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

[pemerton]

I mean I really wouldn't describe trying to accurately model the functioning of several weapons as enjoying the fiction for its own sake.

<snip>

what even "for its own sake" means?

Well, you're welcome to offer another description. Here's another way that Edwards puts it:

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.​

To me, imaging pages of detail of military hardware, or pages of detail of different sorts of swords and polearms and how they might interact with different sorts of armour, seems like it is enjoying the fiction for its own sake. It is sheer imagination. I rarely do this for weapons, but have done it for castles (when I was quite a bit younger than I am now) and for religions (when I was younger, though not quite as young). It's imagining - enjoying a fiction - to no other end than the pleasure of imagining.

what happens if during a Story Now game the participants enjoy the resulting fiction for it's own sake?

Nothing. There are some people who make furniture because they enjoy the process of woodworking. They may also end up enjoying what they make for its own sake, but that's not why they do it.

Narrativism seem to be defined by what and how, whilst other categories are just defined by what. This to me seems inconsistent.

People seemed to agree that because what is no longer narrativistic, it is now a sim even though how remains the same. Now I think it is absurd to call this a sim, but that seems to be what GNS decrees...

These two quotes appear to be in contradiction.

Using PbtA mechanics to play a GM-curated story would be high concept sim, as @Campbell noted. (And he gave some examples of PbtA games along these lines. I've seen people on ENworld post about Dungeon World play that seems to be along these lines.)

Using Rolemaster mechanics to play story now is . . . <drumroll> . . . story now. As I noted upthread, Edwards calls it "vanilla narrativism". This is not hypothetical conjecture, by the way. I've done it.

Because it is actually about authoring fiction in very specific manner about very specific type of points.

To borrow Edwards' phrase, the points are "points" in the Lit 101 sense. I don't think the list of "points" I gave is very profound, or especially specific. It's the bread and butter of fantasy fiction - REH, JRRT, Ursula Le Guin, Arthruian Legend, The Iliad, a lot of super hero comics, all involve this sort of thing.

high-concept sim may have a point.

I see. So it actually is not enjoying the fiction for its own sake? It can actually be about making a point?

<snip>

It certainly can be explored via play.

For reasons I don't understand, you seem to ignore the word "now" in "story now", and to ignore the different sorts of relationship someone can have to some bit of fiction.

Dragonlance-style RPGing is a classic example of high concept sim. Someone has written/prepped a story. The story has a point. The players play through the story. They get to enjoy the story, including its point. The players of the game, in the course of their play, are not themselves engaged in authoring a story with a point. They are audience, not authors.

Story now play is about participants as authors. (Of course they are also audience, for one another's play. But that is not what is distinctive about story now. It is the authorship, via play, that is distinctive.) The "point" is presented, reacted to, built upon, etc, in play. That is why, as Edwards says, there is no "the story" in story now RPGing. It is why GM-enforced alignment is inimical to it. Because those are devices for bringing in an already-authored resolution.

When you talk about the point being "explored via play" there seem to be two possibilities. (1) The player explores, via play, what is involved in being a loyal samurai or an honourable paladin or a cleric of Pelor, etc. That is classic simulationist play: the parameters of the role, and in this case the commitments the role involves, are established in advance (often by the GM) and the player experiences them. I see a lot of advocacy for this sort of play, especially in the context of GM's telling players what it means to be a cleric of a certain god.

(2) The GM establishes situations that test the meaning of being a loyal samurai, or an honourable paladin, or a cleric of Pelor, etc, and the expectation is that the player will make a call about that, thereby expressing some idea of their own about what loyalty, or honour, or religious devotion, demand, and when those demands might be disregarded in pursuit of some other end. Vincent Baker has a nice discussion of this sort of approach, in DitV pp 138, 140, 143:

You can’t have a hero and a villain among your NPCs. It’s the PCs’ choices that make them so. The PCs are empowered to turn sin into goodness sake doctrine if they think it’s the right thing to do. How are you gonna decide up front who comes out on top? . . .

