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

[Manbearcat]

Why the weather is not both? Why can it be just one? This whole idea that it must be one or other seems utterly bizarre and artificial to me.

RPGs are shock full of rules that 1) serve gameplay purpose by providing appropriate challenge 2) simulate the reality of the fictional setting 3) evoke appropriate narrative tropes to which the characters may respond to. And they can do all these things the same time just fine. There is no conflict, you don't need to decide which of these three you're "really" doing.

Also, what measure are we using to find out if the simulationism lands? That seems like an unsupported assertion, or even an unsupportable one since it'll land differently for different audiences, especially if you have to be fluent in the system to understand its 'true' nature.

Time-restricted so I don't have the space to type up a significant response. But let me offer this bit of system procedure information to help engage with your questions/my statement above.

Torchbearer has 4 phases:

• Journey
• Adventure
• Camp
• Town

Camp and Town are about recovery and all manner of personal business (research, building/repairing kit, loading out/haggling at the market, making offerings at shrines, joining cults/religions, telling tales, visiting family/friends or dealing with enemies or developing new friends/enemies, etc).

Despite the reality that overwhelmingly Camp and Town phases are outdoors, you do not make a Weather roll in either Camp or Town.

You only make a Weather roll in Journey and Wilderness Adventures where the point of play isn't recovery or that stuff I put in the parenthetical above.

Why do you not make a Weather table roll in Camp and Town phases? Why does this not hit the litmus test for "gamist nonsense (that violates or is at least at tension with internal causality and your ability to immerse within play?" I'm particularly interested in your response to this CL, given your litmus test in the past for "gamist nonsense."

I'll be back way late this evening so I likely won't interact with your responses until etiher the AM or later.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Time-restricted so I don't have the space to type up a significant response. But let me offer this bit of system procedure information to help engage with your questions/my statement above.

Torchbearer has 4 phases:

• Journey
• Adventure
• Camp
• Town

Camp and Town are about recovery and all manner of personal business (research, building/repairing kit, loading out/haggling at the market, making offerings at shrines, joining cults/religions, telling tales, visiting family/friends or dealing with enemies or developing new friends/enemies, etc).

Despite the reality that overwhelmingly Camp and Town phases are outdoors, you do not make a Weather roll in either Camp or Town.

You only make a Weather roll in Journey and Wilderness Adventures where the point of play isn't recovery or that stuff I put in the parenthetical above.

Why do you not make a Weather table roll in Camp and Town phases? Why does this not hit the litmus test for "gamist nonsense (that violates or is at least at tension with internal causality and your ability to immerse within play?" I'm particularly interested in your response to this CL, given your litmus test in the past for "gamist nonsense."

I'll be back way late this evening so I likely won't interact with your responses until etiher the AM or later.

Hope you have a nice day, looking forward to your eventual response whenever it happens to be.

To respond and consider your point, I think that the reason you don't roll for weather in those scenarios is because the weather isn't setting the tone or playing a role in constructing the outcome of those scenes-- town is safe from the depredations of nature, particularly in the milieu Torchbearer emulates, and so the tone of the story demands that weather be more impactful outside of town than within.

One of my key ideas tends to be that "game elements" like mechanics, procedures, feats, whatever, have a feel to them, a texture that, through the player's utilization, experience, or use of those elements conveys theming-- a kind of playable literary device if you will, and that most conventionally simulative and gamist elements are actually textural (of or pertaining to texture, as opposed to textual, to be clear with the semantics.)

In other words "What feeling does this element create, and how does that inform the feel of the story?" In this instance, the gap that you've highlighted seems to be drawing the participants attention to the weather in some instances, but not others, probably to shift the tone of those instances when it does matter. Doubly so if it has mechanical impact, it is a means by which the environment-- Tolkien's "Wilderness" to borrow the concept, makes itself known to the participants. If say, things are harder to do in the rain, that drives home it's impact on the scene-- the dreariness and exhaustion, which sounds like the point of grind mechanic, from what you're saying.

Meanwhile in the tone of the milieu, town is a place of safety, where the players can find comfortable refuge away from the rain, they don't have to worry about it there, so its touch is gone, along with the cloud it puts over the narrative.

In other words the uneveness of the mechanic creates a kind of "Ludonarrative Harmony" between the narrative ideas of the wilderness as a place of stress /town as a place of safety, and the player's feelings of tension and frustration during each portion of the game. Similarly, from a simulation perspective, it doesn't have meaningful effects anymore because you're safe and can just go inside-- the game doesn't need the information for the simulation to impose logical effects on you, because there are none to impose, its giving the weather variable a null value while you're in town.

 

[kenada]

knowing Torchbearer is FITD

Torchbearer is based on Mouse Guard, which is Burning Wheel. It draws heavily on Moldvay Basic for its thematic elements.

