Simulationists, Black Boxes, and 4e

[PrecociousApprentice]

Thanks for being reasonable about it, a lot of pre-4e people on these boards haven't. They just don't accept that 4e doesn't necessarily fit everybody's preferred playstyle. And it gets hackles raised by 3e people, especially when many of these same people were happy enough with 3e not so long ago and now act so dismissively toward it.

I think that early on I was one of those stating that 4e was for everyone. I have definitely changed my tune. I think that any story can be told in 4e, if not necessarily in the way that all people like to tell them. 4e is different.

4e is just not my sort of game, there's really no chance of me moving over to it. If it wasn't resolution mechanics it would be something else. What they did to the magic system was really the kicker, they tossed so many elements of one of my favorite subsystems they guaranteed I wouldn't be moving on. I played 1e and 2e and they were fun but had problems. 3e fixed so many of those problems and created some new ones. 4e has picked back up many of the problems of 1e or 2e while dumping the elements that kept me playing the game.

I like the change in magic systems. The only reason I ever liked psionics was that it ws magic that wasn't vancian. The new magic is very different, and only eludes to in name or flavor text. I am perfectly OK with that.

Really the reason why many of us who are staying with 3e post here in these threads is a sense of having been abandoned. I've been playing the game for more than 20 years. Out of all the game systems I've experimented with D&D is what stuck. We wanted to like the new edition, we hoped it would fix the problems we'd seen in the system. But instead they took out what for many of us were the fun parts, the unique and entertaining parts, and went in a totally different direction with the game. One that steps too far away from our arena of play. We wanted to like the new D&D but it's a fork where we needed a spoon.

At least you get to enjoy D&D without buying a bunch of new crap. I have to buy all new books. (Which isn't that bad. I already gave all my 2e and 3.x stuff to my brother anyway, before 4e was announced. I just couldn't handle it any more.)

I think that your feeling of abandonment will fade as 4e matures. There will be companies that support it, and players will obviously keep playing it. Let's be honest, the WotC 3.x supplements were pretty lousy anyway. It was the 3pp that kept it interesting. Soon enough the ranchor will abbate, and we can all be friends again. Have fun with your gaming, I have to wait till June for mine.

 

[IanArgent]

That's because we're using the word narrative to define different activities. You're using forge terminology where I'm using narrative in a more common definition as an event history. For me the narrative emerges from the rules which describe what happened in-game. You don't narrate the end of an action till you know whether the action actually occurred. The narrative is not the goal, the narrative is just a description of what happened via the game-rules. Look at the second sentence in my post, there ISN'T a story or a narrative in the sense you're looking for. Those are a record that emerges from the interactions of the PCs via the players and the rules describing how the in-game world functions.

OK - I've been exposed to forge terminology through this and a couple of other threads, not through the Forge itself; so I'm not necessarily using the terminology in a technical sense. What I want out of a game (and a game system) is that after the session is over, when the players are BSing over their beer and skittles (10 minutes, 10 days, or 10 years later); they start off their stories with "No s**t, there I was;..."

I had a hard as hell time doing this in 3E, to be honest. Prior to that, I had spent most of my time GMing Shadowrun 2 & 3, where I could walk into a session cold, set a mission to my players, and go from there. I had nothing more than a plot hook, a MacGuffin, and anywhere from 2 to 12 players depending on the night. I had NO prep, I didn't need it. I could generate a nearly unlimited amount of content from my own head based on the rules and the fluff, and based on the guidelines and some knowledge of probability. I had a very tight and fine control on the difficulty of each challenge. Shadowrun has NO rules whatsoever for generating NPCs (barring cyberware, but there's really no way for the PCs to tell if you boned the essence rules for an NPC). What it did have was fairly explicit guidelines on what an appropriate level of challenge was. And I knew if I made a mistake, the players had the ability to correct for it via the karma mechanism, while I rebalanced the challenge behind the screen.

