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Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8628514" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Well, you're welcome to offer another description. <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Here</a>'s another way that Edwards puts it:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">Simulationist play works as an underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented moments. It differs from the Explorative chassis for Narrativist play, even an extensive one, in that one really has to <em>stop</em> addressing Premise and focus on in-game causality per se. Such scenes or details can take on an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract (e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up pleasing neither enough to attract them further.</p><p></p><p>To me, imaging pages of detail of military hardware, or pages of detail of different sorts of swords and polearms and how they might interact with different sorts of armour, seems like it is enjoying the fiction for its own sake. It is sheer imagination. I rarely do this for weapons, but have done it for castles (when I was quite a bit younger than I am now) and for religions (when I was younger, though not quite as young). It's imagining - enjoying a fiction - to no other end than the pleasure of imagining.</p><p></p><p>Nothing. There are some people who make furniture because they enjoy the process of woodworking. They may also end up enjoying what they make for its own sake, but that's not why they do it.</p><p></p><p></p><p>These two quotes appear to be in contradiction.</p><p></p><p>Using PbtA mechanics to play a GM-curated story would be high concept sim, as [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] noted. (And he gave some examples of PbtA games along these lines. I've seen people on ENworld post about Dungeon World play that seems to be along these lines.)</p><p></p><p>Using Rolemaster mechanics to play story now is . . . <drumroll> . . . story now. As I noted upthread, Edwards calls it "vanilla narrativism". This is not hypothetical conjecture, by the way. I've done it.</p><p></p><p>To borrow Edwards' phrase, the points are "points" in the Lit 101 sense. I don't think the list of "points" I gave is very profound, or especially specific. It's the bread and butter of fantasy fiction - REH, JRRT, Ursula Le Guin, Arthruian Legend, The Iliad, a lot of super hero comics, all involve this sort of thing.</p><p></p><p>For reasons I don't understand, you seem to ignore the word "now" in "story now", and to ignore the different sorts of relationship someone can have to some bit of fiction.</p><p></p><p>Dragonlance-style RPGing is a classic example of high concept sim. Someone has written/prepped a story. The story has a point. The players play through the story. They get to enjoy the story, including its point. The players of the game, in the course of their play, are not themselves engaged in authoring a story with a point. They are audience, not authors.</p><p></p><p>Story now play is about participants as authors. (Of course they are also audience, for one another's play. But that is not what is distinctive about story now. It is the authorship, via play, that is distinctive.) The "point" is presented, reacted to, built upon, etc, <em>in play</em>. That is why, as Edwards says, there is no "the story" in story now RPGing. It is why GM-enforced alignment is inimical to it. Because those are devices for bringing in an already-authored resolution.</p><p> </p><p>When you talk about the point being "explored via play" there seem to be two possibilities. (1) The player explores, via play, what is involved in being a loyal samurai or an honourable paladin or a cleric of Pelor, etc. That is classic simulationist play: the parameters of the role, and in this case the commitments the role involves, are established in advance (often by the GM) and the player experiences them. I see a lot of advocacy for this sort of play, especially in the context of GM's telling players what it means to be a cleric of a certain god.</p><p></p><p>(2) The GM establishes situations that test the meaning of being a loyal samurai, or an honourable paladin, or a cleric of Pelor, etc, and the expectation is that the player will <em>make a call</em> about that, thereby expressing some idea of their own about what loyalty, or honour, or religious devotion, demand, and when those demands might be disregarded in pursuit of some other end. Vincent Baker has a nice discussion of this sort of approach, in DitV pp 138, 140, 143:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">You can’t have a hero and a villain among your NPCs. It’s the PCs’ choices that make them so. The PCs are empowered to turn sin into goodness sake <em>doctrine</em> if they think it’s the right thing to do. How are you gonna decide up front who comes out on top? . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">You’re not providing judgment for the players the way you have to if you’ve pre-decided who the villain is. Instead, you’ve presented your interesting moral situation, the PCs can’t walk away from it, they have to cut through its knot somehow and leave the town better off. So, what do they think?</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">They’ll surprise you. They’ll take sides you never expected. People just endlessly delight me and one of the reasons they do is because of their capacity to take surprising sides. Watch, you’ll see. . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">Your job is to present the situation and then escalate it. The players’ job is to pronounce judgment and follow through. . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">[T]he GM has no opportunity to pass effective judgment on a PC’s actions. Talk about ’em, sure, but never come down on them as righteous or sinful in a way that’s binding in the game world. The GM can’t give or withhold dice for the state of a PC’s soul, and thus never needs to judge it.</p><p></p><p>If that is how you're playing, then you are playing story now. I've done this in AD&D (ignoring the alignment rules, as I mentioned upthread). I've done this in Rolemaster. I've done this in 4e D&D. To be blunt, I've never seen anyone post about this sort of play in 3E or 5e D&D, but for all I know it's happening out there.</p><p></p><p>But not the resolution. That's the whole point.</p><p></p><p>If you don't think there's a difference between the GM and/or the game system telling you what the answer is (who the villain is, what the right thing to do is, etc) - whether expressly, or via the myriad informal cues that can be generated in RPGing (like "don't split the party" or "don't generate intraparty conflict" or "follow the GM's hook or we'll have no game this evening") - and the players establishing their own answers via play, then I can't take this any further. Story now RPGing is premised on exactly that difference - the difference between authorship and audience, as it can be uniquely experienced in the context of RPGing.