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

[Thomas Shey]

I absolutely agree that most GMs who engage in a lot of trickery are not half as clever as they think. Most of the time they simply have players who are willing to go along with the illusion.

Yeah. I once ran a (rather extended) Scion 1e campaign. Because of flaws in how the Scion scale worked, you virtually had to set up opponents in a very structured and this-opponent-will-only-fight-this-PC kind of way, which meant that the whole campaign ended up being pretty heavily railroaded (the most I could do was clip out some scenes when they'd been rendered moot). I was rather apologetic about it at one point, and one of my players (the late, lamented Steve Perrin) said "That's okay. I've been enjoying the trip."

I suspect there's more than a little bit of indulgence that many GMs think of as them being clever at sleight-of-hand.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I can give you chapter and verse on a wide range of cases that come up in typical play, but is your concern here more whether 5e has skill challenges? (Incremental success/failure.)

Well, let me just say, you have a somewhat controversial interpretation of the 5e rules as actually demanding that there be some 'meaningfullness' to resolution. I don't think we need to drag through that again, it had a whole long thread! So, if you want to state that every check MUST resolve some conflict, that would be doing the same thing that SCs essentially do, or as @pemerton points out they at least close out a scene frame, which implies that some question was addressed (it may come up again in some cases, but a general principle is to give the players their victories and not revisit them). You could also employ a heavy discipline where you simple ALWAYS spell out for the player exactly what the valence of the check is, like "If will take 3 swim checks to cross the river without drowning" or something like that, BEFORE the player commits the PC to the attempt! Even better would be to spell this stuff out in terms of character/player INTENT, not just action resolution.

Incremental success/failure isn't inherently necessary, although it certainly seems like a feature you would want in a more extended resolution system, generally speaking...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, but what is the 'gamist view' here? I mean, I think its possible to construct a 'mystery story' for instance, conceptually, but its going to be hard to do so in a gamist fashion.

Not at all. A straightforward mystery can be very gamist in how it works; its all about investigation and putting the pieces together. They aren't usually my cuppa, but that's got nothing to do with them not being gamist, and everything to do with my lack of patience for investigation.

The basic 'tooling' of classic D&D or 5e doesn't really help you at all. Furthermore the story is wide open, you cannot say there are only certain possible suspects, that the motives are really XYZ, etc. D&D at least also lacks any sort of progress structure, so neither is there some sort of signifier of 'achievement' nor is there even an indicator of progress! In fact progress is a hard thing to even consider, as if it turns out you were wrong at some point, you can end up right back at zero, or even worse off than you started.

Just because there are recursive elements in an investigation doesn't make it not-gamist. There ought to be signs of progress whether the system formalizes it or not. At the very least you can be progressively clipping off dead ends and excluding options.

(This doesn't mean that a mystery can't be poorly managed and unsatisfying, but that's true of almost any gamist setup. Mysteries can sometimes benefit from having more game structure to support them (I've mentioned Chill 3e here before), but they're very much a "game" that can get by without any mechanics whatsoever, barring failure states of basic investigative processes (i.e. at the end of the day, you at least need to have some coherent process for addressing ability of characters to perceive things) Most of the rest of it is simply a case if you want it to satisfy gamist needs (as compared to say, simulationist ones) to not produce terminal dead ends).

I'm not saying it would be impossible to construct gamist RPGs that dealt with the subject of mysteries or conspiracies or such stuff, it is just that they wouldn't look at all like D&D!

See my comments above; I think there's a big difference between "can benefit from" and "need" in this particular case.

I do not believe that you can do this sort of stuff in a way I would call gamist in D&D, at least not modern D&D. The problem with going back to really old school techniques, like just having the GM narrate the results of PC actions, is even that doesn't guarantee the adventure will 'work' (IE the PCs may never choose to search the dresser and so never find the vital clue). The other observations about lack of ways to measure achievement or skill also still apply.

That's more a case of someone setting up a structure that's serving a simulationist agenda rather than a gamist one, as I mention above. Single points of failure are a problem in a lot of RPG contexts, but especially when they're dependent on a single roll or decision, they're very much a curse on handling things with a gamist focus.

It seems vastly likelier that any sort of social conflict adventure of the 'conspiracy', 'mystery', or even just general social conflict, is going to rapidly become some sort of HCS or process simulation kind of affair, and process sim is probably going to break down too! (too many variables to simulate, though there might be ways to mitigate that).

Well, the latter is why some of what you're calling process simulation proponents here are hostile to social and intellectual mechanics. They consider them inadequate to this sort of task. I think its more a case of them not tolerating levels of abstraction they would in other areas, but that's a different discussion.

