D&D 5E Simulation vs Game - Where should D&D 5e aim?

[Umbran]

There are no resolution mechanics in games, there are mechanics in games. The deliberate use of language to abuse and control people's thoughts (and thereby behavior) is a huge reason why we are suffering in the current cult-like groupthink. You don't have to agree with what I'm saying, but get out of this single solution BS. Have any other idea, many preferably. What's the answer to what's happening in my game? Quote the Big Model. I see you defending a profoundly prejudiced man's opinion as gospel. Not a person who hated Storyteller WW games, but openly shamed people who knew why D&D was designed as it was in the 90s and deliberately misconstrued current practice for preference. Please have at least one other point of view at least.

This is hyperbolic, to the point of being insulting. And the accusation of "abuse" and "controlling thoughts" used to shame someone into behaving differently is unpleasantly ironic. If you have to tear down others to make your own point look good, then your own point *isn't* very good.

Let's keep it more civil, folks, and don't respond to this in kind. Thanks.

 

[howandwhy99]

Given the frequency in this thread alone with which you have made strictly false statements, and assumed bad faith (especially about Ron Edwards who in his Gamist essay was defending D&D - which was deeply unfashionable with his audience at the time) I have no interest at all in doing so.

I don't agree with you at all on this, if you read that article as a defense of D&D. It's a bait and switch.

Bwuh? Role playing isn't about learning to perform a social role. Immersive roleplaying is about putting yourself in someone else's shoes (fictional or real) and acting as if you were them. Which isn't just a social role.

You asked for the definition of role playing. I gave you the one D&D uses, the one almost every person used prior to 1980.

D&D is learning how to perform a social role (your class, you get XP for it). That you've thought otherwise shouldn't limit the number of definitions you have.

Yeaaahhhh. My biasses as a kid in the 90s. Before I'd ever read anything Ron Edwards had written. Riiight.

Retroactive assignment of past behaviors from a newly invented theory is inverted causality. You didn't have a stance problem prior to believing they were in the game. This is you projecting.

By declaring it a smear campaign (and thereby attacked Ron Edwards directly) you have shown that you have no understanding of it. And by declaring it to be a smear campaign while also boasting you have not studied it shows that you are assuming bad faith.

It is a smear campaign. You admitted it yourself for White Wolf Storyteller games. And the articles I've read it plenty of times, but have forgot them once I realized who close-minded they were.

Eurogames did something else. They stopped trying to compete with computers.

And yet they are all over online in computer or handheld device form. Go figure.

Eurogames are the 1 Page RPGs of the boardgaming market. Simple and relatively fast to play, elegant mechanics, promote social interaction, and don't do anything computers would do better. But boardgaming is a slightly different hobby from tabletop RPGs.

Role playing games are built near identically to wargames. This sounds like subverting one group of people's hobby into another with a broad brush. Please don't do that. That's one of the main issues at point here.

It's not a quote.

D&D requiring predefined game structure for every element is a given. That that design as well as 3e's design being so big were "bad" because computers do them better was a major and oft-repeated attack by Forge guys for a few years last decade.

I'm saying that 1 Page RPGs beat 0 page RPGs - but every page of mechanics beyond that has diminishing returns.

That's biased. Most RPG players I know have dozens of books for individual games. What you're talking about is your preference.

Which is what lead to both The Forge + Storygames and to the OSR which actively promotes "Rulings not rules".

That's not true for the OSR. There is no uniform identity to the OSR. OSR guys want older games for a plethora of reasons. Do you really think I've been championing "rulings not rules"?

Boardgames had their 10,000 counter Avalon Hill Wargames. Those died because few people wanted to wade through so much text and because computers could do it better. Roleplaying games have their 500,000 word games - and no mass market traction outside D&D. The 500,000 word RPG has always been a specific style of RPG - but it's the only one you can make a significant amount of money out of. Once someone owns a one page RPG what then? How are you going to get more money out of them? Sell a second page? The best you can do with a basically one page RPG is either license it and sell it as a one-off toy, or wrap a book round it and hope all the buyers buy a single copy and then sell adventures for it. (Evil Hat is trying both these). If you have a 500,000 word game you can sell the same person literally dozens of books (I probably own three dozen GURPS books).

