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

[AbdulAlhazred]

I mean...when it's pretty clear how negative Edwards thinks "incoherent" game design is, to the point that he seems to struggle to speak positively about "hybrids" etc. even when outright trying to do so, it doesn't seem like much of a leap (or, indeed, a leap at all) to see incoherence as being the defining reason why these things separate from each other.


Then, as I have said before, I see this as a fault built on reifying a union of distinct ideas arising from a quirk of the language we use, rather than the actual character of the things involved. Like someone saying that, because I would the same verb in the phrases "I love ice cream," "I love my boyfriend," "I love my homeland," and "I love the design of 13th Age," these things must all fundamentally be the same in some core sense, whereas "I enjoy long walks among the trees" must be fundamentally different because it doesn't. They are not, and indeed I wouldn't even put them in the same categories of actions, even if there's some commonality there (e.g. romance for one's SO is rather different from patriotism, even though both involve affection).


Man, at least from the essays I've read thus far, I never got any sense of this! It very very much read like Sim is a monolithic thing that is fundamentally united with minor, perhaps even irrelevant details, not a vast category containing multitudes that could conflict internally. Same with the other creative agendas. This is...really really getting into territory of "why on earth did Edwards use the terms he used if this isn't what he meant?"


Perhaps I am daft. What does color refer to?

I guess I need to go diving in the "provisional glossary" again to get all these underlying terms defined because I thought I understood them (due to them being natural language stuff...) and am now seeing that no, it's turtles terms of art all the way down. Never, ever assume you know what a GNS term means on sight. Because it probably diverges, sometimes a lot!


This reads, to me, like some logical pedantry (not that I have much room to complain about pedantry in others, but still.) That is, if we have defined system so broadly, then literally all activities are now an RPG system. Some are just awful stinkers.

But to answer the question buried in there...no, it doesn't look like that at all to me. What you call an "illusion" being "dispelled," I call rejection of an inherently valuable consensus between participants. "Dispelling" that "illusion" means stepping away from consensus and into dictatorship, and alleging the result is still a "democracy" in the Verinari one-man-one-vote style: Verinari is The Man and he gets The Vote.


Well, I haven't played AW, so I can't make a full comparison. But the constantly repeated "talk with your DM because this whole thing could be completely worthless if they decide not to use X" smacks pretty hard of Calvinball to me. There is this pervasive "nope we literally cannot even assume that there even are races, let alone what they might be, because absolutely positively EVERYTHING is 110% malleable, and indeed might even change from one session to the next." I see a lot of lip service paid to telling DMs to be consistent and little to nothing on how DMs actually become consistent, which just makes matters worse. (But, again, I am highly, highly skeptical of the claim that DMs are typically very consistent and rigorous in their freeform work. That would require a level of statistical understanding and working memory of past choices that I have not seen borne out, neither in direct experience nor in discussion with others.)


....it is inherent to the idea of "a rule" that you are supposed to follow it, insofar as following it serves the purpose for which the rule was designed.* Just as it is inherent to the idea of rules to have a purpose for which they are designed. For something to be a rule, it must be both normative and teleological. If it is not normative, it isn't a rule: maybe it's a guideline or a suggestion or a proposal, but it's not a rule without normativity. Likewise, if it has no designed purpose or end, it isn't a rule. In fact I'm not sure it would be anything at all without a telos! Maybe a mere barked command?

The need for agreement is located in them because of the definition of thing they are (or claim to be), in the same way that the need for 90 degree angles are located in squares because of the definition of "square." To be a rule is to have both telos and normativity.

*This, incidentally, is why I get annoyed when people assert that "Lawful Good" must be inherently less Good than "Neutral Good." But that's a side issue.

If I understand correctly, what you're saying is basically "there's all this stuff, classes, races, spells, etc. in 5e, and its mere existence defines what 5e is in a way that no DM could ever overrule without the game imploding because the players will insist on it." OK, fair enough. However, what @Manbearcat was doing was certainly not proposing that any of that stuff has no weight. He was essentially just conducting an exercise which illustrates that EVEN WITH THE ADDITION OF ALL THAT the fundamental structure that he outlined is still absolutely there and still doing the primary work of allocating responsibility for fiction and structuring the play loop. People lose sight of this, they imagine that its some totally different beast than his skeleton outline, but it isn't, not fundamentally. GMs turn to things like illusions and fudges and whatnot because they don't want to have to confront the dichotomy between that structure and what the players may want or imagine things to be like. Thus some games, and maybe 5e isn't exceptionally guilty here, are actually incoherent with themselves at this core level, because they may surround such a core with a cloud of stuff which sounds like it doesn't work that way. This usually is more cultural though, some players think the GM should let them do what they want, but the GM has other ideas! Eventually... KABOOM!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And here is how I would suggest doing this for 4e D&D:

