Simulationists, Black Boxes, and 4e

[jdrakeh]

I thought that was Paranoia.

Well, FRUP was a fantasy world where the D&D core books fell from the sky and were discovered by citizens who enshrined them as holy objects, subsequently structuring their own society according to the rules therein. So, Paranoia with swords, magic, and a gold piece standard economy

 

[IanArgent]

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.

But 3E wasn't a system where the vast majority of the world lived by the rule system either. I suppose it tried; but IMHO it failed at that. Lets recall the errata that stated that the animals with a BAB of 0 and the Weapon Finesse feat for their attacks had Weapon Finesse as a Bonus Feat (and that the DM should pick a feat to replace it). There's a glaring example of having to fudge to fit because the NPCs couldn't live by the rules. There are others where either NPCs don't live by the same rules as PCs, or they just shouldn't have to.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

But 3E wasn't a system where the vast majority of the world lived by the rule system either. I suppose it tried; but IMHO it failed at that. Lets recall the errata that stated that the animals with a BAB of 0 and the Weapon Finesse feat for their attacks had Weapon Finesse as a Bonus Feat (and that the DM should pick a feat to replace it). There's a glaring example of having to fudge to fit because the NPCs couldn't live by the rules. There are others where either NPCs don't live by the same rules as PCs, or they just shouldn't have to.

I found the worst offender to be the ECL/CR dichotomy. PC classed NPC had a CR equal to their HD. So you'd expect a CR X monster would also be Level X PC. But that wasn't true. There were solid reasons for this not to be true, and they all were based on the innate differences between PCs and NPCs. (And most of them simply due to the difference between a long-term protagonist and a short-term antagonist, e.g. due to the fact that we're playing a game and not creating a fictional-world simulator)

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

I think that systems like RQ and RM get surprisingly close (referring to infallible rulestes, PA), 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.

So in essence, a simulationist game can only be achievable if the participants agree to confine their simulationist tendencies to areas that the game handles well in a sim fashion, and agree to play by less sim, say nar or gam, when the game decides to venture into the areas usually referred to as corner cases. To me this seems to imply that a game be either railroad or "illusionist sim", and that no true sim gaming is possible. I can't remember the terminology that was used in the GNS literature (maybe incoherent?), but this was understood about D&D from the beginning of GNS theory. It is interesting that the same thing might apply to all sim. Are all games at least abashadly gam or nar?

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.)

This goes right along with my statement that no ruleset can be infallible. The ability to play sim is dependent on metagame elements like agreeing not to exploit the holes in the sim platform. I have nothing against this. I just feel like I should point out to those players that self identify as simulationists that every game contains a metagame on a very significant level. I and many like me who like 4e have been disparaged by many sim players that 4e and gam/nar play is not good enough because it can't hold up to the ideals of getting everything right in game without a metagame. Metagame is unavoidable by the simple fact that it is both a model (hence not the real thing) and a game (hence not reality). So for either one, there is a level of "something else" that is involved in the playing of the game, namely real life.

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.

I think that this is an area where many simulationists come to be mistaken that sim requires no metagame. There is no need for an overt conversation about social contract at this point, because they have had an ongoing dialogue about it for years. This doesn't mean that the dialogue was overt. Just that a significant body of unwritten rules about how gaming should be done has been established. Maybe they think that early on they were just bad RPers, and now they have matured and are better. They might also think that when they play at other tables, these players just don't get it. In reality, these other players just are obeying a different social contract, meaning that they play by different metagame rules.

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

Yes. Restriction to a small subset of possible play outcomes is necessary for sim play, especially purist for systems. Sandbox is by definition not restricted in it's possibilities.

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.

I like some constraints. I find it funny that a lot of the complaints about 4e by self identified simulationist players is about the constraints on play that 4e imposes on players or character actions.

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.

This is an intriguing idea. The idea that a game can have significant rules content that is of one style, while other areas are of a completely different style. Would this create a coherent game without the need for metagame handwaving?

I think that it would be very possible to create a more meaningful theory and terminology for discussing RPGs than GNS theory. I do not have a huge amount of experience with other systems besides the various iterations of D&D (Shadowrun various editions, Marvel Superheroes, Vampire, a little TriStat d6, a little Exaulted), but I think that now with 4e coming out, we could at least create a better way of talking about the various D&D editions than the obviously very limited vocabulary of GNS.

 

[LowSpine]

Process-response is like the Mouse Trap board game. At least in the context of Grapple Rules. It has allot of unnecessary steps (a man diving into a barrel) - clunky, slow and badly designed.

