D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[pemerton]

So...if you write down in a book, "If you aren't sure what happens, the referee will tell you what happens," suddenly it's a rule and not "DM decides"?

It’s both.

1) Its a rule…

2) …that GM decides.

I’ll leave the implications upon play of said rule as an exercise for the reader…

I gave Manbearcat his well-earned laugh XP, but this reply is serious in tone and spirit.

This reply is also about RPGing, the social and leisure activity. Not free kriegsspiel as used by the Prussian army as a training exercise.

The essence of RPGing is shared imagination, with the play of the game involving establishing the content of the shared imagining. And this shared imagining has a typical allocation of roles at any given moment of play: one participant manages setting and backstory and resulting situation, while another manages a character/protagonist who is in that situation. (These are the player and GM roles.)

For the game to work - ie so we're not all just sitting around the table looking dumbly at one another - stuff has to be said that adds new fiction. First, (i) the "GM" has to make a situation be part of the fiction. Then, (ii) the "player" has to declare actions for the protagonist. And then, (iii) there has to be some way for working out how the shared fiction changes as a result. And if that's not to be the end of the game, then (iv) there has to be a new situation presented that somehow follows from that change in the shared fiction.

Each of (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv) requires what Edwards calls system: "a means by which in-game events are determined to occur."

Sometimes that system involves "mechanics"; ie some sort of rules-governed reference to cues like dice or cards or tables. Just to give some examples:

* In classic D&D, (i) is determined by reference to a pre-authored map-and-key, or by the use of wandering monster dice and tables;

* In Burning Wheel, sometimes (ii) depends on the outcome of a Steel check;

* In Apocalypse World, (iii) is done by the GM saying something (Drama resolution, in terms of Tweet's schema; and a "soft move" unless the player hands the GM a golden opportunity) unless a move is triggered - in that case, "if you do it, you do it" kicks in and (iii) is done by rolling the dice and then following the instructions for that particular move;

* In classic D&D, (iv) is just the same as (i), but in DitV the escalation rules mean that (iv) is a bit different (I'm not an expert on DitV, but am using it as an example of a system that expressly feeds the result of (iii) into the new/re-framing that follows, and hoping not to get it too wrong in the process).​

Now consider a game in which the only rule, at each of (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv), is "GM decides". That is not a RPG, as it lacks the player role altogether. The same person is both framing and declaring actions and resolving. It is just one person telling a story, albeit under a particular structure of storytelling.

So to get a RPG at all, we have to introduce some limit on GM decides at some place in the system.

Introducing "player decides" at (ii) is one possibility, but I think that is prone to cause issues: eg it encourages the player to declare things like "I pull my <insert game-winner here> out of my pocket and deploy it!", which then in turn encourages escalation by the GM at (iii) and/or (iv). Most school children are familiar with this sort of thing in shared imagination play.

I think that's why there are very few RPGs which really intend participant decides as the entirety of their system. Even if they don't always spell out what the rest of the system is meant to be!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Again, I'm obliged to offer conjectures.

The game you describe, to me, seems like high concept simulation play with moments where the priority changes to narrativist/"story now" play.

I can build on the conjecture to suggest some of the responses/table experiences that I would expect in the sort of play you describe. I'm using the words "participant", "player" and "GM" deliberately. I'm also using third person rather than second person because I'm not in a position to impute particular experiences to you or your friends (as opposed to putting forward general, impersonally-framed conjectures).

In no particular order, here are some of those conjectures:

* Some participants finding the "story now" moments very awesome, and retelling them as game/campaign highlights;​

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* When the "story now" moments emerge, some players worrying that the group is drifting away from the plot or getting distracted from what they "should" be doing;​

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* When it seems like play might be heading towards a "story now" moment, some players worrying about whether it's OK to follow their sense of what their PC would (or should) do even though that might disrupt the party or the plot;​

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* The GM worrying that the "story now" moments put a lot of pressure on judgement and adjudication because there is no longer a solidity of prep and planning to rely on;​

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* Participants having a sense of "relief" or "return to normalcy" when the "story now" moment passes, and the main focus of play is the GM providing cues based on their prep which the players pick up on in the "usual" fashion.​

I would also say that the less the last point obtains, and the more the first point, then the more the play is inclining towards "vanilla narrativism" but is stuck with approaches to setting and situation which hinder more than they support. I've experienced that playing Rolemaster.

