The Crimson Binome
Hero
I don't think you understand what "internally consistent" means.
D&D 5E Simulation vs Game - Where should D&D 5e aim?
howandwhy99
Adventurer
The central confusion here is that early D&D is a simulation. It isn't. Stories are simulations. They are fictions or non-fictions because those labels are declarations of whether or not stories exist outside the imaginations of those expressing them.
Games are the things in and of themselves. People don't refer to games as representations. They exist even if only in our imaginations. It doesn't matter if they tell refer to something in our world as they aren't stories. Go has no story. It is purely a game, i.e. it is entirely about pattern recognition.
D&D has a story element in as much as it appears to be a representation of our world. But it ultimately isn't a story, it's a fantasy, an imaginary construct just like any other game.
Games are the things in and of themselves. People don't refer to games as representations. They exist even if only in our imaginations. It doesn't matter if they tell refer to something in our world as they aren't stories. Go has no story. It is purely a game, i.e. it is entirely about pattern recognition.
D&D has a story element in as much as it appears to be a representation of our world. But it ultimately isn't a story, it's a fantasy, an imaginary construct just like any other game.
Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
I think should is a very loaded word here. It implies that there is a platonic ideal of D&D or role playing games that we have yet to reach, but would if only they would design the game as it as was meant to be played. We have a remarkably diverse hobby, and the fact that there are different incarnations that do different things well and make different trade offs is a thing that should be cherished - not condemned. Having Pathfinder, 4e, 13th Age, Dungeon World, Torch Bearer, AD&D, and the multitude of incredibly different games that trace their roots back to the same central premise is a wonderful thing.
The splitting of the base is not a bad thing, but the idea that it is harmful does do a disservice to our hobby. Instead of focusing on what any particular permutation adds to the overall gaming culture we push for homogeneity. Instead of focusing on play techniques and attempting to actually understanding one another we fight over pieces of a new edition as if that will solve the question once and for all.
Obviously, anyone who has seen any of my posts can tell where my preferences lie, but I think we all should take a step back and be thankful that the resources are out there to play the game as you want it to be played. Also being thankful that other people also have access to the types of games they enjoy might help a little.
The splitting of the base is not a bad thing, but the idea that it is harmful does do a disservice to our hobby. Instead of focusing on what any particular permutation adds to the overall gaming culture we push for homogeneity. Instead of focusing on play techniques and attempting to actually understanding one another we fight over pieces of a new edition as if that will solve the question once and for all.
Obviously, anyone who has seen any of my posts can tell where my preferences lie, but I think we all should take a step back and be thankful that the resources are out there to play the game as you want it to be played. Also being thankful that other people also have access to the types of games they enjoy might help a little.
I agree that is one issue. For me, a bigger issue - one that I have actually encountered via many years of play - is that simulationist mechanics tend not to produce emotionally and dramatically satisfying situations and resolutions to those situations.
While it might be the case that truth is stranger than fiction, on the whole fiction is more satisfying than truth. It has resolution. Not all fiction is contrived in the pejorative sense, but all stories are contrivances in at least a literal sense, of having been made up by someone for a reason.
That is hard to get out of a simulationist game.
Simulations of what?
D&D has at least one fundamental difference from go: go has a finite number of possible move-types (and therefore a finite, through very large, number of possible game-states). The permitted moves in D&D (and hence the number of possible game-states) is unlimited. Rather than a list of permitted moves (as in chess, or go, or even Monopoly despite the colour of the latter which creates the veneer of simulation of the life of a tycoon), D&D uses the content of the shared fiction to constrain what is permissible. (For instance, if the GM describes a door in a dungeon, then the players are allowed to declare that their PCs try and dismantle it, take the timber for torches and fashion the metal components into crude weapons. This game move does not need to be written down in any rulebook in order to be permissible. The GM adjudicates it, at least in part, by reference to the content of the shared fiction eg how robust is the door? and how well equipped are the PCs for some impromptu demolition work?
The fact that D&D depends upon fictions, in this sense, of course doesn't mean that it involves stories. Not all stories involve fictions (eg narrative history), and nor do all fictions involve stories (eg thought experiments used to prove or illustrate aspects of special relativity).
