Ondath
Hero
I just want to say how much this post has resonated with me, and how it leaves me with a few questions.I'm not sure you meant it this way, but when @clearstream quoted just this part it sort of singled it out and dawned on me that I've been having that feeling since I started playing the game in 4e (a system I still have a great deal of affection for, but that's not related here.) Specifically, I always had this feeling that there was an experience that I was pantomining-- where I was always trying to get closer to the ideal of the game,and I could never quite achieve it, until recently.
I agree with this statement, in the sense that what trad DND does, is set a story in a milieu of the fantasy world of DND, but does so with the lens of a movie, book, or video game, where the emphasis is on a structured plot that setting serves. I eventually realized that what I was feeling, was the sense that the world I was presenting was fake, like a facsimile of what it should be where its fake and entirely in service of the main plot and the desires of the players. It was almost like a Call of Duty level, where it was a sequential array of setpieces that emulated aspects of dungeon delving (fighting undead in a crypt, a puzzle room, a boss battle, a negotiation with kobolds) but much like how that Call of Duty city is a series of corridors with all of the other roads barricaded by the game, my games were only concerned with presenting the plot as a movie. When we traveled, it was entirely up to the narrative how fast we got anywhere. When I did treasure, it was entirely to give the players the cool stuff they wanted, and they always ran into their backstories, Critical Role style (this was before Critical Role of course.)
It frustrated me, because I realized, that the cool stuff I wanted wasn't really happening, the world of the game I was presenting didn't feel like a space the players could interact with and make their own decisions about. It was so different from... the ideal that I had about what delving dungeons, and being adventurers in a fantasy world should feel like. But then I had to try and trace that back to work out where I'd even gotten my ideas, and I realized that it mostly came from the fiction that the rulebooks harkened back to-- it came from the implications hanging around the main plots of all fantasy books I'd read, or from the games I played, from the idea that what I really wanted to was to step inside them, and step away from the save the world plot to enjoy and explore the world as a place that exists beyond Chekhov's concerns, in other words, where setting provides a rich playground for the characters to exist in and explore.
The 'real' DND, at least the one I found, was about finding narrative divorced from plot by presenting a world without narrative assumptions and letting the story be 'the things that happened when we went adventuring, and the people we became' rather than the structured plots that have become ubiquitous with storytelling. Trad DND then to me, is a literal simulation of the world, diverted to the needs of what I almost want to describe as a hollywood plot line-- they're not adventurers first and foremost, they're the handful of adventurers that got picked out by destiny to save the world.
In that context, disclaiming narrative decision making to game mechanics, or even to myself in a different mindset helps me to create that separation from the needs of the plot-- I pride myself on creating dungeons without thinking about the specific group going through it, with the goal that different suites of capabilities mean different paths through the content that I'm producing, different discoveries, and frustrations. This creates a play space rife with opportunity to have fun, and find interesting things, but that doesn't become smaller by warping itself to the PCs and their plot, which is my ultimate goal. To make them feel like a small part of a big world, and have their stories play out with emergently against that back drop.
None of this is a criticism of trad DND, or not a generic one anyway, its colored by my perspective, and I've run fun plot centric campaigns in the past too.
I'm trying to make sense of the kind of GM I want to be and the kind of games I want to run as of late, and both GNS theory and the Six Cultures Essay have really opened my mind about these things. When it comes to what I want out of D&D, what you're describing - playing 'real' D&D and having the story be things that happened along the way - really fits the bill. For me, the highlight of the games I run have been things that could only happen with that specific group at that specific time because things evolved to that point within the bounds of the universe and the game rules. Just a few games ago, the party killed Cyan Bloodbane inside a small pyramid summoned by the Gnome Wizard's Bag of Tricks - none of that would be possible if I didn't let my lore knowledge of Cyan's personality (his vanity and cowardice) lead him to take the party's bait (which only existed because of a specific magic item they got ages go) to get easy treasure. No amount of game prep and story design on my end as the GM could create that moment, and this is what brings me back to playing D&D time and time again.
With that said, I'm trying to understand what that means about the kind of game culture I seem to like. From the description of GNS Theory, I feel like what I want aligns mostly with simulationist styles, but then if simulationism aligns with trad/neo-trad, I don't feel I belong there entirely - on the contrary, I feel like the way OSR was described in the essay seems to be much closer to what I want (where OSR games don't even pretend that there is a narrative structure, but only create a story in hindsight). But! OSR is usually categorised as gamist, and having run a few OSE games, I can see why. It seems to be much more limited in its tight gameplay loop of "roll up character -> explore dungeon systematically -> either return with treasure and get to new dungeon or die and roll a new character". All in all, I feel like a lot of the labels could fit me for different reasons.