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

[clearstream]

There's definitely some new stuff. Journaling games, lyrical games, Belonging Outside Belonging, coop games like Ironsworn, Brindlewood Bay style mystery as you go play, more recent High Concept games that are more transparent in what they are about like L5R Fifth Edition.

I've been reading L5R. It's upsetting my carefully laid plans for what to play next

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Your whole framing here seems to rest on an unarticulated assumption that makes no sense to me. The assumption you're making is something along the following lines: that resolution is independent of the significance, to the characters, of what is taking place in the fiction. That assumption is false, as far as Burning Wheel is concerned.

You're positing two PCs. You've said nothing about what their relationship is. Nor their Beliefs. You're now positing that one is opening the safe at the request of the other. How does that relate to the two characters? Did the second PC acquiesce in the request? Were they persuaded? Threatened? Do they have a Belief about helping their friend? Or thwarting their frenemy? Or something else? And what intent has their player stated, in relation to their action of opening the safe?

The last time I had a BW PC search a place, it was Evard's tower.

Aramina had the Belief I'm not going to finish my career with no spellbooks and an empty purse!. Thurgon and Aramina, travelling along the Jewel River, debated what their destination should be. Aramina, being learned in Great Masters-wise, believes that the abandoned tower of Evard the Black lay somewhere in the forest on the north side of the river, and wanted to check it out. Mechanically, I succeeded in a Great Masters-wise test for Aramina.

After some time, Thurgon acceded to Aramina's desire that they investigate the tower. Thurgon's Beliefs included I am a Knight of the Iron Tower: by devotion and example I will lead the righteous to glorious victory and Harm and infamy will befall Auxol no more! (Auxol being his family estate; Thurgon has a Relationship with his mother, and an Affiliation with his family). The characters met Friedrich, a former knight of Thurgon's order who poles his skiff along the river (successful Circles test for Thurgon), and he took them to the tower. A demon was also there (maybe waiting for them? - this was the GM's decision about framing) and Thurgon fought it to a standstill. When Thurgon entered the tower and searched it, a Scavenging check failed. Thurgon found things he didn't want to find - old letters that suggested his mother was Evard's daughter. Aramina had swooned while fighting the demon (due to the tax of attempting to cast a spell) and so didn't know about the letters, which Thurgon subsequently burned. She found spellbooks in the tower, but as best I recall the GM didn't even ask for a test to find those: all the action had already been resolved (finding the tower, the demon, the letters).

That sort of interweaving of the PCs' Beliefs and Relationships is key to GMing Burning Wheel. The GM's principal job is to apply pressure on them. A player's principal job is to pursue them: as p 269 of Revised puts it, players "must use their characters to drive the story forward - to resolve conflicts and create new ones. Players are supposed to push and risk their characters, so they grow and change in unforeseen ways." In the case of the safe, each character has a reason for being there, be that finding the dirt, honouring a promise, helping a friend, or maybe betraying one. Those are the considerations that will inform players' declarations of intent, and that the GM will have in mind in narrating consequences.

This seems to be an extremely longwinded way to agree that what's in the safe is dependent on who opens it.

All I can do is repeat that they are not simulationist concerns. The reason for using "objective" DCs is not to explore the fiction for its own sake. It is to establish the colour of the setting and situation. The Adventure Burner explains this (p 264):

[T]hese obstacles create setting. When a player acts in the game, he needs a difficulty for his test. The obstacle is the number; but it's also the object of adversity in the fiction. Obstacles, over time, create a sense of space and logic in the game world. When a player repeatedly meets the same obstacle for the same task, he knows what to expect and he knows how to set up his character to best overcome this problem, or he knows enough to find another way around.​

Some things are harder than others. And this colour then generates decision-making in the resolution system - FoRKing other skills, getting help, using gear, spending Fate and Persona, spending time practising to get better, etc. That's part of the point of the system.

Mate, the text you quote literally describes a simulation.

 

[niklinna]

This seems to be an extremely longwinded way to agree that what's in the safe is dependent on who opens it.

While true, I thought that this had been well established in the discussion anyhow, and resolved to the extent that we understand that for a particular play style, that is exactly what we want.

Mate, the text you quote literally describes a simulation.

Depends on what you mean by "simulation". (Oho! Jargon rears its ugly head.) Burning Wheel is not trying to simulate reality or the cause-effect unfolding of events. But it is trying to generate a certain little-n narrative style, and I've certainly seen the term "simulation" used in that sense.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

While true, I thought that this had been well established in the discussion anyhow, and resolved to the extent that we understand that for a particular play style, that is exactly what we want.

