how many times as Hussar openly expressed that he had a right to be 'grumpy', 'shirty', 'angry', or 'indignant' by the DM not following the rules as he saw them? Isn't he telling us stories about how that has happened at his table? If that isn't antagonism, what is it?
[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] can speak for himself, of course, but to me it looks like irritation and frustration at someone wasting his time. I get angry at drivers who cut me off while I'm cycling, but that doesn't tend to show that cycling, or commuting more generally, is an activity constituted in any interesting way by antagonism.
But this is precisely antagonism. Gamism is defined as: "Gamist refers to decisions based on satisfying clear predefined goal conditions in the face of adversity: in other words, on the desire to win." In its pure form in a D&D context, this expresses itself as game which has the DM on one side and the PC's on the other.
I don't agree with this. The players can make "decisions based on satisfying clear predefined goal conditions in the fact of adversity" without the GM being on one side and the players on the other (I don't quite see how you are fitting the PCs into a discussion of antagonism among the participants).
In my job I teach students and I examine those students. I can assure you that the exams I set require my students to make "decisions based on satisfying clear predefined goal conditions in the fact of adversity". The main source of adversity is the complexity of the material that they are expected to master. Secondary sources of adversity include time constraints, and having to demosntrate the mastery of the material in response to questions that I have set rather than that they haev set.
But I am not in an antagonistic relationship with my students. I am certainly not their enemy. I want them to do well, and do my best to teach them to that end.
In a scene-framed RPG the GM frames scenes that (i) pick up on player signals as to what is interesting and engaging, and (ii) will challenge the players in their resolution. In narrativist play the challenge is predominantly emotional/thematic. In gamist play the challenge is predominantly about skill and guts. In many instances of play I think the two may not be easily distinguishable, particularly in a mechanically heavy system in which the mode of emotional engagement is via skillfully leveraging complex mechanics. (One marker of distinction might be "fail forward" - the more this is a consideration in GM adjudicatin, the more the game will tend to satisfy narrativist rather than gamist priorities.)
Once the scene has been framed, it is resolved by deploying the action resolution mechanics. Given that in mnay (most? all?) systems this will require the GM to make choices, such as which monster attacks which PC, the GM needs guidelines on how to make those choices. In scene-framing play, the most important guideline is
make choices that will keep the scene alive, keep the scene engaging, and keep the presssure up to the players. But that is not the same as GM vs players - for instance, in D&D it will be mediated via the action economy, the creature's stat block, and other relevant elements of the action resolution mechanics. This is a constraint on the GM and the players, and satisfactory scene-framing play relies upon everyone honouring it. (This is why, in this style of play, you don't see dice being rolled behind a screen. When the dragon breathes on the PCs, I as MG roll the attack dice out in front of everyone, and we all learn collectively whether or not the PCs have survived the threatening BBQ.)
The 'rules' that govern encounter building are exceptionally loose and we would be better off describing them as guidelines, and really only occur in certain systems.
In those systems in which they occur, though, they are very important. Marvel Heroic RP, HeroQuest revised, Maelstrom Storytelling, The Dying Earth and 4e are all examples. If the GM doesn't pay attention to them, the game will not deliver the intended experience.
In the case of MHRP, this means abiding by the rules governing the Doom Pool. In HQ revised, this means following the pass/fail cycle for setting DCs. In 4e, this means not building encounters more than 4 or so levels above the party's level without thinking pretty hard about what you're hoping to achieve (this guideline starts to break down in Epic tier play, which is one legitimate criticism of 4e's scaling mechanics), not using soldiers more than a level or two above the party's level, etc.
If you depart from the encounter bulding guidelines, then the game makes no promises that the action resolution mechanics will support engaging, player-driven RPGing that confines GM force to scene-framing and certain well-defined elements of adjudication.
In any event, they don't result in anything like an equal "medium of struggle". The assumption here, unspoken at the table, is that the DM is going to pretend to try to win, but not really.
The GM is not pretending to try to win. Nor is the GM trying to win. Nor is the GM trying not to win. In gamist play, winning is soemthing that happens to the players, not the GM. The GM is (and is not just pretending to) frame challenges, and to adjudicate theri resolution as the rules call for.
I think it can be interesting to think about how the particpants might respond to diffrent sorts of outcomes in this sort of play. Suppose the PCs are fighting a dragon. And the GM, wanting to keep the pressure up, decides to have the dragon attack the cleric, even though it is the fighters who are really the ones pounding away at it. Suppose that the dragon misses the cleric, and then as a result of that "wasted" action the PCs win the fight. The players can reasonably crow, and the GM reasonably lament that, if only s/he'd decided to go after the fighters instead perhaps thinks would have been harder for the players.
Suppose that the dragon hits the cleric, and as a result the party loses its incombat healing/buffing, but the PCs press on anwyway and win. The players can reasonably crow, pointing out to one another, and ot the GM, that even though their healer was down, they pulled through.
Suppose that the dragon hits the cleric, and as a result the party loses its incombat healing/buffing, and as a result of that suffers a TPK. At that point the players might start complaining that the GM wasn't fair. And the GM might also be worried that s/he wasn't fair. This is where encounter building guidelines, robust and transparent action resolution mechanics, etc, all come into play. They help underpin trust rather than suspicion at the table, that scenes are being framed in a reasonable way and likewise adjudicated resasonably.
What is surprising is finding in a gamist context this notion Hussar is advocating for of the players being able to signal to the DM that the players are allowed to skip a particular challenge.
I don't find it remotely surprising. Hussar is playing an RPG. A huge part of an RPG is colour, story and adventure. And he is not interested, within the context of a fantasy RPG, in playing through tedious events the stakes of which have next-to-no emotional resonance.
