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

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have a hair-brained notion of five challenges

1. Drama - as a player I am challenged to propose and unravel psychological motives (e.g. duties, beliefs, desires)
2. Story - as players we are challenged to resolve a premise
3. Simulation - as a player I am challenged to know the world and my place in it
4. Construction - as a player I am challenged to build something in the game world
5. Solution - as a player I am challenged to figure something out (e.g. a puzzle)

With four dimensions they can be addressed along

1. Tactical - position matters, materiel matters
2. Strategic - policy matters, logistics matter
3. Cultural - concerns matter, beliefs matter
4. Magical - relationships matter, appearances matter (is this really separate from cultural? and/or should there be psychological?)

Two tensions

1. Controversy - your choices will face resistance
2. Contribution - your choices make change (is "will enhance" better here?)

And finally the two languages in which they are articulated (always both)

1. Your spoken and written language - maybe English
2. Ludically extended language - indexes, icons, symbols, and rules bound to them

Each game posits a ludically extended langugage, putatively suitable for its challenges, dimensions and tensions. (I feel like there may be more dimensions available, and perhaps tensions are not comprehensive). None of the above are assumed to be in conflict. In fact, it is assumed a game will be more successfully expressive and engaging, the more challenges and dimensions it successfully weds. And both languages are always required. This doesn't really look into metagame, so there is more to be said. It's just something that came to me based on conversation to this point.

[EDIT Note edits, with apologies to @Ondath!]

I wouldn't presume to judge the value of an analytical process to others. For myself, as basically an 'engineer of games', I am currently not seeing how I would use it to map my approach to either designing or running a game. That is, I see these as a potential list of 'ingredients', and that's interesting, but I don't understand how, for example: Challenges 2 and 3 are really distinct. The 'challenges' thus seem a bit like "a list of suggestions of ways players could be engaged." 1 and 2 seem much more general and 'game universal' than 3-5 as well. The 'dimensions' don't seem IMHO to form a coherent set with any shared properties at all. That is 'strategic' and 'tactical' speak to 'scale' in terms of either of 2 things, either in-world time and scale, or time and scale in terms of play (IE strategic deals with the course of play over many sessions, tactical to considerations within the current session, or possibly the next one). 'Cultural and Magical' seem almost like just adjectives that could describe various features of the milieu. I mean, OK, I can kind of see how 'magical' can have a SCALE (less to more magic) and that could be taken as a 'dimension', but I'm not sure how that really relates to the structure and process of an RPG, except maybe in a large sense of "a setting that is described as being highly realistic will require framing devices which adhere to its genre in order to maintain suspension of disbelief", but the same kinds of TECHNIQUES are still applicable as they would be to say high fantasy.

While I agree that player contributions to the game may be met with either acceptance and a cooperative 'building on' or they could be met with 'lets challenge that according to the game process' I wonder what to call that, or if it is independent of other considerations enough to be a dimension in and of itself.

The last one seems fairly concrete. I think it is again a matter of there always being a high degree of interdependency between elements.

So, I would say that in order to create a sort of 'dimensional space' in which either designs or actual play practice could be placed you would want the dimensions to be INDEPENDENT (IE you can pick any value within the range of options regardless of values for other dimensions). A second criterion is that they matter; that is, if nothing really depends on one of these dimensions, then why bother to analyze it? We would obviously not care about what brands of beer are consumed during play, for example (I mean, we will care when we play...). I think another aspect here is consistency. That is, at whatever scale our analysis is operating, at that scale each dimension should be univalent, if it constantly takes on different values across the scale, then there's not much we can say about it in a theoretical analysis of this type. Instead in that case you would want to do a PROCESS based analysis (which might be modeled as an evolving trajectory in a state space if your dimensions are done right).

