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

[Campbell]

For what it is worth I do not really consider myself a Story Now apologist. I am an advocate for unity of purpose when playing games. My favorite feature of The Forge Model was that creative agendas (whether pure or mixed) were not defined as coming from our intrinsic nature, but rather just a purpose we take on for the activity we are taking part in. I'm a big believer in taking on whatever creative agenda the game was built for - the fun we get to have together rather than separately. I have games I love with a primary focus in every agenda (some that even shift between agendas during play).

Favorites include:

• Pathfinder Second Edition [Step On Up]
• Legend of the 5 Rings 5th Edition [High Concept]
• RuneQuest [Process Simulation]
• Riddle of Steel [Process Sim / Story Now Hybrid]
• Blades in the Dark [Story Now / Step On Up Hybrid]
• B/X D&D [Step On Up]
• Vampire 5th Edition [High Concept]
• Monsterhearts [Story Now]
• Classic Deadlands [High Concept]

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That's a genre? Flashbacks are genre? The mere presence of a flashback mechanic is enough to satisfy genre emulation? Apparently genre is a very broad term with how you're using it. Also, entirely irrelevant to the discussion of GNS, as I note above.

Heist is a genre. A flashback that shows how the the things were arranged beforehand is a heist staple. Blades' flashback mechanic is intended to emulate precisely that. And of course genre emulation is part of high-concept sim under GNS.

BTW, I hgave hard time seeing how this sort of flashback could ever work in a game runnin on pure process sim. It is exactly the narrative engine which makes this sort of genre emulation even viable. (More about this later.)

Sure. I agree. However, you're telling me my play and what I want from it doesn't exist and is instead the same as this other thing I tell you it is not.

No. It is only because your obsession about GNS purity that you'd think this. You think the game does A. I say, sure, it does A, but it also does B. You see this as "it does B instead of A," as your framework cannot conceive A and B existing side by side and supporting each other. I am not at any point have been denying that A is happening.

A more fruitful discussion would be to start by acknowledging my play, asking questions to understand it, not refute it or make it sound like something else, and when you've grokked it enough you can describe it back to me such that I recognize it, then you're on solid ground to refute it. Prior to that, you're just lancing strawmen.

You are the one who is denying what's happening in games. You are the one who has ended up in a blatantly absurd position of having to argue that a flashback mechanic in a heist game is not genre emulation.

I feel it would be far more fruitful to discuss how different agendas can support each other and which work well together. Because yeah, this is a 'system matters' thing and I really don't think you can genre emulate every genre with a narrativist engine, nor can you emulate every genre with a pure process sim. Some things simply go better together than others.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Forget resource management, it's all about finding our way efficiently through the maze of transfers between us and our destination. Is it better to change at Reading, or ought we to stay on and change at Didcot Parkway? It's all or nothing. What, there's no sequence that gets us there on time? But... gamist... w...

I do, again, have to note that that's only an issue for a gamist if getting there before the bomb goes off is really the point in the exercise, and that's the only method to get there.

That's one of the key things you have to do at any part of process where a GM has any control of outcome (recognizing that there are games where he's at least not the only one): ask the GM what it is he's trying to do and what purpose he's assuming the PCs have in doing it. There are theoretical reasons to have a ticking-bomb situation where the bomb can't be disarmed, but outside of a hardcore GDS Sim answer (it can't be because events lead the PCs to figuring out it was doing so too late for any practical method to do so), it pretty much means that the purpose is not about stopping the bomb, but something else (and probably needs to be presented that way for it not to just be a "gotcha").

Why I am I being shoehorned into going to point B? I want to play out my life as a Saville Row tailor in love with a Chelsea undertaker (who doesn't notice him). GM, why are you asking me what I will sacrifice to get to point B? Ask me what I will sacrifice to get the attention of the undertaker! No? Well I'm leaving your pointless game...

Well, that's more a case of someone pretty much ignoring premise from get-go. That's a largely separate problem from out the gate (though people with extremely specific expectations of what an RPG is can produce that in all kinds of ways. I've hit a few people who's expectations were apparently formed in very sandbox D&D games early on who won't accept that something is an RPG if the campaign premise constrains them in any way. You can have others who are, bluntly, so selfish that they'll try to hammer the campaign around them into a shape that suits them no matter who else wants it differently.