Sure. And I was merely explaining one reason why I personally might have issue with such an approach, and was quite clear that it was a YMMV matter. But for some reason @pemerton seemed to take an exception to my characterisation, but I still do not know what part they actually found to be factually incorrect.

Depends on what you mean by "simulation". (Oho! Jargon rears its ugly head.) Burning Wheel is not trying to simulate reality or the cause-effect unfolding of events. But it is trying to generate a certain little-n narrative style, and I've certainly seen the term "simulation" used in that sense.

I mean especially under GNS's ludicrously broad definition of simulation, it trivially is that!

"These obstacles create setting. When a player acts in the game, he needs a difficulty for his test. The obstacle is the number; but it's also the object of adversity in the fiction. Obstacles, over time, create a sense of space and logic in the game world. When a player repeatedly meets the same obstacle for the same task, he knows what to expect and he knows how to set up his character to best overcome this problem, or he knows enough to find another way around."

This clearly describes using rules to model a setting in coherent and predictable manner. This is talking about simulation, even if we use more narrow (I would say "sensible") definition of simulation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, but I think calling that 'gamist' is wrong.

I don't. Not if its your primary focus rather than authenticity or getting a strong set of story beats.

Honestly, which SF games have had D&D-like advancement as a central element? I certainly don't know the rules of every SF RPG, but I've played a good number of them, and I cannot think of one! Certainly within the crop of early RPGs, which would have been likely to take root and spread widely without tons of competition (IE in the 1970s

I'll direct you to Fragged Empire where physical rewards are a big part of the motivater. And there are any number of games going all the way back to Space Quest that used D&D style experience (heck, Hero System and GURPS which both have had space games did this, in a somewhat compacted way). Traveler is far from typical in how such games are handled.

Beyond that, the closest I can come up with is D6 Star Wars, but that obviously has the limitation of being heavily built on a specific setting and backstory.

D6 Space wasn't, even though it was derived from the same core mechanics. Neither were the variest Fuzion based games (most of which were SF/Anime based), most cyberpunk games (which are very much about accumulating experience and gear), Aftermath!, editions of Gamma World other than the first couple, and more. How much of a list do you need?

You can get some decent advancement in that game, but it is much less clearly focused on. There's nothing like 'levels' really, as there are in D&D.

Levels are not necessary for advancement to be a motivator. At most they hammer the advancement zing a little harder because you get it all-at-once, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter or doesn't motivate people in the vast array of games that don't use levels.

I ran some d6 Space, the modern version of the system with the Star Wars branding filed off, and yes, you can advance, but its slow and it certainly is not central to the game, nor is loot or any other specific measure of progress. So, no, I think the SF genre has not really taken up the idea in the way D&D did.

And as you see, I disagree. Other than if you get overly focused on levels, rather than experience, I kind of think it requires a pretty parochial view of what's been available on the market to see otherwise. Traveler may have been very early, but its far from representative of how games in the genre go in general.

I suspect the main reason is that SF is intended to be at least partially realistic, the fundamental SF conceit is "what is the world like IF X" where 'X' is something technological. A D&D-like game doesn't really support that conceit very well, and thus SFRPG developers have historically shied away from this sort of design. Now, maybe that is less true today with some of the Transhumanist kind of conceptions of technology and such, but that has its own challenges (like how do you play a PC that becomes transcendent for one). Besides, such games only seem to have appeared really in the last 20 years, and its unlikely one RPG will rise to D&D-like popularity in the current market, there's just too much stuff out there.

Again, your assumptions here require, at the least, ignoring everything in the cyberpunk and related genres, as well as a large number of post-apocalypse games of various degrees of seriousness here.

Like I said, I'm willing to have a discussion of why fantasy has thrived proportion to everything else, but I don't think this thread is the place for it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't. Not if its your primary focus rather than authenticity or getting a strong set of story beats.



I'll direct you to Fragged Empire where physical rewards are a big part of the motivater. And there are any number of games going all the way back to Space Quest that used D&D style experience (heck, Hero System and GURPS which both have had space games did this, in a somewhat compacted way). Traveler is far from typical in how such games are handled.



D6 Space wasn't, even though it was derived from the same core mechanics. Neither were the variest Fuzion based games (most of which were SF/Anime based), most cyberpunk games (which are very much about accumulating experience and gear), Aftermath!, editions of Gamma World other than the first couple, and more. How much of a list do you need?