As you can see, my thought processes in this are pretty hard analytical engineering/scientific tool stuff. Psychological models can be significant here, but it is in terms of how they illuminate the human elements of play. Purely philosophical matters are IMHO pretty irrelevant in most cases as we are dealing with real practical matters, though I'd temper that by saying that perhaps certain thinkers who dealt largely with matters close to the everyday world (Weber perhaps comes to mind) may have some relevance here.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right. This is you doing it again. All this is just thrown together as one package. Having to recover the remains of one's mother is certainly 'a dramatic need' albeit I'd argue we need to establish more about the emotional significance of this for it to truly have dramatic impact. But the further material conditions surrounding that are no longer 'dramatic needs' Yes, the mother's remains must exist (or at least the character needs to believe so) and they need to be in some location that is not readily accessible. And of course the character needs to have some important reason for retrieving the remains. But none of this requires that the player invents the whole Fortress of the Iron Ring and it's place in the setting. They could, but doing so is not 'establishing a dramatic need.' And all this of course comes back to you quibbling about the player establishing a quest upon seeing 'here be dragons' on the map. That they use GM invented place/other setting elements as trappings for their dramatic need doesn't invalidate their contribution. They have established a dramatic need for their character, and also elevated a random flavour text on the map to something that now has significance to the story. (Yes story, we are always creating stories at the RPG table.)

As for 4, you're massively overinterpreting what is actually there. I seriously doubt that it was ever intended for the players to establish significant setting elements via quests, merely to set goals regarding already existing elements. Or if they intended players to have significant setting authority, then they did piss poor job at expressing it.

I would just say that these various things ARE relevant, because in an RPG concepts sort get 'atomized', they go from "I need to recover my mother's body from the Fortress of the Iron Ring" to the particulars of what is there, how to get to it, additional challenges that might exist which may impact this agenda or other character's agendas, etc. Play proceeds at all times and with multiple levels under consideration all the time. So, yes, it MAY BE that establishing all the elements of what the Iron Ring and its fortress are becomes relevant.

At least in classic Story Now however this would not all be established in one fell swoop, nor likely by one participant in the game. For example if it was a Dungeon World game the Iron Ring might be a front invented by the GM as a response to some player inputs (IE one of the players wants to be a classic big hero, he feels the need to prove himself against some sort of evil force). Later the Fortress is established, along with the mother's body and the quest to recover it (IE maybe because the character believes it is a duty, or feels guilty or whatever, as you pointed out this should be fleshed out). Why recover it? That may not yet be explored! Now bonds and alignments and the general "we're fantastic fantasy hero types" orientation of the game in general is LIKELY to drive the PCs towards this fortress.

This brings up a game design/execution consideration that was always important to me in terms of 4e SCs, which I used to describe as the "Framing of the Challenge" (though I avoid that word now since it seems to be used in other ways). What is its scale? Is it an overarching 'framework' that the PCs are operating in which plays out over many sessions? Is it a tactical challenge? Is it maybe somewhere in-between. Maybe it is even variable! (IE some initial checks establish factors that then feed into the more tactical encounter-level sorts of stuff).

 

[clearstream]

Glitch.

 

[Ovinomancer]

If you require your game to exclude others, that's a "you problem" not a game problem.

If your intent was to agree with Campbell, this doesn't read like that at all. If your intent was to question Campbell on excluding games, you are really, really far off the mark.

 

[clearstream]

As above, your model sounds like it asks a different question. Mine asks, "What purposes are there for games?" Yours, if I've understood your most recent post (response below), is asking, "Why do people choose to play games?" In Aristotelian terms, I'm examining formal causes (in essence, "why tables are shaped like tables"), while you are examining final causes ("why tables get made at all," more or less.) Complements to one another. "Prestige" applies to all four of my categories, though I'd associate it more strongly with Score-and-Achievement due to the emphasis it puts on (eventual) success. Values-and-Issues, on the other hand, puts almost no emphasis on success, but rather on resolution, which is very different--more on that later.

For the sake of argument suppose games are rightly categorised ontologically with tools. Using an appropriate analogy, we could have the following example of your two questions (where we are interested in understanding if they are different or the same question.)

• What purposes are there for a hammer?
• Why do people choose to use hammers?

What would be your take on that? (Again, I'd like to respond to more of your post, but let's start here.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right. So here the model is again just a hindrance and leads to this sort of siloed "all or nothing" thinking. I can easily imagine a game being more supportive for playing character drama without becoming Story Now.