That's interesting. So you're admitting the multi-billion dollar videogame industry - the one so many Americans just call "the game industry" - which sells to hundreds of millions of customers basically use the same game designs and offer the same satisfying play experience as old school D&D and Avalon Hill games. And that 1-page RPGs aren't viably marketable? That's a turnabout I wasn't expecting.

Every time I've dealt with someone who claims to be a fan of AD&D and interrogated them in detail about how they play they've told me they do exactly this for a lot of the rules. I don't understand it either. Nevertheless it is a phenomenon I've seen time and time again from AD&D fans (and Palladium/Rifts fans)

Confusion has reigned near supreme since the late 80s at least. How nice it would feel to have every question securely answered.

The story itself in a storygame is an emergent property of the game. It's what happened.

Not in so-called narrativist "story now" games. They hold story creation in the moment paramount. Context is irrelevant, do what you want now.

Storygames exist to make it easier for the DM to be good at describing things, have a solidly balanced system, and use suggestions that are important for the style of game in question while minimising the need to be good at math.

D&D makes it easier for the DM to describe things because they are actually on the map and in the key referenced. They are also solidly balanced, though not in any way like a storygame - here the board is balanced. Your third clause isn't clear to me, but the last seems like any game elegantly made. But of course any DM worth their salt has solid understandings of the math (i.e. the game elements of the game).

Ahahhahaha!

That's probably the single most important thing I wrote in my last post. You really have never had the opportunity to play in a game of D&D? D&D is hard. You start over at 1st level every time you lose. It's not simple and takes major amounts of labor, heart and compassion, dedication, knowing about how to work well with others, and plenty more than I could possibly list. That you scoff at this makes me think you have only enjoyed what I call "forget it as soon as its said" games. That's not D&D. The mystery, the allure, the note taking, mapping, studious reviewing of previous sessions notes, the time spent planning strategy as a group (the player party) in and out of session. Have you ever had or done any of that? D&D as a game?

YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON TALKING ABOUT SINGLE SOLUTIONS.

All those games can be reduced down to one mechanic no other games use: The storygame mechanic.
I tell a story. You tell a story. We do something which results in one of our stories being added to the big story.
Sure there are variations, but my experience and reading of almost every one is they aren't looking to enable actual game play at any point (by providing a pattern to players to decipher).

The problem with the Big Model is the opposite of what you are claiming.
SNIP

This is an interesting take on the theory, but there is no -one- problem with that model.

You are doing the opposite here. Attacking the messenger without reading the message. Pure ad-hominem.

Don't mistake my need to forget in order to learn something different for never having read that stuff. It was poor philosophy then and it remains so now. Who knows if Edwards even thinks any of it is worthwhile anymore? Lots of theorists quit their theories. I'd say it's necessary to have any kind of growth beyond them at all. Modernists (philosophical modernism Descartes to Kant) often built massive singular edifice philosophies like Edwards has here. Uniform and attempting universalism, essentially shutting out all dissent. They were like a book length shouting down in a debate. Nowadays most philosophers have the sense not to put any one as "the one". Which is really one of the Big Mistakes made by he and a bevy of his followers made.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I don't agree with you at all on this, if you read that article as a defense of D&D. It's a bait and switch.

No. It's written at a point in time (the end of the 90s) talking to a specific audence (one that came through White Wolf and was disillusioned by it). D&D was, to that group, deeply unfashionable.

You asked for the definition of role playing. I gave you the one D&D uses, the one almost every person used prior to 1980.

Guess what? It isn't the 1970s. I wasn't even born in the 1970s.

D&D is learning how to perform a social role (your class, you get XP for it). That you've thought otherwise shouldn't limit the number of definitions you have.

