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

[Enrahim]

Not really. That's not the point of the Jenga tower. The point of the Jenga tower is to ramp up the horror factor by ramping up the tension of the players. As they pull each piece out of the tower, each next piece gets that much harder. It's not simulating anything in the game world at all. It's not meant to. It's meant to make you feel like a horror movie. So, in a sense, I suppose, you could say that it's simulating the feeling of a horror movie.

But, that's certainly not the sense that people are using simulation in this thread. There is no connection between pulling the piece and the narrative in the story. But, apparently, so long as I narrate the results in just the right way, suddenly Dread becomes a sim game.

I don't question the design idea behind the jenga tower.

What was the design intention, and how suitable something is for other uses than the original design intent is two quite different questions. We could claim our game is designed to be able to run everything well, and maybe even belive it, without that making it actually do everything well.

I think very few if any here has claimed D&D is clearly designed for simulation. But many seem to claim that it provide a framework and ruleset they find helpful for simulation. I try to point out that in order to unpack to what extent they are right about this helpfulness, it is very useful to look at what they actually want to simulate. First then you can start assessing if some alternate ruleset might indeed be more helpful in their simulation.

To for instance state that RuneQuest would clearly help them get a better simulation without even knowing what they try to simulate seem like a quite extraordinary claim. So I do not think this is what you try to say when you make claims that RuneQuest is more sim than D&D. Rather you appear to define sim as having a certain design feature. This makes RuneQuest more sim than D&D by definition. So the definition appear to be anchored in a design feature rather than a practical concern. Which causes me to struggle to see the practical value of this particular sim concept.

Alternatively I could see that you might be anchoring the definition on the first order approximation of simulating reality as a baseline as mentioned in my reply #18482. In that case I do see the practical application to games that indeed try to deviate little from this baseline. And I think quite a few of the games discussed in this thread has had that property. But not all. And I think quite a bit of the conflict we have seen is in not making this scope of validity of statements explicit enough.

 

[pemerton]

I think very few if any here has claimed D&D is clearly designed for simulation. But many seem to claim that it provide a framework and ruleset they find helpful for simulation. I try to point out that in order to unpack to what extent they are right about this helpfulness, it is very useful to look at what they actually want to simulate. First then you can start assessing if some alternate ruleset might indeed be more helpful in their simulation.

To for instance state that RuneQuest would clearly help them get a better simulation without even knowing what they try to simulate seem like a quite extraordinary claim. So I do not think this is what you try to say when you make claims that RuneQuest is more sim than D&D. Rather you appear to define sim as having a certain design feature. This makes RuneQuest more sim than D&D by definition. So the definition appear to be anchored in a design feature rather than a practical concern. Which causes me to struggle to see the practical value of this particular sim concept.

All that I see being said about D&D being helpful for simulation is that it generates results, and it can do so without needing to have any regard to the player's intention behind their action declaration.

Tunnels & Trolls does this too. But never have I heard T&T described as a simulationist RPG!

 

[AnotherGuy]

Right. This point was made, way upthread, by @hawkeyefan and me (back then it was crumbling rocks, rather than sharp rocks).

Yep, I think these things were said by some of us upthread too!

Ah, I didn't go back far enough!
I did indeed find it strange that I would supposedly be the first to make that association.

 

[FrozenNorth]

You ever tried playing Football without a referee? It pretty quickly descends into everyone arguing about the offside rule.

Yes, I often play football without a referee and it goes perfectly well. They are called pickup games, and the experience more closely resembles a game of D&D than 11 on a side with a referee and the offside rule.

 

[Enrahim]

All that I see being said about D&D being helpful for simulation is that it generates results, and it can do so without needing to have any regard to the player's intention behind their action declaration.

Tunnels & Trolls does this too. But never have I heard T&T described as a simulationist RPG!

I have also stated it provide a structure of play and responsibilities that is helpful for simulation. This happen to be shared among trad games.

And regarding labeling T&T. Now we are back to labeling games rather than examine how suitable they are for a certain kind of simulation. I think simply noone had seen any point in labeling T&T as simulationist, while there seemingly are someone that has found the value in labeling Runequest simulationistic.

As for reasons for labeling RuneQuest simulationistic, there is at least one obvious marketing motivation for that. After all the main differentiator from the big elephant in the room is that it performs a certain type of simulation better than it.

There has also be a motivation i terms of trying to concretisise a now mostly discredited theoretical model for game design.

Note that neither of the two above addresses how well suited the game is for actually running a simulation of all kinds. The practical scope as such is for the first one to be able to attract players that is after that particular flavor of simulation - and for the second it might have had practical application in designing a game for a particular purpose, if the model indeed had merit.

Why would anyone have any interest in labeling T&T as sim?

 

[Micah Sweet]

None of my players are interested in running games--at all. In fact, I'm supremely confident that all of them have some degree of negative interest in running any game, ever.

