simulation-like activity any more than Pole Position or Mario Kart is a car racing simulation. It's not even trying to be.

Simulationist rules MUST simulate something. That's the basic definition. How can anything be considered a "simulation-like" activity if it is in no way actually connected to anything that occurs in the game?

I think the answer here is very simple. Free Kriegspeil tried to improve simulation by getting rid off all the mechanics. I think it is easy to see that the activity tried to simulate war, while not having any mechanics to simulate anything.

D&D arose from offshoot of that tradition, so there are no big surprise that simulation mechanics is rather sparse in that game.

FKR that is a movement that strongly associate itself with this kind of thinking. This movement have produced very many games include games that include mechanics intended to help making a smooth simulation, while never actually simulating anything themselves.

 

[zakael19]

You can think critically about what you are designing without the kind of deep introspection folks like @pemerton and other Narrativists devote to it. What requires you to write academic essays about game theory in order to write a new subclass or a few monster statblocks?

I think that considering the why and how of what makes creative hobbies sing to us (or not) in service of understanding our opinions and reactions to certain games and perhaps alternatives is an inherently good thing. It's not even necessarily particularly deep introspection, I don't seem @pemerton or anybody else here writing long form blog or Medium articles so much as restating mostly short observations with play impressions over and over.

 

[Lanefan]

Oh my god.

RTFM

The fourteen modules that make up the Dragonlance saga are meant to be one adventure, same as if you had bought a WotC or Pathfinder AP. IOW, you are meant to have read all of them before you start play. Remember, this is the early 1980's. Organization of material is all new and it's often pretty wonky. But, the point is, DL 5 is very much the campaign primer.

Though I was playing and DMing at the time, I don't remember now whether the DL module series all came out in one go or were released over time in tandem with the novels they were tied to (which for sure were not all released at once).

'Cause if the modules were released sequentially over time then @Maxperson has a point: someone keen running the modules as they came out wouldn't be able to see the DL-5 content until DL-5 hit the shelves.

And that said, it's also possible there was a snippet in Dragon magazine somewhere prior to DL-5's release that gave much the same advice as a heads-up.

I'll say this, however: were I to haul those modules off my shelf and start running them, I wouldn't expect to have to wait until the fifth module (!) for the DM-advice section and thus I'd likely only read the module I was about to run.

 

[Faolyn]

Yes and in my breakdown of differences between how I run D&D compared to DW, I didn't claim to not use any of the moves. I singled out a subset I wouldn't generally do. It is the principles I pointed to as the main differentiator between what I have been doing and DW.

I reject the interpretation that I have a map with blanks when there is no map. (The idea of a harbour city with a castle do not qualify as a "map") I have fulfilled one half of the principle, just as those with a fully keyed map has fulfilled the other half of the principle.

I reject the notion that the green slime was thinking dangerously. I made it so obvious that I would have been really surprised if anyone or anything of value would get seriously damaged. If they had moved back trying something new, or spending their time getting tools needed to get around it, nothing bad would have happened as a consequence.

The point is, you added something dangerous to the world. You did so in order to hinder the PCs' movements and weren't sure they could get past it ("I had no idea if or how they would be able to get to the other side of this. They did admirably.") That's thinking dangerously.

The name of the move isn't "throw unsuspected traps at the players", after all.

Is it really so hard to accept that you did typical GM things, and that someone thought deeply about what typical things GMs do and wrote them down?

 

[Lanefan]

This is blatant One True Wayism. There's nothing holy or inherently better about play that involves deep introspection or a narrative approach. It's just how you prefer to play. It's an opinion and nothing more, so people who don't play that way who have other opinions have opinions just as valid and as serios as your opinions.

I think you may have misinterpreted what @TwoSix was saying.

The point being made wasn't about in-game play involving deep introspection, it was about using out-of-game deep introspection to analyse the way you already play/DM.

Now, I've got no real use for deep analysis of how I do what I do, but that's another issue entirely.

EDIT: @hawkeyefan beat me to it in calling out the mis-read on deep introspection.

 

[Faolyn]

Well, the absence of pre written adventures for PbtA games might just be that the entire structure and philosophy behind basically makes pre written adventures impossible and nonsensical to write for (almost?) all of them?

Here's quite a big list of adventures for DW. I have an entire book of adventures for Monster of the Week called the Tome of Mysteries. There's a book of adventures, Nephews in Peril, for Brindlewood Bay, that's been sitting in my Drivethru wishlist for a while, and that's an even less mechanically-structured game than PbtA. There have apparently been podcasts about how to use pre-made adventures with PbtA games. I've seen links to fanzines and itch.io pages that have adventures for other PbtA systems.

An adventure is really nothing more than the threats (fronts and countdowns), the adventure locations, and the stats for NPCs. The primary difference is that D&D-style adventures have railroad-ish plots and structures, which PbtA games aren't really supposed to have, and have to take leveling/CR into consideration, which isn't much of a thing in PbtA at all. Otherwise? The concepts behind a typical D&D adventure could be converted into a PbtA adventure without that much difficulty.