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

[Ovinomancer]

I'm keenly reminded of when @Ovinomancer talked about their character in a Blades in the Dark game in another thread. From what I recall, the crew was in a haunted house, and his PC chose to interact with a painting, possibly appraising its worth, in order to repay a debt for a patron or something. But in interacting with the painting and rolling dice, what was once scenery description gained dramatic importance as part of their character's story.

I ran that game, actually. Otherwise

 

[Thomas Shey]

I like that terminology. I can't automatically assign "simulationist" aesthetic priorities to players choosing an objective-resolution game, because they might have chosen that type of resolution due to their intuitive assumptions about what it is like to inhabit a world. A metaphysical priority.

Again, this is assuming you can't have more than one purpose at once. Intuitive assumptions about what it's like to inhabit a world is part of what a simulationist priority is about; it just doesn't have to be the only, or highest priority.

 

[clearstream]

Again, this is assuming you can't have more than one purpose at once. Intuitive assumptions about what it's like to inhabit a world is part of what a simulationist priority is about; it just doesn't have to be the only, or highest priority.

Of course. Our takes aren't in conflict. A might have aesthetic priorities. B (what I've called) metaphysical. C could have both, weighted to aesthetic. And so on.

My meaning is that I can't assume B has an aesthetic priority. They might. They might not. As you point out, they could have a mix.

 

[kenada]

I'd like to take a closer look at this. First let's confirm that a rumour is - a currently circulating story or report of uncertain or doubtful truth. There shouldn't be a path to a false rumour, because rumours are never guaranteed veracious. However, what I feel the intuition here suggests is something reasonably straightforward

When I read

My intuitive response is always "Huh? What's at stake is getting dirt on the supervillain!" But one can reply "Sure, but you don't know/guarantee that the safe is a means to that, right?" One ordinary response in line with your Traveller example is "I do know/guarantee, because player did something else to lock in that content: they used social skills to get information from lackeys confirming the location of the dirt. It's in this safe. That's why we're here."

Of course, I can come back to that with "Sure, but it's still not really guaranteed, is it?!" I believe that will generate a sense of not really getting it from many DMs. It comes down to principles. One set of principles has it that efforts by players can constrain or lock in content. That can come as description or description and system, such as social interaction.

I can picture a possible Traveller GM (not one I'd like) chuckling and pointing out that "rumours" are not facts, and the safe is empty. Gotcha! Alternatively, and in a wide ranges of RPGs, I can picture a GM working with player on a narrative/system path to this specific safe, that has the dirt in it. A gotcha at this point, as I hope is evident from that first possible GM, would for many groups break their social contract... make the GM a spoilsport.

You’ve hit on the distinction Baker is making between task resolution and conflict resolution. The first one, task resolution, is a fundamentally sim-oriented approach. It’s modeling whether someone can perform the activity in question. It’s divorced from why the PC may be attempting it. That’s how it is possible to open the safe but find no evidence or acquire information that proves to be false. Those facts are meant to exist in the world independently of the PCs and their needs, so it makes sense that those outcomes are possible.

Conflict resolution is about whether the PCs accomplish their intent. It would be poor form (if not cheating) on the GM’s part for them to have a player test for a conflict and win, then negate their win with false information or an empty safe. It’s the equivalent of killing the PCs (“rocks fall”) after they win a combat encounter. In both cases, they won, but the GM negated that and took away their victory.

This relates to the diagrams @Campbell shared and @pemerton reposted because conflict resolution provides a concrete way to end a scene that task resolution does that. After all, task resolution is just answering whether the PCs did the thing they did. It’s the equivalent of making an attack roll in combat. The hit may finish off the opponent, but it may not. The difference between combat and task resolution is that combat has a procedure to determine when it has ended (one side is dead or routed) while task resolution typically does not. The exception are tools like skill challenges, which allow the GM to frame the scene but the combined results of the PCs’ task attempts bring it to a resolution.

 

[Krachek]

Traditionally this would be likely to occur in a game as a part of some sort of 'puzzle' where the impressive safe is a decoy.

An empty safe may be the best answer to a previous retreat from the party. « don’t worry guys, the safe will be there tomorrow. » indeed it will be there but empty!

 

[clearstream]

You’ve hit on the distinction Baker is making between task resolution and conflict resolution.

I feel folk pretty comprehensively mistake what I'm saying. I appreciate what Baker is saying. What I'm attempting to get at is something like this - () is magic circle of play. [] is game text. G is game system. P is principles. I is correlation of resolution with player intention.

([GPI])
([G]PI)

Harper's right-hand diagram is adduced toward a conclusion about the second arrangement; i.e. that resolution is correlated with player intention only if the game text includes system and principles. You used the word "concrete" and that seems okay to me. We can easily agree that the first arrangement more reliably ensures correlation with player intent than the second. We might also agree that the first arrangement does not absolutely ensure correlation with player intent, for example, it could be played ineptly.

That's one axis. Now consider - W is imagined world. D is dice roll. = means to index. R is results. T is tensions (with a ring of intentions). C is consequences.

D = R|T
D/W = R|C

Anyone writing a description of resolution for the second arrangement is guaranteed to suggest possible empty safes. When that is the game system, there isn't any faithful description of resolution that avoids suggesting them. Suggesting them, however, does not commit to them. Let's label my arrangements top to bottom C, U, S, O, and suppose they are axes so we have quadrants CS, CO, US, UO.

