The Death of Simulation

[HeinorNY]

Simulationist: Your horses travel X miles per day, the mountains are Z miles away, and you will have to travel through the hill, it will cost you some time, so the travel to the mountains is gonna take you Y days.
Gamist: Roll 1d6 days and you got there (SWSE style)
Storytelling/narrativism: The exact time of travel is irrelevant, none of the players care and the DM will decide the how much time is good for the story with a minimum of good sense.

Simulationist: The power have a duration of 1 minute per level.
Gamist: The power ends when combat ends.
Narrativism: The power ends when the scene ends.

Simulationist: If you use tap the dark side of the force, you'll gain an extra dice in your roll.
Gamist: You make a Will save and fails, your fear made you tap the dark side of the force.
Narrativism: I think tapping the dark side of the force is a nice choice for my character, based on his personality and recent story, so I'll buy the Power of the dark side talent. (SWSE style)

Simulationist: All characters, PCs and NPCs, are created using the same rules. They roll X hd at first level, gain one feat, gain skills etc.
Gamist: Different rules for different charcters, PCs are fully fleshed out, NPCs only have numbers depending on what they'll do in the game (only social skill bonus in a social encounter, only AC, BAB damage HP in a combat encounter.
Narrativism: Different types of characters may use the same rules to be created, but PCs are the protagonist and heroes so they'll have special benefits that will assure that status in the game, as extra HD, access to action points, more powerful classes. (SWSE style)

Simulationist: It works this way because it makes sense in the fantasy context of the world.
Gamist: Its works this way because it's balanced and makes the important parts of the game as fun as it can be.
Narrativism: It works this way because it's good for the narrative and creates a nice and memorable story.

 

[Cbas_10]

DM: You open the chest. There is a scroll of Delayed Blast Fireball* and a Ring of Lesser Awesomeness.
PC1: Awww. I can't use either of them. I'm not competent enough of a wizard to learn to cast that level spell, nor do I possess the inner fortitude to unlock the magic of the ring. Perhaps next when I gain more experience and stamina, I can use both items, but right now they're going into the Bag of Holding...

After some searching and sifting through an older thread heated up over the Christmas Tree & Ring Reqs....

I don't know. Maybe there are new mechanics in 4E that would make the ring-deal more sensible. Still....level-based seems to gamey and arbitrary. I prefer some sort of limit or requirement that is represented by something a character does or achieves (levels is purely a game mechanic....). Scrolls require a character to have skill in spellcasting. That can be explained "in the game world" without the use of rules' terms...and then later backed up by mechanics. But for rings.....Experience with what (in a character's perspective)? Stamina has never been represented by level?

Sorry....I'm beating a dead horse which will absolutely be ignored if I switch to 4E. I was just surprised to see this sort of arbitrary computer-gamey thing slip into D&D.

 

[HeinorNY]

Simulationist: I am the PC.
Gamist: I play with the PC.
Narrativism: I roleplay the PC.

 

[Remathilis]

Simulationist:
Gamist:
Storytelling/narrativism:

By those terms, I'm a Narrativist first, gamist second, simulationist third. I used to be more of simulationist, but my game time is short and I'd rather get to the good stuff (story, action, dialog, drama) with the minimum amount of rules to get in my way.

 

[pemerton]

And many times that is what people are meaning as the genre they think of is "our pseudo medieval world" + independent magic elements.

A game that is based on that though would be very different than D&D.

It would be RQ, I think.

D&D is a mishmash, it had a gamist/simulationist perspective that was probably not designed in coherent fashion to either perspective but kind of picked and choosed which ones would be most fun for players given what they thought at the time.

I think 1st ed AD&D was primarily gamist, but with the nature of the challenge (surviving and propsering in dungeon exploration) and the scale over which success or failure was determined (timescale: the campaign; character scale: not the single PC, but a whole suit of PCs, henchmen, hirelings etc per player, and with party success probably more important also than in later playstyles) being very different from subsequent approaches to play. In the 1st ed AD&D, Gygax has a discussion of time which Ron Edwards cites as an example of simulationism, but read closely it really seems to be a gamist device, intended to make time in the campaign another useful resource that players can exploit more or less well.

I think that 2nd ed really was the peak of incoherence in D&D, with a game promising gamist (or perhaps narrativist) fun delivering (at least in the official modules and gameworlds) simulationist-heavy exploration of someone else's world (either the designers' or the GM's). In light of this, I don't think that it's a coincidence that 2nd ed produced so many spin-offs and supplements - each of them can be seen as an attempt to render the game more coherent for some set of play preferences or other.

3rd ed is pretty clearly gamist in overall intent, with a strong simulationist chassis helping it get there - where it goes wrong is with marginal aspects of the rules (like drowning, weather etc) which weren't properly thought through, and more importantly where legacies of previous editions were not thoroughly revisited through the lens of coherence. 4e is now doing that.

 

[marune]

Simulationist: I am the PC.
Gamist: I play with the PC.
Narrativism: I roleplay the PC.

Bad definitions, specialy the Narrativism one.

 

[apoptosis]

Bad definitions, specialy the Narrativism one.

I used this definition in the other thread:

It goes to WHY are you playing this RPG and what is important to you.

