The Death of Simulation

[UngainlyTitan]

Naturally, I don't see the social aspect as obstacles! I like hanging out with my friends as much as the next person.

<snip> I'm hoping that 4e will allow pleasure to be derived by using play to make statements about a theme - RPGing as (mostly pretty lightweight) literary/dramatic creation. The gameworld (including the PCs) is a vehicle in which this artistic activity is carried out - it's a device, not an end in itself.

Whether that's a different page or a whole different book I'm not sure!

OK, here is where I have a problem, why is your creation a literary/dramatic creation and the story that falls out from the simulationist play not the same?

 

[marune]

OK, here is where I have a problem, why is your creation a literary/dramatic creation and the story that falls out from the simulationist play not the same?

Not every RPG session transcript can be considered a story (lack of a theme). Gamist and Sim play can produce a story, but only in particuliar circumstances, including some luck on the dices, etc.

With a narrativist play style, the transcript is "guaranteed" to be a story (maybe not always a good one).

That doesn't mean that stories created through nar play are necesserly better than stories produced through gamist play, only that that the latter will show up rarely.

 

[Celebrim]

Why, thank you. That is the most cogent explanation for the sim-gamist issue I have heard. It does, however, raise a problem with point of view. You are assuming that a fireball would catch things on fire. If all of the players have that same assumption, then you can go forward in the sim experience. I don't assume a fireball would do more than scorch the walls. I worked in the oil field years ago and saw a handfull of small explosions. Those that were natural gas related typically did not catch things on fire. The fire was hot, but it was over fast. Most of the damage was concussive. An exploding gasoline can catches all kinds of things on fire, however because it throws fuel all over. What if fireball is more akin to the former? Does that mean 1e was gamist for me, but 3e is a sim?

No. To extend your discussion a little, a true high explosive like TNT or PETN almost never catches anything on fire directly because it is over even quicker than a fuel air explosion like natural gas. All of the damage is concussion and fragmentation. But think about that for a second. If it is the intention of the rules to portray fireball as an explosion, shouldn't most of the damage be concussive rather than heat? If we change 'fireball' to 'explosion', should a good portion of the damage be 'bludgeoning'? But in both editions, most of the damage was described as being of type 'fire', and in fact in 1st edition the 'fireball' was explicitly not a high explosive explosion since it was described as exerting negligible pressure on the surroundings - it expanded and engulfed, but it didn't 'blow up' things and create shrappnel.

Ok, then, suppose its still the intention of the designers for it to be literally an expanding ball of flame and not an explosion, and that the heat while damaging is so brief that it doesn't cause secondary fires. But there is a limit to that in simulationist thinking. As your experience indicates, it's quite alright to have a fire that only scorches the walls and the furniture (and a characters armor) without starting a secondary fire because those things are particularly inflamable, but in the rules as written in 3rd edition a fireball going off in a room of gasoline soaked straw doesn't start secondary fires. I don't think anyone has a reasonable expectation that an open flame would do lethal damage to thier person, but not set gasoline soaked straw on fire. A set of rules written with some simulationist intent would almost never say, 'fireball does no damage to objects', or 'fireball doesn't start secondary fires', even if it wanted to avoid the mechanical complexity of secondary fires. Rather, it would say something to the effect of, 'Fireball may start fires in inflamable objects', a phrase you actually here somewhat regularly in the description of fire spells in the first edition PH. A more sophisticated system might define what 'inflamable objects' were (probably with some sort of materials list) and what the likelihood of thier catching on fire would be for a given quantity of flame.

Granting that the fireball is just a single example, I'm sure that there are any number of instances where the natural consequences of a spell or action do not get tracked in D&D. However, for any given scenario, "what is happening in my head" is different, to varying degrees, from "what is happening in your head." How does this get rectified in a sim based game? (or is that the game itself?)

People who care about this sort of thing look for a game system that has a reasonable level of suspension of disbelief. Then the referee tends to fiddle with (house rule) the areas that don't quite jibe with his understanding, possibly with the input of the players. After that, it pretty much depends on the implicit social contract of the group. Some groups then percieve the literal reading of the rules to be the description of the 'physics' of the game world. Assuming that the rules are fairly solid, that will probably hold until a situation comes up which produces really illogical results. Afterwhich, usually with the input of the players, the referee will do some more fiddling with the rules to try to 'improve' the system. Other groups would give the referee latitude to override the rules in the middle of the game where they didn't seem to fit the groups logical expectation of event.

