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

[pemerton]

I would say the two are compatible though.

Absolutely.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You’re conflating a few things. Kriegsspiel is German for war game. Specifically the Prussian war games of the early 19th century, typically with a lot of very complicated rules and no referee. Free Kriegsspiel is the late 19th century movement that arose in response to the convoluted rules of Kriegsspiel and tossed the rules in favor of an experienced officer deciding the outcomes, much like a modern DM often does. Free Kriegsspiel Renaissance is a modern tabletop gaming movement which, much like FK, eschews the rules bloat and focuses on getting back to quick resolution and outcomes.

You mean exactly like a DM can simply make a call on whether an action is possible, impossible, or requires a roll. But not one’s going to confuse D&D with an FKR game.

Free Kriegspiel is still Kriegspiel! I've been a wargamer and RPGer for almost 50 years now. While I am perfectly happy to say you can call anything whatever you like, so FKR can be whatever you choose to make it, actual Free Kriegspiel differed from the earlier versions only in that it was decided in the Prussian General Staff that highly systematized wargame rules were not realistic enough to train actual officers and that it would thus be better to either ACTUALLY PLAY OUT things, or when that was infeasible (which admittedly is often) to have referees decide. In fact even in Free Kriegspiel in practice the Prussians used a lot of charts and tables and such, as it simply made things go more smoothly and critically it removed excuses that could be made for poor performance (IE "the ref was biased. No he wasn't, he just used chart 12.").

So, its not wrong to say that you want to emphasize adjudication over mechanics and say that this was an element that FK introduced. Its just that it wasn't as key as you're making it out to be. The central factor there was basically like the difference between Chainmail and D&D, where in the later a wider range of situations can be addressed, but all the same rules actually exist and can be invoked!

 

[pemerton]

Also, Story Now isn't about emergent story -- that's a very Classic Culture and OSR Culture thing. That story is whatever you put together after play. Story Now doesn't care about that as its focus or agenda. It fixes on on right now, what pressure/ conflict/ antagonism is happening right now and what are the PCs doing about it?

You literally describe the process by which the story is emerging.

And?

Ovinomancer said that "story now" is not about emergent story. You can't rebut that claim by pointing out that a story may emerge from the play. Because the claim concerned what the play of the game is about.

Here's how Edwards defines "story": an imaginary series of events which includes at least one protagonist, at least one conflict, and events which may be construed as a resolution of the conflict.

Story now play, therefore, is about having this sort of thing occurring here and now via the play of the game by all participants. At it's most basic, the player establishes the dramatic needs of the character (which may be internal, or may be driven by the setting); the GM frames a scene that puts those needs under pressure; the player declares an action for their PC; the action resolution mechanics resolve the action, with the upshot either being a defusing, or an escalation, of the conflict. Well-designed mechanics for this sort of play will reliably produce a "rhythm" or pacing of success and failure, so as to get a pattern of increased stakes, and then partial resolution, that roughly reflects the rising action and then resolution in other storytelling forms.

Whether what emerges from the play of a story now game is a story, or not, is secondary. What the play is about is those moments of conflict in which the protagonist must struggle in some fashion to achieve their dramatic need, with the upshot, and the possibility of failure or success, being open at the time the scene is framed, and the action declared.

 

[kenada]

The reason why the "why this and not that?" gets thrown around so often (often by me) is because it reveals that the overwhelming percentage of the time its a completely arbitrary line in the sand. Its nearly always an autobiographical footnote about the person rather than a decision driven by evinced principles.

That is a problem if you're going to put forth some iteration of the position "this is gamist nonsense" and/or "this violates internal causality"...and it becomes particularly fraught when you (a) don't like the game that you attribute this to consistently while (b) you like something else that can/should get dinged for the same thing while (c) you can't articulate the litmus test/line in the sand (precisely because it is something you've felt your way through, and brought in all of your biases and tribalism in the process, rather than conscientiously developed a principle-based working model).

But that is just talking about commenters on an internet message board.

When it comes to design? If I'm playing Torchbearer (for instance), there are so many areas where if I'm someone of serious Process Simulationist priorities, I'm getting dinged left and right. The Weather in Adventure and Wilderness phases but never in Camp/Town (oh, so the open market never suffers from a downpour that will close it down...oh, so our uncovered shelter of which we're spending the evening at isn't vulnerable to a downpour...etc) is just one.

* So our rations always go stale when we return to town? Always? At the gates...like clockwork? Uh huh...

* So we're these hypercompetent adventurers that pretty much never fail at our tasks (Fail Forward Success but Condition/Twist rules Test resolution outside of Contests and Conflicts) but the world just aggressively grinds us down? Good god...imagine what it must be like for the layfolks! How does anyone survive to reach puberty in Torchbearer-land to support functioning steadings/villages/etc? This world and the gods utterly hate us!

* Its crazy how having a map suddenly alleviates all possible complications of the Journey/Wilderness! The beasts of the land tend to their burrows and the skies part because I've got this rusty-trusty piece of marked parchment between my grubby fingers!

