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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8630851" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Now that I've got a bit more time and am a bit more awake, I wanted to return to Niklinna's question about GDS Dramatism and how it relates to D&D.This will require a small side-trip.  One area I actually agree with Edwards about (though not his choice of terms for it and assumption it did harm) is that classic WoD Storyteller was a game that knew what it wanted to be, but was pretty confused about how it would get there.  Avowedly it wanted to be about the struggle to deal with trying to stay connected to your humanity when you'd become something monstrous.  But almost nothing in the attached game system actually gave you any way to engage with that, except for a very limited degree, the Humanity stat (and that was arguably as much a Sim representation of the setting assumptions about how that worked, but it at least set expectations of how you were going to have to engage with the problems that dissonance between monstrous nature and humanity would be).  There was nothing much to help you steer things in that direction or engage with it in any real way except to the degree you could with any system at all or none whatsoever.  Even the metacurrency in use was one of the rare cases where it was as much a Sim element (as it represented character Willpower) as anything else.  In other respects it was pretty much a Gamist design about using cool powers, manipulating others and ripping stuff up.  There were some additional character-definition material in the form of Merits and Flaws later than moved it a bit more along toward some Dramatist concerns, but they were still pretty peripheral, even when they were in use.D&D's dramatist concerns run into the same rock.  Other than the aforementioned Noncombat Profiencies (which also supported some Gamist purpose), there really wasn't much there that required anything beyond token play, and token play is pretty much the definition of pure Gamist approach.  But there were a couple of exceptions that at least can be argued to serve a Dramatist agenda in part or whole.The first is alignment.  Now to forestall any sidetrips on this, alignment is a pretty blunt tool for characterization; it tells you some things in very broad terms, often in ways that seem contradictory.  But it doesn't serve much other purpose, so it can be viewed as one of the few baked in Dramatist elements in the game.  And notably after evolving a bit early on, it has slowly dropped away in significance (in part because it is a pretty blunt tool, but it took one of the few non-Gamist system elements with it as its faded.)The other one is, oddly enough, an example of a structure that can serve two agendas at the same time.  And it came up in the other thread because its such a poor fit on a Simulationist sense.Hit points.  Hit points as expressed in D&D don't work super well with a traditional RGFA Simulationism because nobody in the setting thinks that the fighter with 40 hit points outright can't be killed by that first sword stroke.  It doesn't represent any World based assuption.But Hit points can serve two functions at once.  On one hand, it can absolutely play a Gamist purpose of controlling pace-of-resolution; though not universal, you can find some pretty snarky comments about overly "dicey" games, where things end up turning on on a small number of rolls of dice, and thus the ability to apply skilled play to a situation is muted or eliminated.  Because of the pace-of-resolution control in hit points, it primarily serves to give someone playing a character time to make decisions.  (This is in contrast with a game like BRP, where while there's a lot of tactical thinking, but you don't get a lot of warning when things have jelled; a single crit at the wrong moment, and you're at least out of the fight and maybe dead).On the other hand, there's another lens it can be seen through.  There's a dramatic conceit in some kinds of fiction where a serious set of opponents never put each other right down; when you have basic weapons, elevating hit points can force that (it also can drag things out more than people want, which is why some offshoots of D&D have moved toward hosing down how much of this you get).But there's not a lot else to be found in the D&D mechanics that really supports Dramatist concerns.  Most of the rest of it are big blunt Gamist tools.  The Dramatist values that have applied to it are, like the ones in early Storyteller working with no help on a system level, and pretty much all thrown to the player and GM.</blockquote>

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