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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8633345" data-attributes="member: 16814">So D&D has embedded such switching forever, to the point many just accept it as part of the game.  And that switching is evident in 5e APs -- where you have "the plot" embedded in the game, with directions to the GM on how to ensure events happen (so HCS), but then it presents moments that are handled through the mechanics.  Most obvious is combat, which I'll circle back to, but quite often you have DC checks to find secret doors necessary to be found or walls climbed or social encounters.  These are accepted, because they're so common and have history, but they clunk in practice and you see complaints about them show up.  Fail that check and the game stops because you've moved into a situation were you've actually shifted to purist-for-system and that's not aligning with the HCS.  This is just within simulationism (and probably another knife in model that it doesn't separate these two things more clearly).  Combat, though, is a big one.  No one seems to notice the sudden shift to gamism here, but they complain about the downstream effects all the time.  How combats are too easy (they're their to support HCS, but being evaluated from a gamist perspective); hitpoint recovery makes everything too easy (same); I had a TPK and now have to figure out how to get the replacements embedded in the plot again (gamism result disrupts HCS agenda); and so on.  Myriad issues are caused here.BUT, it works okay often enough and many GM's put their thumb on the scale to prevent this.  I, myself, take a pass over the adventure prior to play and smooth places that I recognize will cause problems (too little or too much) to provide a more even experience, thus prioritizing the HCS agenda by tuning the gamist toggles to a point that I think they won't cause issues.  Still happens, though.  In one of my last few 5e games, I went much more strongly gamist -- a hexcrawl -- where it didn't matter if PCs died or whatever, but I very much paid attention to communicating information so that the players could make reasonable decisions (ie, avoided purist-for-system agenda pushes to stay within gamism).  These were conscious choices.  But every time I pick up 5e, one of the things I absolutely know is that the game will require toggling between agendas and that this will be the largest challenge I have GMing the game.  And I think this is the telling point -- the mark of a great GM isn't really creativeness or acting ability, but the ability to expertly manage these toggles.  This is the primary cognitive overhead of the 5e GM.</blockquote>

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