Ok. I don't quite recognise the priority switching nor the tensions you outline. Now certainly different moments may have different amount of focus on different things, but again, the binary your thinking seems to favour seems rather strange to me. Now unexpected and wild moments or ones which have great emotional impact (possibly due being strongly connecting to 'the dramatic needs' of the character) certainly will be memorable ones, so that is a thing on your list I somewhat recognise. Furthermore, I don't think that my way of running games is anything particularly unusual.

But it is quite possible that this is as close to some sort of understanding that we are going to get.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Hmmm, well, I think the d6 mechanism you describe is not bad. You could also use piling on more advantage dice, which is a bit different in detailed probabilities, but could be given a pretty similar overall effect. I just don't want to focus on enumerating long lists of conditions and circumstances and 'move on' to the action. HoML is NOT AT ALL simulationist! While I have advantage modeling things that would make sense in the real world, that's intended to get the right fiction and produce a sensible narrative, not to simulate the elements of fighting with swords and such. All that is necessary is a quick check to say "Oh, yeah, I have flanking, so Advantage!" The GM can then look and see if anything cancels that with Disadvantage and we're ready to roll. You do get a substantive benefit from advantage, so its rarely not worth having. For the same reason in HoML there are exactly 4 sources of bonuses, and nothing ever stacks within them (and 3 of those really can only have one source of modifiers in general). HoML combat, unlike 4e, or even 5e, or 13a, etc. is FAST. It is purely focused on what the characters are doing and how they react to the situation at hand. Tactics are important, you want stuff like surprise and flanking, but play has more of the quick feel of older classic D&D in terms of it moves along. It really is NOT meant to be a numbers game.

Yeah, but you obviously think one-and-done is fine. I don't, and don't think speed is enough of a benefit for the tradeoff.

 

[pemerton]

Oh, sure, not at all trying to make a commentary on whether things get in the way of other things per se. More just noting one of the weaknesses of the GNS model compared to what I'm going for. It seems silly to me to say that it is "incoherent" to have a game that works toward multiple creative agendas when...I mean, right here, you're showing how your "creative agenda" is Nar, but that you accept that some minimum amount of Sim needs to be there for the play to make sense.

Sure, I just don't read Edwards as considering this sort of thing to be 'incoherent' at all. It is just foundational definition stuff, bedrock that practically every RPG in existence MUST have.

<snip>

we should look at it as there's a base level of 'stuff' that constitutes the shared imagined world, and agenda only relates to how we use it, with the obvious understanding that a Purest-for-system Simulation agenda will want a rather different setting than a Story Now Narrativist one, even though the base assumptions about these worlds could actually be entirely identical.

In this thread I keep reading stuff being attributed to Edwards which is not true, and which can be seen to be not true by reading the quotes that have been presented (mostly by me) in this very thread!

So, here is Edwards on the components of any RPG:

When a person engages in role-playing, or prepares to do so, he or she relies on imagining and utilizing the following: Character, System, Setting, Situation, and Color.​

• Character: a fictional person or entity.
• System: a means by which in-game events are determined to occur.
• Setting: where the character is, in the broadest sense (including history as well as location).
• Situation: a problem or circumstance faced by the character.
• Color: any details or illustrations or nuances that provide atmosphere.

At the most basic level, these are what the role-playing experience is "about," but to be more precise, these are the things which must be imagined by the real people.​

The one point where I think this is wrong is in the characterisation of system as something imagined. Baker, in his clouds-and-cubes work, explains system in much more detail, as an interplay between imagined things (the characters, setting, situation and events) and real-world cues (maps, dice, charts, etc).

Anyway, here is Edwards explaining simulationism:

Simulationism is expressed by enhancing one or more of the listed elements . . . in other words, Simulationism heightens and focuses Exploration as the priority of play.​

In a subsequent essay, he explains that

Obviously the thing to do is to get as clear an understanding of "Exploration" as possible. It's our jargon term for imagining, "dreaming" if you will, about made-up characters in made-up situations. It's central to all role-playing, but in Simulationist play, it's the top priority. . . . unlike Narrativist and Gamist priorities which are defined by an interpersonal out-of-game agenda, Simulationist play prioritizes the in-game functions and imagined events.​

In the same essay, he goes on to say that

The five elements of role-playing . . . are obviously where we start. Modelling them is the ideal. My first point about that is that the model need not be static; dynamic characters and settings, for instance, are perfectly valid Simulationist elements. My second point is that different types of Simulationist play can address very different things, ranging from a focus on characters' most deep-psychology processes, to a focus on the kinetic impact and physiological effects of weapons, to a focus on economic trends and politics, and more. I'll go into this lots more later.