Gamist - It is a game and i enjoy overcoming challenges

Simulationist - It is a way to immerse yourself in a fictional world through your character

Narrativist - It is a way to tell an exciting story about the characters (or your character)

 

[pemerton]

Simulationist: Dwarves are belligerent so they get -2 Charisma.
Gamist: We don't want to over penalize dwaven sorcerers, even if it is against type. No Charisma penalty.

I have no idea where Narativists fit in with this example, though... I've never really understood Narativism.

At a guess:

Sacrifice gamist fun and fairness, and simulationist verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief, so long as it makes a good yarn?

With respect, that's a poor definition of narrativism, if you are trying to capture the Forge sense of the term.

The point of narrativist play is not to enjoy a good yarn, but to produce a yarn. This yarn typically won't be especialy good, given that most RPG players - and I certainly include myself here - are not especially good writers of literature. But it will be the play group's own, and because of this authenticity it has a certain interest for that group.

With this in mind, we can see that play in which the players sit back and let the GM's world and story wash over them is not narrativist play, but rather a particular style of simulationism (in which what the players are exploring is the GM's creative vision). This is why alignment in D&D is best characterised as a simulationist mechanic - what it does is tell a story about morality (whether or not it is a good story is one on which opinions differ!), which the players then get to experience during play. Getting rid of mechanical alignment is (IMO) one of the more signficant departures from simulationism that 4e is making.

Returning to the Dwarves: if being a Dwarf makes a difference in play, then it is important (for narrativist play) that a player gets to choose whether or not they play a Dwarf - so that they can choose whether or not to make that sort of difference in play. It is conceivable that the relevant difference might be the perceived gruffness of Dwarves. A player choosing to play a Dwarf is thereby signalling that they want their PC to undergo a certain sort of adversity (namely, being perceived as gruff) in order to develop whatever theme is of interest to them in the game. A CHA penalty might be one mechancial way to implement this choice.

Most narrativist play would also want the PC's personality to be dynamic (to an extent, at least) and under the control of the player, so you would also want mechanics which allow the player (in circumstances that s/he judges appropriate) to be able to buy off the penalty. It is a little hard to see how this would work in traditional D&D, but you could envisage APs being used here - if the player sets as her Dwarf's goal "succeed despite gruffness" then a bunle of APs might be available to be spent in social challenges to turn what otherwise would be failures into successes.

Problems for narrativism will arise if the gameworld already tries to dictate the implications of that gruffness for the player, as opposed to allowing the player to work them out in the course of play. This could be both (i) the issue never coming up, or (ii) the issue coming up only by the GM telling the player how his/her PC's gruffness is being perceived by NPCs, with the player having no meaningful control over that, and those reactions having no meaningful impact on the game.

In my view, a non-simulationist game that is not interested in exploring these issues of racial identity is either better off just having all PCs default to human, or else better be ready for racial choice to be simply a (gamist) min-maxing exercise. In 4e, I envisage the latter to be the main determinant of racial choice, with simulationist concerns about flavour (what sort of fantasy being do I want to explore while playing this game?) being a secondary factor.

 

[apoptosis]

With respect, that's a poor definition of narrativism, if you are trying to capture the Forge sense of the term....................

Your analysis..way better explanation thine mine

 

[ThirdWizard]

Interesting. By most of these definitions I fall mostly into a Narrativist mindset, as it seems Narrativist fits best with a DMing style that puts creating an entertaining game above all other factors.

I don't know. Maybe there are new mechanics in 4E that would make the ring-deal more sensible. Still....level-based seems to gamey and arbitrary.

But, see we go back to the style thing. It's not arbitrary from a gamist perspective. Everyone pays so much attention to the 11th level get one ring thing they notice the, probably more important, 21st level get two rings. This means you can give a 15th level party of six PCs 10 rings and it is no more of a power increase than giving them 6.

This is probably a very important balancing factor for Rings. It means they don't have to worry about mixing and matching rings until the Epic tier, when things like that might not be as much of a problem because of the Epic power scale.

Then there's the slot increases over time to scale power. I can't remember how many slots PCs have, but they'll have X slots at Heroic, X+1 slots at Paragon, and X+2 slots at Epic, another possible balancing factor. Heck, the whole +1 slot might have even been thought up as a "reward" of sorts for achieving Paragon.

So, its all about one one approaches the rules that determine if one sees them as arbitrary, or good, or bad, or pointless, or smart, or sexy, or whatever. A Gamist probably won't give an explanation much inspection before accepting it. "Oh, I'm not strong enough to call out the true power of the ring yet? I'll try again later." And that's that.

We're seeing the exact same thing with the Pit Fiend, by the way. Simulationists want to know how the Pit Fiend survives in the Nine Hells, how they weave their intrigue, how they can set up their fortifications, and all that good stuff. Because it isn't in the description/stat block, by their play style, the stat block is a definition for the creature. I think this is yet another clash between the Simulationist approach and, in this case according to definitions in this thread, a Narritivist approach. Actually, I think a whole lot of these arguments could break down into this very topic itself.

It's not good or bad, but it obviously clashes with a lot of people's preferred play style.