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

[niklinna]

So if we are evocating the flavour of a genre we are not emulating a genre? What are we doing then? Are genre evocation and genre emulation now in different GNS baskets?

They aren't in any GNS baskets.

From The Forge :: GNS and Other Matters of Roleplaying Theory, Chapter 1

Why "genre" is not part of the lexicon
I do not recommend using "genre" to identify role-playing content. A "genre" is some combination of specific setting elements, plot elements, situation elements, character elements, and sometimes premise elements, such that by hearing the term, we are informed what to expect, or in role-playing terms, what to do. On the face of it, the concept would seem to be useful.

The problem is that genres are continually being deconstructed and re-formed, with elements of one being re-combined with others. This is occurring as a non-planned or non-managed historical phenomenon throughout all media. Therefore "genre" may be a fine descriptive label for what is or has been done, but it's not much help in terms of what to do or what can be done.

In many cases, a given genre label will convey to a close group of people a fairly tight combination of values for these variables. However, the same genre label loses its power to inform as you add more people to the mix, especially since most labels have switched meanings radically more than once. And even more importantly, new combinations of values for the key variables may be perfectly functional, even when they do not correspond to any recognized genre label.

Therefore when someone tells me that a game (or story, or whatever) is based on a certain genre, I have to ask a few more questions - and sooner or later, I get real answers in terms of Character, Setting, Situation, or Color. Only then can an initial Premise be identified, and then the next step toward functional, enjoyable role-playing may occur.

I see that the projection continues. I have praised the design of Apoc World for it's ability to create a whole in which the parts support and elevate each other. I simply do not subscribe to the idea that the game must be about one thing and one thing only because some bizarre commitment to the purity of some ancient game theory.

Phrased that way, I agree. Somebody who wants heroic fantasy is going to be as bitterly disappointed by Apocalypse World as somebody coming to it expecting any kind of simulation (which, again, is not emulation or evocation). But the first is going to know much sooner what trouble they're in for.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So if we are evocating the flavour of a genre we are not emulating a genre? What are we doing then? Are genre evocation and genre emulation now in different GNS baskets?

Genre isn't even in GNS baskets. Simulationism isn't emulation, it's internal cause. So, if you're doing genre by following genre logic to resolve actions, then you're in Simulationism. Having flavor or trappings of genre isn't this, though. If I set the stage for an encounter in the shadow of a burnt out megatank, where various mutants are facing down a PC, that's not calling for genre logic to resolve actions, it's flavor. It's not simulationism. If, however, the PC declares pulling their gun and gunning down the mutants in waves, and the GM says "sure, awesome, note perfect, you do so," that's resolving according to genre logic. But this isn't how AW works. Instead, the player states what their character is doing, and if that triggers a move, then a check is made. This trigger isn't based on genre logic, or if it makes sense to do so, or if there's some cause/effect implicated -- it happens no matter what. Make a move, do the move. There's no auto here. And the result isn't going to be based on genre logic, either, but rather on what the check result is and how that restricts the GM to respond. Fail, and the GM is restricted to making a move against. This might involve pulling from genre logic, but it's not ever required for it to do so. It's only if the genre logic also happens to do what the GM's move is supposed to do -- challenge the PC's core questions -- that it even slips in. If genre logic says something that doesn't align to the result, genre logic loses -- it's what gets discarded.

So, if adherence to genre internal cause is a thing, it's entirely secondary in precedence, and there only if it aligns to the primary drivers of play, which is to put the PC's essential questions under pressure and find out how they get answered through play.

This resolution loop being entirely dissociated from any kind of genre logic or internal cause and the direction that it must be so to follow the agenda and principles of play completely move the game away from simulationism. It doesn't care to replicate genre, unless it's convenient to do so. It's just borrowing genre for stage dressing. You see this in Vincent's comments posted above, where he points out that the key points of contention in AW aren't genre elements at all.

I see that the projection continues. I have praised the design of Apoc World for it's ability to create a whole in which the parts support and elevate each other. I simply do not subscribe to the idea that the game must be about one thing and one thing only because some bizarre commitment to the purity of some ancient game theory.