 

[niklinna]

Why the weather is not both? Why can it be just one? This whole idea that it must be one or other seems utterly bizarre and artificial to me.

It doesn't have to be just one, but for this particular subsystem (and most of its subsystems), Torchbearer shows its gamist priority quite openly. Weather in Torchbearer is the equivalent of a thinly-disguised wandering damage table (except with other mechanical effects such as bonuses or penalties to particular skill tests). The express pupose is to challenge the players and their characters. That thin disguise is, of course, simulation/emulation, a mere rationalization or justification for the random gamist effects, not an effort to evoke the feel of being out in wild nature in rich sensory detail. Not that any given GM couldn't embellish that layer for mood for more simulation/emulation, but the book just gives you dice-roll tables and lists of mechanics.

While some have argued for inherent exclusivity of gameplay goals/agendas (see below the next quotation block), what @Manbearcat is doing here is simply describing the design choices Torchbearer made. Torchbearer does include agendas other than gamist, but it does so in other ways and to (much) different degrees.

RPGs are shock full of rules that 1) serve gameplay purpose by providing appropriate challenge 2) simulate the reality of the fictional setting 3) evoke appropriate narrative tropes to which the characters may respond to. And they can do all these things the same time just fine. There is no conflict, you don't need to decide which of these three you're "really" doing.

While I agree it's possible for an RPG to serve multiple agendas at the same time just fine, it is not the case that there's no conflict. That is, just because these goals/agendas aren't fundamentally incompatible, doesn't mean they are trivially compatible (that is, there can be conflict). As for deciding which [potentially plural!] you're "really" doing, that gets things backwards: Quite a few GMs and players come to a system/group with their preferences established, those preferences may well differ, and a given system/group either meshes with a participant's preferences, or doesn't.

To get back to the issue of exclusiviity, it was Edwards who harped on about incoherence and incompatibility of creative agendas (all his terms). While I agree that can—and often does—happen, I don't believe it is inevitable. In fact, the GEN 2-tier model* talks about deliberate blending of goals as a necessity and gives an example:

Blending
Unless you are one of the rare few who has a group which shares the same GEN goal, you're going to have to support a blend of different goals at the same time. I disagree with all the people and models that say you can't do this. Goals do not clash. The Ron Edward's [sic] model states that if you kill an orc and that death has narrative weight, then you are solely supporting narrative goals. I disagree completely. If the player who killed the orc did so for gamist reasons, and only appreciated the gamist outcomes of that death, then he's supporting his gamist goals, whether that death had narrative weight or not. However, if the guy sitting next to him has narrative goals, and recognises the narrative weight of that orc's death, then he is supporting his own narrative goals, and so on for explorative. One event supporting many goals.

Note that even this short excerpt highlights that participants can support their own agendas when faced with something that may have been motivated otherwise (by the rules, the GM, or another player). That's actually a pretty radical view, which I haven't seen fronted so clearly before. The thing is, the rules, the GM, or another play can make that easier, or harder, and all this theory stuff is helpful in figuring out how and why that happens, so that we can avoid conflict or friction, and enjoy gaming together.

All that said, weather as presented by the Torchbearer rulebook is primarily gamist—but you can add your own dramatic weight to it if you like.

* I very recently learned about the GEN 2-tier model, and while the article linked is incomplete and rather a mess (and unapologetic about being so), I found it an interesting response to, and critique of, the Forge GNS model.

Edit: Added a bit of emphasis.

 

[pemerton]

Why the weather is not both? Why can it be just one? This whole idea that it must be one or other seems utterly bizarre and artificial to me.

RPGs are shock full of rules that 1) serve gameplay purpose by providing appropriate challenge 2) simulate the reality of the fictional setting

Your (2) is what Edwards calls "exploration". All RPGing generates a shared fiction. That's the nature of the game.

@Manbearcat's point is that the gameplay purpose of weather in Torchbearer is not fiction for its own sake, but rather to help set additional parameters for challenge, and for skilled response to that challenge.

3) evoke appropriate narrative tropes to which the characters may respond to.

This is not "narrativism" in Edwards' sense. It is high concept simulationism - ie exploration, but of genre rather than of reality-modelling system. (What @EzekielRaiden upthread labelled emulation.)

Also, what measure are we using to find out if the simulationism lands?

In Edwards' framework, a creative agenda isn't a vessel that does or doesn't land. It's a goal or purpose - the type of pleasure or aesthetic experience which we hope to achieve by way of RPGing. We know we've done it by doing it!