Levels are not necessary for advancement to be a motivator. At most they hammer the advancement zing a little harder because you get it all-at-once, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter or doesn't motivate people in the vast array of games that don't use levels.



And as you see, I disagree. Other than if you get overly focused on levels, rather than experience, I kind of think it requires a pretty parochial view of what's been available on the market to see otherwise. Traveler may have been very early, but its far from representative of how games in the genre go in general.



Again, your assumptions here require, at the least, ignoring everything in the cyberpunk and related genres, as well as a large number of post-apocalypse games of various degrees of seriousness here.

Like I said, I'm willing to have a discussion of why fantasy has thrived proportion to everything else, but I don't think this thread is the place for it.

I think what I'm getting out of this is we have different ideas of what 'SFRPG' consists of. Not only that, but I think I'm making a more definite point than you are. So, for example, d6 Space has SOME advancement (you can actually make your character stupid powerful in, say, combat if you do certain optimal things, for example). It doesn't have something like D&D advancement that you can point at and say "I've achieved X degree of advancement", and in fact if you choose more thematic and less optimal options in d6 Space your character could have a LOT of advancement, and not actually perform any differently than it did on day one. This is where D&D's model excels.

And, as I said, in terms of games that have been around since earlier D&D days, I don't know anything about 'Fragged Empire', but it is a game that was certainly written in the last 10 years. Maybe it has D&D-esque levels, I wouldn't know, but as I said before, it is unlikely to become overwhelmingly popular these days. So its hard to say it is evidence against my thesis...

I DO think something PRETTY CLOSE to levels actually IS required here. That's part of the thesis.

Anyway, I'm happy to discuss it elsewhere if you want.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Found it. But what the heck is with blogs being replaced by redirects to...well, shall we way "questionable" businesses? (Do not answer that question, this thread is in the weeds enough as it is! )

Deep in the Game: Flag Framing

web.archive.org

I'm well into the article and liking what I'm reading!

Honestly it pretty much reads like an outline for Apocalypse World, with a few minor technique variations, terminology, etc.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Found it. But what the heck is with blogs being replaced by redirects to...well, shall we way "questionable" businesses? (Do not answer that question, this thread is in the weeds enough as it is! )

Deep in the Game: Flag Framing

web.archive.org

I'm well into the article and liking what I'm reading!

Yeah, that was good stuff. And easily applicable to many different games.

 

[pemerton]

Can you say what value you saw in implying that players would avoid saying anything implausible?

I think the value of pointing it out is that @FrogReaver's apparent concern that "story now" RPGing will produce implausible events is unwarranted.

To check this, do you mean that wherever you wrote up thread anything to the effect that players would say what was plausible (or avoid saying what is implausible) you now say that the test of plausibility offers no value because the options are infinite?

As you're probably aware, we can exclude infinitely many things from a range of infinitely many options and still have infinitely many options left. (Eg if there are N (= cardinal number of the set of natural numbers) options, each correlated to a natural number, and I exclude all the options correlated to the odd numbers, I still have N options left.)

Now in the context of authorship of fiction I don't know if the number of possibilities is literally N, but for practical purposes it may as well be. Once the implausible options are excluded, I don't know what the literal number of possibilities left is, but for practical purposes it may as well be unlimited.

As I have posted, and as @Campbell posted also not far upthread, a requirement to "say what follows", without more, is nothing more than an instruction to play sincerely, to say sensible things, to no try and dice for beam weaponry in the duke's toilet (which is Luke Crane's example in the BW rulebook). Robin Laws also gives an example in the HeroQuest revised rulebook: just because a cowboy has Fast 20 while his horse has only Gallop 12 doesn't mean that the player of the cowboy can make a roll to try and outrun the horse! Assuming it is a reasonably sober western-themed game, even an average horse is faster than a fast cowboy. AbdulAlhazred has pointed to similar ideas of the "credibility test" in adjudicating Traveller: if it's a world of population 2 (ie somewhere between 30 and 300 people, or thereabouts), there are probably no PGMP-13s (ie portable plasma cannons) available even from the shadiest dealer.

But none of this bears upon the issue of setting stakes and resolving conflicts. If (for whatever genre or prior-fiction related reason) it's not plausible that there would be dirt on this enemy in this safe, then play is not going to get to the point of a player declaring an action to crack the safe so as to find the dirt. But it's the adjudication of that action declaration that we've been discussing for the past several pages. And at least for my part, I've been discussing it under the premise that the action declaration makes sense and doesn't violate any credibility tests.