The one, and only, player who did decide to run games, runs games of a style I have negative interest in playing. (Gritty, high-lethality, morally-ambiguous, low-level survival.) He has given me very kind compliments about my GMing style and how it helped him learn how he prefers to GM, and I have appreciated those comments. He is by far the only one.


Er...no? Not even slightly? That's like saying if I'm hoping to find someone who makes houses like I like them made, it should be easy to sell houses I have built to people interested in making houses. The two interests are fundamentally distinct.


I have not "grown tired of GMing" myself. I'm simply noting that being a GM does absolutely, positively nothing to fulfill my desire to play, and thus telling me "if you want a game like X, just run a game like X!"

This is a new variation on that argument, but it's not ultimately any different in practice. I cannot "make" new GMs. (Which is to say nothing of my moral objections to the very concept!) Running a game does not create new GMs. Presuming that every player is truly a budding GM just waiting for the right mentor to shape them into precisely the kind of GM I want to see is silly at the very best. At worst, it has some very morally-questionable implications.

That is unfortunate for your interests, and I am sorry no one you know seems to want to run a game you want to play in, but do you think you'll have better luck by trying to convince people to change their play culture the way you seem to be doing?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Consider: You have a world where there have never been any dragonborn (or tieflings, or firbolgs, or whatever "non-Tolkien but widely-played race" option you'd prefer I used), though there are dragons and things like dragon-blooded sorcerers. You--for the sake of this argument--don't have any strong feelings one way or the other about dragonborn, but you know that they have never previously been mentioned within the world you run. You have just had a vacancy open up at your table, because a long-time player is moving away (as I know you basically only play in-person). A prospective new player has been recommended to you by a friend. They're generally a good fit (their overall system preferences are similar to yours, your friend has never had an issue with them, they're willing to work with their GMs to come to mutually-satisfying results, etc.)--but they'd really, really like to play a dragonborn, or at least something reasonably approximating one.

If you run a homebrew world where it is simply, flatly not possible to ever include any mechanical nor aesthetic novelties--where it is simply not possible for new interests to get integreated into that world--then you have cut off a meaningful part of player agency. It is not player-as-character agency, but it is still player agency nonetheless.

If, instead, you run a homebrew world where there is always the external terra incognita, then you can collaborate with this new player to find a result which doesn't do anything you have a problem with, but does achieve the few minimum things they're seeking. Perhaps you don't think it makes sense for there to be a true "species" of dragon-like humanoids in this world, but you're okay with a one-off. Or, if there are dragonborn, since they've never been heard of, you want them to be from somewhere far away--so perhaps the character's parents crash-landed in a ship from across the sea, dying only just after begging the character's adoptive parents to look after their child. Or maybe you're fine with the mechanical features, it's the aesthetic ones, so something that doesn't physically look dragon-like would be fine. Or...etc., etc., etc.

Point being, by having the freedom to dip into the "beyond the horizon" unknowns, you can support the player's agency in playing what most excites their sincere, genuine enthusiasm.

As always, "genuine enthusiasm", as I use the phrase, excludes grubby-hands power-gaming nonsense, among other sorts of things. Someone who just wants to powergame no matter what consequences it might have isn't being a reasonable participant. I'm talking about the things that fire a player's imagination and make them excited to learn what happens next.


I don't understand why. This is one of the most powerful, and most useful, applications of this concept. Why is it so offensive to you to take time to consider what a player feels excited to play? To investigate how their enthusiasm can be supported, rather than rejected?

To me this whole argument seems to be you telling folks that no matter what, the GM needs to accommodate the player's creative desire. That fundamentally, what they want is more important than what you want.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Have you not seen the examples in this thread?

Any and every action the GM doesn't like, regardless of reason, can and will get a "no". Doesn't matter what the action is. That was core to the discussion we had about my (constructed) example of the faux-Egypt paladin character being completely incapable of even TRYING to convince the Priesthood of Set to help with preventing an invasion of faux-Egypt. The GM can, in fact, reject a player's action for any reason or no reason at all. The player just has to trust that it will make sense. Potentially for months before any answers whatsoever will be forthcoming.

Didn't see that one, and I don't agree with your premise that the GM can decide to not accept player action in the game that falls within the confines of their PC. Players take actions through their PCs, and GMs describe what happens. Rinse, repeat.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I hear you but please see my reply post #18477 to Max where I directly tie the consequence of the action to the poor die roll.

In some games you can and should absolutely do that. Not in all games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is not an example of "player actions made within the confines of their PCs in an active game" being vetoed. From my understanding if what you have written previously, your PC actually got to try to convince the priesthood of Seth to the extent possible within the confines of the PC. The attempt failed due to not being able to get direct access to the priesthood of Set, due to circumstances outside the confines of the PC.

Makes sense to me. What's the problem here @EzekielRaiden ?