And now you are using definitions that are 2E only to support your argument about what happened in the 1970s.

Retroactive assignment of past behaviors from a newly invented theory is inverted causality. You didn't have a stance problem prior to believing they were in the game. This is you projecting.

False.

It is a smear campaign.

False.

You admitted it yourself for White Wolf Storyteller games.

"I do not like why these games do this. Here's how we should do things better." <> A smear campaign. Another false statement.

And the articles I've read it plenty of times, but have forgot them once I realized who close-minded they were.

Right.

And yet they are all over online in computer or handheld device form. Go figure.

There are a number of them that turn from game into computer game. Because people like the gameplay and because they are very easy to code. They are a tiny niche, normally played by people who already know the boardgame. You might as well say that because movie tie-in novels sell then novels are like movies.

Role playing games are built near identically to wargames.

Role playing games in the 1970s grew out of wargaming. They then started changing and broadening and becoming an art form of their own rather than a modified form of wargaming. Many RPGs are built like wargames.

But even though D&D might have been built based on wargame rules (and has always been the RPG closest to wargames) it was not built like one. For designing a wargame you do not make up what you want in a wargame the way the actual original players played things like Balrogs.

This sounds like subverting one group of people's hobby into another with a broad brush. Please don't do that. That's one of the main issues at point here.

The main issue at point is that you have a dogma that RPGs are and must be built near identically to wargames. You are unwilling to allow an RPG to be built by any other means (even if there are examples since the 80s - and had any wargame been built the way Vampire: The Masquerade was with its in the book objections to "Rollplaying not roleplaying" for people actually using the rules it would have been laughed out of the wargame community.

That's biased. Most RPG players I know have dozens of books for individual games. What you're talking about is your preference.

I own over three dozen books for each of GURPS and D&D. Once more you are missing the target fairly massively.

That's not true for the OSR. There is no uniform identity to the OSR.

There is massively more uniform identity to the OSR than there is to Storygames (which is a world away from claiming that the OSR is one thing). But you seem to want to lump Storygames under one banner.

OSR guys want older games for a plethora of reasons. Do you really think I've been championing "rulings not rules"?

I had no idea that you considered yourself a part of the OSR. If I'd put you with any group in this hobby based on what you are advocating for, it would have been with The Gaming Den and that approach to D&D 3.5. I linked to the OSR's Short Primer because the mainline OSR is demonstrating that older games were played a completely different way to the one you are advocating.

That's interesting. So you're admitting the multi-billion dollar videogame industry - the one so many Americans just call "the game industry" - which sells to hundreds of millions of customers basically use the same game designs and offer the same satisfying play experience as old school D&D and Avalon Hill games.

You are putting words into my mouth. I believe that the multi-billion dollar videogame industry is undertaking what amounts to a brute force attack on the entire space playable with objective and impartial arbiters. One fraction of this is to take Avalon Hill style designs, weld them to real time tabletop wargames, and get the Total War series. Which is a great series of games that has almost entirely eliminated the problems of actual Avalon Hill games. Does this mean that this is the only thing they do? No. Wii Sports (second best selling video game ever, after Tetris) is not designed the way you'd design a tabletop wargame. If anything it's designed the way you would actually design an immersive storygame along the lines of Monsterhearts - throw out all the existing ideas, concentrate on what the people you are trying to model actually do, and turn that into a game. A

And that 1-page RPGs aren't viably marketable? That's a turnabout I wasn't expecting.

If you can fit a game on the back of a cereal box selling that game is never going to be profitable. How is that a turnabout?

Confusion has reigned near supreme since the late 80s at least. How nice it would feel to have every question securely answered.

How nice and how impossible. Large swathes of the OSR are advocating Rulings, not Rules. Your tastes are a minority interest - but you seem to be declaring that people with other tastes are trying to destroy the hobby.

Not in so-called narrativist "story now" games. They hold story creation in the moment paramount. Context is irrelevant, do what you want now.