 

[Thomas Shey]

On the gamist side, a commitment to rock-solid prep and a tight resolution space (ie the dungeon) can make GM-as-glue gamism possible. Even here, there can be problems, for instance for some social conflicts. And take the same approach into a less confined and spartan (imagined) environment, and as I and @AbdulAlhazred have said, the gamism will break down, because no matter how disciplined the GM is, they will have to make stuff up to preserve the logic and verisimilitude of the fiction.

I again think this assumes a gamist agenda has to be much more "tight" than anyone I know focused on that does. Sometimes making things up as long as you communicate them to the players and are flexible to concerns about temporal concerns (i.e. potential earlier decisions the players made that would have been made differently with the current information, which they should have had) has no meaningful impact on the gamist process; you take in the addition, include it in your decision making, and move on.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So my thoughts here would be the following:

This seems to be calling on a pretty sizable edge case use of Rule 0; deploying it transparently during play to "fix" an eff-up so it can be resolved in such a way that observes Gamist priorities. This absolutely can happen, but it is a very remote usage of Rule 0.

The problem with this is that's a good part of the use of Rule 0 I've made over the past 40 years. The rest have been rules-peripheral cases where there simply were no mechanics that seemed to address the issue at all, or the most analogous ones seemed to produce obvious problems on multiple levels. The only other thing I can think of that lands in "Rule 0" ground is house rules, and those are even less likely to break gamist concerns as long as they're shared with the player group at earliest possible occasion.

Can you give an example of what you're referring to? I'm beginning to wonder if you (and possibly some of the others) are using "Rule 0" in a much broader way than I've classically seen it used.

But lets talk about that edge case. The change has to be both transparent and deftly deployed AND the GM has to be very self-disciplined and conscientious (they have to be hyper-aware of even the smallest of mental-model-perturbing eff-ups and demand of themselves and the table the time and effort to resolve the mismatch). This is because we're (the participants interested in distilling Skillful play from Unskillful play) reliant upon the players having well-parameterized mental models of the situation such that their OODA Loop can be executed with optimum skill. If we fail at either transparency or deftness, that (lets call it) "software patch" that we're introducing into play doesn't yield the necessary course-correction to the players' mental models.

All generally fair, though I again I think you're seeing the process as, of necessity, much tighter than I do. There's enough slop in most mental models on either end that a lot of things will, at worst add in a little wobble that people expect anyway. It doesn't significantly deflect their ability to engage with the situation in a gamist fashion, because, well, we're not playing chess.

In my experience, the huge % of in-situ "eff-up fixes" like you seem to be describing above doesn't entail the transparency rider because the GM is simultaneously trying to observe "I'm There" priorities (High Concept Simulation or Purist for System - Process Sim - agenda) and being transparent about the "software patch" to fix the players' mental model will be perceived as harming immersion.

I won't deny there can be some tension in those areas. But I'd argue when that tension reaches the point where transparency regarding anything that will significantly (and this is not a trivial qualification; see my comment above) impact the necessary information to make a proper ongoing gamist decision set is being kept to the vest, that's because the gamist agenda isn't being given any high preference in the first place. As I've noted, there are people who consider the term "gamist decision" an epithet (I saw someone bluntly say so in a thread not long ago), so at that point its no surprise that its not being done in a way that serves gamist desires; the people involved either consider that trivial, or that gamist desires can go hang.

But yeah, if a GM applies the fix with transparency and deftness, Gamist priorities can absolutely be salvaged. Its just that this (IMO) a small subset of a very small use case of deploying Rule 0. Its sufficiently "edge-case-y" enough and demonstrably different enough that it should really be called something different; "system patch" or something.

Whereas to me, it seems like the primary purpose of Rule 0.

And finally, this is why I'm a huge believer of systematizing this stuff and structuring play/conversation and having a principle that says to "keep the meta-channel open (to resolve exactly this stuff)." You are (a) no longer become reliant upon GM self-discipline, conscientiousness, and deftness of resolving the software patch. Not just that, but you (b) aren't reliant on the nearly perfect uptake of that software patch in real time by the players (same problem but coming from the other direction). Neither (a) nor (b) manifest as a problem because you have a huge part of this equation offloaded onto or bridged by system (eg Torchbearer or Blades is a great example of what I'm talking about).

Well, the ideal is, of course, for this to be handled with houserule work outside game play time, but, well, sometimes you notice the air coming out of the tire while you're checking them and sometimes you figure it out on the road.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Another possibility that I'm not sure we've mooted yet is gamist-fantasy, by which I mean the feeling of gamism, without over-indexing on wargamey crunch and difficulty.

So a casual player can get excited and feel great on an @EzekielRaiden's Score - Achievement axis (with perhaps some of my Construction - Perfection going on too) and that really is satisfying a gamist agenda, just not a rigorous wargamey gamist agenda. They're in it for the gamist-fantasy.