* It always seems to happen that my Enemy enters stage right or my Family/Friends/Hometown gets put into the crosshairs or I'm put in a situation to fight for or forfeit my Belief/Creed on a "failed" Ask Around or Circles check! Kinda odd that crap I don't care about or that isn't personal to me rarely ever happens!

Its littered with stuff like this which should tick the "gamist nonsense" or “narrative causality” clause. It does it because it was intentfully designed to be a brutal game engine for challenge-based Adventuring first and second and third its intended to be a crucible to find out whether you will fight for your Belief/Creed/Hometown/Friends/Family and forgive/confront your Enemy in a brutally unforgiving imagined space that makes every decision count and brings cowardice/heroism/sacrifice/expeditiousness at great tension via its structure and reward cycle.

There is a level of elision of Simulationist priorities within an intentfully designed game that has to at some point tick the "gamist nonsense" box for folks. But the reality is, after decades and decades of these conversations and the last decade here on ENWorld, its pretty clear to me that Sim priorities + game engine get deeply inventoried, overanalyzed, misapplied (due to something being ignorantly or willfully misconstrued) and vociferously lobbied against to attack this thing I hate...yet simultaneously the opposite for this thing I love!

That violates my sim priorities for functional conversation!

---

Back to Torchbearer. The reality is, there are many, many, many ways they could have simultaneously (a) actually made the game engine less intricate/complex while making it (b) more internal-causality-gratifying. They're trivial to enumerate. However, everything has a cost. And the cost would have been that (i) the decision-space of every moment of play would have been less consequential and (ii) the overall through line of play would have lost its deep, deep integration which is hell bent on distilling skillful play from unskillful play.

So if the above paragraph is true (and it is), then it becomes a very difficult argument to make that this game was designed upon some meaningful synthesis of Gamist priorities, Simulationist priorities, and Narrativist priorities. To whatever extent simulation exist in this game, it is merely the veneer of it sufficient to actually orient a group of 4 disconnected brains on a shared imagined space. Its not there for high fidelity to internal causality nor is it there to promote some kind of state of deep experiential consistency of actually being in Middarmark (or whatever land your Torchbearer game might be in). Its there to test how skillfully you can play individually and collectively, how your dramatic needs embedded in your character manifest within play, and to reflect upon the skillfulness and evolution of character.

I mean. I'll defer to my 3 players here. @AbdulAlhazred , @kenada , and @niklinna . Do you feel like your experience in our play would ever produce the italicized orientation toward play/experience with play above? You can certainly correct me with I'm wrong, but I'm pretty doubtful! I'm not saying that the experience of play is shallow at all...but whatever visceralness comes from play doesn't derive from the italicized priorities above in my estimation (and it hasn't for any of the groups I've GMed TB in the past either)!

I think that’s fair. I would say emphatically so for myself because of the work I’m doing on my homebrew system, which is (more or less) a Process Sim take on Moldvay Basic. There are times when things look superficially similar, but the details and reasoning for them are often quite different. A map, for example, doesn’t obviate the need to travel somewhere. It just removes the need to search for the location to find it again (meaning events still happen as usual along the way). Weather is a force of nature. It may happen while you are traveling or exploring, but it can also happen while you are camping or in town. If it snows for days, the snow accumulates, and that affects your ability to travel and make camp. Stuff like that.

 

[pemerton]

What do you mean by player-authored quests? I couldn't find any info on it in the DMG, and when I look for info on this online, what comes up is people complaining about 4E making quests much more overtly gamist with things like index cards...

From the 4e PHB, p 258:

Most adventures have a goal, something you have to do to complete the adventure successfully. The goal might be a personal one, a cause shared by you and your allies, or a task you have been hired to perform. A goal in an adventure is called a quest.

Quests connect a series of encounters into a meaningful story. . . .

Sometimes a quest is spelled out for you at the start of an adventure. . . . Other times, you figure out your quests while adventuring. . . .

You can also, with your DM’s approval, create a quest for your character. Such a quest can tie into your character’s background. For instance, perhaps your mother is the person whose remains lie in the Fortress of the Iron Ring. Quests can also relate to individual goals, such as a ranger searching for a magic bow to wield. Individual quests give you a stake in a campaign’s unfolding story and give your DM ingredients to help develop that story.​

And from the 4e DMG, pp 102-3

Quests are the fundamental story framework of an adventure - the reason the characters want to participate in it. They’re the reason an adventure exists, and they indicate what the characters need to do to solve the situation the adventure presents. . . .

Thinking in terms of quests helps focus the adventure solidly where it belongs: on the player characters. An adventure isn’t something that can unfold without their involvement. . . .

Quests should focus on the story reasons for adventuring, not on the underlying basic actions of the game - killing monsters and acquiring treasure. “Defeat ten encounters of your level” isn’t a quest. It’s a recipe for advancing a level. Completing it is its own reward. “Make Harrows Pass safe for travelers” is a quest, even if the easiest way to accomplish it happens to be defeating ten encounters of the characters’ level. This quest is a story-based goal, and one that has at least the possibility of solution by other means.

