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

[niklinna]

5e rules actively hinder Story Now because of the resource model being the Adventurering day but often allowing overspending to swamp a scene. This requires GM control of pacing or extremely wonky scenes. The resource recovery model also cuts against be ause pacing. The disparity in class capabilities requires spotlight management. All of this names Story Now difficult or impossible.

Thanks for pointing those all out!

 

[Campbell]

I think a whole lot of folks make a bigger deal out of the incoherence thing than is really intended. It's really just about us making things harder for ourselves than we need to (rules or procedures getting in the way).

So much emphasis gets put on what is theoretically possible in these discussions that we often lose sight of best practices. Like it's theoretically possible for me to do a whole bunch of heavy squats the day before I'm going to attempt to hike a 14er. Might even make it. Doesn't mean it's a particularly brilliant idea.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Do I detect a little shade being thrown?

Maybe a little. I prefer discussions to be as accessible as possible.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For those of you who played/play 4e, what do you think of the implementation of player-driven quests? Does it work fine as is (i.e., as a section in the dmg), or would you rather it took some different form? I'm not familiar with these books, but I can imagine that if a game really wants to focus not just on quests but quests that are player driven, it could be more fundamentally integrated into the play advice and mechanics. It's very clear to me how this works in Blades in the Dark, for example, because the mechanics (such as players choosing which type of action they are going to take, being able to manipulate the dice pool in a variety of ways, xp for desperate rolls) match up with the play advice (fall in love with danger for players, asking questions for GMs). So that makes it very clear what player-driven means.

For my part, I definitely would prefer that it be fully spelled-out in both the PHB and the DMG, and I think that it would behoove the game to spend more page space on Quests if they're supposed to be this important (as said in the DMG). However, in practice, I've found them reasonably effective as they are. Not perfect, but little is, right? Of course that's a purely player perspective on it, so I may have just gotten lucky with DMs.

Is player-driven gameism ever a thing, or is player empowerment in this way only a feature of Story Now games? There has recently been some talk in OSR spaces about how the 1e dmg assumed that the DMs worlds would be inhabited by several play-groups worth of characters, all operating in competition with each other. I'm not necessarily charmed by such Gygaxian fundamentalism, but for those interested it would seem to provide a model of dnd play that is both 1. very gameist (especially as it leans into the wargames heritage of the game) and 2. very player driven (as a session isn't even scheduled unless a group of players, who each may have several characters, bring some of them together to work on a particular project).

See below re: player-driven gamism. As for "player empowerment," I see gamism generally as being already pretty player-empowering if it's handled correctly.

That is, in a gamist game with really good design, everyone involved (player and DM alike) can in a sense "relax," unless they wish to do otherwise. The DM can comfortably assemble challenges, and trust that if the system tells them "this should be pretty easy" or "this should be pretty scary" (always with the caveat "...unless luck intervenes!"), then it most likely will be (within said caveat). The DM can just throw together whatever sounds cool, without being overly concerned about whether it's calibrated to the party. In fact, the DM may not even really need to know much about the party's capabilities at all; if the system is well-balanced, there's little need for a hyper-vigilant DM that nixes overpowered options or broken combos. Likewise, a player that wants to can go all out, hunting the best and most awesome stuff...but they can also just relax, do a few minimum things (e.g. raise their prime attributes, pick up an Expertise feat, that sort of thing) and then otherwise doing whatever sounds fun regardless of whether it's strong.

I, personally, see this as a form of player empowerment, but it's "empowerment" in a way completely different from the "empowerment" of "Story Now." Instead of being anxious or blithe about future success and failure, players can confidently do what they like. Similarly, DMs no longer have to be ever-vigilant for whether a player playing a powerful class is getting too much spotlight time or whether allowing a particular build or option will lead to wonky balance issues, and can instead just fill the campaign with whatever content they think sounds interesting. (It is, not so coincidentally, this very empowerment which enables the distinct form that gives 4e some of its "Story Now" side: by making the game very good at being a game, the players can more-or-less detach from focusing on the game, and instead focus on what drives them, what things they Value, and what Issues will test those things.)

Is 4e as a Story Now game the way it is typically understood, or is that a particular point of view established on these boards? I've mostly heard it referred to as too gameist.

AIUI, it is gamist in intent and focus, in part because it's a D&D game and D&D has always been pretty gamist. The narrativist/"Story Now" perspective on it is somewhere between "accidentally on purpose" (as in, they did things purposefully which led to it, but I don't think anyone believes that it was the designers' intent that these purposeful choices would do so) and "emergent." Sort of like how I don't actually believe the goal with 3e was to make an effective "process" Sim game, which is why you have some really funky things. However, people reading and playing it got a lot of "process" Sim from playing it, even though it isn't intentionally that kind of game.