Personally I don't see any great need to assume that Story Now is the only form a Narrativist agenda can take. That is, I think that you cannot say a game is really narratively focused unless the narrative has significant dramatic leeway within play. So, the premise and the milieu, and the process of play must allow for things like players who decide how characters react to events within the game. That further implies that the sequence of events is not fully determined beforehand (which I think is pretty much a given for all RPG play to at least some degree). It also implies that whichever participants make decisions about character reactions are able to make EFFECTIVE decisions, at least potentially. By effective I mean they matter dramatically (I guess it is possible they might have very little impact on the direction the plot takes, as in my Doomed Station example).

I am not sure to what extent any of the people responsible for developing the whole GNS thing explored non-Story Now Narrativism. Certainly games were produced which have had significant narrativist focus in which the 'recipe' isn't exactly like what was originally presented by Edwards. One might consider those games to be less Narrativist in agenda, but I am not sure that's a very good conclusion. It might be better to consider that some elements are necessary, some are supportive, and some might easily be replaced by something else that works equally well, or were simply misidentified as being core. I think it would also behoove people to look at post-GNS ideas, as it is likely many of these points are ones that have already been addressed, since GNS is an almost 20 year old theory at this point!

 

[Umbran]

If your intent was to agree with Campbell, this doesn't read like that at all. If your intent was to question Campbell on excluding games, you are really, really far off the mark.

Given the context, I don't think so. I was responding to the following exchange:

Regarding D&D, what I've basically been saying is that WotC would be wise if they offered more support for people who are interested in increasing dramtism in their games.

How is this not calling for basically excluding the OSR and indie portions of our community?

Basically, D&D cannot/shouldn't offer dramatism, because that will exclude OSR. Never mind that the OSR has several games of its own. That is no longer about the game, but about the entitlement to exclusivity in a game that is not really a part of the OSR to begin with! That really is an issue of people, not of the game itself any more.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not so sure. As long as they're things the players had no reasonable way to know beforehand anyway it doesn't matter, unless you consider 'guessing well' to be a meaningful challenge and I wouldn't.

But if we accept your premise, in what GNS category would an improvised dungeon delve fall into then, if lack of preplanning disqualifies it from gamism? Let's assume there is no heavy focus on exploring character drama beyond "dungeons are kinda scary" and not heavy emphasis on presenting super coherent fantasy milieu. You classic fight bugbears, avoid traps, get treasure type of an affair.

It is Gamist. While it may be that the original definition of Gamist may have been formulated in such a way that it isn't, I would consider that a limitation on the definition. It is easily fixed. Gamist requires a set of challenges that are presented to the players in an IMPARTIAL WAY. That is, there must be a 'level playing field' in some sense. If the challenges are invented on the basis of how the player performed on previous challenges (IE 'that was too easy, lets see how you deal with THIS!') then there's no fair and objective challenge level that everyone faces. You aren't beating the game if the GM makes things easier in room 2 because room 1 kicked your ass. The most straightforward way to arrange this is a pre-generated adventure. Random generation however assures us of the same kind of impartiality (although now luck is a factor in challenge level).

I'd note that TYPICAL play in D&D didn't absolutely hinge on real fairness. That is you can still have a pretty decent game where the GM changes things on the fly to make it tougher or easier, but I'm not sure that is really Gamist anymore, maybe more Sim, possibly 'Sim of Gamism'.

 

[clearstream]

I wouldn't presume to judge the value of an analytical process to others. For myself, as basically an 'engineer of games', I am currently not seeing how I would use it to map my approach to either designing or running a game.

Right, it's just a quick thought experiment, not anticipated (by me at least) to be robust enough to engineer from.

That is, I see these as a potential list of 'ingredients', and that's interesting, but I don't understand how, for example: Challenges 2 and 3 are really distinct. The 'challenges' thus seem a bit like "a list of suggestions of ways players could be engaged." 1 and 2 seem much more general and 'game universal' than 3-5 as well.

The first part of the thought experiment was to see if it were possible to frame some of the main impulses in terms of challenge? Behind the question is the thought of resisting the urge to say that prestige and problem solving are not present under all motives (and therefore can be in a separate category.) So the question being asked isn't - would these be suitable to design a game with? It's - does it make any kind of sense to suppose that challenge - performance with risk, perhaps - can be found connected with every motive?