The second point is that the mechanics-emphasis of the modelling system are also highly variable: it can handled strictly verbally (Drama), through the agency of charts and arrows, or through the agency of dice/Fortune mechanics. Any combination of these or anything like them are fine; what matters is that within the system, causality is clear, handled without metagame intrusion and without confusion on anyone's part. That's why it's often referred to as "the engine," and unlike other modes of play, the engine, upon being activated and further employed by players and GM, is expected to be the authoritative motive force for the game to "go."​

Hence, as he goes on to say, in simulationist play internal cause is king.

So pointing out that @AbdulAlhazred's HoML involves exploration - ie imagining stuff - doesn't show that it is oriented towards simulationist play. As AbdulAlhazred has himself posted, that just tells us that it meets the minimum requirement for being a RPG.

The question is, is the game as designed and played intended to heighten exploration as the key focus of play? Or is the exploration a means for the injection of some further agenda? I think AbdulAlhazred has made it fairly clear that the latter is true, and this is one reason for using an advantage/disadvantage mechanic with a few obvious and evocative triggers (like flanking) - the system is intended not to reinforce a focus on itself for its own sake, but rather to be readily available for doing something else ie finding out how dishonourable the paladin is really prepared to be, in the pursuit of victory.

you're very clearly advancing some "genre"/"High Concept" Sim!

I don't know what the verb "advance" means here.

AbdulAlhazred is designing a game to support "story now" play similar to how 4e D&D does. His game uses a mechanic which (i) doesn't reinforce exploration of the system for its own sake, because it is simple and confined and doesn't interact much with other system elements in intricate ways, and (ii) makes some of the story now play he is interested possible.

He has not stated high concept sim as an agenda, and there is nothing about his game that particularly suggests it is well-suited for high concept sim. For instance, there doesn't seem to be anything that dictates an answer to the paladin's question to flank or not to flank, whereas one would expect a game oriented towards high concept sim to provide such an answer ("internal cause is king").

Perhaps, as a question for you and any other better-versed participants in the thread: Would Edwards have considered "High Concept" Sim to be incoherent with "purist-for-system" Sim?

They're "incoherent" in that they are different priorities for play. Purist-for-system sim is about heightening the exploration of system. High concept sim is about heightening the exploration of character, setting and/or situation. It's not arbitrary that you can't just add "system" to the high concept list of elements whose exploration is heightened: the relationship between character, setting, situation and system is not a symmetrical one. (See my post not far upthread replying to you and @Manbearcat.)

Here is Edwards on games that support high concept sim:

At first glance, these games might look like additions to or specifications of the Purist for System design, mainly through plugging in a fixed Setting. However, I think that impression isn't accurate, and that the five elements are very differently related. The formula starts with one of Character, Situation, or Setting, with lots of Color, then the other two (Character, Situation, or Setting, whichever weren't in first place), with System being last in priority. . . . The process of prep-play-enjoy works by putting "what you want" in, then having "what you want" come out, with the hope that the System's application doesn't change anything along the way.​

It's not a coincidence that a lot of high concept sim play involves GM override of the system as presented in the game text (eg fudging, a lot of manipulation of backstory in defiance of instructions to prep and stick to prep, etc). This is because system is last in priority - so departing from it does not contradict the purpose of play - and also because designing a system that will reliably have "what you want" come out is not trivial. GUMSHOE and Fate seem to be some of the best contemporary exemplars, but those techniques hadn't been invented when Dragonlance, Dead Gods, V:tM etc were in their heyday.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think my way of playing is anything particularly unusual.

Nor do I. Although "your way of playing" covers a fair bit of ground. There are posters on ENworld who I'm pretty confident would describe themselves as sharing your way of playing - for instance, who would strongly identify with your example of the warlock and the crime lord - but who would respond quite differently from how you did to the harpy alliance.

Now unexpected and wild moments or ones which have great emotional impact (possibly due being strongly connecting to 'the dramatic needs' of the character) certainly will be memorable ones, so that is a thing on your list I somewhat recognise.

One way to think about "story now" RPGing: it wants that to be happening all the time in play. Not literally every moment - there are features of RPGing (updating PC sheets, checking notes to see what happened last session, etc) that would make that impossible, and also most people like a bit of respite between emotionally charged moments. But still, the main thing we are looking for in play.

