NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8623525" data-attributes="member: 42582">I thought I might have a crack at responding to the OP.As per some of my recent posts, I think that it is quite helpful to separate techniques from goals/creative priorities/creative agendas.I also think that, when we discuss techniques, we have not to talk about not only mechanics but also principles/expectations on various participants, allocations of authority over the fiction that flow from those principles/expectations, etc.And even when we focus on mechanics, we have not only action resolution mechanics but also PC build mechanics and mechanics that govern setting generation (eg Traveller has a fair bit of this) or situation generation (wandering monster checks are this). Sometimes only the first is noted and the other two are neglected.On this point, <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/" target="_blank">Edwards has the following to say</a>:Gamism . . . operates at two levels: the real, social people and the imaginative, in-game situation. <ol style="margin-left: 20px"> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The players, armed with their understanding of the game and their strategic acumen, have to Step On Up. Step On Up requires strategizing, guts, and performance from the real people in the real world. This is the inherent "meaning" or agenda of Gamist play . . . Gamist play, socially speaking, demands performance with risk, conducted and perceived by the people at the table. What's actually at risk can vary - for this level, though, it must be a social, real-people thing, usually a minor amount of recognition or esteem. The commitment to, or willingness to accept this risk is the key - it's analogous to committing to the sincerity of The Dream for Simulationist play. This is the whole core of the essay, that such a commitment is fun and perfectly viable for role-playing, just as it's viable for nearly any other sphere of human activity. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The in-game characters, armed with their skills, priorities, and so on, have to face a Challenge, which is to say, a specific Situation in the imaginary game-world. Challenge is about the strategizing, guts, and performance of the characters in this imaginary game-world. For the characters, it's a risky situation in the game-world; in addition to that all-important risk, it can be as fabulous, elaborate, and thematic as any other sort of role-playing. Challenge is merely plain old Situation - it only gets a new name because of the necessary attention it must receive in Gamist play. Strategizing in and among the Challenge is the material, or arena, for whatever brand of Step On Up is operating. . . .</li> </ol> Competition is best understood as a productive add-on to Gamist play. Such play is fundamentally cooperative, but may include competition. That's not a contradiction: I'm using exactly the same logic as might be found at the poker and basketball games. You can't compete, socially, without an agreed-upon venue. If the cooperation's details are acceptable to everyone, then the competition within it can be quite fierce. . .  . So what is all this competition business about? It concerns conflict of interest. If person A's performance is only maximized by driving down another's performance, then competition is present. In Gamist play, this is not required - but it is very often part of the picture. Competition gives both Step On Up and Challenge a whole new feel - a bite. How does conflict of interest relate to Step On Up and to Challenge? The crucial answer is that it may be present twice, independently, within the two-level structure. <ul style="margin-left: 20px"> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Competition at the Step On Up level = conflict of interest regarding players' performance and impact on the game-world.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Competition at the Challenge level = conflict of interest among characters' priorities (survival, resource accumulation, whatever) in the game-world.</li> </ul> Think of each level having a little red dial, from 1 to 11 - and those dials can be twisted independently. Therefore, four extremes of dial-twisting may be compared. <ol style="margin-left: 20px"> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">High competition in Step On Up plus low competition in Challenge = entirely team-based play, party style against a shared Challenge, but with value placed on some other metric of winning among the real people, such as levelling-up faster, having the best stuff, having one's player-characters be killed less often, getting more Victory Points, or some such thing. Most Tunnels & Trolls play is like this.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Low competition in Step On Up plus high competition in Challenge = characters are constantly scheming on one another or perhaps openly trying to kill or outdo another but the players aren't especially competing, because consequences to the player are low per unit win/loss. Kobolds Ate My Baby and the related game, Ninja Burger, play this way.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">High competition in both levels = moving toward the Hard Core (see below), including strong rules-manipulation, often observed in variants of Dungeons & Dragons as well in much LARP play. A risky way to play, but plenty of fun if you have a well-designed system like Rune.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Low competition in both levels = strong focus on Step On Up and Challenge but with little need for conflict-of-interest. Quite a bit of D&D based on story-heavy published scenarios plays this way. It shares some features with "characters face problem" Simulationist play, with the addition of a performance metric of some kind. Some T&T play Drifted this way as well, judging by many Sorcerer's Apprentice articles.</li> </ol> Things get more complex than this, because different roles for GM and players lead to combinations of the above categories within a single game. For instance, players can cooperate as a party and compete with the GM, for instance, given a rules-set that limits GM options (a combination of #1 and #2). This shouldn't be confused with cooperating with one another, cooperating with the GM, and competing against the GM's characters (#4).Maybe there's more that could be said about win/lose, challenge, and competition in gamist play, but I think that's a good start: we have the real-world step-on-up level, which may or may not involve competition (contrast, eg, D&D tables where players show off their builds - low competition at the step-on-up level - with tables where they compete to have the highest-level PC - high competition at the step-on-up level); and the in-fiction challenge level, which also may or may not involve competition (contrast, eg, D&D tables where the players have their PCs cooperate to beat the GM's encounters, with ones where the PCs compete with one another to grab the best magic items).Well, I don't know about "we", but when I say that D&D is "gamist" I mean what Edwards means: that much D&D play has a step-on-up aspect to it, and that the game has mechanical components (eg a la carte PC building with many interacting elements; resource management requirements) that allow that step-on-up aspect to be pursued by the game participants. It also brings cultural/"meta" expectations that the players will have their PCs confront and try and overcome the problems the GM puts in front of them.Note Edwards' comparison of, and contrast drawn between, gamist play and the sort of play that Edwards calls characters-face-problems-simuationism (a type of high-concept simulationism). In contemporary D&D play, the line between these two orientations/approaches is (I think) a pretty fine one. As Edward says, it depends on whether or not there is a performance measure (typically informal) for play. If I see a poster complain about 5e D&D being on "easy mode", I think that person does have such a performance measure, and so has a gamist orientation even though most of their techniques are probably the same as a simulatioinst-inclined 5e RPGer who just enjoys working through the adventure path and finding out what happens to their PC.I also think some of the standard sorts of discussions one sees around D&D play reveal the thinness of this line. For instance, the typical occurrence of combat challenges in D&D adventures reflects its gamist orientation. But typically the overarching "story" needs the PCs to succeed at those challenges - hence discussions around fudging, milestone levelling, whether or not to start new PCs at 1st level, etc. There is a bit of a clash here between the gamism and the characters-face-problems-simulationism, because the standard techniques for making the "story" work - ie for satisfying the simulationist imperative - tend to undercut the integrity of the measurement of performance, ie the gamist imperative.It wouldn't be too rash a generalisation to say that various forms of this tension have dominated the D&D "meta" since the early-to-mid 1980s.</blockquote>

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