I am the same. I have played with GMs who would try and make the group interview all the soldiers before hiring them, but had two ways of handling that. One was to stop trying to hire them. The other was to use those situations as an excuse for intragroup roleplaying - there were 6 or 7 players in the group, some with interesting PCs and personalities, and intragroup RP provided an opportunity for a sort of "shaodw game" in which the GM couldn't meddle.
What he's talking about isn't a broad sandboxy approach in which the players set the goals (though it may include that to some measure), but rather being able to determine the actual events of play. It seems like Hussar is saying, "If PC's only want to play out combat encounters, then everything else should be handwaved and we should only jump from important combat encounter to combat encounter."
Hussar has said nothing about playing out only combat encounters. He's talked about avoiding boring encounters where nothing is at stake. There are many non-combat encounters which are not boring and which things are at stake, and I would be gob-smacked if Hussar has not both played in and GMed such encounters.
I guess the closest I have seen to this is games that were played on a pure hack and slash level, and they usually involved old school dungeon crawling with zero deviation from that model. That is to say, they structured the game universe in such a way that it actually only had the elements of play they were intereted in.
I guess that's one way to do it. The "say yes or roll the dice" approach is an alternative, and these days proably more widespread, approach to having only interesting stuff figure in play. You free-narrate over the other stuff, where nothing is at stake and the only puprose is to addd or reinforce a bit of colour.
This however is along the lines of, "It's ok if you have towns and wildernesses, just so long as you understand that isn't where the game takes place." They are accepting a game universe that has elements of play they aren't interested in, but dealing with it (or not, see Hussar's frustration) by giving players a veto over whether or not those elements of play may actually interact with the character. That is novel to say the least, and I can't help but think that it is never going to run smoothly.
It's not particularly novel. I first developed approaches along these lines in the later 1980s, GMing Oriental Adventures and The World of Greyhawk. RPGs systematically build around thse sorts of ideas have been published at least since the mid-90s (maelstrom Storytelling is an early example; Over the Edge is arguably an earlier example). The Forge and its leading figures have produced many games along these lines. And in terms of mainstream appeal you don't get much more mainstream than Marvel Heroic RP, a game which thanks major Forge figures in its acknowledgements (Vincent Baker and Clinton R Nixon) and is based around scene-framing techniques.
Of course in most of these systems the player "veto" is informal, and the game is designed to avoid the need for the exercise of any veto by including elements in PC building that allow the players to signal their interests, so that the GM can then frame situations around those interest in the way that Eero Tuovinen describes in the
blog I linked to upthread.
In the situation you describe, he can signal to the player that he doesn't really want to play out the whole escape from prison element, and the DM is expected to cut scene forward to a point at which the player is no longer in prison with the assumption that the escape has now successfully occurred.
That is not how a scene-framing game would ordinarily play. If going to prison is not something that will be interesting for the table to resolve,
then the GM would not have the player be imprisoned in the first place.
The question is, "Does the player get to narrate to me how he escapes a scene or what the NPC may legitimately demand?"
The answer to this questio obviously depends on the details of the system. In Burning Wheel the answer is "in part" - the PC will have player-chosen Instincts which may be relevant to aspects of an escape from prison, and the NPC will have been brought into the gameworld via the players' spending of PC build resources on a relationship, which will in part define the contest between teh two characters and hence shape the NPC's demands.
The actual outcome of the NPC's demands would likely be determined by a Duel of Wits, in which each character states his her demands, and the action resolution mechanics than determine who agrees to what.
From what you've described, I don't find any real difference between how Burning Wheel is describing play and how I play out a game.
I am very confident that a typical BW session would play out extremely differently from how you run a game. Almost nothing you talk about - from your objection to player vetoes over situation and scene-framing, to your conception of the setting as having some existence indpedent of scene-framing and the adjudication of action resolution, to your preference for detailed GM planning with contingencies upon contingencies if villains are killed, etc - is part of by-the-book BW play.
Whereas nearly everything that Hussar talks about - skipping boring bits, the GM framing in response to player-expressed interests, "say yes or roll the dice", a preference for character and situation taking priority over setting
the Grell, which has become the focus of player emotion, not leaving the scene until some final conflict has taken place - would be part of by-the-book BW play.
And in any event, you don't notice some incoherence in first asserting "He seems to be advocating a form of gamism." and then stating to the contrary that "Hussar is looking for a game run in something like the way that the Burning Wheel books talk about." Aren't those two radically different things?
No. The structures of gamist and narrativist play are very similar, as
Ron Edwards pointed out in 2003:
Step On Up is actually quite similar, in social and interactive terms, to Story Now. Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things:
* Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. This isn't an issue of whether Author (or any) Stance is employed at all, but rather when and for what.
* Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion.
* More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.
*Reward systems that reflect player choices (strategy, aesthetics, whatever) rather than on in-game character logic or on conformity to a pre-stated plan of play.
Hussar's approach to play, as evinced in this thread, particularly illustrates points 1, 3 and 4: author stance (his PC is motivated to cut to interesting situations like fighting the grell); casual negotiation of exploration with system as constraining but not delivering ("say yes or roll the dice", pass over the desert crossing or the taking on of hirelings via free narration); and reward (in the form of gaming pleasure, and the informal feedback between participants in the game when it is humming along) deriving not from "being his character" but rather from the way his choices as a player shape the way the game unfolds (and conversely getting irritated when he makes clear choices as a player, like recruiting extra muscle to fight the grell, which then get redirected by the GM so as to have nothing like the impact on the play experience that they were intended and expected to have).