 

[Krachek]

At last, the thread get long enough to go on the Ron Edwards article

• Gamism is expressed by competition among participants (the real people); it includes victory and loss conditions for characters, both short-term and long-term, that reflect on the people's actual play strategies. The listed elements provide an arena for the competition.
• Simulationism is expressed by enhancing one or more of the listed elements in Set 1 above; in other words, Simulationism heightens and focuses Exploration as the priority of play. The players may be greatly concerned with the internal logic and experiential consistency of that Exploration.
• Narrativism is expressed by the creation, via role-playing, of a story with a recognizable theme. The characters are formal protagonists in the classic Lit 101 sense, and the players are often considered co-authors. The listed elements provide the material for narrative conflict (again, in the specialized sense of literary analysis).

Is DnD allowing gamism in the sense he gives?

The rules are sharp enough to allow some competition and strategy. But overall the game is build around a cooperative play. The game don’t have specific mechanics to mesure the success of individuals play.
The fight against the monsters and the rest of the world may be challenging for a team play, but ultimately players can’t never be sure is their success is influenced by DM fiat. The only way would be that the DM exposed his notes and prepared encounters after the game to the players. And even so the DM control the opponents and is the referee at the same time. So there will always be a doubt about the absolute fairness of any challenge.

So overall DnD provide a very mild gamist environment.

 

[Campbell]

So, one of the main areas where Process Sim stuff can conflict with High Concept stuff is when rules that seek to accurately depict the setting end up undermining the sort of play, we expect to see based on the game's sources of inspiration. Typical classic Vampire - The Masquerade play is a very good example of this conflict in my opinion. The process simulation-oriented rules around feeding and frenzy tend to discourage players from actively engaging in doing like actual vampire things. Also, the very elaborate combat rules that simulate things like being very fast with a bunch of extra turns distract from the visceral fantasy of those things.

Vampire Fifth Edition focuses more on rules that bring the experience of being a Vampire forward while rewarding acting in genre appropriate ways, so players don't have to fight against the system nearly as much. It does so in a couple ways:

• It uses a much more narrative focused combat system
  • Things like initiative and differences between weapons are completely optional.
  • After 3 rounds combat stops and the ST just narrates what happens.
• Instead of tracking blood it uses a hunger dice system focused more on what it feels like to be a hungry predator on the verge of losing control then modeling how things work in the setting. Stuff like bestial failures and messy criticals keep the beast on the surface at all times.
• Disciplines tend to focus more on modeling the fantasy behind the powers rather than an elaborate modeling of the process.

Not that it always has to, but it often does.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The rules are sharp enough to allow some competition and strategy. But overall the game is build around a cooperative play. The game don’t have specific mechanics to mesure the success of individuals play.

Neither does much of any gamist RPG. Its not the way gamist play expresses itself.

(The emphasis of competition among the players in the GNS entry is one of the things wrong with it. It ridiculously excludes all kinds of gamist play).

The fight against the monsters and the rest of the world may be challenging for a team play, but ultimately players can’t never be sure is their success is influenced by DM fiat. The only way would be that the DM exposed his notes and prepared encounters after the game to the players. And even so the DM control the opponents and is the referee at the same time. So there will always be a doubt about the absolute fairness of any challenge.

So overall DnD provide a very mild gamist environment.

Not in a GDS sense it doesn't.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, yes, I think that would potentially be true.

No, but also yes. Incoherence, as defined, is differing creative agendas such that the goal of the game differs. In both versions of Sim, the agenda is adherence to some agreed internal cause -- be it 'realism' or genre or process or whatever cause-effect line you're going for. Verisimilitude is a good buzzword here. So, since both HCS and PFS advance the same agenda, they aren't incoherent.

BUT.

The internal cause is pretty misaligned between the two of these. You could have a PFS that aligns well with HCS, depending on the HC, and you'll not have incoherence. This seems pretty rare, though, and certainly not the way the HCS is used commonly, so I'd say that there's at least some incoherence in the application layer. However, this is a bit fraught. On one hand, I think that a lot of HCS play would welcome a good PFS system that delivered reliably -- they'd think this was a great expression of the agenda. On the other hand, you have things like FKR, where are pure HCS and antagonistic to PFS*. So, yeah, there has to be some incoherence involved here, but it's not required like the incoherence when trying to align two different creative agendas together.

*One could easily argue that the original free kriegsspiel was a HCS reaction to a overly complicated PFS system.

