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

[EzekielRaiden]

My reading of the essays is that the sort of competition referred to in Step On Up is the same sort of competition you might see within a sports team or World of Warcraft raid team. It's about making the big play, standing out, being recognized for your skill. That Play of the Game stuff is a big part of the appeal to challenge oriented play.

Yeah. It's a "competition" that occurs between people who are cooperating to achieve victory. In something like League of Legends or other MOBA games, it's the competition to land the "last hit" on enemies, and thus get all the fat lewts, trick out your champion, and consequently steamroll the enemy. Getting a pentakill (that is, landing the final blow against every single person on the enemy team before any of them can revive) feels really good, and is a form of soft "competition" between explicit allies.

But I think calling it "challengist" play is a bit off too, @clearstream , because it really is important to draw the distinction between "challenges," which I think can be loosely summarized as specific obstacles within the gameplay space (e.g. "an encounter" is a "challenge," but likewise "a negotiation" is a challenge, they just use different rules), and "step-on-up," which is...more to do with how one prepares for and understands (or, more specifically, evaluates) that "challenge." Narrative and Simulation don't invoke "step-on-up," because strategizing and achievement, in the sense of "I bested that situation"/"we came out on top"/"WAHOO WE DID IT" are not really relevant to those things. "Narrative" (if I have understood it correctly) is about answering value-questions, while Simulation is either about exploring a milieu ("genre" Sim/what I called "emulation") or about exploring a world treated very rigorously as a world and what logical consequences derive from that ("process" Sim). You can't really "come out on top" if the goal is "collectively produce experiences that evoke comic book characters," because...there is no judgment standard (no "step on up") and the "challenge" is just the fictional situation of the story, lacking the "you must overcome it" aspect that "challenge" implies.

There's also the problem that Narrativism, again if I have understood it, can also be parsed as challenging things, but in an extremely different sense: challenging a person to make a decision, to fall on one side or another (or to fall away, having refused to decide, etc.) These are challenges to the values and beliefs of the character and/or player. But such challenges cannot be bested, generally speaking; one does not speak of having defeated anything by choosing to go with one's gut even when the evidence says otherwise, or the like. Instead, these are challenges that are simply responded to. One responds in some way (including the option of not responding, sometimes).

Now, it's fair to say "it's confusing to call it anything related to 'game,' since we call ALL of these things 'games'!" But I do think that trying to be reductive about it down to just "challenge" swings the other direction--it excludes the implicit scoring system of "step on up."

Even if you aren't competing AT ALL, even if you have a full and unbroken commitment to "all for one and one for all," "Gamist" play very much includes the concept of being "scored" against something. Even if that "something" is an abstract ideal or the like, or "push the number as high as it can go," or whatever. E.g., using 4e as a starting point, you want your character to be effective at their role in combat. That's "step on up." The natural result of seeking effectiveness in that role is that, barring bad luck, you will succeed more often in combat situations--which are "challenges." But if we consider a particular role, the judgment standard for "step on up" is subtle and multi-layered, which is part of what makes it interesting as a Gamist thing (games where it's too easy and simple are generally not well-liked, and it's hard to make simple-yet-deep games.)

A 4e Defender, for example, needs to find the right balance point between "stickiness" (keeping enemies where you want them to be), damage output (how threatening you are), and defenses (how difficult you are to hurt). If you're too sticky but have weak defenses, you're making yourself a sitting duck. If you can dish out lots of damage and take lots of damage, but have no way to keep enemies near you, they'll just avoid you when they can. If your damage output is just generally low, then your enemies won't care about ignoring you; but if it's too high, then conversely you'll take too many hits and the party's effectiveness will sag because all the damage is getting piled on only one group member. Thus, you have several different "scores" (some of them not strictly measured by numbers, e.g. how "sticky" you are) that don't just go from low=bad to high=good, but which have variable and shifting sweet spots you want to aim for.