Here's Campbell's post:

Saying what follows as a group is what we do in every roleplaying game ever designed or will be designed. The question at stake here is how we are actually going about the conversation. What's the process? What are the animating forces? What are we permitted to do? What are we expected to do? Who decides what? How do they decide? What constraints are they under? How do we maintain accountability with each other?

<snip>

Do you have something more specific in mind when it comes to saying what follows? What's the process? What are the constraints? What are the GM's duties? What are the player's responsibilities?

I've pointed to a process in Classic Traveller: the player specifies what item their PC wants (guns, licences, dirt); the GM sets a throw required, modified by Streetwise skill; the player makes the throw, and if they succeed their PC has learned where to get the stuff. The key thing being that the outcome is not the PC learns what some or other NPC believes but rather the PC learns where to get the stuff.

You've posted a procedure from 5e D&D, but it is not a procedure that results in the PC learning to get the stuff. It's a procedure for getting a NPC to tell you what they believe; but it doesn't settle anything about the truth of what they believe. That's a fundamental difference.

Module B2 Keep on the Borderlands has yet another procedure: at the start of the campaign, the GM rolls on a rumour table and tells the players things their PCs have heard on the rumour mill. The table is deliberately set up so that some of those things are true and some are false; the players therefore have to try and puzzle through the rumours they receive, correlate them with other information they might obtain while exploring the Caves, and do their best with the conclusions that result.

Each of these procedures is consistent with "say what follows", "resolve things playfully", "don't say implausible things". But each is very different. Which reinforces that "say what follows", "resolve playfully", "don't say implausible things" are not very tight constraints. They are features of all successful RPGing. But not all successful RPGing is the same in methods, principles or agenda.

In 5e Social Interaction, the player knows what has been done. Frex - they know that the accountant has done as asked - e.g. truthfully told them all they know about the location of the dirt - but unfortunately does not know its location... if that would follow from the conversation up to now.

How do the players know that what the accountant has sincerely told their PCs is, in fact, true?

To put it another way: interrogating the accountant is, in structural terms, no different from opening the safe. Task: We interrogate the accountant. Intent: We want to know if the dirt is in the safe. If task resolution is used, the characters can successfully interrogate the accountant, and have him sincerely ("truthfully") tell them there is no dirt in the safe, and yet it be the case that the dirt is in the safe, but the accountant just didn't know it (he didn't know about the false back of the safe with the dirt hidden behind it). Or the accountant can sincerely tell them that the dirt is in the safe and yet be wrong, because just this morning it got moved (the enemy being worried that the kidnapping of the accountant might reveal the location of the dirt).

This goes back to the quote from Paul Czege upthread:

My personal inclination is to call the traditional method "scene extrapolation," because the details of the Point A of scenes initiated using the method are typically arrived at primarily by considering the physics of the game world, what has happened prior to the scene, and the unrevealed actions and aspirations of characters that only the GM knows about.​

Those unrevealed actions and aspirations - be they the accountant's ignorance of the false back of the safe, or the enemy's machinations in moving the dirt - are not excluded by the 5e social resolution system that you posted. And in fact, in my personal observation of D&D play (based on its rulebooks, its published adventures, and the way that people post about their play of the game) those unrevealed action and aspirations seem to play a fundamental role in whole swathes of D&D play, determining when conflicts and situations are resolved or not.

The rule say that "The referee should set the throw required" and then gives examples. Page 20 of Book 1 (1977 version) also states the following general set of principles:

It is impossible for any table of information to cover all aspects of every potential situation, and the above listing is by no means complete in its coverage of the effects of skills. This is where the referee becomes an important part of the game process. The above listing of skills and game effects must necessarily be taken as a guide, and followed, altered, or ignored as the actual situation dictates. . . .

In order to be consistent (and a consistent universe makes the game both fun and interesting), the referee has a responsibility to record the throws and DMs he creates, and to note (perhaps by penciling in) any throws he alters from those given in these books.​

Referee can decide whether to alter or ignore skills and game effects.

The above listing of skills and game effects must necessarily be taken as a guide, and followed, altered or ignored as the actual situation dictates.

The subject of the verbs must necessarily be followed, altered or ignored is the above listing of skills and game effects. In other words, the referee is expected to treat the listing of skills and how they work as a guide, accommodated to the actual situation.

