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

[Manbearcat]

So...if you write down in a book, "If you aren't sure what happens, the referee will tell you what happens," suddenly it's a rule and not "DM decides"?

It’s both.

1) Its a rule…

2) …that GM decides.

I’ll leave the implications upon play of said rule as an exercise for the reader…

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Was this really true, though? I was always under the impression there were some potentially synergies with powers from different classes that were deliberately avoided by choices of where they went. I realize the multiclassing feats could end run this to a degree, but there was overhead on that and practical limitations of how much you could fish in that pond.

I think someplace I touched on that, Twin Strike represents bad 4e design, because it is completely bonkers overpowered in the hands of any class except Ranger (it is bonkers for rangers too, but the whole class is designed around KNOWING that they have this one bonkers thing and rolling with it, so it holds up OK). So, yes, 4e MCing/Hybridizing, and a couple other places where you can 'borrow', all restrict usage to Encounter or even Daily so that the unbalanced nature of TS is effectively thwarted (like you can't ever combine it with anything that would let you use it at the end of a charge).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Hmmm, well, I think the d6 mechanism you describe is not bad. You could also use piling on more advantage dice, which is a bit different in detailed probabilities, but could be given a pretty similar overall effect. I just don't want to focus on enumerating long lists of conditions and circumstances and 'move on' to the action. HoML is NOT AT ALL simulationist! While I have advantage modeling things that would make sense in the real world, that's intended to get the right fiction and produce a sensible narrative, not to simulate the elements of fighting with swords and such. All that is necessary is a quick check to say "Oh, yeah, I have flanking, so Advantage!" The GM can then look and see if anything cancels that with Disadvantage and we're ready to roll. You do get a substantive benefit from advantage, so its rarely not worth having. For the same reason in HoML there are exactly 4 sources of bonuses, and nothing ever stacks within them (and 3 of those really can only have one source of modifiers in general). HoML combat, unlike 4e, or even 5e, or 13a, etc. is FAST. It is purely focused on what the characters are doing and how they react to the situation at hand. Tactics are important, you want stuff like surprise and flanking, but play has more of the quick feel of older classic D&D in terms of it moves along. It really is NOT meant to be a numbers game.

This is a good demonstration of what I mean when I say most games do not go for an absolutely uncompromising purist position on the various game-purposes. Even in the above, an utterly unabashed, actively S&A game, there is just a little concern about G&S stuff. "Flanking" isn't just an abstract power-up you can trigger, it still has that thin veneer of "this situation should be somewhat sensible." The key thing is, it takes a severe and unforgivable breach of that veneer--something that can't be explained at all--to justify even small concessions to the tactical-strategic framework. By comparison, even a very G&S game tends to avoid having blatantly and obviously flawed mechanics, because that's the parallel equivalent of "severe and unforgivable breach of that veneer." The fixes may be weak or incomplete or not really improve so much as avoid catastrophic problems, but they'll still do it, generally speaking.

It’s both.

1) Its a rule…

2) …that GM decides.

I’ll leave the implications upon play of said rule as an exercise for the reader…

That analysis seems pretty friggin' useless, not gonna lie.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is a good demonstration of what I mean when I say most games do not go for an absolutely uncompromising purist position on the various game-purposes. Even in the above, an utterly unabashed, actively S&A game, there is just a little concern about G&S stuff. "Flanking" isn't just an abstract power-up you can trigger, it still has that thin veneer of "this situation should be somewhat sensible." The key thing is, it takes a severe and unforgivable breach of that veneer--something that can't be explained at all--to justify even small concessions to the tactical-strategic framework. By comparison, even a very G&S game tends to avoid having blatantly and obviously flawed mechanics, because that's the parallel equivalent of "severe and unforgivable breach of that veneer." The fixes may be weak or incomplete or not really improve so much as avoid catastrophic problems, but they'll still do it, generally speaking.