It's subjective, right? I value GNS concretely for going to bat for story and bringing to light important considerations that historically have been powerful in some types of story-telling. I kind of like the now part, but I don't get why it is welded to story? Every agenda might be run in now. Sim-now. Game-now. Rejection of that intution arises from commitments that are tautological (it can't be like that, because the model says its not like that). And that sort of intuition is why I keep coming back to wanting a model that is multidimensional rather than just three-nodes. The three-node pattern is far too limited to describe the space.

Well, I'm not going to speak for GNS, but at least the developers of GDS never thought it covered everything. It didn't intrinsically say anything about the stances players took playing for example (though some stances were going to be difficult with some--Token Stance was going to be pretty odd with a game with a heavy Dramatist agenda for example, and there's serious questions about how Author or Director stance plays with pretty purist Sim). GDS was never viewed as the all-purpose power tool.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Almost universally, folks who say "system doesn't matter" are saying it because the above is their apex priority for play. (a) They are concerned overwhelmingly or wholly with a matrix of that italicized bit above + one of those two bolded bits and (b) they feel that you can just free form your way through play with a GM fulfilling the role of "causality coordinator and mediator", governing action declarations based on their personal sense of things. When things go wrong, they'll mash those two together and who the hell knows at any given point what form of causality will govern a given collision of imagined space meets player action declaration. This is a failure condition because it injures the experiential quality of the exploration and the reliability of the causality of the system.

I think (at best--there are "system doesn't matter" people who have that view because they assume system will fail them without outside intervention with anything they're trying to do.) that's a one-way arrow though--not everyone with those priorities considers system to not matter. Some of them think it matters a great deal to the degree it supports or interferes with them getting to the result they want.

Almost universally, these folks talk about "actor stance exclusivity" and use the terms "(high) immersion" or "verisimilitude" as a precursor to play at all.

On the other hand, I can note that while that might be true, there's a big bifurcation between people who can accept things like genre conventions in their internal model and those that can't. There's a reason during the r.g.f.a. days that Actor and IC stances were not considered the same.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Also. I want to point out that it is amusing how the agenda railway problem summary @Hussar posted reflects the layman understanding of GNS and gets 'corrected'. But it actually pretty much is how these terms are generally understood and used, and that understanding very closely resembles the categories outlined in GDS. So whilst the terminology of GNS may have stuck, what people outside Story Now circles understand these terms to mean much more closely corresponds to GDS.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Accidental post

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've always found it super-straightforward to see for gamist that system must matter, but for narrativist? No one has ever explained why in a way that accounts for all actual play. GM decides, and the experience is just the same as if we rolled biased dice (i.e. dice with modifiers or pooled). No one can really say why it matters that GM decides some things, except to say that they are passionately against it and it gets in the way of their personal expression. That's subjective.

Even among gamists, system isn't automatically important. Note that there were a lot of gamist elements in old school D&D that had no systemic support at all; they were entirely about narrating actions on the part of players that the GM assessed as to their viability and outcomes.
And there are still people of that bent who expect the GM to take matters in hand if the system is not doing proper support, which in practice means they don't really consider the system important for their gamist preferences.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

It's subjective, right? I value GNS concretely for going to bat for story and bringing to light important considerations that historically have been powerful in some types of story-telling. I kind of like the now part, but I don't get why it is welded to story? Every agenda might be run in now. Sim-now. Game-now. Rejection of that intution arises from commitments that are tautological (it can't be like that, because the model says its not like that).

Yep, absolutely.

And that sort of intuition is why I keep coming back to wanting a model that is multidimensional rather than just three-nodes. The three-node pattern is far too limited to describe the space.

Yeah. And as much I dislike D&D alignment, I have to wonder if some sort of alignment-like 'what' and 'how' matrix or some such might be better at describing these things.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Heist is a genre.