I think I may have missed some, but I'm sure people will chime in about this then.

If it is at least sometimes "incoherent," why call them by the same name? Wouldn't it be clearer to call them by different names, since they at least frequently (even if not always) contradict each other?

Especially since, as AbdulAlhazred has said, it's actually quite possible for Gamist and Narrativist to get along perfectly fine so long as they stay out of each other's way?

 

[clearstream]

It seems tautological that pre-authored and not pre-authored are mutually exclusive.

As far as I can make out then, we're in agreement that they are dichotomous.

EDIT Note however the potential for differences in meaning between "pure shared authorship" and "not pre-authored". I did mean on-the-fly and everyone did take it that way, so for me the rewording is okay. If it turns out that "not pre-authored" was intended to mean something different we may then have to unpack that.

(If one ignores the temporal dimension, that events of authorship that at a certain time are yet to occur have, at a later time, already taken place.)

That seems partly right. We might also separate them on grounds of the actions taken in authorship and the participants in those actions. Of course, in my thought-experiment I'm not ignoring the temporal dimension (as implied by "pre".)

EDIT I assume you do not intend anything significant in dropping the "shared" part of authorship on-the-fly, i.e. you were rephrasing only to emphasise the conflicting temporality. Right?

But it is not tautologous,

Can you expand on your thought here, as it does not seem to follow from the above.

EDIT Do you mean just that it does not guarantee any separation in quality? If so, yes, agreed. I do not think they are necessarily dichotomous on qualities like vividness or inhabitability (although it is possible for them to differ on such qualities). I do feel that Stonetop's worldbuild is vivid and inhabitable.

and in fact seems to me false, that only one of those possibilities involves a game-world that is vivid and inhabitable.

Okay, good. I do not say it.

My point is simply that you are associating "vivid and inhabitable" with one and not the other approach to setting. And I am contesting that association.

What is the colour of that which is yet to be created? I am associating a known colour with an object I see before me, and am silent about the unknown colour of an object that has yet to be created (and by others, at that.)

Edwards doesn't take the position that you both state here, ie that any setting is inconsistent with "story now" RPGing. In this thread, not far upthread, I've quoted his discussion of Glorantha. And there is his whole "setting dissection" discussion.

To quote again,

I'm not saying that improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play.​

His wording obscured his meaning for me. Thank you, on re-reading I see you are correct. Why then did you introduce this quote at the juncture it appears up-thread?

EDIT Ah, I found it. Was it only to say that

not all pre-authored material is conducive to story now play.

Which I would agree with. I took your meaning to be more emphatic: i.e. to say that no pre-authored material could be conducive to story now play. It is good to have that now cleared up.

2nd EDIT As an additional note, before posting up-thread I did re-read his "I'm not saying..." line a few times to grasp it's meaning. In context with your apparent thoroughgoing disagreement with my arguments, I guessed he could be implying that not all "Narrativist" play is "story now" play, i.e. perhaps there he meant to imply that here are forms of narrativist play that could deemphasise the now. (In that light, he was criticising OTE primarily for its harms to the now.) It would be helpful to know then - in your view, when Edwards uses the term "Narrativist", is that always a synonym of "story now"?

Glorantha, as presented in RQ and HW/Q sourcebooks, is not the result of a play experience. It is pre-authored (at least originally, by Greg Stafford). So is not within the scope of Edwards' criticism of Over the Edge, which is a particular criticism: producing one person's play experience as the input for another person's play. Notice how Baker - who surely must have created many vibrant setting elements in the playtesting of Apocalypse World - doesn't present that stuff as an input into others' play. That's just one respect in which the whole design of AW flows from Edwards' essay.

To ask whether Stonetop's setting is useful for "story now" play, we would want to ask things like how was it created, what conflicts does it present to those who use it for play, etc. I don't know the answers to those questions. They're not answered by pointing out that it is over 200 pages - as I posted, JRRT wrote more than 200 pages about Middle Earth and that is no obstacle to doing "story now" Middle Earth/LotR RPGing.

The post I responded to implied to me that it was overlooking the worldbuilding in Stonetop. Both Stonetop and LotR have a great deal of worldbuilding, e.g. the former has 229 pages worth. I pointed that weight of text out only to emphasise that it is not the worldbuilding that is genuinely at issue. It was very much my point that 229 pages or even more of pre-authored worldbuilding presents no obstacle to "story now".

We are in agreement so far as I can work out