You’re not providing judgment for the players the way you have to if you’ve pre-decided who the villain is. Instead, you’ve presented your interesting moral situation, the PCs can’t walk away from it, they have to cut through its knot somehow and leave the town better off. So, what do they think?

They’ll surprise you. They’ll take sides you never expected. People just endlessly delight me and one of the reasons they do is because of their capacity to take surprising sides. Watch, you’ll see. . . .

Your job is to present the situation and then escalate it. The players’ job is to pronounce judgment and follow through. . . .

[T]he GM has no opportunity to pass effective judgment on a PC’s actions. Talk about ’em, sure, but never come down on them as righteous or sinful in a way that’s binding in the game world. The GM can’t give or withhold dice for the state of a PC’s soul, and thus never needs to judge it.​

If that is how you're playing, then you are playing story now. I've done this in AD&D (ignoring the alignment rules, as I mentioned upthread). I've done this in Rolemaster. I've done this in 4e D&D. To be blunt, I've never seen anyone post about this sort of play in 3E or 5e D&D, but for all I know it's happening out there.

Like in Story Now game you establish your character's dramatic needs before the play.

But not the resolution. That's the whole point.

If you don't think there's a difference between the GM and/or the game system telling you what the answer is (who the villain is, what the right thing to do is, etc) - whether expressly, or via the myriad informal cues that can be generated in RPGing (like "don't split the party" or "don't generate intraparty conflict" or "follow the GM's hook or we'll have no game this evening") - and the players establishing their own answers via play, then I can't take this any further. Story now RPGing is premised on exactly that difference - the difference between authorship and audience, as it can be uniquely experienced in the context of RPGing.

 

[pemerton]

I love that whole post, but this bit really inspired me to highlight something. If you always know "what my character would do" and do that (whether because situations make that easy or because you have a very fixed and clear idea of who your character is), that's kind of low on the Story Now scale. If you hit a situation where you don't immediately know what your character would do, and agonize in the moment about the best thing to do relative to your character's values, particularly when the situation pits multiple values against one another, that's the juicy in-the-moment drama Story Now is going for.

In my list, I presented some as questions - ie things the player brought into play - and some as statements - ie things that were revealed as a result of play.

As a player (cf GM) of FRPGs, which I am only occasionally, there are three moments that are really stuck in my mind. They all come from Burning Wheel play, and just a couple of sessions:

Aramina wanting to explore Evard's tower, and Thurgon persuading her to first repair his armour. My memory for the mechanics is a bit hazy - I think it was a duel of wits, with the GM scripting for Aramina - but the situation has remained with me. As I posted back when the play took place, it's not quite Vermeer: the RPG, but the (non-romantic) intimacy of the moment has stuck with me. It was made possible by some mechanical elements (rules for armour damage, and rules for the Mending skill, and neither of them too complicated in their operationalisation), by some subtle interplay of Beliefs (Thurgon: Aramina will need my protection; Aramina: I don't need Thurgon's pity), by the fact that the principles that govern framing and conflict resolution mean there is no overwhelming gameplay imperative that the armour must be repaired (contrast the crises in D&D play when PCs have to turn up to the ball unarmoured!).

Thurgon and Aramina, returning to Thurgon's ancestral estate Auxol, meeting Thurgon's brother Rufus. And the resulting exchange, in which the Rufus's shame at his failings, and resulting bitterness towards Thurgon and Aramina, emerged powerfully over a series of successful and failed checks. The GM did a terrific job of framing, but the system also came through. (As it always does: Luke Crane is a genius!)

Thurgon's mother Xanthippe berating him for having been away so long, and forbidding him to leave again. The GM wanted a Duel of Wits. Thurgon prayed instead, and I put everything into the dice pool, and got lucky on the roll, and it was like a Gandalf-liberates-Theoden moment as the years fell from Xanthippe's shoulders and she realised that she and Thurgon must liberate Auxol together. I hate to think what would have happened if Thurgon had duelled and lost. Would he have sunk as low as Rufus? (I think I may have had to shift to Aramina as main character for a while.)