1. Introduce the setting - fallen Nerath, and perhaps work out if there's any particular aspect or element people want to focus on;​

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2. Make the PCs, choosing build options that locate them (geographically, historically, thematically) within fallen Nerath - at this stage I think Halfling rangers who worship Melora or Avandra risk being energy sinks, but Dwarven Paladins of Moradin ready to crusade against the giants, or Eladrin envoys from the Feywild concerned about incursions of Goblins and Formorians are good stuff;​

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3. This is probably the weakest part of 4e D&D in the present context - it doesn't have clear processes for making the PCs into "walking soap operas" - what I did was tell each player they had to establish one loyalty for their PC, and this led to relationships to places, peoples, gods etc which was enough to start with (4e themes and backgrounds, on their own, are good for step 2 but I don't think have quite enough heft to cover step 3 on their own)​

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4. Prep: the players can work out if/how their PCs are connected, but more important is that the GM has to prepare (or at least find in a sourcebook) the stat blocks, maps etc that will allow presenting situations that speak to the concerns that have been identified at steps 2 and 3 (so if there are Raven Queen-oriented PCs, prep undead and Orcus cultists; for Kord-worshippers prep Bane-ites; etc); think about, and in practical terms work out, how these can be interwoven within the framework of fallen Nerath, and lean into D&D tropes where they will help carry this load;​

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5. Begin play with an event that locates the PCs within the conflicts and tensions and connections the GM has identified and prepped for at step 4 and forces them to choose a side in some or other respect - it doesn't necessarily have to be as overtly destabilising of status quos as Edwards says, because fallen Nerath is already lacking status quos (the points of light are under constant threat from the darkness), but it has to provoke action for these characters given their contexts, and D&D leans heavily into taking sides in larger conflicts so build on that, don't shy away from it;​

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6. Resolve conflicts - I think Edwards's generic advice here is pretty sound for 4e D&D;​

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7. As a result, the setting will be transformed: so as the PCs scale up the tiers not only are they changing in their standing, capabilities etc but the world they are engaging with is changing as a result of their actions (the "tiers of play" text in the PHB and DMG gives generic ideas about what sorts of changes might be expected - these don't need to be metaplotted, as following the preceding steps will make that sort of thing happen emergently).​

I think using 4e D&D for a different setting (eg Dark Sun) needs a different set of steps, because 1 and 2 will probably be weaker in terms of a situation-rich location and context for the PCs, and hence step 4 will be harder. In my Dark Sun game, I used kickers as a supplementing aspect of step 3. That helped, but the setting still has a fair bit of "status quo" that I found it can be work to push against.

I think Quests can be drafted into providing step 3. That is, whenever I start a 4e game I tell the players to each invent a quest for their character to start out with. As things progress they should have 1-2 personal quests, and probably at least 1 group quest going on at any given time. These are pretty much going to do the work of things like 'bonds' and 'beliefs' in terms of giving them something to chew on and drive the narrative forward. The GM will always frame scenes which address the quests. "If you don't successfully cross the river, before taking a long rest, you won't be able to rescue the Princess." Care should be taken not to be too strong of a quest giver yourself as GM, or you will diverge into more of a High Concept game, particularly if the quests don't really address things relevant to the PCs (IE their backgrounds, themes, etc.) but instead address things like meta-plot and setting stuff. Obviously you can take that path and stay in Story Now if you do it right, it just becomes a more setting-directed version. That's probably pretty much what the devs imagined would be done with 4e if you played that way, but 4e doesn't have strong barriers in its design between 'setting tourism' and 'setting as source of dramatic needs'.

 

[Campbell]

Still, the point is very good, you can add all sorts of player-facing D&D-esque mechanical foofarah and you won't ever get Story Now.

It took me awhile to realize that any player facing mechanic that requires interfacing with GM facing mechanics like defined monsters or NPC stat blocks fundamentally has no real teeth. At the end of the day those GM facing mechanics and assumed prep are a block box to players thus non-binding. This is especially true when the game instructs the GM to essentially ignore these mechanics and their prep when inconvenient.