If you hit those sweet spots, whatever they may be for a given context, but fumble using your tools during the actual challenge, then you're still not getting the desired Gamist experience. You've Stepped On Up, but you haven't actually Achieved. Likewise, if you somehow stumble into success without the "step on up" side, you'll have Challenge, but you won't have any metric of success--you're just bumbling around and getting lucky (or being mollycoddled). You've (sort of) Achieved, but you failed to Step On Up. Both components seem pretty necessary to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My impression is that story games are not the same as freeform rp in this sense. That is, story games have rather precise allocations of narrative authority, and this precision (which is not necessarily “crunchy” mechanically) is what appeals to storygame enthusiasts, because then they aren’t relying on unspoken assumptions of narrative goodwill.

And having been on largely freeform MUXes at one time, that's probably a valid feeling to have. When those were going well they were very enjoyable, but it when they weren't...

 

[Thomas Shey]

But mechanics of these kind cause a lot of opposition when they are even hinted at. Which means that DnD has never been a Nar game, except in a very broad free form “cos the dm sez “ sort of way.

I think that "except" is skipping a lot of thrust in a lot of D&D games though; there's too much focus on how the story plays out in a lot of groups to just dismiss it, though I agree there's not much formalization there and a tendency to want most of the lifting in that area to be done by the GM.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Returning to the OP, given some statements in a previous post:

Addressing this, it's not that narrative mechanics "aren't engaging," but they're engaging in a very different and, generally, much more "cerebral"/"slow-burn" kind of way. It's hard to have impactful ethical choices without sufficient buildup. In games specifically built for "Narrative" play, this issue (if I'm understanding things correctly) is handled by, more or less, keeping everything focused "in the now," hence the "Story Now" label, and thus provides impact via keeping up the ongoing tension of the current moment. You're always under threat, or pushed to make a snap decision and have to live with the results, etc., which creates tension. Giving distributed narrative power, again if I'm understanding this correctly, is what makes sure the players aren't just feeling constantly tense with no ability to respond; they are subject to tension, but they have tools to respond to that tension.

Gamism, on the other hand, might be seen as either requiring less build-up, or being more...basic, I guess, in certain senses. Chess or Go can still have extremely deep strategy and such, but you don't need to understand a whole bunch of subtle context and past history to know why a particular action is exciting or engaging. With a game, all you need to know are the rules (which are necessarily a-contextual, that's what they're designed to be) and the current state of play (which should be fairly visible to the audience). It's the difference between being dropped into the middle of a chess game or fútbol match, and sneaking into a theater in the middle of a play you know nothing about or jumping into an improv scene without any knowledge of the preceding events. It's not that there's zero engagement in one or the other, nor that gaming is in some objective sense "easier" or "harder" than making tough ethical decisions, but there's still some sense in which one is supposed to be able to quickly understand the state and stakes of a "gamist" situation, while it is difficult (sometimes impossible) to truly understand the state and stakes of a "narrativist" situation if you weren't there for those events.


Building off the above (assuming I haven't gotten lost in another conceptual cul-de-sac), we call D&D "Gamist" because, in general, the way that it sets "things you care about as a player" (stakes) is via clever, strategic manipulation of rules-elements in order to overcome a fundamentally numerical or strategic challenge, having logistical concerns as a primary motive, and a fundamental emphasis on some sense of "winning."

Now, before people tear into that as "YOU CAN'T WIN D&D THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT," I don't mean "winning" in the sense of terminating play with a permanent victor. I mean "winning"--what I called "success" earlier in this thread IIRC--in the sense of achieving a triumph, of rising to the challenge and proving yourself superior to it, of (as has been referenced several times in the thread) "Step[ping] On Up." Unlike with "Narrative" experiences, there really are "loss" conditions. This is why, for example, when I tell people that I don't have random, permanent, irrevocable death in my games, a LOT of them immediately leap to the (erroneous) conclusion, "oh, so your game is BORING because NOTHING MATTERS?" (please for the love of God don't interrogate me on this one, if you have questions PM me or go looking for posts by me using the words "irrevocable" and "death.") That kind of response simply, fundamentally, is not a criticism that could come up in a "narrative" game context in GNS terms, because "success" in that context, success at making moments of poignant drama or answering questions of moral/ethical/personal value, is kind of unrelated to whether or not characters can permanently die.