It doesn't say the referee can call for a check on Streetwise in accordance with the stated procedure and then ignore the result.

 

[pemerton]

This is especially so in that Apocalypse World's moves barely resemble task-type actions, and there are no skills! What the heck are "hard" or "sharp" in concrete simulationist terms? It's all about your style in navigating the imaginary world.

On this we don't quite agree.

The key principle for AW is "if you do it, you do it" (pp 12, 190). So the moves are specified in terms of things that character's do: they do things under fire, or dig in to endure fire, or go aggro on someone else, or try to seize things by force, or try to seduce or manipulate someone else, or read persons or charged situations, or open their brains to the world's psychic maelstrom.

The key point about the triggers for moves is that they are not specified in terms of intents - like, when you want someone to help you or when you want to escape from danger. They are specified as occurrences in the fiction. Which is actually pretty central to the design of the game.

The stats, too, establish something about the setting and the people who inhabit it. Hardholders, choppers and gunluggers are hard: these are the sorts of people who seize things by force and bully others about. It's like the high STR half-orc or barbarian in D&D, except this time they're not weirdly bad at intimidation!

Angels and drivers and sharp: these are the sorts of people who can size up any person or situation. This also establishes an immediate contrast between the two sorts of vehicle-oriented character (chopper and driver). In D&D this is a WIS-oriented character.

Battlebabes and operators are cool: not easily rattled, stealthy too (given the default rule that sneaking about is a type of acting under fire) - analogous to D&D DEX-oriented thieves but with a touch of CON or CHA thrown in.

Brainers, hocuses and savvyheads are weird: I think that speaks for itself. They are the ones who are attuned to the psychic maelstrom and the various ways it manifests.

Skinners are hot. That's pretty self-explanatory too. In D&D that's a high CHA.

I'm not trying to argue that AW is no different from D&D. But I am trying to avoid overstating the contrast. @AbdulAlhazred has posted not far upthread, and I agree, that stats and skills in 4e D&D are very much a character's style in navigating the imaginary world. But that style also tells us something about the character in the fiction. The chopper with +3 hard is not a 100 lb weakling from a Charles Atlas add. The skinner with +3 hot (from the Breathtaking playbook move) is not plain and poorly spoken. Just like the 4e wizard with 20 INT and +15 to all their knowledge skills is not an illiterate bumpkin.

All I can do is repeat that they are not simulationist concerns. The reason for using "objective" DCs is not to explore the fiction for its own sake. It is to establish the colour of the setting and situation. The Adventure Burner explains this (p 264):

[T]hese obstacles create setting. When a player acts in the game, he needs a difficulty for his test. The obstacle is the number; but it's also the object of adversity in the fiction. Obstacles, over time, create a sense of space and logic in the game world. When a player repeatedly meets the same obstacle for the same task, he knows what to expect and he knows how to set up his character to best overcome this problem, or he knows enough to find another way around.​

Some things are harder than others. And this colour then generates decision-making in the resolution system - FoRKing other skills, getting help, using gear, spending Fate and Persona, spending time practising to get better, etc. That's part of the point of the system.

Mate, the text you quote literally describes a simulation.

It describes establishing the colour of the setting, as something upon which the player (via their PC) acts. That's pretty central to roleplaying. Apocalypse World has this too - Make Apocalypse World seem real is at the top of the agenda items on p 108 - but because it uses a different resolution system - "if you do it, you do it" followed by soft or hard moves - it doesn't rely on varying obstacles to convey the setting.

It's not a simulation, in either case, because (to borrow @Campbell's phasing) the players can't, and are not expected to, poke and prod at the setting to find out what makes it tick and what it's inner logic is. The setting, with its depth and endurance and sense of reality, is being established for a different purpose.

This seems to be an extremely longwinded way to agree that what's in the safe is dependent on who opens it.

It's an explanation, with an example from actual play, of the way in which framing - what is at stake, what are the obstacles - and resolution, especially of failure, are established not just by the GM's ideas about what is in the imagined world but by what the PCs - the protagonists - are bringing to the situation. Who opens the safe may be fundamental to that, or a minor detail.

When spellbooks were found in Evard's tower, they ended up with Aramina but it may have been Thurgon who literally found them in his search of the tower. I don't remember. It didn't matter. Aramina had already staked her Belief in recalling the location of the tower (the successful Great Masters-wise test) and so letting Thurgon find them is a way of just "saying 'yes'" at this moment of play.