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

[Thomas Shey]

Now this I'm going to disagree with.

Say you want to do a Ticking Clock scenario. The PC's must travel from Point A to Point B or Bad things Will Happen. Looking at the three approaches does highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

In a heavily Sim game, these scenarios don't really work very well. After all, it's mostly just a basic math question. The train leaves at 5:25 traveling at 50 Km/h. Can it reach the next stop, which is 100 km away in under 2 hours? Well, yes. It can. And, in a Sim based game, the DM shouldn't be adding things to the game specifically to slow that train down because that's not really sim anymore. Anything that slows that train down should arise from the setting itself and if there isn't any reason (outside of dramatic tension ones which are off the table) for the train to slow down, then the train doesn't slow down.

Ah, but if you're doing genre emulation, it very much is. There might be a theoretical explanation as to how it works out that way, but its still going to do so, because genre emulation is a fundamentally dramatic conceit. That's what makes it so problematic being balled in with other sorts of Sim.

In old-style Sim you're correct. But GNS Sim isn't just oldstyle Sim.

In a more Gamist game, the question actually changes. It's not Can the PC's arrive in time? No. The question is now, "What resources will it cost to reach the destination on time and will the PC's be able to deal with the challenge at the destination after having spent resources?" It's all about resource management and whatnot. Which in turn, inspires different possible approaches - maybe a sort of gauntlet challenge where the point of play is to make it to the end; or maybe some sort of resource attrition to make the final challenge more challenging. Or some combination of the two. It's entirely possible that the players will never reach the destination, or, may reach the destination too weak to resolve the challenge, or maybe will blow through the entire thing by clever play. It's one long challenge with lots of moving parts.

Not all Gamism is about resource management. Some of it is about proper use of non-consumable abilities and finding ways to apply them to the matter at hand. The only difference between the gamist and dramatist approach here is whether anticlimax is to be avoided; in a heavily gamist approach its accepted, and potentially even considered virtuous.

(Note I did not say narrativist approach, because, again, narrativism is sufficiently specialized I do not feel either competent to or inclined to directly engage with it).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Fair enough. I wasn't terribly concerned about the exact details. I was simply trying to show how (even a flawed) understanding of GNS leads to useful examinations of games.

I'd suggest it shows useful value in part because it was flawed. Note in my response your comments to me work better for GDS than they do GNS.

 

[Hussar]

I'd suggest it shows useful value in part because it was flawed. Note in my response your comments to me work better for GDS than they do GNS.

Sigh.

Always the problem with using examples. People would rather pick apart the example rather than attempting to understand the point.

The point I'm making is that using the model, we can see pretty clearly that the different agendas will lead to very different experiences from the same starting point. Absent the model, all we can really do is talk about our personal experiences and play dueling anecdotes all the while beating each other over the head with dictionaries as overly pedantic discussions mire down in impossible positions.

If we were discussing GDS, then FANTASTIC. Let's use that model. You like that model better. Great. We get that. We understand your point. Mission accomplished.

But NO ONE ELSE IS USING THAT MODEL IN THE DISCUSSION. So, at the end of the day, what are you trying to accomplish? People are telling you that they are using THIS model and NOT THAT model. Insisting that everyone else must use THAT MODEL because you happen to like it better isn't contributing to the discussion after the fifteenth time that you've been told that no one else is using your model.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But NO ONE ELSE IS USING THAT MODEL IN THE DISCUSSION.

Not everyone is using GNS, but those who are are pretty much insisting that its the proper one to bring in. As long as that's the case I reserve the right to show why it isn't that great a choice. As I noted, if you think I'm the only one in this discussion who has an issue with that, I'd suggest I can point to at least three others.

 

[niklinna]

If we were discussing GDS, then FANTASTIC. Let's use that model.

The OP did put GDS on the table as well. I'd love to see more discussion and examples that explicitly use GDS.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The OP did put GDS on the table as well. I'd love to see more discussion and examples that explicitly use GDS.

