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

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think it’s just because you’ve not peeled back the assumptions in your example.

What’s determined the NPC has the information in the first place? Isn’t your ‘hot’ skill what’s doing the work there? And if so isn’t whether the NPC has the information unrelated to your hot skill and the most important aspect and Yet the hot skill check resolves that as well.

Or take a slightly different example. Say it was established the NPC had the info. At that point it becomes process/sim because your characters fictional ability to seduce is fictionally and substantially related to why you were able to get the info.

This seems to be why I stay so confused in these discussions, because I’ve always easily picked up on sim elements but while conflict resolution play can sometimes momentarily become task/sim play it doesn’t have to be.

I personally take this in the same way as I take the whole "Its all gamist because the goal of any RPG must be to enjoy the act of playing it" argument. Sure, there's an element of "in the fictional sense X follows from Y" in ANY RPG (except maybe a few way out ones like Toon where the action is all literally nonsense). However, if the discussion is about AGENDA, then it is quite possible for the plausibility/accuracy/verisimilitude/whatever of the action in the game's fiction to be unimportant to the players except to the degree that it establishes a thought structure, fictional position, which the participants in the game can use to make the game 'go' and not fall apart.

So, sure, hotness attribute 'explains' why I can 'seduce'. This need not be any more plausible or accurate than is needed to get buy in from the participants so that they can all imagine the hot character doing his thing.

I think how you are reasoning is what lead people in the late '70s and early '80s to imagine that some 'perfectly accurate simulation' would magically make every story 'work'. They confused the imaginary causality of events with what makes games 'go'. They seem to have believed that the troubles with doing that stemmed from lack of verisimilitude. That is, the "you plot to assassinate the king" story couldn't work in a D&D game because the rules are not an accurate enough simulation of reality to reproduce an assassination. Obviously this conception was deeply flawed! It did lead to much mental horsepower being expended on ideas around how to construct a 'game engine' that would be both playable and highly realistic. This was the impetus for the endless exploration of different skill systems, dice pools, and various other things like 'skill trees', etc. etc. etc. None of it ever really bore any fruit.

 

[clearstream]

I think that my general response to the 'chain of decisions' argument is that there's still one proximate decision which established that fact. I don't think it does us much good to talk about a whole series of decisions (establishments of facts within the fiction) as being determinative, because that is subject to infinite expansion to the point where everything we have ever determined about the fiction since session 0 has some significance. It is like the the Buddhist view of causality, it may be very true in some sense, but it is not valuable to us in terms of explicating the play at any one moment at the table, and is in another sense false. I mean, our legal system clearly operates on a similar basis, mothers are not held to be culpable because they gave birth to murderers, for example.

I would point to something of a leap in your doubts, which is that it's unjustified to say that it is subject to infinite expansion.

To get from first suggestions of a chain to some crucial moment will occur within one session, or a couple of sessions, or be a long arc. In the last case, the count of events that tick toward it will typically be low on a per session basis. In the other cases, decisions (of the sort we've been dicussing) bearing on a chain while many in number, will be vastly fewer than infinite.

You would hopefully agree that the RPG "conversation" at any point is informed by what came before it: the fiction, secured by the continual cycle of validation against fictional positioning, the system, secured by maintenance of state. Remember that I am not talking about events that might have happened outside our window during play, I am speaking specifically of those events that formed part of our play.

It is possible to picture disjunctions, such as we end a session, take a long break, and resume with no idea of what came before. However, we also maintain ephemera of play that helps remind what we'd agreed to that point was true. So we might well resume with vague memories, but still with a shared fiction and system state and still able to go forward together from there. It doesn't matter that what we go forward with is not faithful to all that preceded it. It only matters that as a group we say what it is and accept it as such. Thus, in the end, it is the process that you would need to have doubts over, because it is tolerant of disjunctions.

However, you obviously can have the doubts you do - I do not have such doubts, but then our experiences are not identical - and that does not leave us with any obvious way forward. It's been a really interesting thread and I've been able to understand some things a lot better (and some of those things are things about myself - I've been able to understand some of my own experiences better). So thank you all!