Sure, heist as a genre focuses on a large scale robbery or a string of robberies. Blades doesn't do this in any consistent way. Play doesn't have to be about robberies at all. My last game was with a crew of smugglers. We did a few heists, but we also did smuggling, a lot of occult stuff at the end, politics, and flat out beatdowns. So, if Blades was meant to emulate a heist genre, it seems to not do so with surprising regularity. I can do heists, for sure, but it's not a heist emulator.

A flashback that shows how the the things were arranged beforehand is a heist staple. Blades' flashback mechanic is intended to emulate precisely that. And of course genre emulation is part of high-concept sim under GNS.

It's also a staple of other genres. It's not at all unique to heists. This was my point -- heist as a genre is fairly specific, but flashbacks are not specific to heists. You can have heist genre without flashbacks. Flashbacks are neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve heist genres. A great example of flashbacks in a non-heist is Westworld, which makes extensive use of flashback layering.

So, this entire argument is a poor construing of what Blades offers in an attempt to lump it into an easy bin and claim that it's simulationist -- I mean, you've ignored the repeated statements that just having genre isn't sufficient for that agendas, but that genre has to be the point of playing, but that aside this fails.

BTW, I hgave hard time seeing how this sort of flashback could ever work in a game runnin on pure process sim. It is exactly the narrative engine which makes this sort of genre emulation even viable. (More about this later.)

It's good that you're finally acknowledging that simulationism has more than one bucket, and that there are differences in techniques.

No. It is only because your obsession about GNS purity that you'd think this. You think the game does A. I say, sure, it does A, but it also does B. You see this as "it does B instead of A," as your framework cannot conceive A and B existing side by side and supporting each other. I am not at any point have been denying that A is happening.

And, again you show you haven't paid attention. Of course games can do multiple things. 5e is a good example. YOUR claim about AW is incorrect. Some games do multiple things, others do different multiple things, some don't do things. AW doesn't do any simulationism. This isn't purity, it's actually applying what the model says to what the rules actually say and not your loose argument that any genre is genre emulation and that this is the same thing as simulationism. I've pointed out where those steps are wrong individually and together.

I've already said a few times how games manage different agendas -- they toggle. You've made claims about harmonizing, I've disagreed. The agendas are mostly exclusive of each other, so you cannot meet more than one at the same time, but you can toggle between them. My example of The Between earlier showed how that works with Sim and Narrativism. It also showed what kinds of structure actually have to be in place for Sim to function, and those are lacking in AW.

You are the one who is denying what's happening in games. You are the one who has ended up in a blatantly absurd position of having to argue that a flashback mechanic in a heist game is not genre emulation.

It's not. I don't know what to tell you. You seem to have a very low bar for sufficiency. I think it's tied to how much you want to show that the GNS model has no useful things to say -- like how you try to discredit it for not having the same number of things in each bin, how you try to say that the Narrativism bin is the same as Dramatism from the GDS model, how you claim any genre is emulation and therefore simulationism (when that's not remotely close to sufficient). You've yet to try to apply the model in a constructive way but instead have only posted how it doesn't work, and you've made errors every time you've done so.

There are legit criticisms of GNS. The ones you're putting out, so far, aren't. You've touched closely on a few, but chose to run in a different direction.

I feel it would be far more fruitful to discuss how different agendas can support each other and which work well together. Because yeah, this is a 'system matters' thing and I really don't think you can genre emulate any genre with a narrativist engine, nor can you emulate any genre with a pure process sim. Some thins simply go better together than others.

Yes, because that discards the model. However, the utility of the model is that it's identifying agendas that conflict. It's pie-in-the-sky to assume that no agendas actually conflict; that they all can work together if we just hold hands hard enough. But that's not true. I showed this with the hitpoint example. I've linked examples from the first 20 posts on the main page of ENW that show conflicts in agendas. Conflicts exist, and GNS actually is useful in identifying why they exist and what the conflict is actually over. The model isn't there to tell you how to fix it, but how to identify and understand the source of conflict. If you want to talk about how to work through conflict, I'm 100% game. I love that stuff. But that's not what you're doing. You're saying that agendas do naturally work together and this model, the GNS model, is wrong because it suggests that they do not.