In my first edition games, you typically say a combination of both sorts of resolution going on. It works pretty well so long as your gamist players are willing to confine the overcoming of challenges to in game means. If you have a gamist motivated player (he wants to 'win') who percieves working the metagame to be easier than winning within the rules, that is, he percieves manipulating the DM into changing the rules to produce favorable interpretations of any of his actions is easier than overcoming the challenges under the current rules, then it can be a problem. To a lesser extent, it can be a problem where the setting the referee wants to simulate doesn't correspond to the setting in which a narrativist wants to conduct his story. You typically see this problem when the narrativist player wants to play a character that does dazzling stunts, and the referee wants to simulate 'gritty realism', or conversely (and I've been in this situation), you want to play a 'gritty' realistic character and the game system encourages over the top cardboard technicolor characters who do three impossible things every day before breakfast.

Is simulationism v gamism a purely subjective viewpoint?

Since in GNS, we are dealing with a description of human motivation, its all somewhat subjective. It's hard to climb in peoples heads and see why they are really doing something. It's hard to climb in your own head and see that.

But there are clear cases of 'gamism' vs. 'simulationism' that can be demonstrated. One of the most obvious is if in a game session, the players are asked to play chess or sodoko or solve a riddle. In purist simulationism, the players themselves are part of the metagame and don't really exist. Therefore, in a game from a purely simulationist perspective, puzzles within the game should never be solved by player skill, but rather by character skill. The thing theoretically being simulated is the character solving the puzzle, and this should be done according to the characters skill in 'Knowledge (enigmas)' and not the players. There is never a case were asking the players to solve a riddle is more simulationist than gamist.

Incidently, I believe that a certain amount of simulation ought to infuse a good game system (not to be confused with the belief that a certain amount of realism ought infuse a good game system), but that's where I draw the line. Ultimately, the game is about player enjoyment. Pure simulationism tends to end up reducing the role of the players (player and referee alike) in the game to the extent that it becomes unfun and purely mechanical. You might as well let the computer play the PC's too and just watch the game.

You can see this in other contexts too. Games like SimCity are very far out on the end of the 'simulationist' perspective. In fact, prefers people to refer to his games as 'digital toys' rather than as 'games', because there isn't alot of 'gamist' elements to them. His games are the thought experiment made real, more than they are games.

 

[LostSoul]

OK, here is where I have a problem, why is your creation a literary/dramatic creation and the story that falls out from the simulationist play not the same?

The difference lies in creating theme vs. reinforcing theme. Nar play demands that you answer a thematic question in your own way; sim play demands that you answer a thematic question in the same way the source material did.

 

[marune]

Incidently, I believe that a certain amount of simulation ought to infuse a good game system (not to be confused with the belief that a certain amount of realism ought infuse a good game system), but that's where I draw the line. Ultimately, the game is about player enjoyment. Pure simulationism tends to end up reducing the role of the players (player and referee alike) in the game to the extent that it becomes unfun and purely mechanical. You might as well let the computer play the PC's too and just watch the game.

Simulationist play is when Exploration (+- what many call "roleplaying") is the main focus.

Of course Exploration is needed and welcome in Gamist and Narrativist play, because without Exploration, you don't even have an RPG!

You can see this in other contexts too. Games like SimCity are very far out on the end of the 'simulationist' perspective. In fact, prefers people to refer to his games as 'digital toys' rather than as 'games', because there isn't alot of 'gamist' elements to them. His games are the thought experiment made real, more than they are games.

Civilization is a game that went from a very "sim" style to a more gamist one in recent editions

 

[Celebrim]

Not every RPG session transcript can be considered a story (lack of a theme). Gamist and Sim play can produce a story, but only in particuliar circumstances, including some luck on the dices, etc.

With a narrativist play style, the transcript is "guaranteed" to be a story (maybe not always a good one).

That doesn't mean that stories created through nar play are better than stories produced through gamist play, only that that the latter will show up rarely.

I understand why you'd think that, but that's not my experience.

First, it involves a very narrow definition of 'story'. It is true a gamist or simulationist game often has very few of the formal dramatic elements of a story - rising action, denoument, epiphany, conclusion, or whatever - but it almost always has the one essential element of a story - conflict. Without the formal elements of a story we expect a story to have, it might not be a very enjoyable story in the telling of it, and it might notably lack a meaning, but it will still be a story.

And in defence of that, you could point out that in real life, very few peoples lives follow classic narrative arcs, and even when they appear to do so, we often find that it is because the biographer has taken some dramatic license with the person's life in choosing what events to emphasize or leave out, according to the needs of the story that the biographer formulated.

I have certainly been in simulationist games where stories evolved into being.

I've also been in narrativist games where the failure of the participants to compose a story, led to the same sort of meandering narrative that you would expect to be composed by a simulationist or gamist game. This is particularly true of games that are played in weekly sessions, such that the participants tend to focus entirely on the current scene and not its place in the larger story to the extent that eventually there is no story - only a series of (hopefully) emotionally cathartic scenes.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Not every RPG session transcript can be considered a story (lack of a theme). Gamist and Sim play can produce a story, but only in particuliar circumstances, including some luck on the dices, etc.

With a narrativist play style, the transcript is "guaranteed" to be a story (maybe not always a good one).