Well, its like all games have SOME SORT of genre. All games presuppose unless otherwise stated that ordinary facts of life appertain. Obviously this is true! So, yes, in HoML flanking exists as an advantage-producing tactic because that is A) something that players are likely to grasp and be able to reason about without needing to plain old memorize all the rules, and B) when you go imagine the story in your private imaginary world inside your head your brain doesn't go WTF!!!! Instead the story looks and sounds a lot like other stories of heroic battles, and the mechanics reinforce taking actions/tactics which will tend to produce those sorts of narratives. You can think of it as part playability and part concession to the genre. One thing it doesn't do is get in the way of Story Now. In fact having these things is necessary to any successful SN play, as there have to be SOME SORT of drivers on character choice that arise out of fiction. If none of those existed, then Narrativist play would collapse into Gamism, as all there would be is arbitrary ways to get bonuses and penalties (or whatever) and they couldn't be tied to anything humanistic at all!

So, HoML has flanking rules. Thus if the Paladin wants to seriously crush the orc, he's going to want to stab him from behind. How does that play with his sense of honor? Play to Find Out!!!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, its like all games have SOME SORT of genre. All games presuppose unless otherwise stated that ordinary facts of life appertain. Obviously this is true! So, yes, in HoML flanking exists as an advantage-producing tactic because that is A) something that players are likely to grasp and be able to reason about without needing to plain old memorize all the rules, and B) when you go imagine the story in your private imaginary world inside your head your brain doesn't go WTF!!!! Instead the story looks and sounds a lot like other stories of heroic battles, and the mechanics reinforce taking actions/tactics which will tend to produce those sorts of narratives. You can think of it as part playability and part concession to the genre. One thing it doesn't do is get in the way of Story Now. In fact having these things is necessary to any successful SN play, as there have to be SOME SORT of drivers on character choice that arise out of fiction. If none of those existed, then Narrativist play would collapse into Gamism, as all there would be is arbitrary ways to get bonuses and penalties (or whatever) and they couldn't be tied to anything humanistic at all!

So, HoML has flanking rules. Thus if the Paladin wants to seriously crush the orc, he's going to want to stab him from behind. How does that play with his sense of honor? Play to Find Out!!!

Oh, sure, not at all trying to make a commentary on whether things get in the way of other things per se. More just noting one of the weaknesses of the GNS model compared to what I'm going for. It seems silly to me to say that it is "incoherent" to have a game that works toward multiple creative agendas when...I mean, right here, you're showing how your "creative agenda" is Nar, but that you accept that some minimum amount of Sim needs to be there for the play to make sense. It's a very, very minimal amount, so it takes some really, REALLY bad problems for you to have to do something to fix it. But it's still there, and in general you'd never sacrifice a meaningful amount of Story Now expressiveness to gain even a dramatic increase in "process" Sim.

Yet at the same time, you're very clearly advancing some "genre"/"High Concept" Sim! Which, yet again, is why it seems so weird to me to use the same name for these things.

Perhaps, as a question for you and any other better-versed participants in the thread: Would Edwards have considered "High Concept" Sim to be incoherent with "purist-for-system" Sim?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh, sure, not at all trying to make a commentary on whether things get in the way of other things per se. More just noting one of the weaknesses of the GNS model compared to what I'm going for. It seems silly to me to say that it is "incoherent" to have a game that works toward multiple creative agendas when...I mean, right here, you're showing how your "creative agenda" is Nar, but that you accept that some minimum amount of Sim needs to be there for the play to make sense. It's a very, very minimal amount, so it takes some really, REALLY bad problems for you to have to do something to fix it. But it's still there, and in general you'd never sacrifice a meaningful amount of Story Now expressiveness to gain even a dramatic increase in "process" Sim.

Yet at the same time, you're very clearly advancing some "genre"/"High Concept" Sim! Which, yet again, is why it seems so weird to me to use the same name for these things.

Sure, I just don't read Edwards as considering this sort of thing to be 'incoherent' at all. It is just foundational definition stuff, bedrock that practically every RPG in existence MUST have. I mean, even TOON, a game where there effectively is nothing even close to a 'natural world' and half the play is 4th Wall stuff, still assumes that if your toon falls off a cliff it will crash to the bottom, right? I mean, the game wouldn't work otherwise, as who would think its funny if none of the laws of nature exist or get lampooned? I mean, its funny because your toon crashes to the bottom of the cliff 'falls down' and then gets right back up again and does more stuff (IIRC the falling down kind of ends your scene or something, been decades since I played it). I'd expect the only way to subvert "how the world works" kind of stuff would be to actually invent a setting where none of it applies, maybe something like The Matrix, but then you'd have THAT as a setting, supplying its own logic, lol.