I've talked about GMing AD&D story now, but we never had moments like the ones I've described: the system can't generate them. We came close in some of our RM play, with one player and that one PC in particular. But BW does it more effortlessly.

 

[Hussar]

As a basic point, which I think that gets lost here, is that any discussion of "fairness" pretty much drifts the game into Gamist agendas. Look at the 3e rules for Level Adjustment for races. From a sim perspective, there's no reason why a Fire Giant fighter needs many times more xp to advance to 2nd level than a Human fighter. It's not like Fire Giants are stupid or cannot learn. They are quite intelligent, according to the game, and are perfectly capable of learning.

So, why does it take thousands more XP for my Fire Giant Fighter to level up to level 2 than your Human fighter? Well, in a word, fairness. It wouldn't be fair to let my character, with it's huge advantages, advance at the same pace as yours. It's absolutely not balanced. The 2e Complete Humanoids rules were brutal for this. I could play an Ogre fighter, say, start at 1st level with an Ogre's HP, and then advance at the same speed as a Human. Once my class HP (which I roll at each level) exceed my "natural" HP, I start gaining more HP. There's no disadvantage whatsoever for playing an ogre (well, other than Int I suppose) compared to playing a Human. An Ogre (or Minotaur, which is even more ridiculously broken) fighter is just flat out better than a Human one.

Which, IMO, is where the very strong resistance to non-standard races comes from. At least, a big part of it is from there. DM's are so worried that some non-standard race will be "broken".

And, there's that word again - broken. Which is a purely Gamist consideration based on fairness.

@clearstream repeatedly points to how we should look at how 5e enthusiasts talk about the game. Well, okay, let's do that shall we? How many threads about this or that being broken/over/under powered are there? A few? A once in a blue moon conversation that rarely rears it's head?

No. Game balance threads are a weekly, if not daily discussion. Hell, we have WotC banging out Unearthed Arcana articles SPECIFICALLY to call attention to balance issues. There was a two year period of play testing where the overwhelming majority of conversation was dominated by balance issues.

So, yeah, I'll agree with @clearstream here. We absolutely should look at what 5e players talk about when talking about 5e to see where the agenda is. And, it's dead, smack bang on center in Gamist agendas.

 

[niklinna]

Like in Story Now game you establish your character's dramatic needs before the play.

But not the resolution. That's the whole point.

Well actually, that "before the play" bit was about High-Concept Simulation play (I'm not going to nest 4-5 levels of quotations), and really it's not crucial to HCS, it's just a practical matter in that Simulation thrives on detail and consistency, which is hard to generate on the fly.

Story Now is perfectly fine with establishing dramatic needs on the spot, by the way. You could say Story Now doesn't care when you establish the dramatic needs. You could establish a new dramatic need in the middle of a scene. But as @pemerton says here, it definitely cares about when you resolve them: in play, at the table, with everyone involved, and not through offline scripting.

 

[pemerton]

Story Now is perfectly fine with establishing dramatic needs on the spot, by the way. You could say Story Now doesn't care when you establish the dramatic needs. You could establish a new dramatic need in the middle of a scene.

I think this is an interesting thing.

Burning Wheel has some moderately strict rules about this - unlike Torchbearer, a Belief or Instinct can be changed at any time, but not during a scene that has been framed to put them to the test. The GM is allowed to defer the change until the scene is resolved.

A very different example: in the Dying Earth some of your dramatic needs (gluttony, lust etc) are set by your resistances, and these can only be changed via standard PC build processes. So during a scene you're stuck with the resistances you have!

I'm not meaning to contradict you here. I think it's interesting to think about different design and play approaches to the question you've raised, across the variety of story now-oriented RPGs and RPGing.

 

[niklinna]

I think this is an interesting thing.

Burning Wheel has some moderately strict rules about this - unlike Torchbearer, a Belief or Instinct can be changed at any time, but not during a scene that has been framed to put them to the test. The GM is allowed to defer the change until the scene is resolved.

A very different example: in the Dying Earth some of your dramatic needs (gluttony, lust etc) are set by your resistances, and these can only be changed via standard PC build processes. So during a scene you're stuck with the resistances you have!