More accurately, I just think there's a wide variety of what degree of game-engagement people find satisfying. I enjoy computer strategy games, but I'm normally looking for Civilization, not Crusader Kings.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The problem with this is that's a good part of the use of Rule 0 I've made over the past 40 years. The rest have been rules-peripheral cases where there simply were no mechanics that seemed to address the issue at all, or the most analogous ones seemed to produce obvious problems on multiple levels. The only other thing I can think of that lands in "Rule 0" ground is house rules, and those are even less likely to break gamist concerns as long as they're shared with the player group at earliest possible occasion.

Can you give an example of what you're referring to? I'm beginning to wonder if you (and possibly some of the others) are using "Rule 0" in a much broader way than I've classically seen it used.



All generally fair, though I again I think you're seeing the process as, of necessity, much tighter than I do. There's enough slop in most mental models on either end that a lot of things will, at worst add in a little wobble that people expect anyway. It doesn't significantly deflect their ability to engage with the situation in a gamist fashion, because, well, we're not playing chess.



I won't deny there can be some tension in those areas. But I'd argue when that tension reaches the point where transparency regarding anything that will significantly (and this is not a trivial qualification; see my comment above) impact the necessary information to make a proper ongoing gamist decision set is being kept to the vest, that's because the gamist agenda isn't being given any high preference in the first place. As I've noted, there are people who consider the term "gamist decision" an epithet (I saw someone bluntly say so in a thread not long ago), so at that point its no surprise that its not being done in a way that serves gamist desires; the people involved either consider that trivial, or that gamist desires can go hang.




Whereas to me, it seems like the primary purpose of Rule 0.



Well, the ideal is, of course, for this to be handled with houserule work outside game play time, but, well, sometimes you notice the air coming out of the tire while you're checking them and sometimes you figure it out on the road.

I really kind of think it is rather easier for a truly hard gamist agenda to break down in the face of issues surrounding clarity of rules. For example: the Fireball spell states (in 1e at least) that a fireball will conform to a space and always take up the same volume (22,000 cubit feet IIRC, or 22 full 10x10x10 cubes on a standard 10'/square ruled dungeon map as traditionally specified in the DMG and present in pretty much all TSR modules). HOWEVER, very few GMs seem to have enforced that rule! What happens when you do? Well, the party incinerates itself! And the players get irate, because they lost! This is a very simple straightforward case of just expecting the rules to be employed in a way that is 'expected' vs RAW. It doesn't even touch on problems related to perception.

Suppose now that the GM described some sort of air shaft, and the magic user player looked at the map and said to himself, welp, the area here is CLOSE to 22,000/ft^3 and then there's this airshaft, which will surely vent out some of the blast, so I should be safe. You can guess what happens next... I mean, this is all just basic pure gamist level issues without even considering that half the players expected something else.

IME if I'm playing Questioner of All Things and I want to cast a spell, I darn well want to have a VERY PRECISE model of how that is going to work. So the GM or the game MUST spell it out EXACTLY, because success and failure ride on it! If they don't, if its just all losey goosey, well, I hardly call that a game, cause I can break that wide open pretty much every time! Now, the GM in that case is likely to want to stop that from happening, and suddenly we're not in gamist land anymore at all! This is TYPICAL IME. I mean, the only reason it doesn't happen is because we've already been playing together for 9 years and all this got worked out 8 years ago. lol.

Still, I remember when I started a 1e game and told everyone, "hey, lets play exactly how its written and see what happens!" Right off the magic user accidentally killed off the whole party, like in the first room. That was the end of that...

 

[Thomas Shey]

I really kind of think it is rather easier for a truly hard gamist agenda to break down in the face of issues surrounding clarity of rules. For example: the Fireball spell states (in 1e at least) that a fireball will conform to a space and always take up the same volume (22,000 cubit feet IIRC, or 22 full 10x10x10 cubes on a standard 10'/square ruled dungeon map as traditionally specified in the DMG and present in pretty much all TSR modules). HOWEVER, very few GMs seem to have enforced that rule! What happens when you do? Well, the party incinerates itself! And the players get irate, because they lost! This is a very simple straightforward case of just expecting the rules to be employed in a way that is 'expected' vs RAW. It doesn't even touch on problems related to perception.

That absolutely can be a thing, but I think that usually gets worked out pretty early by the difference between RAW and what I call RAU (Rules As Understood). Even gamist-centric groups have, effectively, unstated conventions they go by (which often will end up in house rules once someone notices that its not RAW, or alternatively everyone just adjusts to going back to RAW).