That doesn't mean that stories created through nar play are necesserly better than stories produced through gamist play, only that that the latter will show up rarely.

I take it then that in this context story and theme have a narrow technical meaning. It is not just an account of the heros and their doings.

 

[Psion]

Given that the sort of themes I think can be put into play in the game are themes like courage, loyalty, etc, alignment is completely fatal to narrativist play in respect of them, because it already answers all the interesting questions.

I don't buy that. The presence of a right or preferred answer does not mean that a character knows or agrees with this "cosmic rightness". And what happens when the cosmos thinks what your character is doing is wrong? Are you evil? What if the cosmos doesn't reign in.

Further, to invoke a little philosophy 101 here, alignment is traditionally agent evaluation and act evaluation (and I feel that some 3e authors really muddled and damaged this by more explicitly defining good/evil acts). Taken in this light, interesting question might take the form of "what would a good person do in this situation" more than "what is right"?

 

[apoptosis]

The question is - can the gamist elements be narratively unified, such that making the best thematic decision does not] disadvantage one's chance of success? If not, you are right and my theory falls over. I'm hoping that the design goal of "equally viable builds" will do the job here - that the equal gamist viability will also be coherent thematic viability.

I take it that you think it's a pipe dream?

Hey Peryton,

Sorry had to finish an article on the neurobiology of depression, which has paradoxically been depressing me as I hadn't finished it.

As i mentioned before I really am interested in your theory but it was kind of breaking down for me when I looked at individual example that you were using to support your model.

I definitely feel you some real foundation to your theory but I have to admit I am finding it lacking some explanatory or discriminatory power.


Where I have been caught up is that I keep running into PC options equating to narrativistic control (in terms of GNS narrativism) and I think this might be the issue for me.

Instaed of critiqiuing your supporting examples as that was not sufficiently allowing me to come to a good resolution on the issue, i wanted to look at it a different way and assume your theory is true and then use it to test games that are "known" to be Gam/Sim/Nar by design to see how your ideasl works for them.

I choose monopoly, champions and Burning Wheel.

In monopoly (basically the simplist of gamist ideas) the theme we are exploring is that "with risk we can have great reward or catastrophic failure". We are playing crazy real estate barrons (which happen to look like ships, thimbles and an iron). The game is basically about using chance (risks) to your advantage. Do you buy or not buy the property. Do you build or not build house/hotels, try to get out of jail by chance or pay $50. There is not much game choices except ones based off of chance. If we increase player options that are tied in with the theme of and reward risks, say the player can choose to draw 3 chance cards instead of 1, or they can choose to pay double the rent or no rent. Does this increase narrative play of the game. My thoughts would be no. They player while being rewarded possibly for thematic choices and having greater options would not by many considered to be a more narrativistic game even if the players have greater options (and in this case it is taking power from the system and not a GM as there is not GM)

The next one is Champions. this is the mother of simulationst games in many ways (simulation a comic book genre). Characters have multitudes of choices during character creation, during combat and post combat. They can buy off their disadvantages, buy new powers etc. You could say the characters are exploring the theme of fighting evil without becoming evil. They can make choices of killing attacks vs non-killing attacks. They can buy dependent NPCs and enemies as disadvantages that tie into this theme. All these options though dont really give a narrativist spin to the game as their is not really a strong set of rules that tie exploring the theme to rewarding players for exploring these themes or giving them real narrative control over the themes (IMO). Now this game has way way more PC options than 4E does (far more than 4E would compared to earlier versions of D&D) but I wouldnt say it is any more narrativist than 4E is or more than 4E is compared to earlier D&D versions.

The last is BW. It is a narrativist game. One area where PCs have lots of options is in the Fight mechanics (parry, disarm, etc.) Most would say that this area of the game is where it is not narrativist and really falls into strict gamism (maybe simulationism). If we swithc to just the bloody fight rules do we become more or less narrativist. I would say neither, no effect on narrativism though we have removed a lot of PC options.

So my general thoughts is that correlating PC options with narrativistic control (using classic GNS) ends up losing coherency and discriminatory prowess for the the term narrativism which puts us back to issues with the word losing its meaning possibly.

Many simulationist type of games tend ot have LOTS of PC options to help simulate more realistic outcomes (parry, dodge, duck and roll vs abstracting the combat) but that to me doesnt add any narrativistic feel as it doesnt help them explore character themes and goals in a meaningful way.

I enjoy this discussion (i hope readers are not too bored) and please feel free to shoot holes in my counter-theories and choice of model systems. I wrote this quickly so hope it makes some sense.

Skeptic, LostSoul (and anyone else who has interst in this) also feel free to tear these thoughts to shreds.

Apoptosis

 

[marune]

I take it then that in this context story and theme have a narrow technical meaning. It is not just an account of the heros and their doings.

Take a look at theme's and fiction's definitions on Wikipedia.