Not that there is no value to defined GM facing mechanics. Just that they are essentially nonbinding unless the GM takes an inordinate amount of discipline in applying them. Even then a lot of GM fiat is required to make representational mechanics flow into a game state. Even more so when we leave relatively constrained environments like dungeons or try to treat those dungeons as living breathing things. Not that GM fiat is bad. I run and play in a lot of games that are pretty much held together by GM glue because that's the only way you can have any sort of exploratory play.

That fiat also does not have to be applied in an indiscriminate way. There are lots of disciplined ways to decide how the underlying setting and characters work.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For (1), it seems that the first thing the GM needs to do is to vary scene-framing imperatives. Here's Edwards on something in the neighbourhood of what you're describing - both possibilities and risks/pitfalls:

Simulationist play works as an underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented moments. It differs from the Explorative chassis for Narrativist play, even an extensive one, in that one really has to stop addressing Premise and focus on in-game causality per se. Such scenes or details can take on an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract (e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up pleasing neither enough to attract them further.​

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Historically, this approach has been poorly implemented in role-playing texts, which swing into Simulationist phrasing extremely easily, for the reasons I describe in "Simulationism: the Right to Dream". You cannot get emergent Narrativist play specifically through putting more and more effort into perfecting the Simulationism (which requires that the Narrativism cease), no matter how "genre-faithful" or "character-faithful" it may be. I consider most efforts in this direction to become reasonably successful High-Concept Simulationism with a strong slant toward Situation, mainly useful for enjoyable pastiche but not particularly for Narrativist play at all. . . .​

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Sole reliance on deepening and detailing any aspects of Exploration is misguided. The vast majority of attempted Narrativist design is a hunt for the perfect Simulationist design that will ostensibly permit the Narrativist play to emerge, leading to abashedness at best. It's often combined with mistaking an effectiveness-improvement mechanic for a reward system - at this point, the game text simply facilitates High-Concept Simulationist play, and the Narrativist goal is left to Social Contract alone. Various publishing practices, especially a long string of scenario and setting supplememnts, provide the coffin nails.​

With the above in mind, one challenge I can see is this: how do the players know what sort of scene is being presented to them? One possible answer: what's presented in the scene might be sufficient to let the players know whether it's intended to be an exploration scene or a protagonistic scene.

I think the bigger challenge than this scene-framing aspect is on the resolution side. Upthread I quoted Edwards, from "setting dissection", saying "embrace the fullest and most extreme rules-driven consequences of every single resolved conflict, no matter what they are" and to "Show those consequences and treat them as the material of the moment in the very next scenes, every time". But that might not work for the exploration scenes. The issue here, it seems to me, is how to make sure the ingame-causality that is used in these scenes doesn't undercut the elements of the shared fiction that are central to the protagonistic moments of play. In the abstract we can talk about the importance of "quarantining" one from the other, but how are we going to do that if the same PCs are in the same setting interacting with the same NPCs? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it seems tricky to me.

As for (2), it looks like it might just be another version of (1), or else it might be "story now" with very extended framing. This remark seems apposite, though not conclusive, in relation to (2):

"El Dorado" was coined by Paul Czege to indicate the impossibility of a 1:1 Simulationist:Narrativist blend, although the term was appropriated by others for the blend itself, as a desirable goal. I think some people who claim to desire such a goal in play are simply looking for Narrativism with a very strong Explorative chassis, and that the goal is not elusive at all. Such "Vanilla Narrativism" is very easy and straightforward. The key to finding it is to stop reinforcing Simulationist approaches to play. Many role-players, identified by Jesse Burneko as "Simulationist-by-habit," exhaust themselves by seeking El Dorado, racing ever faster and farther, when all they have to do is stop running, turn around, and find Vanilla Narrativism right in their grasp.​

Maybe group (2) is looking for a very strong explorative chassis, manifested via what I've called "extended framing". The challenge is how to stop it turning into those Clancy-esque hardware pages? And how to avoid that without play just being agonisingly slow? The problem is that GM narration on its own isn't RPGing, but every time the players declare actions that are resolved via considerations of ingame causality rather than protagonism we're back to reinforcing simulationism and running the risk of undercutting protagonism. I don't know if there's any general solution to this. As Edwards says (same essay):

What happens when Premise is addressed sporadically, or develops so slowly that the majority of play is like those hardware-pages? Whether this is "slow Narrativism" or "S-N-S" or just plain dysfunctional play is a matter of specific instances, I think.​