3E D&D was an entirely different paradigm. So many world assumptions were baked into the rules, and some much of the balancing was implicitly "fudge to fit" without telling you what you were fitting to. I could follow the rules for advancing a monster, and still not be sure at the end whether or not the rules resulted in a valid end product (the monster's actual challenge matching the "expected" CR). Or I could wing it, but with no guidelines on whether my winging it would end up "right" either. 3E was a much more rigid system. In the name of "support" the rule endied up being quite constraining. Monsters were built using the same tools as PCs were built, so that they could conceivably be used as PCs. Except that because monster abilities are not always appropriate as PC powers, the entire reason for using the PC framework for monsters (HD as level, etc) became a cruel joke for most monsters. But without the need to make monsters conform to the PC paradigm for creation and advancement, you are free to break the rules of PCs when designing monsters.

Who cares if a monster PC of 15th level in 4E isn't the same as a 15th-level monster NPC of the same race. In cases where the monster's powers were interesting, the vast majority of the time a 15th level monster PC was vastly weaker than a 15 HD example of the same race, because of level adjustment (and to a lesser extent, racial hit dice). PCs and NPCs live by different rules for creation and advancement, because PCs and NPCs fill different roles. Even in 3E, this was the case because of level adjustment.

D&D is not intended as a world simulator. the vast majority of people in a world don't live by D&D rules. The rules are for governing the interaction of PCs (who are exceptional, and have been exceptional in every edition of D&D I've been familiar with) with the rest of that world. When PCs interact with the world, the GM and the PCs are attempting to tell a story (IMHO). That all the rules have to support, and that's all they should support, to the extent that the GM needs the rules to do so. The rules shouldn't say how the avaricious vizier overthrows the old king. The GM should take care that that method is at least plausible - if the king dies in a locked room, there should be a method that the PCs can discover that the room wasn't sealed after all. The PCs may not be able to perform the same trick, but it shouldn't be absolutely forbidden by the rules. (This is why SR only has 3 things that magic can't do, as near as I can tell - you can't raise the dead, you can't teleport, and you can't time travel; anything else is at least theoretically possible - and even those rules have exceptions if you look hard enough).

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

D&D is not intended as a world simulator. the vast majority of people in a world don't live by D&D rules.

Which is where we differ, I go the other way around, the rules are the physics of the in-game universe and everyone live by those rules. That those rules produce a world very different from our own is the prime attraction.

 

[jdrakeh]

Which is where we differ, I go the other way around, the rules are the physics of the in-game universe and everyone live by those rules. That those rules produce a world very different from our own is the prime attraction.

It would be a magnificent world of satire code-named "FRUP" and authored by James Wallis.

 

[hong]

It would be a magnificent world of satire code-named "FRUP" and authored by James Wallis.

I thought that was Paranoia.

 

[Fifth Element]

It's been said that there are two basic systems of law. One is "What is not permitted is forbidden." the other is "What is not forbidden is permitted." The same holds true for RPG design. Previous editions of D&D have always emphasised the importance of the GM for adjudicating situations the rules didn't cover. In other words there was no pretense that the rules covered all situations and yet the PCs could attempt actions outside the rules. The attitude I seem to see in the 4e rules, and the 4e fans, is the opposite. "Can I do X?" "Do you have a power for X on your sheet?" "No. " "Then no."

I simply cannot agree that all previous editions of D&D were the same way. Specifically, the 3E version of the above is:

"Can I do X?" "Do you have a feat for X on your sheet?" "No. " "Then no."

Seems to me that was a common complaint about 3E, that having so many feats and skills and special combat maneuvers meant that players and DMs assumed that if it wasn't in the rules, you couldn't do it.

 

[Nom]

Which is where we differ, I go the other way around, the rules are the physics of the in-game universe and everyone live by those rules.

Ayup. That there is the essence of what I call "simulationism" or "concretism". As opposed to what I call "abstractionism", where the rules are primarily a resolution mechanism.

Previous versions of D&D have wandered between both camps. 4E has jumped firmly into the abstractionism camp.

For those with a simulationist bent, "weird" is a good way of describing it. If you approach 4E with a "rules as physics" model, it will appear very strange. Though it might be fun to try a new hat and see how it fits.

 

[pemerton]

In the instance of the characters wanting to sell the kobold armor, I would ask first, to who? Then I would ask, don't you have better things to do as heroes than become used kobold armor traders? If the answer to the second is no, then I would say that it is either a GM problem or a group vision problem. I would not like to play in a group where the best thing to do at the moment was to take up a trade as a "Dead Monster Surplus" salesman.