4E grapple (black box) is like a real mouse trap. Mouse steps on trigger plate ---> mouse gets snapped in two.

 

[LostSoul]

So in essence, a simulationist game can only be achievable if the participants agree to confine their simulationist tendencies to areas that the game handles well in a sim fashion, and agree to play by less sim, say nar or gam, when the game decides to venture into the areas usually referred to as corner cases. To me this seems to imply that a game be either railroad or "illusionist sim", and that no true sim gaming is possible.

When you are playing with a sim agenda, you have to know what you are focusing your attention on. Sometimes those corner cases aren't going to matter at all.

If I was playing a sim game where we wanted to recreate a Star Wars story, we could leave the question of hyperspace travel speeds up to the GM. It moves at the speed of plot in the movies, therefore it moves at the speed of plot in the game. (The GM has the responsibility to maintain the sim agenda by making sure it travels at the right speed.)

If I was playing a sim game, where we wanted to explore what it would be like to be 17th-century pirates, we'd want to know how fast our ship could go (and we'd probably have a random weather table, as accurate as possible).

My point is that stuff you don't care to explore can be handwaved away without loss of player agency. I define railroading as being unable to make meaningful choices; if you can't make meaningless choices, it's not a big deal.

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

LostSoul this sounds reasonable. To make it not "illusionist" for nar, all you have to do is make sure that there is actual player protagonism. Since player protagonism is the province of nar, taking it away without revealing or aknowledging that you have will create "illusionist narrativism", which is really simulationism. Actually, i guess I disagree then. Since the province of simulationism is "exploration" or "recreation", if you are unable to "recreate" or "explore" with any fidelity, but you do not aknowledge this, they in reality you are playing an "illusionist simulation". Player protagonism is not a factor in simulationism. There are many hard core sim players that would rather limit protagonism to forward "recreation and exploration with fidelity". This is actually the argument I see most against 4e. I am not sure if this would necessarily make it either gamist or narrativist, but it lessens the simulationist aspects greatly, making it at least incoherent.

So really, player agency is not an issue. I guess by railraoding, I meant that the thing that is suposed to create the simulation, namely the rules, is being forced to do so in a certain way outside those rules. It is not player railroading because that is the province of narrativist play, in essence it eliminates narrativist play and creates "illusionist narrativism". The correlate to narrativist railroading for simulationist play is where the agency is taken from the rules, and given to someone else, namely the GM in the form of handwaving and creates "illusionist simulationism".

I will need to work on this, but I am starting to think that there is no possibility of a coherent simulationist rules sytem, as defined by GNS. It will all require a significant amount of metagame to create, and not one that is inherent in the world created/explored.

 

[pemerton]

So in essence, a simulationist game can only be achievable if the participants agree to confine their simulationist tendencies to areas that the game handles well in a sim fashion, and agree to play by less sim, say nar or gam, when the game decides to venture into the areas usually referred to as corner cases. To me this seems to imply that a game be either railroad or "illusionist sim", and that no true sim gaming is possible. I can't remember the terminology that was used in the GNS literature (maybe incoherent?), but this was understood about D&D from the beginning of GNS theory. It is interesting that the same thing might apply to all sim. Are all games at least abashadly gam or nar?

<snip>

I just feel like I should point out to those players that self identify as simulationists that every game contains a metagame on a very significant level. I and many like me who like 4e have been disparaged by many sim players that 4e and gam/nar play is not good enough because it can't hold up to the ideals of getting everything right in game without a metagame. Metagame is unavoidable by the simple fact that it is both a model (hence not the real thing) and a game (hence not reality). So for either one, there is a level of "something else" that is involved in the playing of the game, namely real life.

<snip>

Restriction to a small subset of possible play outcomes is necessary for sim play, especially purist for systems. Sandbox is by definition not restricted in it's possibilities.

I don't think every sim game is abashedly narrativist or gamist, but I do think you are right to say that every sim game needs a metagame to establish the point of the sim (as Lost Soul says).

The difference between sim and narr/gamism is that the metagame happens in character build and campagin/encounter design (these are all done so as to facilitate exploration of the right thing) rather than during the course of play (eg no metagame in action resolution). Ron Edwards I think acknowledges this in his essay on sim in which he complains that sim gaming texts frequently don't do a good enough job of handling this metagame asepct (and so, for example, two players turn up to the game with an assassin and a paladin, because no metagame discussion & resolutioin took place in advance).