I'm not meaning to contradict you here. I think it's interesting to think about different design and play approaches to the question you've raised, across the variety of story now-oriented RPGs and RPGing.

Good point! It would be easy to dodge in a scene by saying "Well that isn't one of my values any more."

I'll freely admit I wasn't thinking of that, but it's a good thing I only said "establish a new dramatic need in the middle of a scene".

Now you've got me thinking about how & why some games put limits on how many dramatic needs you can have....

 

[pemerton]

Some people with simulationist preferences who advocate "Hardline Actor Stance," for example, regard anything that risks taking them out of their character immersion or dispelling the illusion as "(meta-)gamist" and "not roleplaying." So when they see things like fate points, invokes/compels, etc. in Fate that they claim break their personal sense of immersion, then Fate fails the purity test for what "simulationism" is supposed to be (for them).

To me, this observation is in the same general ballpark as my comment upthread that someone might love B/X D&D and hate T&T, even though they are both dungeon-crawling gamist-oriented RPGs.

There is a lot that factors into the play experience beyond creative agenda. I don't own BitD and have never read it, and I don't expect that to change: not because I have anything against its creative agenda, but because its tropes don't really move me.

 

[niklinna]

There tends to be more openness to this among Neo-Traditional Play. However, such games support this to differing degrees. Fate, for example, is honestly fairly High Concept Simulationist / Neo-Trad even though it gets labeled as a "story game" or "gamist" by its detractors.* But it has mechanical support for players to introduce backstory or for the GM to invite the players to do so as a natural part of play.

Fate supports story in that you can write aspects that embody values that can be challenged or put into conflict. But in practice they tend toward being a High-Concept Simulationist mechanic with a glossy, brightly-colored story candy shell. But, they're also a Gamist element in that you can use them strategically and tactically to win conflicts. A trifecta, really!

* I suspect that the source has to do a lot with how some people have differing expectations of what "simulationism" entails particularly in regards to immersion. Some people with simulationist preferences who advocate "Hardline Actor Stance," for example, regard anything that risks taking them out of their character immersion or dispelling the illusion as "(meta-)gamist" and "not roleplaying." So when they see things like fate points, invokes/compels, etc. in Fate that they claim break their personal sense of immersion, then Fate fails the purity test for what "simulationism" is supposed to be (for them).

This again shows how criticizing GNS for lumping too much under Simulationism misses the mark. Mode/style of play isn't the only level on which we can discuss coherence and conflict.

 

[Campbell]

If the overall issue with the Threefold Model is lumping too much in together, I think the obvious solution is to expand, rather than contract.
The reason why I am so adamant about keeping High Concept Play and Story Now play separated is that in terms of why we are playing they are near opposites.

When I am playing a character focused game with a High Concept agenda, I'm leaning into the narrative we are creating together. I am embracing tropes, making decisions based on what I think makes for a more compelling narrative, embracing drama for the sake of drama, building scenes with other characters where my character struggles in the appropriate ways. I am playing tropes, genre and a narrative outcome. Games like Smallville or Hillfolk (when played according to their text) typify this sort of play.

When I am playing a character focused game with a Story Now agenda, I am doing almost the exact opposite. I am advocating for my character and doing so as hard as possible. I am not leaning into drama for its own sake. Instead, I am playing with a sense of curiosity and vulnerability about how this character would respond to the situation at hand. I follow the fiction. I do not lead it. I embrace the tension of the moment - the anticipation of where things might lead. I keep the story feral.

The thought process and aims could not be more different. Even if sometimes the resulting fiction looks superficially similar.

 

[Manbearcat]

How I read this person's argument is that "fairness" is part of G but that "fairness" is not required for G. For example, OSR talks about how some challenges aren't fair and balanced, but the OSR is fairly (though not universally*) Gamist.

* or at least the portion of the OSR community that views OSR through the lens of intentional game design and philosophical approaches rather than a simple desire to play D&D retroclones.