The first order of business is to cover things that are fun. Looting crappy kobold armor is not particularly exciting. It is a resource, so I guess there are people who will do it, but aren't there better things going on in the campaign?

The problem with this attitude is that it constrains what an RPG can/should be.

But not every RPG can be all things to all people.

All I can say is that this would be a game breaker for me. If I can't loot the monsters armour because it's just pixels on his sprite... Then why the hell am I bothering to sit at your table when I've been able to get that level of game for 20 years from a nintendo? It absolutely shatters immersion for me.

It may not suit your narrative purposes as GM to have my character do so, but I really couldn't care less.

Why assume that it is the GM who is setting the agenda? If in fact most players don't care to loot kobolds, then dropping the rules for that from the book does not hurt the vast majority of players regardless of what the GM does or does not permit their PCs to do in the gameworld.

A surprising number of players LIKE dealing with minutae, and besides, knowing they CAN is often enough. It's amazing how many players will try to do something just because the rules say they can't.

To me this really suggests "social contract" problems. At the least, in such a case the players aren't all agreed on what they sat down at the table to do.

And there's better ways to deal with wannabe armor merchants than fiat denial -- start seriously tracking encumberance, reminding them that carrying armor is a lot harder than wearing it. They want to hire hirelings? Labor trouble, bandits, they need food and water for the mules, and, suddenly, it's not worth it to haul that kobold armor back to town -- a fact driven home by having a price for what it's worth already in mind.

So instead of solving social contract problems directly, it's better to import a clunky simulationist mechanic into the game and do it that way? I know that D&D has a history of doing it this way (alignment would be the paradigm of this) but I'm pretty sceptical myself.

Thanks for being reasonable about it, a lot of pre-4e people on these boards haven't. They just don't accept that 4e doesn't necessarily fit everybody's preferred playstyle.

Some of us have been saying this - that the game would not suit those with simulationist preferences - since the first announcements that every class would have a mix of at-will, per-encounter and daily powers.

If D&D isn't for simulationists, then what is? GRUPS? HERO? FATAL? There has to be some system out there for them!

As I've noted in other threads, both RM and RQ are currently in print, and both a really good games that cover much the same subject matter as does D&D (ie heroic fantasy with a touch of sword-and-sorcery).

 

[pemerton]

So it is more of an issue of a consistent one to one cause-effect sort of resolution. The rules can be there, in your face, and as "unbelievable" as needed, just that there is no interpretation of them. The general theme is Input + Rule-> Unambiguous Output. No interpretation necessary.

More or less. Even then it's tricky: RM has very detailed critical results for combat (no interpretation necessary) but more abstract result descriptions for non-combat endeavours (so some interpretation necessary). CoC uses about the same level of abstraction for both combat (hit points) and sanity (san points) which both require a degree of interpretation.

But, as another poster explained:

You are narrating an act in the game world that directly corresponds to a game mechanic. When you narrate you go no farther than the resolution mechanism has taken you, step by step.

I definitely like the fortune in the middle. No need to get stuck at the "Why did that happen?" moments. Make it up.

Even RM or RQ have a little bit of this eg in RM, you have to narrate whether a miss resulted from a poor aim or a dodge (though, in melee, the rules give a dice roll to tell you whether you missed, were shield-arried or were weapon-parried - no-on said this is a rules-light game!).

A system of role playing that requires rules that are infallible in implementation and never create a "what the heck was that?" moment in the game would be so unweildy so as to be unplayable, if they were comprehensible in the first place.

I think that systems like RQ and RM get surprisingly close, provided that the game confines itself to a certain sphere of activity: roughly, small-scale combat and magic, small-scale social interaction, etc. The interaction between these micro-matters and large scale events (wars, famines, weather etc) has to be pretty-muched handwaved. But provided that this is not the main focus of the game then the GM handwaving that stuff won't really count as railroading, and nor will it impede on the low-level simulationism.

Anyone who thinks that their simmulationist game will never have corner cases either uses liberal doses of abstraction, metagame constructs, does not understand the game, or isn't really playing it.

A combination of the odd bit of abstraction, together with a "social contract" understanding that certain emergent phenomena that are not core to the game will be disregarded (and related bugs not exploited) typically does the job. (This sometimes happens in wargame or boardgame play also.)