(As an example, Fragged Empire has a bleeding rule. In my hurry to read it at an early point in process, I read it as cutting in when an attribute went to zero from critical damage. As it turns out, it happens when the attribute goes to negative (i.e. -1 or worse). No one had apparently noticed the difference between what I was doing and/or took my word for it (often a mistake because, well, I'm sometimes sloppy) and what the rules said (possibly because it doesn't come up all the time) but as soon as someone on the FE Discord mentioned it in passing, I checked and found out I'd been doing it wrong and brought it to everyone's attention. Since the RAW rule was more benign to PCs, no one was at all upset, but its gone the other way too and people have mostly just shrugged).

However in the example at hand, this is still only a problem because the players and the GM aren't on the same page, and the GM was unwilling to cut any slack for that. Nothing about being gamist precludes understanding that mistakes and misunderstandings happen. Even back in my Hardcore Young Gamer days when it became obvious that I and the players were effectively using different rules sets regarding Fireball, I'd have said "Okay, this particular one time we'll have it work your way since you did this thinking it did, and the whole tactical setup you chose was based on it. But we need to thrash out whether we want to go by the book or do a houserule before its used again" and everyone would likely have just nodded and gone along.

Suppose now that the GM described some sort of air shaft, and the magic user player looked at the map and said to himself, welp, the area here is CLOSE to 22,000/ft^3 and then there's this airshaft, which will surely vent out some of the blast, so I should be safe. You can guess what happens next... I mean, this is all just basic pure gamist level issues without even considering that half the players expected something else.

Again, that's about a failure to communicate, however, which can be a problem all over gaming. Its only a massive problem if the GM and players don't recognize that things can go awry there. Again, the simple response would be "You could have asked first. Do you want to back up and change your mind there?" I mean, not to put to fine a point on it, but nothing about GMing for gamists requires you to be a jerk.

IME if I'm playing Questioner of All Things and I want to cast a spell, I darn well want to have a VERY PRECISE model of how that is going to work. So the GM or the game MUST spell it out EXACTLY, because success and failure ride on it! If they don't, if its just all losey goosey, well, I hardly call that a game, cause I can break that wide open pretty much every time! Now, the GM in that case is likely to want to stop that from happening, and suddenly we're not in gamist land anymore at all! This is TYPICAL IME. I mean, the only reason it doesn't happen is because we've already been playing together for 9 years and all this got worked out 8 years ago. lol.

Or, frankly, because the clarity wasn't as good as it could be, so you asked. This doesn't completely address the issue--its one of those cases where you don't want to just do this one-off because consistency is kind of virtue--but it does prevent it from turning into a problem from most POVs.

Still, I remember when I started a 1e game and told everyone, "hey, lets play exactly how its written and see what happens!" Right off the magic user accidentally killed off the whole party, like in the first room. That was the end of that...

Well, yes, like the unspooling lightning bolts, that was one of those rules designed to just be a pain in the ass, which early D&D was known for.

 

[Krachek]

There is a lot of needs and space for DM fiat in DnD.

Just for plain combat encounters DM decide how monsters choose targets, flee, surrender, bargain, attack down PC, and so on.

In a Meeting with a Npc a DM will at best have a prepared paragraph of notes, that will rapidly become insufficient. DM will have to improvise using free choice or tables if available.
On future meeting the DM usually make the NPC evolve: precise motivations, add unknown secrets, unless we pretend to have define the entire life of this npc prior the first meeting!

Same things happens when PC interact with larger group. village, town, kingdom, faction, guild. a DM cant define an entire faction prior a meeting or encounter with the PCs. if the PCs continue to interact with the faction, DM will have to add things backward.

There is guidelines to build a dungeon, an encounter, and even a typical adventuring day, but nowhere there is a golden rules that force the DM to stick to his preparation. Some DM will stick to their notes, some won’t and some won’t even have notes and still manage to run a session. The DM guide don’t take side for any of those style.

 

[clearstream]

There is a lot of needs and space for DM fiat in DnD.

Just for plain combat encounters DM decide how monsters choose targets, flee, surrender, bargain, attack down PC, and so on.

In a Meeting with a Npc a DM will at best have a prepared paragraph of notes, that will rapidly become insufficient. DM will have to improvise using free choice or tables if available.
On future meeting the DM usually make the NPC evolve: precise motivations, add unknown secrets, unless we pretend to have define the entire life of this npc prior the first meeting!

Same things happens when PC interact with larger group. village, town, kingdom, faction, guild. a DM cant define an entire faction prior a meeting or encounter with the PCs. if the PCs continue to interact with the faction, DM will have to add things backward.

There is guidelines to build a dungeon, an encounter, and even a typical adventuring day, but nowhere there is a golden rules that force the DM to stick to his preparation. Some DM will stick to their notes, some won’t and some won’t even have notes and still manage to run a session. The DM guide don’t take side for any of those style.

That's very true. There are many decisions that must be made in play. My doubt is around a supposition that those countless decisions don't arise in RPGs generally. Choice of twist or condition in TB2, or rulings as to Good Ideas. It seems to be turtles all the way down.