Balesir
Adventurer
Hmmmm - I'd be interested in your definition of "story", here. The thought experiments I'm familiar with for Special Relativity involve an "observer", and as soon as you have an observer you have a "story" (albeit a fairly bland one), it seems to me.
Edit: Oh, and do "narrative histories" involve fictions? Heh - that's one that will run and run, I'll wager!
By "story" I have in mind, at least in this context, the sorts of things that many RPGers aim at - both Forge-y narrativists and old-fashioned 90s-style railroaders. There is a recognisable plot, with protagonists, complications and some degree of resolution.
On this conception, imagining someone standing on a platform watching a very fast train run along infinite tracks while shining torches doesn't count as a story!
If I was posting on a cultural studies board I might have stated my claim a bit more cautiously. By "narrative history" I am thinking of something like (say) Leon Wolff's In Flanders Fields, which has chapters and tries to frame the events that it is presenting in terms of cognisable "episodes". A contrast would be (say) an archaeological catalogue (one I happen to have on my shelf at the moment is the companion book to the BBC TV series In Search of the Dark Ages), or social history such as EP Thompson's Whigs and Hunters (though this also contains narrative elements within it).
Of course if people want to take up the issue about whether it is possible to have meaningful non-fictional accounts of history, I'm happy to have that discussion!
Pickles JG
First Post
Old AD&D the one I started with listed everything in Inches which were either 10' or 10 yards.
Squares I like for ease of use but for immersion calling your 5' squares "fathoms" or similar seems sensible.
howandwhy99
Adventurer
What you're saying here is harmony (in poetry, music, dance, song, and even stories) doesn't result in emotional or intimate fulfillment.
Yes, Go is a finite game, but D&D is an infinite game with imperfect information. Neither of them are storygames where participants trade off storytelling rights. At any given point in D&D, the game construct is finite. But the ability to create add game constructs increases its current size of complexity. At any given point any action taken by a player begins their remembered understanding of the current design they've encountered. These understandings are imperfect however, and like every game except storygames experience with the game allows learning about it through play. (i.e. There is a world/game out there, we are learning about it, and it benefits us to do so.)
The very particular game design you are talking about is a storygame, not a role playing game or D&D. That is a single way to design a game and and a very singular if not insular understanding of games. Storygames lose almost every benefit of actual game design as well as every manner of game play. Almost none of those games aret about playing a game at all. Instead they are about creating stories, something almost inconceivably different (and if that's the only philosophy a person is familiar with, they probably have difficulty even conceiving of games). The philosophy you continue to promote as D&D is a single playstyle with little to no historical game design evidence. Please stop trying to make D&D into another storygame heartbreaker by conflating the two. They are not remotely the same endeavor.
By your understanding then is non-fiction non-story commonplace personal experience then? In my conversations in the past with you I'd have thought you believed all personal existence is necessarily narrative stories and its relation to the outside world is what made those stories fictional or non-fictional. Now perhaps are you saying thought experiments about reality aren't stories because they don't have some narrative format? But why then persist is claiming they are fiction? Fiction is a narrative term that limits thought experiments to literary theory - something I doubt most any thought experimenter wants to be confined within. They don't want their results to be fictions, they want a better depiction of reality (what non-fiction stories refer to).
Zaran
Adventurer
It's not that simulation is necessarily trying to emulate reality. Simulation is adding a Green Dragon to the area because the environment is a Jungle . Simulation is giving the GM enough information that they actually create a world and not just put together balanced encounters. Simulation is interpreting what a player wants their character to do into the rules without requiring them to have the specific action on their character sheet. I want the tools and information to have the world make sense and that can be set on top of the rules. I do not want to hand-wave crafting a sword. I do not want to minimize life in the city just because it detracts from getting the PCs into the dungeon. It's something that really doesn't need a new edition to accomplish but that ship has sailed. I feel like it's a good thing that they seem to be focusing on giving the GM enough tools to more than just make great encounters.
Registered just to express my agreement with this comment. Simulation (I actually prefer the term immersion) is simply a way for players to experience the game world through the eyes and sensibility of a game-world character, rather than interfacing primarily with game mechanics, or standing back as an author.
From what I've seen of 5E, it will be easier to engage with in a primarily in-world perspective than 3E or 4E, and yet offer more consistent and transparent game system options than 1E or 2E. Which suits my preferences admirably.
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