You praising AW has nothing to do with the fact that you're denying the play of others. Not saying you don't like it, not saying that you don't understand it, but outright says that they are wrong about how they've been playing and that the game is doing a different thing altogether. You deny. You deny in your claim that the game could only work with some "bizzare commitment to the purity of some ancient game theory." Aside from the fact that this is another ad hominin attack, questioning the motives of players rather than addressing the stated play in an attempt to dismiss that play, this is entirely dishonest from the point of view of the topic of discussion -- the discussion is about and around that exact game theory. We've taken that as the basis for this entire discussion, so tossing it out to attack others is part and parcel of the denial of play. That AW is self-proclaimed Story Now, that AW was written in 2010 when GNS wasn't ancient by whatever standard you're using, that the designer was quoted above confirming these assessments you're dismissing -- all of this goes directly to your motivated denial of play. You're effectively calling people in this thread lying liars that lie or deluded fools that don't even understand how they're playing a game. There's zero curiosity shown.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I'm not even really upset -- frustrated a bit, but that's mostly because this always seems to be where this ends with certain posters. I am tired of trying to make it sound less than it is -- it's a straight denial of other people's play, and not even a few people or people doing something very weird, but play of a game that hits the top 10 games in the market consistently.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It was about GNS High Concept Simulationism, which is where Edwards apparently exiled GDS Dramatism to. Hence my interest!

So all Dramatism was rolled into the genre emulation bucket, no matter what the game is about setting and genre-wise? Well, okay then.

 

[pemerton]

Then why mention it as defining feature of simulationism if it is present in other styles as well?

it is utterly absurd to conflate enjoying technical manuals of WWI tanks with enjoying Macbeth!

The purpose of simulationist play is to enjoy the fiction - the imagination - for its own sake. In the context of Macbeth, this would be enjoying both the progression of story elements - witches, murders, forests, etc - and also the characters as revealed in soliloquy. The contrast would be staging a production of Macbeth.

A person who stages a production of Macbeth may also come to enjoy the performance for its own sake, but that's not the typical reason for doing it. Putting to one side purely utilitarian motives like I got paid to stage a production of Macbeth, the person staging the production normally thinks they have something to say or contribute or convey by doing so.

The comparison to "story now" RPGing is not perfect, but it is there. Whether or not one comes to enjoy the fiction for its own sake, that's not the agenda. The agenda is to say something during play. Hence the definining feature of simulationism, which is playing to enjoy the fiction for its own sake is not present in other agendas. There is a difference between goals and byproducts.

Then why mention having a point as defining feature of narrativism, if it happen in other styles too?

There is also a difference between a fiction with a point and setting out to create a fiction with a point via the process of RPG play.

Then don't obfuscate this by talking about the subject matter, as that can be shared with the other styles, if it is the method that is distinctive!

I am not obfuscating. I am talking about goals of play. Agendas. Priorities. You seem to be ignoring that. Which is odd, if the goal is to understand a theory of creative agendas!

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.

The first logically always entails the possibility of the second.

No it doesn't. They're mutually exclusive. A RPGer who is exploring something that has been established in advance of play cannot, at the same time make a call, in play, about what that thing is. As soon as you do the second, you are no longer doing the first.

Probably the best-known manifestation of this is every debate ever that arose from the GM's enforcement of alignment in D&D play. But it comes up in all sorts of other ways too. For instance, if the GM has already decided that the outcome of a particular action declaration will result in defeat for the PC (eg on the basis of prep), then a player who declares that action cannot be testing whether or not following a certain conviction is the only way to succeed. This rules out a whole host of fantasy-thematic-story-now RPGing; and pushes towards expedience-oriented RPGing. This is a very common refrain in the history of D&D play (see eg every thread ever that lamented the prevalence of "murder hobos").

Even if the GM wouldn't intentionally engineer a situation that would test the commitment (though many would) such a situation may nevertheless arise due the events unfolding at the table. Is it incidental emergent narrativism then?

My own view, based on observation and others' reports of play, is "no" because the GM has already authored the answer to the test. Ie the GM is doing exactly what Vincent Baker tells the DitV GM not to do, namely, "playing god" and deciding what loyalty, fidelity, etc require. The player is exploring the GM's established view of the theme, not making their own call via the play of the game.

It is exceeding common for campaign themes and character concepts to have open questions that need to be resolved in play. In fact, I have hard time imagining situations where this at least implicitly wouldn't be the case even if it wasn't clearly articulated.

What examples do you have in mind? As I posted, I'm sure it's happening somewhere but I don't see examples of it in the accounts of 5e play that I read. These seem to involve GM-authored plot hooks that establish the villain; GM determinations of what various values, commitments etc demand; and working out character concepts in a way that does not actually put them to the test.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In terms of Drama and GNS, my feeling is that Drama is a property which EMERGES from play. That is, it is a characterization of the narrative itself, is it dramatic or not dramatic. You COULD talk about things which generate drama, but I would also say that GNS Narrative play SHOULD be dramatic in some sense. At least it should really have some elements of drama.

The issue is when you're focused on creating dramatic outcomes without caring about the Now element particularly. Where does that go? Because there are absolutely games and game groups that are about the former while being hit of miss about it being Now (they won't resist it but if it gets in the way of what they're doing they'll abandon it in a moment).

 

[pemerton]

A lot of people have emphasises how in Story Now the players are co-authors, that they have more control over the narrative than in a traditional game.