Simulationism, on the other hand, seems to have a very...distinct relationship with the concept of "winning" or "losing." That is, in general, "process" Sim can superficially resemble Gamism because of its heavy emphasis on understandable states of existence. There's a distinct consonance between the value "process" Sim puts on a cognizable world that runs on understandable rules (which is probably what most people mean when they say things like "system as physics engine") and the emphasis Gamism puts on a cognizable state of play that runs on understandable rules. The distinction, as I understand it, is that "process" Sim wants those rules to be as naturalistic and grounded as possible, and (in general) achieving the maximum amount of detail they possibly can while still being usable, while Gamism is totally fine with rules that flout IRL intuitions without any explanation other than "because that makes a better game."

On the other hand, "genre" Sim can superficially resemble "Narrative" in that, as frequently noted above, it literally comes out of stories and trying to generate the feel and experience of building such a story through improvisation. The main difference, if I've understood things correctly, is that "genre" Sim is really only interested in the "feel" or "milieu" and doesn't really give two figs about whether the process of play is forcing people to ask and answer tough questions or the like, so "success" in "genre" Sim terms means "did it evoke the right feelings/tropes while you played?" and "victory" is understood in a rather nebulous way as, more or less, "did the end result feel like a <genre> story?" E.g. if you're playing a supers game, did it feel like your adventures were like something that would occur in an actual comic book? If yes, success; if no, failure.

So, as you can (hopefully) see from this, Gamism (and to a certain extent "process" Simulation) in some sense "offloads" some of the investment work onto things that don't require you to be playing. They both heavily use comparatively-detailed rules systems, where understanding those systems is key to achieving success/"winning." This is the sense in which they are "easier"--there's a provided, semi-fixed component to all contexts, which is then augmented by the specific context of "this particular fight/challenge. Those two pieces of information (the rules and the current, observable context) are the inputs, which are (when designed well) meant to be easy to pick up. Then the "engagement" comes in when trying to find how to respond to the current context, using those rules, in order to advance your position toward success and away from failure, and there's usually some kind of objective measure (e.g. HP in combat, distance in a race, number of failures vs successes in a skill challenge, etc.) for who is "closer" to failure or success.

Actually, this sort of speaks to me that maybe the crux of the problem is the separation of "narrative" and "challenge" as being different goals, games like DND which have this sense of triumph, generally tell the kinds of stories in which the player aligns themselves with their character and party which all have the same objective, the narrative being invoked is that of working toward, succeeding, or failing at the objective and all the obstacles and thematic questions that come up along the way. In the course of this, the Players-Inhabiting-Characters interact with a space rich with narrative elements that they can utilize, react to, prod, and play off of (in other words, the setting.)

The impulse of separation between the joy of problem solving, and the joy of narrative is itself in contention, because to many of the people playing DND, they're likely the same thing-- the story, like a good episode of Star Trek or Supernatural, is about how we overcame the problem (or met our objective, more generally), and about the things we discovered along the way, and how they intrigue us or how we reacted to it. That does get you to stories, Man vs. [Blank], that blank might be a dragon, or a need for treasure, or an oppressive empire-- how you contend with it is the story. The game elements you use to indulge a 'challenge' mind set (class, spells, weapons), are also the tools that you use to solve the problem in the story, the difference in their efficacy is part of the narrative space and the narrative context of the choices one makes.

I think what DND does, in terms of embracing challenge in the way you discuss, is to externalize the story, the characters of the story still have internal conflict, but the pressure is coming from the external elements of the story, e.g. your cleric might have a crisis of faith, but thats mediated through their relationship with their God, which is external and played by the GM. This controlled adversarial relationship, is how DND positions your Man vs. [blank] and tells its stories, and then embraces that conflict as a problem that you as the player, and you as the character are attempting to solve in the physical reality of the game world.