So, IMHO, we should look at it as there's a base level of 'stuff' that constitutes the shared imagined world, and agenda only relates to how we use it, with the obvious understanding that a Purest-for-system Simulation agenda will want a rather different setting than a Story Now Narrativist one, even though the base assumptions about these worlds could actually be entirely identical.

Perhaps, as a question for you and any other better-versed participants in the thread: Would Edwards have considered "High Concept" Sim to be incoherent with "purist-for-system" Sim?

Well, yes, I think that would potentially be true. Lets think about it: So, a High Concept Simulation... lets say 5e D&D Forgotten Realms. The object is to experience FR, and life as a character in FR as imagined by Greenwood et al. So we're going to be guided around via whatever sorts of plots and hooks and such, which are intended to give us as much exposure to the atmosphere, geography, history, etc. of FR as possible. The 'Sim' is of FR, the game is simulating the various characteristics of the FR setting and the genre that is attached to it. So we will not only be exposed to stuff, but to a D&D milieu style of fantasy genre. Everything is in service of those ends. Elminster will hire us to perform some secret mission that just happens to be barely possible for level 1 PCs. We're going to be squarely in the path of the main metaplot and it will be a red carpet to greatness (but there may be SOME danger).

Now, imagine a Purist-for-System Simulation: We'd want a system that provided us with an experience that was as close as possible to some sort of plausible experience of actually living in, say, Waterdeep (granting that we're adventurers and not ordinary folk). The experience should provide all the considerations and elements of what is deemed, by setting logic strictly, to be such an experience. Thus we're just as likely to end up ignominiously robbed and our throats slit in some back ally by thugs after drinking a bit too much at the wrong bar as we are to end up being recruited by Elminster to accomplish some mission or other. Why would Elminster need the likes of us dirt kickers? He's probably got 500 of his own recruits already lined up, and whomever he would send us against is 99% likely to be able squash us like bugs anyway. Whatever metaplot exists will grind on and we're unlikely to even notice it until it hits us in the face.

These two are both going to use exactly the same FR (except it may have slightly different features described in each case).

 

[pemerton]

No, I'm pretty sure I'm not, it's just your binary lists fail to capture the reality of my game and games of a lot of people commonly play.

<snip>

what if the game has a mix of things, some of which that are on your story now lists and some that are on your not-story-now lists? What's happening then? What is it? Because every iteration of these you have produced has elicited in me the same response: a lot of these do not exclude each other and a ton of games combine stuff from both categories. So could we just please accept the reality and acknowledge that this is thing?

Again, I'm obliged to offer conjectures.

The game you describe, to me, seems like high concept simulation play with moments where the priority changes to narrativist/"story now" play.

I can build on the conjecture to suggest some of the responses/table experiences that I would expect in the sort of play you describe. I'm using the words "participant", "player" and "GM" deliberately. I'm also using third person rather than second person because I'm not in a position to impute particular experiences to you or your friends (as opposed to putting forward general, impersonally-framed conjectures).

In no particular order, here are some of those conjectures:

* Some participants finding the "story now" moments very awesome, and retelling them as game/campaign highlights;

* When the "story now" moments emerge, some players worrying that the group is drifting away from the plot or getting distracted from what they "should" be doing;

* When it seems like play might be heading towards a "story now" moment, some players worrying about whether it's OK to follow their sense of what their PC would (or should) do even though that might disrupt the party or the plot;

* The GM worrying that the "story now" moments put a lot of pressure on judgement and adjudication because there is no longer a solidity of prep and planning to rely on;

* Participants having a sense of "relief" or "return to normalcy" when the "story now" moment passes, and the main focus of play is the GM providing cues based on their prep which the players pick up on in the "usual" fashion.​

I would also say that the less the last point obtains, and the more the first point, then the more the play is inclining towards "vanilla narrativism" but is stuck with approaches to setting and situation which hinder more than they support. I've experienced that playing Rolemaster.