Which people? Please cite some posts.

I have posted and reposted the following multiple times in this thread, and it has been "liked" by (at least) @Campbell, @kenada, @hawkeyefan, @Ovinomancer and @niklinna:

An interesting thing about Apocalypse World is that it has (almost) no metacurrency. (I've used "almost", because there are a couple of particular playbook moves that come close, but are easily avoided.) On the surface, its allocation of functions to the GM and the players is very "traditional".

But as soon as we drill below the surface, we can see that it upends that "traditional" approach completely, because of the expectations it puts on the players to drive play through their PCs (a bit like a classic sandbox, but even moreso, and with emotional connections and relationship really being foregrounded) and on the GM to keep buiding up the pressure via those soft moves, which will eventually explode into trouble, because someone is going to roll 6- some time soon.

So to really make sense of a RPG, we have to look at all its components - its mechanical techniques (like metacurrencies), and the sort of principles or expectations it sets up for GMs and players, and how these are going to interact with its tropes and setting and stuff, and how that whole package is going to produce an overall play experience at the table.

The key to "story now" is the principles and expectations that govern the GM's use of their authority over setting, backstory, scene-framing and narration of failure; and the expectations that govern players' use of their authority over declaring actions for their PCs.

Anything else - ie that goes beyond "vanilla narrativism" - is just refinement of techniques.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So if we are evocating the flavour of a genre we are not emulating a genre? What are we doing then? Are genre evocation and genre emulation now in different GNS baskets?

Well, keep in mind the thing I've mentioned about genres: some of them are just a choice of time, place and situation. They don't really require any special design elements in a system to represent. As I mentioned, Westerns don't have any intrinsic genre conventions outside of their place, time and possibly choice of protagonists. You can use any number of generic game systems to play a Western without needing any any special rules for the most part.

Now, with post-apoc settings, its one of those "it depends" cases. Broadly, its just a setting where an apocalypse happened and the characters are survivors (either near term or long term.).

But when you are doing something like Mad Max a bit more is required usually, because for all of its grittiness, its very much in High Heroic mode in some ways, and a game system that doesn't put its thumb on the scale in some way likely won't get that. But its not all, or even the majority of post-apocalypse styles, albeit perhaps the most well known one.

So you can absolutely have a game designed to evoke a particular genre without going out of its way to emulate one. The former is just an indication of implied setting for the most part, where the latter has to do a lot more heavy lifting.

 

[pemerton]

'Simulationist' in GNS terms seems to me to be a fairly coherent concept. That is it indicates an attempt to evoke, within the experience of playing the game, some specific effect or aspect. So, maybe it is a specific superhero milieu, for example. I'd note that this means you CAN sometimes look at a given game element and consider that it may serve more than one agenda! So, a game that is, say, giving you all the Story Now kind of tools, but then heavily restricts what sorts of stories you can tell via mechanics, genre conventions, setting, or whatever, may be as much Simulationist as it is Narrativist, and its even possible that the experience it is simulating DEPENDS ON the very elements of Story Now to enable its simulation aspect, like in LotR if you want to simulate it one of the key points might be personal Will and the will to take up a duty, but also to 'do your own thing' in defiance of power. Story Now techniques can definitely support that! So I'm not sure things are as specific and narrow as they are often made out to be, they are just less MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.

I think what this post illustrates is the difference between techniques and creative agendas, and the fact that techniques developed in the context of one creative agenda can turn out to be useful for another (ie in Forge terminology they can be "drifted"0. I posted examples upthread of how this is the case for Rolemaster: certain of its techniques (around a melee combatants or spell caster's allocation of points from a pool, and resulting risk distribution) are clearly intended to serve a simulationist purpose, but are able to be drifted to narrativist purposes, because they give the player a capacity to establish the stakes of their action.

My view is that Edwards is correct that this can be a ready source of conflict at a RPG table: if a player is looking for a simulationist experience, while the GM is expecting "story now", then the player will feel cast adrift or unguided (eg in the LotR game, they keep waiting for the GM to tell them what duty demands); if a player is looking to play "story now" while the GM is expecting the game to be simulationist, there will be clashes of the sort that alignment, dark side points, paladin's falling, etc, etc are notorious for giving rise to.

This seems to me to be another illustration of the point that it is principles and expectations, rather than techniques per se, that are fundamental to the difference between the different creative agendas.

Narrativist, notably, does not have subtypes, and that has been a historical critique of GNS.

In his "setting dissection" essay, Edwards does contrast setting-based and character-based "story now". And in practice that distinction existed at least from the publication of HeroWars in 2000.

(I stepped up my wayback skills - here's a link: Wayback Machine)

 

[pemerton]

Edwards erased or co-opted or buried the idea of drama and that sucks

I don't think this is true, or fair.