I've brought up how the cultures of play can be discussed as artistic movements in the past, so it leads me to question, are we really discussing how the language that we're using shapes how we construct stories through the game, from the perspective of different movements with differing language, and therefore frames of reference for what is ultimately necessary (or preferred) for the products of those movements (being the 'games' or 'systems' or 'stories' which are then firmly interrelated concepts.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

In my experience, a lot of the dissatisfaction with the term “gamism” often stems from the people who are resistant against thinking and talking about TTRPGs as ‘games’ more so than how “gamism” maps onto certain play goals.

I'd go as far as to say its outright hostility rather than just resistance. As someone who's been a fairly gamist player and GM throughout my time in the hobby, I've seen plenty of that.

 

[Aldarc]

I'd go as far as to say its outright hostility rather than just resistance. As someone who's been a fairly gamist player and GM throughout my time in the hobby, I've seen plenty of that.

I'm vaguely reminded of the whole "It's not a doll! It's an action figure!"

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yep. The theory strongly implies that incoherence is bad and to be avoided. I feel this is trivially untrue. Sure, different design desires may conflict, but this is not automatically so. One can achieve harmony and even have different elements support each other. It would be like saying that comedy drama is incoherent as it contains conflicting design goals of drama and comedy. And furthermore, of course one can also have conflicts between design desires that fall under same category in GNS, as the categories are incredibly broad and vague.

I think there's a legitimate point that if you have a strong tendency toward one of the poles, a design which compromises with that is going to feel like its interfering with what you want fairly frequently, and thus feel a negative.

Where GNS severely fails is that it either ignores or outright denies the existence of people who, as I put it, really do want chocolate with their peanut butter. They don't want a purely gamist or narrativist experience; they get value out of the hybridization between those concepts (or with simulation, or all three). This doesn't mean there isn't some dilution and compromise of them individually when doing that, but that the experience of the admixture is valuable enough to some people (probably the majority) that such compromise is more than acceptable.

And the concept of "incoherence" as used in these discussions outright seems to deny that's possible. And it isn't necessary; GDS did not have it, and while you can criticize GDS on various grounds, the lack of this sort of purist view was not one of them.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I have no better idea of how these terms work, if anything this thread has shown half the terms to be so meaningless we can assign the same word oppisit meanings.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm vaguely reminded of the whole "It's not a doll! It's an action figure!"

I'm usually willing to assume people have come by their hostility honestly; I think it not infrequently comes from encountering people who are doing what used to be called Token play (which, to be clear, I consider a legitimate, albeit limited way to play) and/or minmax approaches, one or both without consideration of how it impacts other people playing; that can easily be a malign influence on a session or whole campaign.

But it often translates into gross prejudice toward people who are still oriented toward rpg-as-game that my tolerance for is very limited; if you find my desires in the range of RPG play incompatible with your own, that's fine, but presenting it beyond the pale, not so much.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Whether its a 'game' is something in and of itself to tease out though, is the game the thing happening around the table, or the rules engine we use when we roleplay. With precision, I see roleplaying as an activity, the games are the specific instances of the activity (e.g. A Watcher's Tale was the name of my first campaign in PF2e) and systems are aids in that activity (PF2e being the package of tools we used for that game.)

In theory, I see the conceptual construction of the 'system', in a vacuum-- not necessarily historically, though it doesn't seem to be entirely inaccurate historically, to be the practice of roleplaying itself (playing pretend) where someone hit something they were dissatisfied with trying to run free (probably combat, historically), and so they decided to pull in a set of rules to navigate it (historically, they drew on existing war games, to adjudicate scenarios that resembled war games.) You could argue they started with war games, and started roleplaying to expand them-- and that's why I say "Not historically."

In that sense I feel coherence is a matter of taste and a reflection of the coherence of the 'game' the tools are aiding. If your 'game' (the thing happening around the table) finds itself moving from dungeon corridors to castles and court life, then your game is now about both dungeon crawling and politics, and you pull in tools accordingly-- focus, on a systemic level, is incidental or potentially even inconvenient, because you already have the set of things you desire to do or the emerging needs of the story. In other words, its already as coherent as you need it to be, because the need for the tools developed organically out of the natural course of the fiction.