I could not read that sentence without laughing out loud. If you have no context you have no story. A narrative is something that is ongoing. Your summary there literally couldn't be further from "story now" if you tried.

What Story Now is saying is that you don't need to worry about the small stuff. There is no reason to tie up sheets with such things as carrying capacity unless that is likely to be a vital aspect of the story. On the other hand if things are likely to be vital (like relationships) include them. And the biggest thing that every storygame I am aware of does is has a way to establish a context as fast as possible. Far from rejecting the context, context is critically important to Storygames.

D&D makes it easier for the DM to describe things because they are actually on the map and in the key referenced.

This is specific to Sandbox D&D. Not all D&D is Sandbox D&D. And I have never said I dislike D&D (I dislike some versions of it - but that's a different story).

Also that you are saying this is another example of you wanting only One True Way. Rules Cyclopaedia D&D does things one way - it's a good way. Monsterhearts another - and that too is a good way.

That's probably the single most important thing I wrote in my last post. You really have never had the opportunity to play in a game of D&D? D&D is hard. You start over at 1st level every time you lose. It's not simple and takes major amounts of labor, heart and compassion, dedication, knowing about how to work well with others, and plenty more than I could possibly list.

Played D&D for years, run D&D for years. Even the way you outline. DMing such a game is about logistics - and you have far more to remember than the players do. Far more notes.

That you scoff at this makes me think you have only enjoyed "forget it as soon as its said" games. That's not D&D. The mystery, the allure, the note taking, mapping, studious reviewing of previous sessions notes, the time spent planning strategy as a group (the player party) in and out of session. You don't do any of that, do you?

I've done it. It's fun. It is also a minority interest within roleplaying circles. That you are equating all roleplaying games with that one particular mode of play that has been a minority interest ever since D&D started getting read by people outside Gygax' extended circle simply shows how narrow you want to make it. Dwarf Fortress and Nethack are both fine games, and the computer equivalent of what you are talking about here.

All those games can be reduced down to one mechanic no other games use: The storygame mechanic.

"We made some up we thought would be fun" was Mike Mornard's consistent summary of D&D pre-1974. It is also an excellent summary of your "Storygame mechanic" (which isn't a mechanic that shows up in many storygames). So apparently D&D was based on the storygame mechanic.

Sure there are variations, but my experience and reading of almost every one is they aren't looking to enable actual game play at any point (by providing a pattern to players to decipher).

This has more to do with you not understanding the idioms than anything else. Writing a storygame involves in most cases controlling the emergent gameplay, and it's often subtle. If we look at Nicotine Girls, does it read like a PVP game to you? Because it is. There are masses of patterns in Apocalypse World, and more in the tighter written Monsterhearts (and Monsterhearts is unequivocally a Storygame - it says so right on the cover).

As for "actual game play", this is another example of your One True Way approach. Dogs in the Vineyard is a cross between Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken, with some tactics involved on top of that. That's gameplay. Apocalypse World and co (especially Monsterhearts) have a lot of patterns to decipher, and Torchbearer might just be the only game to do old school logistics-based dungeoncrawling of the sort you love better than either Brown Box D&D, BECMI, or Rules Compendium D&D. Does this mean that all Storygames do? Fiasco isn't a game in the restricted sense you are using it in. That much I will accept. (That said, there are choices, and there are patterns in there).

Don't mistake my need to forget in order to learn something different

As far as I know that's only a property of Sherlock Holmes.

Now please stop trying to restrict Roleplaying Games to one specific branch of exploration focussed D&D that was definitely not the dominant mode of play by the time DL-1 turned up in 1984 and that would abolish the entire White Wolf canon. And please stop trying to project your own prejudices onto Storygames when very few of them are like that.

 

[LostSoul]

The first sentence says to me that you're mentally imprisoned in a philosophy. But plenty of others in our hobby are similarly stuck. Get out of that theory is my advice. Evacuate it from your mind. Don't believe my opinions instead. That won't help me. But quit all that lousy reductive thinking from the Forge which leads people into your second sentence: That you can't even understand why individuals can live life differently from each other.