Really rigorous "process" Sim games generally shouldn't produce things like Pun-Pun, the peasant rail cannon, the locate city bomb, etc. Developing stuff like that is heavily gamist. But, for example, I see a certain shadow of "process" Sim in the attempted granularity of skills and skill points (which almost surely evolved for gamist reasons out of the heavily gamist NWPs of 2e, but their new form does have a certain semblance of "process" Sim.) Likewise, the principle behind Prestige Classes, and how they're supposed to be grounded in the world and a perfectly natural fit for a character e.g. that one should pick up a new PrC because it happens to fit how you've naturally grown, looks pretty "process" Sim-esque to me. And it's why people complained so much about the practice of them, which was extremely gamist and (IMNSHO) not in a good way, forcing players to carefully plan out character building, sometimes over the course of a dozen levels or more just to make sure they didn't miss out.

Perhaps it would be best to say that 3e and 4e are both openly gamist games, but because of the way the rules were structured, how they were presented to DMs and players, and certain (relatively light) mechanical touches, it is possible to play the former in a "process" Sim-focused way, and the latter in a narrativist "Story Now"-way.

Player-driven gamism I guess would be something closer to Arnesonian play, in the sense of actively inventing your own missions ('We're going to go and rob the temple of that snake cult the GM mentioned') and then relying on Calvinball style tactics and lateral thinking to achieve those goals outside of excessive dice rolls or actual combat (flooding the dungeon and so forth).

For my part, the idea of "player-driven gamism" makes me think of "West Marches"-style games, but even that is a bit iffy as the game itself is doing most of the heavy lifting for declaring what "Score" is (e.g., higher levels, more money/treasure) and what "Achievement" means (surviving a long time, building up a power base, having the clout to send others to do your dirty work, etc.) I think your notion of Calvinball is actually spot on, and reveals exactly why "player-driven gamism" is extremely rare. Calvinball is supposed to be a game you can "win" at in some sense, but it is not supposed to be something that has clean, clear, pre-defined goals, strategies, or even general behaviors. Probably the closest games I can think of to this sort of thing are Nomic and Mao, and the latter much moreso than the former. (Nomic can become anything, so it can of course become this sort of thing, but I don't think it starts that way.) Mao preserves the competitiveness of Calvinball, but technically lacks the open-endedness (as usually each "version" has a fixed set of rules, you just aren't allowed to be taught them other than by testing them and getting penalized for breaking them.)

So I guess it would be sort of a hybrid of Nomic and Mao, where rules may exist but they're changeable and may not be explicitly told; "Score" would thus be almost unrecognizable, as it would necessarily be idiosyncratic to each table or even each session, and "Achievement" would arise as much, if not more, from creatively inventing new rules as it would from creatively applying rules that already exist. I imagine "Score" would in part arise from how much of the rules-space a person is personally responsible for creating or reshaping.

And, much like "Story Now" vs "Story Before," I can't imagine this being something wildly popular amongst the gaming public. If I may coin a possibly-foolish corollary, "Rules Now" vs "Rules Before" is almost always going to favor the latter, because a fair chunk of people derive joy from cleverly or proficiently using rules they already know about. Relatively few people derive a ton of joy from Calvinball-type experiences, which mostly leave people either bewildered or frustrated; it's extremely difficult to not just think seven moves ahead, but to think seven games ahead, because each move changes what moves are allowed to be made, not just which moves are currently available to be made.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Maybe a little. I prefer discussions to be as accessible as possible.

Yeah, I'm...real bad at "concise" and "straightforward." See: previous post. I've worked on it, but haven't got far. Hope my offering suited.

 

[clearstream]

I agree that this is a valid interpretation. I look at this way, 4e is written the way it is because the torch bearing masses of grognards are NO JOKE. So it came down from on high, "don't lay it on too thick."

Is it really right to suppose they had that strong fear while they were writing the core books, before publication and reaction?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Is it really right to suppose they had that strong fear while they were writing the core books, before publication and reaction?

From corporate? Heck yeah, unfortunately.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Maybe a little. I prefer discussions to be as accessible as possible.

Me too. Except more so. I hate all this Label-ism. All this pseudointellectual discussion about what something is and is not is a complete waste of time. All that matters is what people do at the table, and so long as they are having fun they are doing it right.

 

[clearstream]

From corporate? Heck yeah, unfortunately.

We're speculating, though. Right? There is no direct evidence of it?

An alternative, speculative narrative: they saw how excited by and accepting players were of Bo9S and wrote 4e believing players would love it. Most likely corporate were aligned (else they wouldn't have funded development.)

 

[soviet]

It seems to me that 5e was nakedly a gamist system with gamist instructions, while 3e and 5e are gamist systems with (largely high concept) sim instructions. I think what we see (that Edwards knew already) is that, at least for the market leader, what makes a game good and what makes a game successful are often competing pressures. Precisely that incoherence and ambiguity of rules vs instructions creates a lot of chatter online (as people argue over which half is to be given primacy), creates a perceived need for more supplements ('this new book will fix things for sure'), and ultimately just appeals to the widest group of potential customers possible, especially as many people are likely to change or drift things anyway through fudging and house rules. Why create the perfect dessert topping when you can make a simply tasty one that also serves as a floor cleaner and an industrial solvent?