You should allow and even encourage players to come up with their own quests that are tied to their individual goals or specific circumstances in the adventure. Evaluate the proposed quest and assign it a level. Remember to say yes as often as possible!​

A player-authored quest doesn't give the player authority over scene-framing - in 4e D&D, that remains squarely with the GM. But it obliges the GM to frame scenes with a certain goal, or dramatic possibility, in mind, namely, the one the player has put forward via their quest.

As far as I'm aware, 4e D&D is the only version of D&D to suggest that the players, and not the GM, might be the ones who establish the dramatic framework for the PCs' adventures. And to then provide support for that - because of the way it so strongly supports scene-framed play. This is one of the reasons it is regarded as the closest D&D has come to embracing "story now" RPGing.

 

[pemerton]

Elaborating on my post 393, and also of relevance to 395:

It is easy to underestimate what is involved in leaving resolution open at the moment of framing and action declaration.

If the action declaration is I look inside the safe to see if the jewels are there and the GM has notes saying that they're not, and uses those notes to say what the PC finds in the safe, then the resolution was not open.

If the action declaration is we sail to the island and the GM (via prep, or via a random events roll, or whatever) says that the PCs' vessel is washed away to a different shore, then resolution was not open.

Etc.

That's not to say that "story now" can't use prep, or freeform narration of consequences, because not every action declaration is an expression of protagonism. Some is just going back-and-forth with the GM to establish framing, stakes etc. A crucial skill for story now GMing is to recognise when the stakes have shifted, such that we are no longer at that preliminary stage, and now the player's protagonism (and the PC's corresponding dramatic need) is engaged, and hence the resolution has to be open and its time for the action resolution mechanics to do their thing.

This is relevant to 4e D&D and player-authored quests, because 4e's scene-framing approach, and its use of skill challenges for non-combat resolution when the stakes are significant, allows open resolution. Whereas D&D's more traditional reliance on map-and-key/prep-style resolution makes it much harder to leave resolution open.

 

[Malmuria]

Well, I agree that people are free to apply or not apply whatever intellectual structures they wish to their activities. I certainly am not one to fault someone for not doing a GNS style analysis of their FK! That doesn't mean I cannot apply that framework to it and derive some sort of insights about it. I would further propose that using various such constructs could well elucidate areas where a game could be improved, or at least perhaps explain why it is most suited to particular participants, etc. Those seem like useful goals.

Certainly you can, and it might be useful. My thought was more just that any "culture of play" might have its own internal theoretical framework, explicit or implicit, with GNS being more particular to storygame enthusiasts, in part because of the historical context of their development. Thus that particular idiom (e.g. including terms like gameism) might not be immediately or ever useful to those outside of that play culture (e.g. 5e players).

 

[Malmuria]

TBH I personally cannot even figure out how GDS makes sense in and of itself and have not been able to apply it usefully to any game design or play.

That's quite the statement!

 

[Thomas Shey]

Right. We discussed superhero genre logic in the other thread, and I find it (or at least excessive amount of it) rather jarring, and would have hard time playing a game that relied heavily on it. I would probably quite like a more simulationist superhero game that took the superpowers seriously and explored the consequences in more grounded manner. Like you say, simulation and genre emulation are very different things and can easily be in direct conflict!

Well, the problem is once you chase down the rabbit-hole of ignoring those genre conventions, what you logically end up with isn't really a superhero setting; its a supers setting (or what I've seen called a people-with-powers setting), and honestly, its likely to be virtually a post-apocalypse one. There are games that dig into that ground (AMP Year One and its sequels are pretty much at least compromises here, and the EABA setting/game Eschaton goes in on it pretty hard) but other than maybe a couple trappings (people have codenames and a few may wear costumes) they don't look much like a superhero setting in other ways; among other things they're usually more bloody than even Iron Age comics, and often turn around the idea of society at war with its supers as much as anything else.

 

[Manbearcat]

It's a throw-away line that a few people have blown into massive proportions.

From 4E DMG, p103.

"Player-Designed Quests. You should allow and even encourage players to come up with their own quests that are tied to their individual goals or specific circumstances in the adventure. Evaluate the proposed quest and assign it a level. Remember to say yes as often as possible!"

That's literally it. The whole thing right there.

Considering I'm one of the "few people" you mention, I just have to comment on this.

My comment?

WOW

"throw-away line?"

This is one of the most subversive, indie-game-derived elements of 4e (along with Fail Forward, Success With Complications, Closed Scene Resolution for Noncombat Conflict, 4e's version of "cut to the action" and "drive play toward conflict" in "skip the gate guards and get to the fun" and all the other elements that we've talked into the floor)! This is full-on Forge-derived Story Now player-authored kicker that could have been ripped directly from Dogs in the Vineyard initiation/background conflict or Sorcerer.

If Player-Authored-Kickers, which puts players in charge directly of the course of the upcoming conflict-scape (and therefore wresting the trajectory of play from the traditional authority structure of D&D; the GM's), is "throw-away" rather than subversive and a huge deal...? What exactly would be subversive? What isn't throw-away?