Thanks for the reply. I may be mentally imprisoned in a philosophy but, if I am, the prison keeps me from knowing. So that's difficult!

The point of my second sentence wasn't about individuals living different lives, it was more about the difficulty of communication on the internet. I believe that there's more common ground here: when you say there's no "fiction" in D&D, and describe what you mean by game patterns, I think that sounds a lot like what I think of "fiction". Maybe I don't understand what you're trying to say, though; I chalk that up to the difficulty of internet communication.

Seriously, I'm glad you posted. But this isn't saying anything to me other than you may not be willing or capable to see things differently than the path you've been led down. At least where the crowd is shuffling...

I mean, if you like it, fine. But do you see anyone else around here contradicting this all-knowing theory? Supporting free thought for understanding RPGs & D&D? Promoting theories based on practice and evidence not suppressive agenda?
(honestly, there are some folks, but it's usually more break open a can of the one true way)

I hope to try to see things differently, but if I can't or won't it's hard to tell. If I don't understand something it's hard to know if it's because I've adopted a philosophy that makes understanding impossible or if I simply cannot grasp the concept. I guess the best I can do is try to muddle through it.

If you're willing to answer some questions I have that might help gain a better understanding of what I'm not understanding. (I can think of two: 1. You seem to draw a line between resolution mechanics and mechanics. What is the difference between those two? Or maybe for more clarity: since you say that there are no resolution mechanics, what is the definition of a mechanic and why can't/shouldn't they be called resolution mechanics? 2. Let's say the game brings the PCs into a goblin lair. One of the players asks what goblin dung smells/looks like, and how it might be different from that of other animals and humanoids. This isn't in the module or on the key. Is the DM's on-the-fly decision still considered part of the module?)

 

[Hussar]

The same way we always have - he's better at managing what he's got and avoiding serious injuries. That arrow that would have killed him when he was still green, he avoids the worst of now, protecting his vitals and taking it somewhere less serious or rolling with the punch, so to speak. Would you expect a skilled boxer to be able to function longer while taking hits than a neophyte? I would. He's better at blocking, he's generally better at managing the after-effects of a hit in the short term, and he's better at managing his own stamina. Same with a more experienced fighter.

Ok a few people have given this same line.

That's not what's being done though. The point being made was that hp can be objectively measured by factoring in the number of hits someone can take where each hit does equal damage.

If that is true, then how do you rationalize hp? Because none of the rationalizations so far work. There is no dodging or turning wounds in this scenario.

Context is important.

 

[pemerton]

I used to believe that rules as physics was the only correct way to run a game, and the alternative was some sort of railroad. This was from bad experiences with seat of their pants referees where I didn't understand how their campaign world worked and constantly misinterpreted situations.

<snip>

Common sense isn't necessarily enough as an adjudication method as it isn't common, and it's inherently subjective.

There are a range of techniques that are relevant to this issue, that I'm guessing those bad referees were not using.

First, "say yes or role the dice". So the default orientation is that players' action declarations for their PCs are successful.

Second, being clear on the stakes before the dice are rolled. So that a player knows what is at stake, and what will happen if a die roll is failed, before the situation is actually resolved.

Third, framing action declarations and stakes in terms of outcomes - how do things end up for my PC? - rather than process.

Given that the outcomes and the process used to achieve them are intertwined, this distinction really isn't persuasive. Any player could simply cry "fiat" if the DM chooses a framework that he feels was less favorable to him than some other possibility.

<snip>

I don't see any connection between what players want and what drives the interactions of rules with game outcomes. What happens happens; the players may or may not want it, but that desire is really irrelevant. That's a metagame consideration for the DM to manage how he chooses.

Player desire is crucial in my game, because it is what leads to action declarations for PCs, which in turn leads to things actually happening.

Choice of framework for resolution is not fiat. The issue of "more or less favourable" does't really come into play, because - at least in the system I was talking about (4e) - players have resources to deploy across multiple frameworks.