We succeed in simulationist play if we play a RPG and experience the fiction - the imagined world and events of play - for the sake of it. We call a RPG simulationist if it seems apt to help with that. Tunnels & Trolls, and Cthulhu Dark, and HeroWars/Quest, are all examples of RPGs that are not simulationist in this sense - they do not have mechanics, or procedures, or principles and advice, aimed at experiencing the imagined events for their own sake. Rolemaster, RuneQuest and (much of) Classic Traveller are simulationist in this sense - they emphasise experiencing the imagined world during play, and have mechanics and principles intended to reinforced this. And I have a number of D&D modules - Speaker in Dreams and Expedition to the Demonweb Pits are two I'll mention - that emphasise experiencing the imagined events in play, and have advice to GMs to help ensure that this remains the focus of play.

Torchbearer is, deliberately, full of processes and principles that take attention away from imagining the events of play, and instead focus the players' attention on how to overcome the obstacles the GM is confronting them with.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Torchbearer is based on Mouse Guard, which is Burning Wheel.

whoops, ill edit that aside out

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

In Edwards' framework, a creative agenda isn't a vessel that does or doesn't land. It's a goal or purpose - the type of pleasure or aesthetic experience which we hope to achieve by way of RPGing. We know we've done it by doing it!

We succeed in simulationist play if we play a RPG and experience the fiction - the imagined world and events of play - for the sake of it. We call a RPG simulationist if it seems apt to help with that. Tunnels & Trolls, and Cthulhu Dark, and HeroWars/Quest, are all examples of RPGs that are not simulationist in this sense - they do not have mechanics, or procedures, or principles and advice, aimed at experiencing the imagined events for their own sake. Rolemaster, RuneQuest and (much of) Classic Traveller are simulationist in this sense - they emphasise experiencing the imagined world during play, and have mechanics and principles intended to reinforced this. And I have a number of D&D modules - Speaker in Dreams and Expedition to the Demonweb Pits are two I'll mention - that emphasise experiencing the imagined events in play, and have advice to GMs to help ensure that this remains the focus of play.

Torchbearer is, deliberately, full of processes and principles that take attention away from imagining the events of play, and instead focus the players' attention on how to overcome the obstacles the GM is confronting them with.

I don't disagree with the direct part at the top.

But that doesn't seem to follow, "imagining the events of play" and "overcoming the obstacles the GM is confronting them with" are identical when the events of play are chiefly concerned with obstacles the GM is confronting them with because the obstacles are a part of the fiction and even the focus of the story. The second thing, in other words, is already a representation of the first thing.

 

[clearstream]

None. GNS is not a predictive tool.

Oh right. When I think about any model, I ask myself what we predict we will see given the model is true? That's a normal way to validate and employ a model. I don't see a reason that GNS would be an exception. Perhaps if it were entirely self-referential and offered no insights into any features of the real world.

You may dislike the word "prediction" even though it is the right word for what I am discussing. One can think of modelling something. To the degree the model has fidelity to that something, it will be "predictive" of features or behaviour of that something.

Perhaps think about a model objectively: how do you tell if some novel model is right? You look at its descriptions and see what they say about the thing modelled? A good way to understand that is as a "prediction" that the thing will have the properties modelled. You are not just accepting in advance that the model is right, you're looking for evidence that matches what it says (predicts.)

To say GNS is not predictive would amount to saying it has no value as a model or description of any real phenomena.

 

[pemerton]

"imagining the events of play" and "overcoming the obstacles the GM is confronting them with" are identical when the events of play are chiefly concerned with obstacles the GM is confronting them with because the obstacles are a part of the fiction and even the focus of the story.

All obstacles in a RPG are part of the fiction. That's what makes it a RPG.

So any RPG gameplay that focuses on overcoming obstacles involves thinking about the fiction.

But does the play, and the system that drives it, reinforce experiencing the fiction for its own sake? In Torchbearer, the answer is "no". The way the players parcel and allocate their resources does not do that. The way resolutions are established does not do that. The fact that the conflict resolution system is more like Tunnels & Trolls than like RM or RQ means that it does not do that.

And none of this is because Luke and Thor were aiming to foster simulation but failed! It's because they wanted a game that would, in its basic structure and ethos of play, emulate Moldvay Basic.

 

[pemerton]

Oh right. When I think about any model, I ask myself what we predict we will see given the model is true? That's a normal way to validate and employ a model. I don't see a reason that GNS would be an exception. Perhaps if it were entirely self-referential and offered no insights into any features of the real world.

<snip>

To say GNS is not predictive would amount to saying it has no value as a model or description of any real phenomena.

Weberian ideal types are models. They are not predictive - they are analytical and interpretive.

Classifying artistic or philosophical movements is a type of model. (A model for systems of ideas and practices.) This is not predictive. John Rawls is dead, but that doesn't mean we can't discuss the extent to which he is a Kantian - but we're not trying to predict what he will write next!