From here, written in 2003:

The Threefold Model for role-playing included the term Dramatism, as presented by John Kim at his Threefold Model (http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/) webpage. When I learned about the Threefold, I'd already been thinking about stuff I'd later call Currency and also about Jonathan Tweet's discussion of resolution presented in Everway. The basic notion of the Threefold impressed me: it was time to talk about goals and priorities independently of everything else, then to see whether everything else flowed to and from them. This was at the time that Sorcerer was making its small way into commerce, so the mailing list was the place for our first discussions; most of them are archived at the Sorcerer website (http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com).​

​

At this point, since "Drama" as a resolution category in Tweet's schema and "Dramatism" as a goals-category in the Threefold referred to two different things, I decided that the names were confusing. Going by which set of ideas was first presented (Tweet's), I changed Dramatism to Narrativism. This terminological change was limited to discussions on the Sorcerer mailing list and later at the Gaming Outpost.​

​

However, our use of the terms and ideas on the Sorcerer mailing list took on its own character almost immediately​

From here, written in the latter part of 2001:

• Simulationism is expressed by enhancing one or more of the listed elements in Set 1 above; in other words, Simulationism heightens and focuses Exploration as the priority of play. The players may be greatly concerned with the internal logic and experiential consistency of that Exploration.

The "listed elements in Set 1" are "Character, System, Setting, Situation, and Color."

Here, early in 2003, he adds that "Obviously the thing to do is to get as clear an understanding of "Exploration" as possible. It's our jargon term for imagining, "dreaming" if you will, about made-up characters in made-up situations. It's central to all role-playing, but in Simulationist play, it's the top priority."

There is no burying of the idea of drama. There is (i) a resolution of a terminological conflict, and (ii) an attempt to analyse what is involved in "drama"-oriented RPGing.

One of the principal phenomena that Edwards wants to understand is the sorts of conflict that are generated by classic D&D alignment, dark side points, Vampire metaplots, etc - ie play expectations and associated techniques that seem to reliably cause conflicts over who gets to decide these matters that are central to play.

In the early 2003 essay he says the following about the simulationist approach to "drama", under the heading High Concept:

In cinema, "High Concept" refers to any film idea that can be pitched in a very limited amount of time; the usual method uses references to other films. Sometimes, although not necessarily, it's presented as a combination: "Jaws meets Good Will Hunting," or that sort of thing. I'm adopting it to role-playing without much modification, although emphasizing that the source references can come from any medium and also that the two-title combo isn't always employed.

The key word is "genre," which in this case refers to a certain combination of the five elements as well as an unstated Theme. How do they get to this goal? All rely heavily on inspiration or kewlness as the big motivator, to get the content processed via art, prose style, and more. "Story," in this context, refers to the sequence of events that provide a payoff in terms of recognizing and enjoying the genre during play.

This sort of game design will be familiar to almost anyone, represented by Arrowflight (Setting), Pax Draconis (Setting), Godlike (Setting), Sun & Storm (Setting + Situation), Dreamwalker (Situation), The Godsend Agenda (Character-Setting tug-of-war), The Collectors (applied Fudge, Situation + Character), Heartquest (applied Fudge; Character), Children of the Sun (Setting), Fvlminata (Setting), and Dread (Situation + Character), Fading Suns (Setting), Earthdawn (Setting), Space: 1889 (Setting), Mutant Chronicles (Setting), Mage first edition (Character), Mage second edition (Setting), Ironclaw (Setting), and Continuum (Setting with a touch of System). Many Fantasy Heartbreakers fall into this category, almost all Setting-based. Some of the best-known games of this type include Tekumel, Jorune, Traveller (specifically in its mid-80s through mid-90s form), Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, Nephilim, Feng Shui, the various secondary settings for AD&D2 like Al-Qadim, and quite a few D20 or WEG games which rely on licensing. I am coming to think of D20 as a kind of High Concept chassis, a very new and interesting development in RPG design.

Also, most incoherent game designs are partly or even primarily High Concept Simulationist as well, with AD&D2 and Vampire (first edition) as the best-known examples.

At first glance, these games might look like additions to or specifications of the Purist for System design, mainly through plugging in a fixed Setting. However, I think that impression isn't accurate, and that the five elements are very differently related. The formula starts with one of Character, Situation, or Setting, with lots of Color, then the other two (Character, Situation, or Setting, whichever weren't in first place), with System being last in priority.

I also recommend examining Theme carefully. In this game, it's present and accounted for already, before play. The process of prep-play-enjoy works by putting "what you want" in, then having "what you want" come out, with the hope that the System's application doesn't change anything along the way.​

That's analysis, not burying! And expressly draws the contrast with purist-for-system/"process sim".