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8628514, member: 42582"] Well, you're welcome to offer another description. [url=http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html]Here[/url]'s another way that Edwards puts it: [indent]Simulationist play works as an underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented moments. It differs from the Explorative chassis for Narrativist play, even an extensive one, in that one really has to [i]stop[/i] addressing Premise and focus on in-game causality per se. Such scenes or details can take on an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract (e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up pleasing neither enough to attract them further.[/indent] To me, imaging pages of detail of military hardware, or pages of detail of different sorts of swords and polearms and how they might interact with different sorts of armour, seems like it is enjoying the fiction for its own sake. It is sheer imagination. I rarely do this for weapons, but have done it for castles (when I was quite a bit younger than I am now) and for religions (when I was younger, though not quite as young). It's imagining - enjoying a fiction - to no other end than the pleasure of imagining. Nothing. There are some people who make furniture because they enjoy the process of woodworking. They may also end up enjoying what they make for its own sake, but that's not why they do it. These two quotes appear to be in contradiction. Using PbtA mechanics to play a GM-curated story would be high concept sim, as [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] noted. (And he gave some examples of PbtA games along these lines. I've seen people on ENworld post about Dungeon World play that seems to be along these lines.) Using Rolemaster mechanics to play story now is . . . <drumroll> . . . story now. As I noted upthread, Edwards calls it "vanilla narrativism". This is not hypothetical conjecture, by the way. I've done it. To borrow Edwards' phrase, the points are "points" in the Lit 101 sense. I don't think the list of "points" I gave is very profound, or especially specific. It's the bread and butter of fantasy fiction - REH, JRRT, Ursula Le Guin, Arthruian Legend, The Iliad, a lot of super hero comics, all involve this sort of thing. For reasons I don't understand, you seem to ignore the word "now" in "story now", and to ignore the different sorts of relationship someone can have to some bit of fiction. Dragonlance-style RPGing is a classic example of high concept sim. Someone has written/prepped a story. The story has a point. The players play through the story. They get to enjoy the story, including its point. The players of the game, in the course of their play, are not themselves engaged in authoring a story with a point. They are audience, not authors. Story now play is about participants as authors. (Of course they are also audience, for one another's play. But that is not what is distinctive about story now. It is the authorship, via play, that is distinctive.) The "point" is presented, reacted to, built upon, etc, [i]in play[/i]. That is why, as Edwards says, there is no "the story" in story now RPGing. It is why GM-enforced alignment is inimical to it. Because those are devices for bringing in an already-authored resolution. When you talk about the point being "explored via play" there seem to be two possibilities. (1) The player explores, via play, what is involved in being a loyal samurai or an honourable paladin or a cleric of Pelor, etc. That is classic simulationist play: the parameters of the role, and in this case the commitments the role involves, are established in advance (often by the GM) and the player experiences them. I see a lot of advocacy for this sort of play, especially in the context of GM's telling players what it means to be a cleric of a certain god. (2) The GM establishes situations that test the meaning of being a loyal samurai, or an honourable paladin, or a cleric of Pelor, etc, and the expectation is that the player will [i]make a call[/i] about that, thereby expressing some idea of their own about what loyalty, or honour, or religious devotion, demand, and when those demands might be disregarded in pursuit of some other end. Vincent Baker has a nice discussion of this sort of approach, in DitV pp 138, 140, 143: [indent]You can’t have a hero and a villain among your NPCs. It’s the PCs’ choices that make them so. The PCs are empowered to turn sin into goodness sake [i]doctrine[/i] if they think it’s the right thing to do. How are you gonna decide up front who comes out on top? . . . You’re not providing judgment for the players the way you have to if you’ve pre-decided who the villain is. Instead, you’ve presented your interesting moral situation, the PCs can’t walk away from it, they have to cut through its knot somehow and leave the town better off. So, what do they think? They’ll surprise you. They’ll take sides you never expected. People just endlessly delight me and one of the reasons they do is because of their capacity to take surprising sides. Watch, you’ll see. . . . Your job is to present the situation and then escalate it. The players’ job is to pronounce judgment and follow through. . . . [T]he GM has no opportunity to pass effective judgment on a PC’s actions. Talk about ’em, sure, but never come down on them as righteous or sinful in a way that’s binding in the game world. The GM can’t give or withhold dice for the state of a PC’s soul, and thus never needs to judge it.[/indent] If that is how you're playing, then you are playing story now. I've done this in AD&D (ignoring the alignment rules, as I mentioned upthread). I've done this in Rolemaster. I've done this in 4e D&D. To be blunt, I've never seen anyone post about this sort of play in 3E or 5e D&D, but for all I know it's happening out there. But not the resolution. That's the whole point. If you don't think there's a difference between the GM and/or the game system telling you what the answer is (who the villain is, what the right thing to do is, etc) - whether expressly, or via the myriad informal cues that can be generated in RPGing (like "don't split the party" or "don't generate intraparty conflict" or "follow the GM's hook or we'll have no game this evening") - and the players establishing their own answers via play, then I can't take this any further. Story now RPGing is premised on exactly that difference - the difference between authorship and audience, as it can be uniquely experienced in the context of RPGing. [/QUOTE]
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