I'm officially on holiday shortly, so I won't say more for a few weeks. I won't be able to stop myself from reading the thread, even so! So any new examples or ideas you have I will surely see. If the thread is still going when I'm back I might well rejoin at post 5000 or so!!

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, well, it isn't one of the major points of discussion in this thread really, but my point comes close to saying 'setting doesn't matter'. That is, any sort of story can manufactured out of appeals to 'setting logic', hidden backstory, etc. at any given point in the play of an RPG. The idea that only certain things follow, that fiction itself is in any way binding to those with authority over it, doesn't fly. I think the fiction SIGNALS things from those in authority over it, and the "adhere to criteria which espouse..." in my previous comment is meant to convey that there are, presumably, criteria which are important to other participants which a GM in such a position would likely factor into their description of what happens next. Fiction by itself is just a very weak kind of constraint.

I think that's very much dependent on the practioner(s) involved; for some its a strong one because there's a great degree of dissonance in moving outside what feels like a naturalistic extension of what's been already established, and for others its just the frame whatever story one is interested in writing has. The latter is, of course, what you're talking about but I don't think it does the discussion any good to not accept people in the first category exist.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I personally take this in the same way as I take the whole "Its all gamist because the goal of any RPG must be to enjoy the act of playing it" argument.

I think if you're addressing my argument in this, the reason you're having an issue with it is you're using "playing it" much more expansively than I am.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would point to something of a leap in your doubts, which is that it's unjustified to say that it is subject to infinite expansion.

To get from first suggestions of a chain to some crucial moment will occur within one session, or a couple of sessions, or be a long arc. In the last case, the count of events that tick toward it will typically be low on a per session basis. In the other cases, decisions (of the sort we've been dicussing) bearing on a chain while many in number, will be vastly fewer than infinite.

You would hopefully agree that the RPG "conversation" at any point is informed by what came before it: the fiction, secured by the continual cycle of validation against fictional positioning, the system, secured by maintenance of state. Remember that I am not talking about events that might have happened outside our window during play, I am speaking specifically of those events that formed part of our play.

Well, I'm talking about play as well, but I also include all the POSSIBLE elements of fiction. I mean, it may be in Story Now that's nothing, but in a typical 5e D&D campaign its really pretty much infinity, the GM can simply generate such fictional causes as and when desired!

It is possible to picture disjunctions, such as we end a session, take a long break, and resume with no idea of what came before. However, we also maintain ephemera of play that helps remind what we'd agreed to that point was true. So we might well resume with vague memories, but still with a shared fiction and system state and still able to go forward together from there. It doesn't matter that what we go forward with is not faithful to all that preceded it. It only matters that as a group we say what it is and accept it as such. Thus, in the end, it is the process that you would need to have doubts over, because it is tolerant of disjunctions.

Again, assuming that there is a strict limitation to shared fiction. I think this is an interesting point WRT any 'Zero Myth' play, that it removes a lot of this sort of thing from consideration. That is, the GM may be framing scenes (in say Dungeon World) and thus invent 'reasons' as-needed for stuff, but the ONLY reason for them to do so is to address things right there at the table. This does have an effect on the character of the sorts of fictional causality that are likely to be invoked in play.

However, you obviously can have the doubts you do - I do not have such doubts, but then our experiences are not identical - and that does not leave us with any obvious way forward. It's been a really interesting thread and I've been able to understand some things a lot better (and some of those things are things about myself - I've been able to understand some of my own experiences better). So thank you all!

I'm officially on holiday shortly, so I won't say more for a few weeks. I won't be able to stop myself from reading the thread, even so! So any new examples or ideas you have I will surely see. If the thread is still going when I'm back I might well rejoin at post 5000 or so!!

have a good one!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that's very much dependent on the practioner(s) involved; for some its a strong one because there's a great degree of dissonance in moving outside what feels like a naturalistic extension of what's been already established, and for others its just the frame whatever story one is interested in writing has. The latter is, of course, what you're talking about but I don't think it does the discussion any good to not accept people in the first category exist.