The really important part is that the average number of arrows to drop someone is an objective part of the game world

I've responded to this a couple of times.

From the fact that character X endures 10 arrows on one occasion, it doesn't follow that this is typical, or a basis for generalisation.

The only people who can make the generalisation are the players in the real world, who base it on the maths of the character sheet. But we can't project from that into the gameworld unless we take as a premise that the maths of the character sheet represents the causal logic of the gameworld. And of course that is a premise that non-sim players probably don't embrace.

Whatever the relationship between successful hits and falling unconscious from HP loss, a 2[W] power objectively has more of an impact than a 1[W] power.

<snip>

If you want to measure hit points in "average number of Biting Volleys as performed by Ranger 7 Sally", then that would be equally consistent (albeit less easily understood).

The same reply applies here. For me, at least, "Biting Volley" doesn't map to a distinct event in the gameworld. Within the gameworld the archer character is just shooting arrows. It is only at the table that some of them are triggered by Twin Strike, some by Biting Volley and some by off-turn actions like Disruptive Strike.

narrativist tend to be much much lighter (with as far as I'm aware the sole exception of Burning Wheel)

That crunch of BW is part of what makes it appealing to me as (hopefully) the system for my next campaign, when our 4e game is finished.

 

[pemerton]

Insofar as you must impose reality within your game, no, I was really just being a bit facetious.

Yes, I knew you weren't being deadly serious.

My point was only that people can treat reality as illustrative without knowing the rules that govern it.

Chemistry is really just applied physics. Biology is just applied chemistry. Sociology and psychology are just applied biology.

This is even more tangential, into philosophy of science and method. I think Weber remains the greatest of all sociologists. His work is not applied biology. Of other disciplines, the ones to which it is most closely related are history and philosophy.

 

[pemerton]

Where did I claim this wasn't the case?

<snip>

what is the "bigger picture" of these replies to my posts? Is it to inform me of things I already know?

In your post to which I replied, you said that using minions to represent weak/unlucky versions of "on level" creatures, such as 4th level duergar thugs, was not using minions in the way that other posters has said minions are supposed to be used. (Your word.)

My point was that no one had said minions are supposed to be used to handle PC improvement relative to creature types. They said that minions can be used to do that. Which leaves it open that they can be used to do other things too, like represent weak or unlucky versions of an "on level" creature.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Choice of framework for resolution is not fiat.

Of course it isn't. That was precisely my point. Neither is dictating outcomes, which you derisively refer to by that term. Both of them are variations of exercising the DM's power.

The issue of "more or less favourable" does't really come into play, because - at least in the system I was talking about (4e) - players have resources to deploy across multiple frameworks.

It certainly does come into play, unless those resources result in an exactly equal chance of success for all conceivable mechanical approaches. If the players would be able to survive a fall fine by virtue of hp, and you ignore this in favor of some other mechanical approach (RAW or otherwise), you've screwed them. If the players would have struggled to fight a battle using their combat powers and attacks and you allowed them to circumvent it with a skill challenge that was easier for them, you've given them a gift.

Regardless of whether this was your intent, that's the truth of what happened. Hiding behind this boundary you've established (dictating process but not outcomes) doesn't change the fact that the outcomes and process are inextricably linked, and ultimately outcomes are still being primarily determined by the choices of the DM (and secondarily, if at all, by other factors).

Moreover, as the DM, you determined what those resources would be to begin with (by deciding things like their starting level, ability score generation parameters, and equipment options), and you established the knowledge which the players used in allocating those resources. Given all of this context, trying to draw a specific distinction and referring only to DM actions that determine outcomes as "fiat" is ludicrous.

 

[Hussar]

Of course it isn't. That was precisely my point. Neither is dictating outcomes, which you derisively refer to by that term. Both of them are variations of exercising the DM's power.

.

Umm, if you were making a dictionary, under DM fiat "dictating outcomes" is what DM fiat is. How would you define DM fiat?