One implication of this is that simulationist play is likely to work better with a play group who have played together enough to generate common expectations and understandings as to the limits of the rules.

Another implication is that purist-for-system plus sandbox play is a recipe for rules and social contract headaches.

The trick is what the abstractionist is optimising for. The optimisation is not for mechanical effectiveness; it's for gameplay effectiveness.

<snip>

In a "simulationist" or "concrete" model, the story and the mechanics must be synchronised before and after each resolution event. In an "abstractionist" model, you can synchronise whenever you choose and to the extent you choose, even if a large number of resolution events occur between the two.

Of course, nothing is pure. For example, a simulationist may accept that turn-based activity is an "unrealistic" game mechanic effect, so is willing to blur the story when it comes to who moves when. Similarly, few abstractionists would consider it reasonable to describe a character as having survived the combat when the mechanics clearly pronounce him dead.

Good points. With respect to the bit about turn-based activity: the number of variant initiative and action-resolution systmes that have been published for Rolemaster, to try and resolve this conundrum, is truly frightening!

Using your terminology, if I understand you correctly, a simulationist expects each roll of the dice to represent something real in the game world -- a hit or miss, say -- while an abstractionist does not -- a "to hit" roll may or may not refer to a hit, and a "damage" roll may or may not reflect any physical harm being done.

My gut instinct is to call the first good design and the second bad design -- not because the first is more detailed and the second less so, but because the first models something we're trying to model, and I don't know what the second one is even doing.

The second is trying to generate outcomes in the gameworld. But each dice roll used in that process is not itself representational (eg extended contests in HeroWars).

For those that have claimed that worldbuilding is nonsensical if any game constructs that describe the elements of the world are inconsistent in a one to one mapping fashion, with mutability of the results/game elements being a weakness of the process, I would point to the many millions of published fiction books out there that require no game constructs or concrete modeling at all to create fantastic and very detailed worlds. No one to one mapping of game concepts to world building required. These examples seem to be zero to one in their mapping of game to world. The world building is entirely fluff. No crunch required.

Well said.

At the extreme of abstractionist play would be a mechanic where you roll d4 before you declare some interaction with the gameworld. On a 4, you describe something really good for your PC, on a 3 you describe a net positive, on a 2 it works out for no benefit or loss, and on a 1 you describe a net loss. In this model, the resolution mechanic doesn't abstract any real world event; it limits how the player gets to describe what is about to unfold.

The point of the rules are not to create the world. Your imagination does that. The point of the rules are to organized play and distribute power within the playgroup, and to provide an agreed apon action resolution system framework so that the process can be a game.

Let's put to one side the pure simulationist, for whom the point of the rules is to create the world. Even for the narrativist, there can be a virtue in having some constraints. As I explain in another post, this is part of the attraction, to me, of the use of a sim-heavy system (RM) for narrativist play.

Nom's sample mechanics, by imposing no constraint on player narration, support one sort of approach to the narrativist agenda. Sim action-resolution mechanics coupled with metagame character build and encounter design support a completely different approach: they don't deliver the world (because the metagame delivers both antagonists and protagonists) but they involve each player, unavoidably, in a very intricate narrative that (for the right play group) may be just what is required to achieve their narrative purposes.

I think more abstract rules, such as T&T, support simulationism better in that they produce fewer WTF moments. By virtue of telling the players less about what is going on, they break suspension of disbelief less.

Imo the best system for not breaking SoD is completely freeform - GM decides everything.

But your second paragraph comes close to contradicting your first: either we have utter GM fiat, which is barely roleplaying, or else the players have to make it all up, at which point the purpose of play is not to explore an imaginary world (because the rules aren't delivering that experience) but to do something else (either win ie gamism, or have the players engage in meaningful descriptions ie narrativism).

See you mistakenly assume that when I brought up narrative devices that I meant that the GM should have sole perogative for deciding the narrative. I hate that.

I think that this is a common misinterpretation (on these boards, at least) of "narrativism". Further evidence that the GNS terminology may not be the most transparent.

 

[pemerton]

I am intrigued that you would use what has been reported to be a very hard core simulationist game for narrativist play. How do you accomplish protagonization of the PCs with what I have heard is a purist for system style game? It seems like giving ultimate power to the rules is by default deprotagonizing.

