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="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8627578" data-attributes="member: 6790260">For my part, I definitely would prefer that it be fully spelled-out in both the PHB and the DMG, and I think that it would behoove the game to spend more page space on Quests if they're supposed to be this important (as said in the DMG). However, in practice, I've found them reasonably effective as they are. Not perfect, but little is, right? Of course that's a purely player perspective on it, so I may have just gotten lucky with DMs.See below re: player-driven gamism. As for "player empowerment," I see gamism generally as being already pretty player-empowering if it's handled correctly.That is, in a gamist game with really good design, everyone involved (player and DM alike) can in a sense "relax," unless they wish to do otherwise. The DM can comfortably assemble challenges, and trust that if the system tells them "this should be pretty easy" or "this should be pretty scary" (always with the caveat "...unless luck intervenes!"), then it most likely will be (within said caveat). The DM can just throw together whatever sounds cool, without being overly concerned about whether it's calibrated to the party. In fact, the DM may not even really need to know much about the party's capabilities at all; if the system is well-balanced, there's little need for a hyper-vigilant DM that nixes overpowered options or broken combos. Likewise, a player that wants to can go all out, hunting the best and most awesome stuff...but they can also just relax, do a few minimum things (e.g. raise their prime attributes, pick up an Expertise feat, that sort of thing) and then otherwise doing whatever sounds fun regardless of whether it's strong.I, personally, see this as a form of player empowerment, but it's "empowerment" in a way completely different from the "empowerment" of "Story Now." Instead of being anxious or blithe about future success and failure, players can confidently do what they like. Similarly, DMs no longer have to be ever-vigilant for whether a player playing a powerful class is getting too much spotlight time or whether allowing a particular build or option will lead to wonky balance issues, and can instead just fill the campaign with whatever content they think sounds interesting. (It is, not so coincidentally, this very empowerment which enables the distinct form that gives 4e some of its "Story Now" side: by making the game very good at being a game, the players can more-or-less detach from focusing on the game, and instead focus on what drives them, what things they Value, and what Issues will test those things.)AIUI, it is gamist in intent and focus, in part because it's a D&D game and D&D has always been pretty gamist. The narrativist/"Story Now" perspective on it is somewhere between "accidentally on purpose" (as in, they did things purposefully which led to it, but I don't think anyone believes that it was the designers' intent that these purposeful choices would do so) and "emergent." Sort of like how I don't actually believe the goal with 3e was to make an effective "process" Sim game, which is why you have some really funky things. However, people reading and playing it got a lot of "process" Sim from playing it, even though it isn't intentionally that kind of game.Really rigorous "process" Sim games generally shouldn't produce things like Pun-Pun, the peasant rail cannon, the locate city bomb, etc. Developing stuff like that is heavily gamist. But, for example, I see a certain shadow of "process" Sim in the attempted granularity of skills and skill points (which almost surely evolved for gamist reasons out of the heavily gamist NWPs of 2e, but their new form does have a certain semblance of "process" Sim.) Likewise, the principle behind Prestige Classes, and how they're supposed to be grounded in the world and a perfectly natural fit for a character e.g. that one should pick up a new PrC because it happens to fit how you've naturally grown, looks pretty "process" Sim-esque to me. And it's why people complained so much about the practice of them, which was extremely gamist and (IMNSHO) not in a good way, forcing players to carefully plan out character building, sometimes over the course of a dozen levels or more just to make sure they didn't miss out.Perhaps it would be best to say that 3e and 4e are both openly gamist games, but because of the way the rules were structured, how they were presented to DMs and players, and certain (relatively light) mechanical touches, it is possible to play the former in a "process" Sim-focused way, and the latter in a narrativist "Story Now"-way.For my part, the idea of "player-driven gamism" makes me think of "West Marches"-style games, but even that is a bit iffy as the game itself is doing most of the heavy lifting for declaring what "Score" is (e.g., higher levels, more money/treasure) and what "Achievement" means (surviving a long time, building up a power base, having the clout to send others to do your dirty work, etc.) I think your notion of Calvinball is actually spot on, and reveals exactly why "player-driven gamism" is extremely rare. Calvinball is supposed to be a game you can "win" at in some sense, but it is not supposed to be something that has clean, clear, pre-defined goals, strategies, or even general behaviors. Probably the closest games I can think of to this sort of thing are Nomic and Mao, and the latter much moreso than the former. (Nomic can become anything, so it can of course become this sort of thing, but I don't think it starts that way.) Mao preserves the competitiveness of Calvinball, but technically lacks the open-endedness (as usually each "version" has a fixed set of rules, you just aren't allowed to be taught them other than by testing them and getting penalized for breaking them.)So I guess it would be sort of a hybrid of Nomic and Mao, where rules may exist but they're changeable and may not be explicitly told; "Score" would thus be almost unrecognizable, as it would necessarily be idiosyncratic to each table or even each session, and "Achievement" would arise as much, if not more, from creatively inventing new rules as it would from creatively applying rules that already exist. I imagine "Score" would in part arise from how much of the rules-space a person is personally responsible for creating or reshaping.And, much like "Story Now" vs "Story Before," I can't imagine this being something wildly popular amongst the gaming public. If I may coin a possibly-foolish corollary, "Rules Now" vs "Rules Before" is almost always going to favor the latter, because a fair chunk of people derive joy from cleverly or proficiently using rules they already know about. Relatively few people derive a ton of joy from Calvinball-type experiences, which mostly leave people either bewildered or frustrated; it's extremely difficult to not just think seven moves ahead, but to think seven games ahead, because each move changes what moves are allowed to be made, not just which moves are currently available to be made.</blockquote>

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