The second part of my post on Fate was responding a separate point they made about traditional play and the hostility of introducing backstory.

The conversation has moved on from this, but I figured I'd just use this post (because its related) to give my thoughts on fairness and prep as it pertains to Gamism.

"Fairness" when it comes to Gamism requires:

* Procedural Understanding and Integrity - The entire table needs a requisite understanding of (a) the shared imagined space, (b) what the play procedures for resolving gamestate collisions do and how they do it (including resource economies like what assets both sides can bring to bear and how those assets get brought into the conflict), and (c) that everyone plays hard and commits to fidelity toward the shared goal.

* Procedural Skill and Transparency - The players especially need some level of confirmation that THIS instantiation (rinse/repeat) of (a) and (b) and (c) is legitimate. For instance, if, by design, "what (type and amount) resources the GM can bring to bear" is gated behind skillful player surveillance, then the GM needs to skillfully handle BOTH the gating AND the reveal and honor that reveal with above-board procedural fidelity (the players need to understand it and see it). A GM fumbling their role in either the gating or the reveal or the honoring will short-circuit skilled play.

Some random thoughts about Prep and Gamism + One thought about Gamism + Story Now:

* Gamism is entirely functional without a pre-prepped play-space so long as certain preconditions are met (see above).

* If the site of Skilled Play is overwhelmingly (though not wholly) at the scene/conflict level (see D&D 4e), then the requirement of a pre-prepped play-space is reduced dramatically. If we're running a 4e combat, the GM should telegraph encounter budget info such that threat can be inferred and should render the shared imagined space of the battlefield array so that players understand the constituent parts (including goals and any NPCs they have under their control) of the conflict. Skill Challenge Complexity and Level should be given and, again, goal of conflict/intent of action declarations and nature of opposition should be well-rendered by the GM. If its a social conflict where dice pools/traits/tags should be inferable by players, those should be resolved quickly beforehand (or given outright if the players would already know them and need to interact with them to make moves in the Conflict - eg Torchbearer Convince conflicts and equipping - in this case social - weapons for possible Maneuver to Disarm).

* If the primary play-space of Skilled Play is "The Adventure," "the Score," or "The Adventuring Day" then the assets that the GM can be brought to bear absolutely must be inferable and within the gamespace to decode (see Information Gathering phase of Blades or Town phase in TB) or transparently encoded (see encoded Torchbearer Adventure Size construction or Score Tier info/Assets for enemies and Engagement Roll then Position/Effect handling in Blades).

The larger and more complex each of these units gets (for instance, I can routinely improvise ALL Short Adventures in TB, and MOST Medium Adventures in TB, but I would NEVER even attempt to improvise a Long Adventure in TB), and that complexity is all of procedure-side/PC-build/power/resource refresh disparity/array of available GM assets-side/physical imagined play-space size + interconnectedness/integration, the higher the demand for full prep in order to meet the demands for Skilled Play.

TLDR - Shorter, transparent + robust systemization/automation, less complex, less consequentially interconnected (or outright discrete) play-spaces can easily be improvised and fulfil the demands of Skilled Play. As that continuum moves ever onward toward the other side there is a point of steep diminishing returns for the GM to not prep and then there is a break-point where the demands of Skill Play cannot be met without prep. Finally, running a Gamist game via improvisation (or without much prep) requires a dedicated GM who is extremely conscientious, who understands the game they're running at a very technical level, is well-practiced (don't kid yourself...this takes a lot of practice), is willing/able to devote significant amount of mental bandwidth and cognitive horsepower to "the mission" during play, and who cares deeply about the competitive integrity of the play-space to pull this off.

* Transparency and game engine robustness is a necessity for a Gamist-aspiring engine to play nice with (and enable the production of) Story Now play. Conversely, Game engine opacity and frailty/insipidness in its Gamist-pursuits does the exact opposite. It disables Story Now play and it enables High Concept Sim (particularly of the Participationist variety because responsibility and accountability for the trajectory of play is removed from players and offloaded entirely onto GM - and in this case, this is a willing transaction by the parties involves by way of implicit or explicit social contract).