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

[Micah Sweet]

Oh, I agree that the two 'inventories' are not precisely the same. I think the main distinguishing feature is just that there's no real cognitive equivalent of 'encumbrance'. It may, realistically, be true that one person can likely only know a finite amount of stuff, but RPGs are unlikely to come up against any such limit, practically speaking. That does beg the question though of why a system like BitD's is rejected, as it has sufficient plausibility (and certainly seems like it also invokes player creativity and skill). I still think the most significant factor here is just that people like what they are already comfortable with. I mean, if I never played an RPG, then sure I'll glom onto the concept of such a game, as it isn't challenging something else. OTOH when you tell me there's a heterodox way to do something, well, most people will approach it with skepticism, at best. lol.

I certainly don't reject it, I just don't care for the concept outside of a game with that specific sensibility and intention. Good in BtiD and similar games. Less good elsewhere.

 

[pemerton]

I don’t know that knowledge checks function similarly to flashbacks. Knowledge checks seem like an acknowledgement that the character knows more about the world they live in than the player, because that world was created by the gm.

But if you were to start a thread that explained that the function of knowledge checks, perception checks, "I speak to the guard" checks, etc is for the players to learn what the GM has decided about the fiction, you will have any number of posters telling you that you are wrong, you are derisive of their approach to RPGing etc.

I know because I've tried it!

in practice its impossible to know everything a character knows about their subjects of expertise, where its not impossible to know everything that exists in your pack.

Whether or not the first claim is true I'll pass over.

But the second claim is not plausible to me. I'm not sure that I can tell you everything that is in my backpack that I take back and forth to work every day. I definitely can't tell you everything that is on my desk, either at work or at home. I can't tell you everything that is in my cupboards, or on my bookshelves. (Not all the books, let alone the pamphlets and maps, let alone the knick-knacks).

The way that classic D&D creates the illusion of a total inventory is by (i) being incredibly, implausibly sparse, and (ii) glossing over details (eg you have "iron rations" but we don't say anything about what they are, what sort of container they might be in, etc). And (ii) is just what BitD does, only more systematically and with a different rule for who gets to fill in the details when.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Oh, I agree that the two 'inventories' are not precisely the same. I think the main distinguishing feature is just that there's no real cognitive equivalent of 'encumbrance'. It may, realistically, be true that one person can likely only know a finite amount of stuff, but RPGs are unlikely to come up against any such limit, practically speaking. That does beg the question though of why a system like BitD's is rejected, as it has sufficient plausibility (and certainly seems like it also invokes player creativity and skill). I still think the most significant factor here is just that people like what they are already comfortable with. I mean, if I never played an RPG, then sure I'll glom onto the concept of such a game, as it isn't challenging something else. OTOH when you tell me there's a heterodox way to do something, well, most people will approach it with skepticism, at best. lol.

Its not just that, though. As I averred elsewhere, there's a difference between plausibility of outcome and dissonance of process. When it comes to character knowledge, people often don't even know what they know in real life until its time to retrieve it in many cases. The way our "encumbrance" works in that area is complex and our retrieval of same is a linear process. Basically, the very question of whether you Know X is what let's you know if you Know X in some cases, and in some cases you have to "look" for it. This becomes very obvious to some of us as you get older and things get put "in the back of the closet" as it were. And that's with actual possession of the information, not just the emulation of it that is what's going on in an RPG.

(There are some other issues there that come up; I think that to represent fields of knowledge properly you could really use a better model than a pure die roll in many cases but it'd probably get stupid complex really quick).

On the other hand, its not only possible to know what you have on your person when traveling, people wh do so frequently usually do (especially when likely to be away from resupply). So there's a dissonance for that not being true for some people with one that simply doesn't exist with the other.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I certainly don't reject it, I just don't care for the concept outside of a game with that specific sensibility and intention. Good in BtiD and similar games. Less good elsewhere.

To be fair to some other participants, that doesn't really explain why you don't care for it though. Its entirely possible for it be a purely packed matter of taste, but that doesn't leave much to talk about.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Whether or not the first claim is true I'll pass over.

Its not a trivial part of my point, you know.

But the second claim is not plausible to me. I'm not sure that I can tell you everything that is in my backpack that I take back and forth to work every day. I definitely can't tell you everything that is on my desk, either at work or at home. I can't tell you everything that is in my cupboards, or on my bookshelves. (Not all the books, let alone the pamphlets and maps, let alone the knick-knacks).

You are not, however, someone who is dependent on the contents of your backpack being necessary to your survival, and being away from immediate resupply in a potentially hostile situation. I can promise you if you talk to people who do find themselves in that situation regularly, they'll have a very good idea what they have with them, and in fact check it quite regularly when setting out. This parallels what PCs in most games where inventory is relevant do quite well.

The way that classic D&D creates the illusion of a total inventory is by (i) being incredibly, implausibly sparse, and (ii) glossing over details (eg you have "iron rations" but we don't say anything about what they are, what sort of container they might be in, etc). And (ii) is just what BitD does, only more systematically and with a different rule for who gets to fill in the details when.

I'll again argue that often that's because it again doesn't matter. Similarly in the above, if you asked a backpacker what his freeze dried food was in he'd probably say "Uh, some kind of plastic?" because he doesn't need to know; its not relevant to the functional issues unless something really unusual happens. As I've mentioned before in regard to "kits" it only comes up when someone is trying to use something "off label" as it were.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But if you were to start a thread that explained that the function of knowledge checks, perception checks, "I speak to the guard" checks, etc is for the players to learn what the GM has decided about the fiction, you will have any number of posters telling you that you are wrong, you are derisive of their approach to RPGing etc.