The way Edwards talks about this topic definitely makes me think he was around and actively thinking about game design in '70s and very early '80s, as it seems directed heavily at that set of game designers who seem to have been convinced that adding detail to either mechanics or setting (and usually these sorts of games basically merge the two) would somehow magically produce 'true story'. That is, if the imperatives governing what a character stance player was motivated to do perfectly matched with the participants ideas of verisimilitude that some sort of magic would happen where they would be able to play in a way that perfectly illustrated their character's concerns. This was of course nonsense, of the highest order in fact. It was however clearly a motive in the design of some games with very extensive rules and an aim of simulating some genre with great fidelity (and usually including an attempt to produce highly realistic outcomes). I think Edwards describes this quixotic quest in rather interesting terms! Systems like GURPS and the FGU system used in Aftermath (which I think is a descendant of the Bushido system too IIRC) are illustrative of this sort of thing. Steve Jackson was undoubtedly never really sold on that canard, his game system was certainly friendly to it though.

 

[Campbell]

If I've understood you correctly, what you're describing here is related to what I tried to get at just upthread:

If I'm following you properly, you're working out consequences and fallout via the internal causality of the setting. This avoids shaping narrative outcomes. But it also pushes towards exploration rather than "story now" - you're certainly not embracing the fullest and most extreme rules-driven consequence of every single resolved conflict! So the play probably won't toggle between (i) exploration of character, setting and situation and (ii) story now. It will tend to remain (i).

Yeah. I do not think there's any way around it if you want to separate out fallout from the site of conflict. My Vampire and L5R games are unabashedly High Concept play. They focus on character exploration, but it's not the same crucible that Sorcerer places characters in. The systems involved also reward playing to a defined character and genre (much like Inspiration in 5e) rather than testing the conception of the character.

It basically works off this model (Also from John Harper's blog) :

The basic difference is that in exploratory play conflicts are often disconnected from each other as well as from the resolution of the underlying situation. The only way for the situation to fundamentally resolve is because the GM decides it has based on their understanding of the setting and other characters. The GM is basically the glue that holds everything together.

Again not bad. Just not fundamentally compatible with the momentum of Story Now play. You can kind of shift between the two, but it looks a lot like free play between scores in Blades or transition scenes in Marvel Heroic where you have scenes between situations that are more conflict neutral in order to setup the next situation.

 

[pemerton]

@clearstream, @Crimson Longinus

I really strongly recommend @Campbell's post just upthread of this one!

 

[pemerton]

The way Edwards talks about this topic definitely makes me think he was around and actively thinking about game design in '70s and very early '80s

In one word: Champions!

 

[Thomas Shey]

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It took me awhile to realize that any player facing mechanic that requires interfacing with GM facing mechanics like defined monsters or NPC stat blocks fundamentally has no real teeth. At the end of the day those GM facing mechanics and assumed prep are a block box to players thus non-binding. This is especially true when the game instructs the GM to essentially ignore these mechanics and their prep when inconvenient.

I think that's only really true if two other things are true:

1. The players don't hold the GM to playing fairly and/or
2. The GM is good at disguising what he's doing.

You're correct that if its accepted that he can just change things on the fly then nothing matters, but even in games that acknowledge that as okay, its far from a given that local game culture will.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In one word: Champions!

Yeah, in some ways it could be a bit like 4e in that you get to define exactly what the 'flavor' is for each of your powers, and thus you can create a very cohesive backstory and overall understanding of the character. It can be a lot like the way keywords work in 4e, though there isn't any real mechanical similarity between the systems beyond "they are both fairly early ability-based RPGs." Obviously more recent versions of Hero System are a bit more sophisticated. It also did have the kind of structure that lent itself easily to a kind of Low Myth play where the player would do things like invent a nemesis and then the GM would have to bring them on stage (because you got extra points for having a nemesis, so basically if the GM didn't do that, they were giving you free build points, lol).

I still remember my characters, Mushroom Man and The Wizard, which were both min/maxed to the hilt, but had interesting backstories (though I couldn't tell you anything about them at this point 41 years later, lol).

 

[clearstream]

It took me awhile to realize that any player facing mechanic that requires interfacing with GM facing mechanics like defined monsters or NPC stat blocks fundamentally has no real teeth.

That's not a GM thing, that's an RPG thing. The only teeth in any RPG are those the participants by their prior and ongoing consent give teeth.

You think something in AW has teeth? Nope, not unless everyone at the table agrees it has teeth.