This is, by the way, why I'm being pretty insistent about this. GNS was not the assumed default from the start here. It could be used pretty freely because most of the uses people make of Gamism will fit either model or a couple others. As soon as it wandered off from that, however what model you're working from matters, and you can't just default to GNS because it assumes some fairly big agreement with some things that are not agreed with my default even by all the participants in the thread.

As I noted before, if people really find value in Story Now, that's fine. I consider it just one of a number of tools if you're pursuing certain sorts of story-focused effects, but people are neither required to agree nor care. But am I going to agree GNS Nar is particularly useful in general, or that GNS Sim is anything but kind of a hot mess? No, and in the context of this thread I don't see why I should; GNS is only a portion of what its about.

 

[niklinna]

I didn't ask for agreement about GNS. I asked for discussion and examples using GDS.

 

[Campbell]

I'm not familiar with GDS. Is it normal to self identify as one category or another? All this I'm a Gamist. I'm a Simulationist. stuff seems kind of weird to me. In my book play agendas are not or least should not be an intrinsic part of who you are.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I didn't ask for agreement about GNS. I asked for discussion and examples using GDS.

That was more a continuation of my response to Hussar, Niklinna.

The problem is with your request--discussion and examples of what? As I said, we had a pretty productive discussion of the initial question earlier, because as I said, GNS and GDS aren't radically different in how they handle "Game", and in the areas they disagree, probably both views are viable parts of a superset.

But what else are we talking about that I could reflect GDS about? Why D&D isn't GDS Sim? That one is pretty straightforward, as long as you don't get bog down in the "how much abstraction is too much?" question. Why isn't it GDS Drama is more complex, and less clearcut, because as I noted, it turns on whether you're talking the game as a whole, or its mechanical support (D&D's mechanical support for dramatist concerns is, as has been noted, is pretty minimal, in part because big parts of the game's fanbase is, honestly, pretty hostile to it.

Essentially, I'm willing to try and elaborate on how it seems to relate, but I need a bit more context to what part of the current discussion you're interested in.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not familiar with GDS. Is it normal to identify as one category or another? All this I'm a Gamist. I'm a Simulationist. stuff seems kind of weird to me. Like play agendas are not or least should not be an intrinsic part of who you are. Right?

Some people are very diverse. You may just be one of them. But a lot of people do lean in to some agendas more heavily. I mean, have you seen the number of people who badmouth game elements getting in the way of roleplaying?

Back when GDS was put together, its history is instructive. David Berkman (the author of the early diceless game Theatrix) came in to r.g.f.a. (who's original function was just as the A would suggest, about "advocacy"; promoting a game you value, if necessary by comparing it to other games.

Berkman came in and, essentially, presented the position that everyone who wasn't playing his game was making an error; that they were all looking for Story, and everything else just got in the way of that.

By historical accident, there were a handful of extremely pure-quill Simulationist types there at the time. It was abundantly clear to them that what they wanted was not what Theatrix was offering, but they had to develop some language to explain why. The proto-Dramatist in there at the time were actually kind of interested in understanding where the proto-Simulationists were coming from, and so some back and forth started (pretty soon they started largely ignoring Berkman because, honestly, he was either incapable or unwilling to accept that his premise might be faulty). At a certain point it became obvious that the initial Simulation/Drama separation wasn't covering all the cases (I suspect it was early enough that someone brought up early D&D token play, but it actually happened before I stumbled into r.g.f.a.) and Gamism was added in, but since the extent participants at the time were largely uninterested in RPGs as games, their initial work was, shall we say a little less than adequate, and when a few of us came in later who did care, it never entirely got addressed.

Besides working on refining the Threefold, a lot of discussion went out on topics like Stances (though they seem slightly different than what I usually see these days). But the initial view that the Simulationist had that it was kind of an all-or-nothing thing broke down pretty early when people came in who tended to prefer mixes of the various agendas, or favored one at one time and a different one at another time.

So the sort of all-one-thing phrasing you see has a pretty long history.