RM has a number of features that are interesting in this respect (and differentiate it from RQ or Classic Traveller).

*Rather than more-or-less random character generation and skill development (designed to model the ingame vicissitudes of life experience) RM has highly metagaming character build and development rules. This makes character build and development an important part of narrativist play using RM.

*Furthermore, RM characters are forced by the character development rules to have (compared to D&D) a very wide spread of character skills: lore skills, social skills, crafting skills etc in addition to core adventuring skills. This makes each RM PC far more expressive of particular player interests and priorities within the game than in some other RPGs.

*RM has a very intricate magic system with a very wide range of spells (both mechanically and in flavour terms). The typical caster at mid- or higher levels knows a fairly wide range of such spells. This gives players a lot of options in respect of how their PCs tackle ingame challenges.

*RM also has a combat system in which attack and parry are allocated from the same pool (unlike RQ - Traveller has something like this for melee combat, but that is less important in a sci-fi game). There are a lot of other options that draw on the same pool (movement in combat, initiative boosts, etc), all of which give players of warriors a lot of options in respect of how their PCs tackle ingame challenges.

*The above two features of RM, combined with the overall breadth of character abilities, mean that the RM rules give players a lot of scope to build characters and resolve situations in-game in a way that is highly responsive to their own priorities. They also mean that character build can solve at least some of the problems facing the use of simulationist action-resolution mechanics in narrativist play without needing sophisticated metagame action-resolution mechanics.​

Now I'm by no means saying that RM is God's gift to narrativist gaming. And many of the features described do not start to emerge until around 5th level play, which makes low-levels in RM much more deprotagonising (though in my experience considerably less so than low-level AD&D or 3E).

But for those for whom character build itself serves a type of aesthetic narrativist purpose (and contrary to Ron Edwards, I do think that character build, when it is of characters who are actually being played in the game, is an aspect of play) it does offer something unique that our group enjoys a great deal.

The detail in action resolution is also attractive to players who want a narrative that is detailed but constrained. To try and explain: with FiTM, for example, a player can simply describe his or her PC's "Disruption" spell as causing nerve damage, or breaking bones, or whatever. The mechanics do not force the player to make a choice about the nature of the damage. This gives freedom, but it also (in a sense) allows the player to hide from the meaning of the act that their PC is engaged in using the spell.

In RM, by way of contrast, there is a mechanical difference between a spell that causes bruising, or causes bleeding, or causes nerve damage, or disintegrates the target's hands, or blasts the target with elemental energy. Even within the latter category, the crit table for fire is different from that for cold. Or turning to mind-control: the mechanics differentiate between taking control of a foe's mind directly, or placing a part of the foe's soul in an object on the caster's person and then using that soul object to exercise control.

The upshot of this is that the mechanics for spells and combat produce, inevitably, very graphic and detailed accounts of what is going on in the gameworld. And players, by choosing various sorts of character build and thus certain sorts of preferences for action resolution, are buying into one or the other way of their PC doing things. In anything but the most light-hearted play, this forces the player to think about the significance of their PC's actions. (I should add: at least in my experience, this also makes RM a much more gritty game than D&D.)

Of course you could do this in a system designed more expressly designed to support narrativist play. But a more abstract, FiTM system perhaps leaves more options open in circumstances where it can be important to be forced to choose.

Why not 4e? Seems like it should be very easy to accomplish a narrativist agenda with 4e than most non-nar games. Why are you wed so much to a heavy sim game?

Why wedded to sim-heavy? Habit. Aesthetic preferences - both pleasure in mechanics, and in the features of the system described above. My friends' preferences are also an important factor - I think that they prefer very vanilla narrativist to something more pervy, and are particularly perhaps a little self-conscious about too much metagaming during action resolution.

Having said that, I am quite interested to try 4e, but perhaps not with my RM group. One of my RM players plays in a D&D group with other friends of mine, so I might get to play with them. Or maybe my RM group will be interested in trying it out (in which case I'd be the GM).

I have, but have not run, most of the 3E Penumbra modules and I think that there is a fair bit of stuff in those that would be interesting for my group. I've been in the process of converting them to HARP - maybe I should try them in 4e instead!