I'm not at all denying they exist, in fact THEY ARE what I would call 'people with a simulationist agenda' in all probability. However, I do think that even a GM that wants the utmost verisimilitude is also bound to consider other things. I mean, suppose you devised a 'living sandbox', you will STILL need to arrange it such that the PCs don't encounter some level 10 monstrosity the minute they exit the gates of the keep to hexplore, right? You may provide an explanation like "the nasty monsters were all driven off by the Holy Knights of Decorative Shrubbery" but the object is still playability. That kind of consideration is simply unavoidable in real working games. And notice that said GM came up with an in-fiction reason for the dearth of nasty monsters in the keep's vicinity, it wasn't exactly hard to do that!

 

[niklinna]

Subject to @Campbell's point that I've quoted, if the player has their PC do something that triggers a move then they're making that move.
[...]
So the player's intent isn't really a factor (again, subject to the go aggro vs seduce/manipulate distinction). It's what their PC does.

It may not be a factor in the mechanics, but there's a fiction being spun too, which usually involves character motivations. I'm not going to show up to the table and roll a die to decide every action my character takes. I don't have to reel off my rationale, either as player or character, for my actions, but I do have some fictional position in terms of the situation. That's all I'm saying.

This is why the design of moves is so fundamental in a PbtA game: by choosing to make things moves, you're making those the fulcrum on which stakes turn. Because otherwise, if no move is triggered by an action declaration, here's how it works (from pp 116-7):

Perhaps it has appeared that am I talking from the perspective of a GM?

 

[niklinna]

This is really bizarre 'no true Scotsman' wriggling. If you are drawing the difficulty of the safe opening from the quality of the chest in the fictional world, then that mechanic absolutely is modelling, simulating, that fictional world. Mechanics that "create a sense of space and logic in the game world" are absolutely simulationistic mechanics.

It's all a matter of degree. Any mechanic that references real-world considerations is simulationist, of course. Without some amount of that, you don't have a role-playing game. But for this case, for this game, it's not a priority, and rules around it will be minimal in number and detail.

 

[niklinna]

It would be a crap GM who in any SN game who would simply hand the PC the object of their ultimate aim on a silver platter for the cost of risking one move. Also, remember, the whole point is really to confront what the character IS, or some other premise potentially, not to just run around giving out good and bad outcomes for checks. This is why the GM frames scenes instead of the players! They can't generate tension, and IT IS THE PLAY WE ARE AFTER, not the results of the play. This is identical to its Gygaxian parallel, the GM doesn't make one room dungeons with a pile of treasure and one tough monster and call it a day.

I have been in games where the GM had a player other than the one spotlighted in the scene do the framing. It could go wrong, but I haven't seen it do so yet. Players in this particular type of game are usually happy to turn the screws on fellow players!

 

[niklinna]

I'm not at all denying they exist, in fact THEY ARE what I would call 'people with a simulationist agenda' in all probability. However, I do think that even a GM that wants the utmost verisimilitude is also bound to consider other things. I mean, suppose you devised a 'living sandbox', you will STILL need to arrange it such that the PCs don't encounter some level 10 monstrosity the minute they exit the gates of the keep to hexplore, right? You may provide an explanation like "the nasty monsters were all driven off by the Holy Knights of Decorative Shrubbery" but the object is still playability. That kind of consideration is simply unavoidable in real working games. And notice that said GM came up with an in-fiction reason for the dearth of nasty monsters in the keep's vicinity, it wasn't exactly hard to do that!

If the GM and players are concerned with utmost verisimilitude (and for their sake I would hope they share priorities), then that GM definitely need not prioritize arranging things such that a level 10 monstrosity isn't right outside the gates...depending on what we mean by "arranging", since the state of the game world at the beginning of the play does need to be determined somehow. Even, then, whether the GM deliberately places the monster or a die roll against a table does it, the GM is also going to figure out some reason for the monster being there too. And the mere presense of a monster right outside the gates doesn't mean they're just going to sit there blocking the only exit: It might get hungry and go hunting, it likely has to sleep, the PCs might figure another way out of the keep, and so on.

Dialing back on that for playability is of course a sensible option, and doing so would reflect a healthy understanding of modulating and balancing priorities rather then extreme agenda purism (which is a reflection of reifying modes of play in each moment to rigid typologies of gamers and games into singular monolithic buckets, which, sadly, happens all too often).