I can then make claims like

• CS ensures strong I
• CO may ensure strong I, depending on what the text says
• US ensures strong I
• UO may ensure strong I, depending on what P is

Harper's left-hand diagram is solid. Harper's right-hand diagram solidly describes one way CO and UO can go. What way they go is settled only in the actual text, or the actual principles. Harper's right-hand diagram is a conclusion about a single - often seen - settlement (i.e. that of "traditional" play); what's invisible are all the other diagrams describing the other settlements.

For avoidance of doubt then, I am not saying that Harper's diagrams are incorrect. I am saying that supposing all RPG is captured by just two diagrams is incorrect. As @pemerton often says - I don't see how this can be controversial.

 

[Campbell]

Baker is not talking about game texts at all. He's speaking to binding social agreements when he talks about system. Whether you write it down or not is immaterial.

 

[clearstream]

Baker is not talking about game texts at all. He's speaking to binding social agreements when he talks about system. Whether you write it down or not is immaterial.

Yes, all good. No denial of that in what I am saying.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Personally I find it easier to think mostly in simple task resolution terms. And yes, in sometimes this means that your success does not do much, except perhaps net some information about what is not there (you successfully search for secret doors, but there aren't any here, so what your success gains is the knowledge about the absence of secret doors) or even in some rare situations make a situation worse (you succeed at destroying a supporting pillar... causing the ceiling to collapse on you.) And to me this is perfectly fine.

Right, there's nothing wrong with it. It simply leads to certain types of play (which one depends on other factors). It does mostly rule out some approaches though. I'd note that PbtA DOES come pretty close in that the baseline check mechanic allows for a 'simply fail and suffer a consequence (GM hard move)' as one of the possibilities. However that is only appropriate where it follows from the existing action, the move addresses PC concerns, and takes things further into the 'pressure cooker'. It also should help depict a fantastic world, etc. So you CAN do something close to task resolution mechanics, but you'd need to center certain considerations elsewhere in order to create a game that isn't either HCS or some form of classic gamist challenge system.

 

[pemerton]

Sure, the GM authored the world. Or perhaps some professional setting maker did (at least partly.) No one is eliding the matter, nor this being the case make what @Manbearcat said inaccurate.

Who said anything about @Manbearcat being inaccurate? Not me.

Let's put it this way: in a story in which a character is apt to find incriminating papers in a safe, why wouldn't how skilled a thief the character is, and how strong the safe is, not shape the fiction?

Because the strength of the safe or one's skill in picking locks is in no way causally connected to the contents of the safe. Lets say one character have excellent skill at smashing locks and another have mediocre skill at picking them. Why would which of them manages to open/break the lock have any connection to what's behind the lock?

<snip>

Fiction can be sensitive to such things, but this approach muddles completely unconnected things together.

What is getting muddled together? And what does in-fiction causation have to do with the relationship between characters and what is at stake in a situation?

In Burning Wheel, if my PC has a high skill in Lock Picking, then it is more likely that my PC will get what they want by picking locks, than is the case for another PC whose skill in Lock Picking is lower. This is not a model of how causation works in the fiction. It's not a model of anything.

REH's Conan is more likely to achieve his goals, as protagonist, by fighting than is (say) JRRT's Frodo. In Burning Wheel, if I want to play Conan I need (among other things) a high score in fighting. If I want to play Frodo, I need (among other things) a high score in Perception. And if I want to play Sam, I need (among other things) a high score in Cooking. That's what makes it more likely that my PC will get what he wants - helping his friends endure their struggles - by cooking for them. As it happens, my knight PC Thurgon has a passable rating in Cooking. In building the character that way, I'm not just establishing a state of affairs in the fiction that this guy knows how to cook. I'm also sending a signal about my character: I aspire to achieve things by cooking.

Of course, if the opponents are tougher, then achieving a goal by fighting them will be harder (for Conan, or for anyone else). If a situation is more complicated or obscure - whether literally or emotionally - than it will harder for even an astute person to achieve their goal by understanding it. If all there is to cook with is what can be scraped together on the trail; or if the tastes of those I'm cooking for are so jaded that nothing but the finest cuisine will move them; then even an experienced cook will find it harder to achieve what they want by cooking.

There's nothing muddled about any of that.

I've never built a lock-picking character, but one of my friends I play with did once. Just like the examples I've given, that sent a signal too, that his character aspired to achieve things by picking locks. There was no muddle.

In such situation in Burning Wheel, how you determine 'the DC'* of the safe opening check? Is it based on the quality of the safe or narrative likelihood of the papers being in there, or something else?

(*I don't remember what the BW equivalent is actually called, but I remember that the mechanics are such that the odds scale way more steeply than in D&D, so GM's determination affects the odds drastically more.)

For each skill, there is a list of obstacles. The obstacles for lock-picking are based on the quality of the lock. Whether the test to open the lock could be augmented by (say) Incriminating Documents-wise; or whether the GM would just "say 'yes'" to the opening but call for a check on Incriminating Documents-wise when the contents of the safe are inspected; or something else; would depend on further details of the situation: how it was framed, and what the Beliefs of the characters are.