Your fixation on genre is weird, especially since the model doesn't really care much about genre -- it would only care in the sense of a high-concept sim whose goal is to specifically emulate a genre. Other than that, genre isn't even a consideration for the model. It is in some of Edwards other essays, where he talks about the role of setting in various agendas (it's a good read, but long and even denser than the GNS essays). The fixation you have that genre is the important detail just doesn't follow. Of course not every game can use every genre. That's, well, obvious. And totally beside the point. We aren't talking GNS to evaluation what genres a game can support because it doesn't care about that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Now that I've got a bit more time and am a bit more awake, I wanted to return to Niklinna's question about GDS Dramatism and how it relates to D&D.

This will require a small side-trip. One area I actually agree with Edwards about (though not his choice of terms for it and assumption it did harm) is that classic WoD Storyteller was a game that knew what it wanted to be, but was pretty confused about how it would get there. Avowedly it wanted to be about the struggle to deal with trying to stay connected to your humanity when you'd become something monstrous. But almost nothing in the attached game system actually gave you any way to engage with that, except for a very limited degree, the Humanity stat (and that was arguably as much a Sim representation of the setting assumptions about how that worked, but it at least set expectations of how you were going to have to engage with the problems that dissonance between monstrous nature and humanity would be). There was nothing much to help you steer things in that direction or engage with it in any real way except to the degree you could with any system at all or none whatsoever. Even the metacurrency in use was one of the rare cases where it was as much a Sim element (as it represented character Willpower) as anything else. In other respects it was pretty much a Gamist design about using cool powers, manipulating others and ripping stuff up. There were some additional character-definition material in the form of Merits and Flaws later than moved it a bit more along toward some Dramatist concerns, but they were still pretty peripheral, even when they were in use.

D&D's dramatist concerns run into the same rock. Other than the aforementioned Noncombat Profiencies (which also supported some Gamist purpose), there really wasn't much there that required anything beyond token play, and token play is pretty much the definition of pure Gamist approach. But there were a couple of exceptions that at least can be argued to serve a Dramatist agenda in part or whole.

The first is alignment. Now to forestall any sidetrips on this, alignment is a pretty blunt tool for characterization; it tells you some things in very broad terms, often in ways that seem contradictory. But it doesn't serve much other purpose, so it can be viewed as one of the few baked in Dramatist elements in the game. And notably after evolving a bit early on, it has slowly dropped away in significance (in part because it is a pretty blunt tool, but it took one of the few non-Gamist system elements with it as its faded.)

The other one is, oddly enough, an example of a structure that can serve two agendas at the same time. And it came up in the other thread because its such a poor fit on a Simulationist sense.

Hit points. Hit points as expressed in D&D don't work super well with a traditional RGFA Simulationism because nobody in the setting thinks that the fighter with 40 hit points outright can't be killed by that first sword stroke. It doesn't represent any World based assuption.

But Hit points can serve two functions at once.

On one hand, it can absolutely play a Gamist purpose of controlling pace-of-resolution; though not universal, you can find some pretty snarky comments about overly "dicey" games, where things end up turning on on a small number of rolls of dice, and thus the ability to apply skilled play to a situation is muted or eliminated. Because of the pace-of-resolution control in hit points, it primarily serves to give someone playing a character time to make decisions. (This is in contrast with a game like BRP, where while there's a lot of tactical thinking, but you don't get a lot of warning when things have jelled; a single crit at the wrong moment, and you're at least out of the fight and maybe dead).

On the other hand, there's another lens it can be seen through. There's a dramatic conceit in some kinds of fiction where a serious set of opponents never put each other right down; when you have basic weapons, elevating hit points can force that (it also can drag things out more than people want, which is why some offshoots of D&D have moved toward hosing down how much of this you get).

But there's not a lot else to be found in the D&D mechanics that really supports Dramatist concerns. Most of the rest of it are big blunt Gamist tools. The Dramatist values that have applied to it are, like the ones in early Storyteller working with no help on a system level, and pretty much all thrown to the player and GM.