 

[pemerton]

The thought experiment my question is intended to guide toward is this

1. I could begin with a pre-authored game-world, such as Stonetop, that I count vivid and inhabitable
2. In an alternative world, I could begin with a tabula-rasa, and my group will author our game-world on the fly. Here I mean tabula-rasa with utmost sincerity! No sneaking in of any preliminary sketches. Nothing about the world is pre-authored. It is perforce the case that no adjectives can be reliably assigned to it by me, thus inviting each reader to make their own judgement (as you do.)

These are dichotomous

It seems tautological that pre-authored and not pre-authored are mutually exclusive. (If one ignores the temporal dimension, that events of authorship that at a certain time are yet to occur have, at a later time, already taken place.)

But it is not tautologous, and in fact seems to me false, that only one of those possibilities involves a game-world that is vivid and inhabitable.

My question proposes resisting that dichotomy. If we were to avoid either extreme, to find a balance, where might that lie?

My point is simply that you are associating "vivid and inhabitable" with one and not the other approach to setting. And I am contesting that association.

Is Edwards right? So that Stonetop's - 229 extraordinarily detailed pages of canonical setting is indeed an irredeemable curse!?

<snip>

Edwards seems skeptical that there can be any value in pre-authored material such as Stonetop's 229 pages at all

Edwards will Edwards—that is, make a dynamic tension into a do-or-die binary.

<snip>

He did like to take an extreme position, didn't he?

Edwards doesn't take the position that you both state here, ie that any setting is inconsistent with "story now" RPGing. In this thread, not far upthread, I've quoted his discussion of Glorantha. And there is his whole "setting dissection" discussion.

To quote again,

I'm not saying that improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play. I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play . . . and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play . . . then why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?​

Glorantha, as presented in RQ and HW/Q sourcebooks, is not the result of a play experience. It is pre-authored (at least originally, by Greg Stafford). So is not within the scope of Edwards' criticism of Over the Edge, which is a particular criticism: producing one person's play experience as the input for another person's play. Notice how Baker - who surely must have created many vibrant setting elements in the playtesting of Apocalypse World - doesn't present that stuff as an input into others' play. That's just one respect in which the whole design of AW flows from Edwards' essay.

To ask whether Stonetop's setting is useful for "story now" play, we would want to ask things like how was it created, what conflicts does it present to those who use it for play, etc. I don't know the answers to those questions. They're not answered by pointing out that it is over 200 pages - as I posted, JRRT wrote more than 200 pages about Middle Earth and that is no obstacle to doing "story now" Middle Earth/LotR RPGing.

 

[niklinna]

Perhaps, as a question for you and any other better-versed participants in the thread: Would Edwards have considered "High Concept" Sim to be incoherent with "purist-for-system" Sim?

Ooh, good one. I'm eager to see what comes of this!

 

[Ovinomancer]

Perhaps, as a question for you and any other better-versed participants in the thread: Would Edwards have considered "High Concept" Sim to be incoherent with "purist-for-system" Sim?

No, but also yes. Incoherence, as defined, is differing creative agendas such that the goal of the game differs. In both versions of Sim, the agenda is adherence to some agreed internal cause -- be it 'realism' or genre or process or whatever cause-effect line you're going for. Verisimilitude is a good buzzword here. So, since both HCS and PFS advance the same agenda, they aren't incoherent.

BUT.

The internal cause is pretty misaligned between the two of these. You could have a PFS that aligns well with HCS, depending on the HC, and you'll not have incoherence. This seems pretty rare, though, and certainly not the way the HCS is used commonly, so I'd say that there's at least some incoherence in the application layer. However, this is a bit fraught. On one hand, I think that a lot of HCS play would welcome a good PFS system that delivered reliably -- they'd think this was a great expression of the agenda. On the other hand, you have things like FKR, where are pure HCS and antagonistic to PFS*. So, yeah, there has to be some incoherence involved here, but it's not required like the incoherence when trying to align two different creative agendas together.

*One could easily argue that the original free kriegsspiel was a HCS reaction to a overly complicated PFS system.