I know because I've tried it!

Whether or not the first claim is true I'll pass over.

But the second claim is not plausible to me. I'm not sure that I can tell you everything that is in my backpack that I take back and forth to work every day. I definitely can't tell you everything that is on my desk, either at work or at home. I can't tell you everything that is in my cupboards, or on my bookshelves. (Not all the books, let alone the pamphlets and maps, let alone the knick-knacks).

The way that classic D&D creates the illusion of a total inventory is by (i) being incredibly, implausibly sparse, and (ii) glossing over details (eg you have "iron rations" but we don't say anything about what they are, what sort of container they might be in, etc). And (ii) is just what BitD does, only more systematically and with a different rule for who gets to fill in the details when.

Yeah, here we circle back to my, ever unpopular, point about the GENERAL sparseness of fiction in RPGs. I mean, it may also be the case in other sorts of fiction, like novels, that much is not just unsaid but actually unknown to anyone including the author. But uniquely in RPGs this matters a lot more since it is a SHARED incomplete fiction. The GM doesn't know what the players might engage with, and the players don't know what things the GM has or has not filled in beforehand, or is simply 'coloring in' at play time.

For example, rummaging in my laptop bag that I take to work every few days there are a whole bunch of pieces of paper, some cabling, a fork, a plastic table knife, 3 napkins, a pencil, and a pad of postit notes. None of this stuff takes up enough space for me to care about, so it just stays there, and the other day when I needed a fork, it was there! What if my D&D character needed a fork? Why not have a way to see if I've inadvertently left one in the 'pack trash' in his satchel? Seems perfectly reasonable to me, and that fork could save your life! Heck, I could probably tie someone up with the cables, draw a small map on one postit, and leave a message for someone on another. Sounds kinda useful, in the right situation.

It always seems odd to me that there should be any real resistance to the idea of having mechanics that simulate that kind of thing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

To be fair to some other participants, that doesn't really explain why you don't care for it though. Its entirely possible for it be a purely packed matter of taste, but that doesn't leave much to talk about.

I don't like the idea of deciding something in the physical world of the game to have always been true as an effort of player will when it would be advantageous. I know knowledge checks are conceptually similar, but they feel quite different. To expound further I feel would just lead to other posters explaining how my opinion is wrong, and I really don't need that today.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Its not just that, though. As I averred elsewhere, there's a difference between plausibility of outcome and dissonance of process. When it comes to character knowledge, people often don't even know what they know in real life until its time to retrieve it in many cases. The way our "encumbrance" works in that area is complex and our retrieval of same is a linear process. Basically, the very question of whether you Know X is what let's you know if you Know X in some cases, and in some cases you have to "look" for it. This becomes very obvious to some of us as you get older and things get put "in the back of the closet" as it were. And that's with actual possession of the information, not just the emulation of it that is what's going on in an RPG.

(There are some other issues there that come up; I think that to represent fields of knowledge properly you could really use a better model than a pure die roll in many cases but it'd probably get stupid complex really quick).

On the other hand, its not only possible to know what you have on your person when traveling, people wh do so frequently usually do (especially when likely to be away from resupply). So there's a dissonance for that not being true for some people with one that simply doesn't exist with the other.

Well, as I demonstrated in my last post, it wasn't even possible for me to know what was in my own carrying bag, lol. So I'm a bit dubious that simplistic sparse inventories with things like "Iron Rations" really tells us the whole story. The real world is just much more 'textured' than our descriptions of imagined worlds, and that has real consequence.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, as I demonstrated in my last post, it wasn't even possible for me to know what was in my own carrying bag, lol. So I'm a bit dubious that simplistic sparse inventories with things like "Iron Rations" really tells us the whole story. The real world is just much more 'textured' than our descriptions of imagined worlds, and that has real consequence.

The answer to that, to me, is not to decide what is actually in your carry bag based on what you want to be there at the time.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't like the idea of deciding something in the physical world of the game to have always been true as an effort of player will when it would be advantageous. I know knowledge checks are conceptually similar, but they feel quite different. To expound further I feel would just lead to other posters explaining how my opinion is wrong, and I really don't need that today.

To be perfectly clear, I think the use of inventory at least was established as an element of play from very early in the development of D&D, along with the convention of depicting the action in a 'stream of consciousness' kind of style where things always take place (mostly) in a chronological order, at least in terms of any specific character. Maybe this is actually part of the 'Braunstein' legacy. Since Dave's D&D play arose directly out of a LARP-like kind of RP where it would be impossible to mess with time (impractical at the very least) that just naturally carried over into D&D. Nor was it, IME since I played back in the mid-70s, particularly noted by most of us. We just did it that way because 'that is how it is done'. Nobody even thought to try anything different (well, not in my crowd anyway, undoubtedly those crazy people on the West Coast subverted this sometime around Jan 1 1975...).

So, no, nothing about it is wrong at all! Neither is it 'right', it is just what it is. I do think, particularly back maybe 10 years ago or so, when a lot of us started talking here about different ways of playing there was a pretty strong backlash of people saying literally "THAT IS WRONG!" It seems like the leaf has turned largely at this point though. Many prefer older ways, which is cool though. Maybe even some newer types of play rely on linear time too, I'm not sure.