The 'dimensions' don't seem IMHO to form a coherent set with any shared properties at all. That is 'strategic' and 'tactical' speak to 'scale' in terms of either of 2 things, either in-world time and scale, or time and scale in terms of play (IE strategic deals with the course of play over many sessions, tactical to considerations within the current session, or possibly the next one). 'Cultural and Magical' seem almost like just adjectives that could describe various features of the milieu. I mean, OK, I can kind of see how 'magical' can have a SCALE (less to more magic) and that could be taken as a 'dimension', but I'm not sure how that really relates to the structure and process of an RPG, except maybe in a large sense of "a setting that is described as being highly realistic will require framing devices which adhere to its genre in order to maintain suspension of disbelief", but the same kinds of TECHNIQUES are still applicable as they would be to say high fantasy.

Your word "scale" is better - I agree - I am thinking of something like the volumes over which the challenges operate.

The last one seems fairly concrete. I think it is again a matter of there always being a high degree of interdependency between elements.

I felt happiest with the last part, and I think it has useful implications.

So, I would say that in order to create a sort of 'dimensional space' in which either designs or actual play practice could be placed you would want the dimensions to be INDEPENDENT (IE you can pick any value within the range of options regardless of values for other dimensions). A second criterion is that they matter; that is, if nothing really depends on one of these dimensions, then why bother to analyze it? We would obviously not care about what brands of beer are consumed during play, for example (I mean, we will care when we play...). I think another aspect here is consistency. That is, at whatever scale our analysis is operating, at that scale each dimension should be univalent, if it constantly takes on different values across the scale, then there's not much we can say about it in a theoretical analysis of this type. Instead in that case you would want to do a PROCESS based analysis (which might be modeled as an evolving trajectory in a state space if your dimensions are done right).

For sure. Were I putting forward something other than a hair-brained thought experiment, I would look for greater rigour. As you do.

As you can see, my thought processes in this are pretty hard analytical engineering/scientific tool stuff. Psychological models can be significant here, but it is in terms of how they illuminate the human elements of play. Purely philosophical matters are IMHO pretty irrelevant in most cases as we are dealing with real practical matters, though I'd temper that by saying that perhaps certain thinkers who dealt largely with matters close to the everyday world (Weber perhaps comes to mind) may have some relevance here.

It's often hard to gauge the impact of purely philosophical matters. Typically, those matters are not so pure, and often enough what folk suppose is just an aspect of their practical position has various commitments underlying it. That said, my focus is almost always ontological, so I probably end up baffling others who are thinking sociologically. They vex me, too, so at least we're even

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Personally I don't see any great need to assume that Story Now is the only form a Narrativist agenda can take. That is, I think that you cannot say a game is really narratively focused unless the narrative has significant dramatic leeway within play. So, the premise and the milieu, and the process of play must allow for things like players who decide how characters react to events within the game. That further implies that the sequence of events is not fully determined beforehand (which I think is pretty much a given for all RPG play to at least some degree). It also implies that whichever participants make decisions about character reactions are able to make EFFECTIVE decisions, at least potentially. By effective I mean they matter dramatically (I guess it is possible they might have very little impact on the direction the plot takes, as in my Doomed Station example).

I am not sure to what extent any of the people responsible for developing the whole GNS thing explored non-Story Now Narrativism. Certainly games were produced which have had significant narrativist focus in which the 'recipe' isn't exactly like what was originally presented by Edwards. One might consider those games to be less Narrativist in agenda, but I am not sure that's a very good conclusion. It might be better to consider that some elements are necessary, some are supportive, and some might easily be replaced by something else that works equally well, or were simply misidentified as being core. I think it would also behoove people to look at post-GNS ideas, as it is likely many of these points are ones that have already been addressed, since GNS is an almost 20 year old theory at this point!

Thank you, good post, and I agree with pretty much all of it. However, some posters (@Ovinomancer, at least) early on this thread specifically insisted that Story Now and Narrativism are one and the same, so I remain confused regarding the matter...