My own belief is that sim can be a useful platform for narrativist provided that the players are able to have some control over the content of the simulation. Now in your post above you try to do a reductio on sim play, by arguing (as I take it) that it is either pure GM railroading, or else really something else, because the players (in having some control over the sim) are exercising agency.

I don't agree with your argument, because I think you are leaving out one very common aspect of sim play: the players railroad themselves (eg by specifying a personality for their PC and then sticking to it - D&D alignments are a crass example of this, Pendragon passions or HERO/GURPS personality flaws a more sophisticated example).

In my experience, this sort of sim play can drift into lowkey vanilla narrativism when the players realise that instead of being beholden to pre-determined personalities for their PCs, they can shape their PCs (both in terms of mechanical development and non-mechanical asepctes of personality development - though in many games, including RM, the two are intertwined) in order to pursue a thematic point. This tends to be accompanied by a shift out of actor stance ("true roleplaying" according to many sim players) into author stance.

I don't think the sort of narrativist game I'm talking about is going to deliver the most profound insights of all time into the human condition - but then, to be honest, I'm not 100% sure that a session of I Kill Puppies for Satan or Life With Master will either (though I have no doubt that both are very good games).

I think that this is an area where many simulationists come to be mistaken that sim requires no metagame. There is no need for an overt conversation about social contract at this point, because they have had an ongoing dialogue about it for years. This doesn't mean that the dialogue was overt. Just that a significant body of unwritten rules about how gaming should be done has been established. Maybe they think that early on they were just bad RPers, and now they have matured and are better. They might also think that when they play at other tables, these players just don't get it. In reality, these other players just are obeying a different social contract, meaning that they play by different metagame rules.

I think you are right about this.

This is an intriguing idea. The idea that a game can have significant rules content that is of one style, while other areas are of a completely different style. Would this create a coherent game without the need for metagame handwaving?

I don't know that the RM game I play is entirely coherent - for example, it uses a roughly narrativist XP system (XPs for accomplishing goals) but getting a level allows the player to spend simulationist-style currency (development points derived from stats) according to his or her own metagame agenda (ie narrativist or gamist character build). But the incoherence doesn't affect play too badly. One reason for preferring HARP over RM is that it tries a little harder to achieve (and can be more easily drifted to fully achieve) coherence in character build, with fully narrativist XP, development points and fate points.

To look at it in another way: Suppose you took TRoS and stripped away the Spiritual Attributes - you have mechanics to support a game of detailed, gritty interpersonal combat. Then suppose you added in other aspects to character build - detailed knowledge skills, social skills, magic skills and spells - which gave players a lot of control over when and if their players get into combat. And suppose you tweaked the combat rules a little so that a reasonably experienced PC, even against a roughly equal foe, was able to exercise a high degree of control over the danger faced in an encounter and the risk s/he wishes to take. Then you have RM (it does the last bit via its attack/parry rules - an interesting case of a simulationist mechanic serving a narrativist purpose) - and like TRoS, it can still be a game about what is worth killing and what is worth dying for. The lack of Spritual Attributes/Fate Points can make things a little hairy at the edges (there's no narrativist mechanical buffer for a player who miscalculates) but most of the time (at least at mid-levels and above) the system can muddle through.

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

To look at it in another way: Suppose you took TRoS and stripped away the Spiritual Attributes - you have mechanics to support a game of detailed, gritty interpersonal combat. Then suppose you added in other aspects to character build - detailed knowledge skills, social skills, magic skills and spells - which gave players a lot of control over when and if their players get into combat. And suppose you tweaked the combat rules a little so that a reasonably experienced PC, even against a roughly equal foe, was able to exercise a high degree of control over the danger faced in an encounter and the risk s/he wishes to take. Then you have RM (it does the last bit via its attack/parry rules - an interesting case of a simulationist mechanic serving a narrativist purpose) - and like TRoS, it can still be a game about what is worth killing and what is worth dying for. The lack of Spritual Attributes/Fate Points can make things a little hairy at the edges (there's no narrativist mechanical buffer for a player who miscalculates) but most of the time (at least at mid-levels and above) the system can muddle through.

The way you have stated this, I would actually think it would give a better platform for presenting the theme of what is worth killing and what is worth dying for, because like in real life, there are no redos or get out of jail frees. These types of mechanics would just get in the way of making the statement "This is worth killing/dying for!" because it means less.

For the rest, I will think on it and respond. I think there is more to my premise than has been explored or explained. Thanks for the insightful dialogue so far.