I’m curious to hear others peoples response to this blog. I don’t know if I completely buy into the threefold model but I think the three section each have merit and it does do a good job.
For me the most important part of the post is that it gets at what really annoys me about 4E review, even the good ones. I don’t know or care if they went in the new direction to make it into a video game. I do know that I’m one of those “wanna-be-actor” types that learn towards a verisimilitude conducive system (or play).
Do you guys have a lot of problem with RP in 4e? I realized that having “static powers” that you perform is nice but it does limit what fluff you can add to the attack. In 3.5, when you attacked you could flourish up the sword play to be whatever type of strike you wanted, but now your Tide of Iron already have flavor text and it limits you a bit. You really don’t use Tide of Iron to get the push but describe it as a flash of quick sword work which causes your target to back peddle. Nothing stops you from doing that but it takes a little bit of effort to do that, more then it did before. I kind of wish they had made the powers more generic with their naming and whatnot.
Nothing stops you from doing that but it takes a little bit of effort to do that, more then it did before. I kind of wish they had made the powers more generic with their naming and whatnot.
So you’re saying it’s noticably easier to have no flavor text at all and come up with a description from scratch compared to looking at flavor text, deciding you don’t want to use that, and then coming up with something? Is this really something that can get in the way of your enjoyment of the game?
Nothing stops you from doing that but it takes a little bit of effort to do that, more then it did before. I kind of wish they had made the powers more generic with their naming and whatnot.
So you’re saying it’s noticably easier to have no flavor text at all and come up with a description from scratch compared to looking at flavor text, deciding you don’t want to use that, and then coming up with something? Is this really something that can get in the way of your enjoyment of the game?
That was my thought when reading this. I have actually had this argument with a player of mine. I just don’t understand it.
The verisimilitude of any game is not in the mechanics. It’s in the interactions between players and DM. The mechanics exist to make the game fair and thus fun for everyone at the table. If you don’t understand them or don’t trust your DM (or resident rules lawyer) to understand them, then they can get into the way of verisimilitude by causing arguments and halting play to look up rules. When the rules are known and understood (by all or by a trusted few), however, verisimilitude can exist regardless of which rules are actually being used.
The reason many (though not all) “Simulationists” dislike 4e and prefer 3.5 (IMHO) is because they don’t yet know and understand the 4e rules the way they know and understand the 3.5 rules and they don’t have any one at their table that they trust that has that level of knowledge and understanding. The result, predictably, is their games have hiccups or outright halts that break verisimilitude when the rules come to the fore and dominate the conversation at the table. Given time to learn and adapt to the rules, they would probably find that while the mechanics are different, the no more break verisimilitude than the 3.5 rules did.
While I don’t have much of a problem with flavor text (heck, I usually ignore it anyway), there’s the issue that the *effects* of 4e powers tend to be way specific. And also, there’s hardly anything you can do now that doesn’t involve attacking, which, while good from a gamist perspective, it might mess up some character concepts. That’s the main issue, and it’s something I, too, find kinda icky in 4E - it seems to go way too deep into the gamist field. I don’t like seeing RPG as “playing a game”, like Magic or Warhammer or Diablo or whatever, and 4E D&D seems to make it painfully clear that, yes, it is intended as a *game*, not a way to tell a story, or even a simulation of a fantasy world.
Nothing stops you from doing that but it takes a little bit of effort to do that, more then it did before. I kind of wish they had made the powers more generic with their naming and whatnot.
So you’re saying it’s noticably easier to have no flavor text at all and come up with a description from scratch compared to looking at flavor text, deciding you don’t want to use that, and then coming up with something? Is this really something that can get in the way of your enjoyment of the game?
Nope, what I was saying is that I wish fluff wasn’t so specific. It is a personal opinion for one thing, and that’s because I like to make up how my attack is made given the mechanics that are there. I fully expect many, if not most, people to like the fluff and to use it. In most situations I will use the fluff provided and flourish it up and call it good, but in some situations I want the same effect but a different action. It isn’t impossible, just a bit more involved when the name of the power is pretty much a shorted version of the fluff text. It’s wishful thinking I suppose, but that’s all I meant.
Also, BP is right, you can act up anything if you the rules well (in my opinion at least, and that’s what I do) but there are certain mechanical things about 4e that make it more of a conscious effort.
While I don’t have much of a problem with flavor text (heck, I usually ignore it anyway), there’s the issue that the *effects* of 4e powers tend to be way specific. And also, there’s hardly anything you can do now that doesn’t involve attacking, which, while good from a gamist perspective, it might mess up some character concepts. That’s the main issue, and it’s something I, too, find kinda icky in 4E - it seems to go way too deep into the gamist field. I don’t like seeing RPG as “playing a game”, like Magic or Warhammer or Diablo or whatever, and 4E D&D seems to make it painfully clear that, yes, it is intended as a *game*, not a way to tell a story, or even a simulation of a fantasy world.
I see what your saying here Kaz, but you have to admit it is probably pretty hard or maybe even impossible to satisfy both the people who want D&D to tell a story completely and people who want D&D to just be a game completely. So I guess they try to find a balance of that, which probably leans one way or the other at some points.
You just can’t always satisfy everyone completely. Even if somehow they had D&D open for storytelling or just as a game, someone would complain that they wanted it back in the middle. Going to be arguments any which a way they make it, so I figure they probably try to lean towards the seemingly most popular opinion at the time they are making the game.
And about the flavor text, I just don’t see how having that is interfering with your ability to make up your own moves. If you wanted you could just ignore the that and the name, just look at what the attack does and make up your own description during the battle, and let it change everytime. Having it there just gives people who don’t want to take the time to do things like that something to see. Or at least a guideline for what their imagination has the attack doing. Please explain further so I can understand from your point of view please.
I also agree with BP on his theory about why people prefer 3.5 to 4E.
[ Edited: 17 September 2008 10:21 AM by Chad Reynolds]
In reading the blog post, I can see his opinion, but as we all know, opinions are like (Gibbering Mouther didn’t eat my word, I just didn’t write it), everybody has one.
I tend to agree with him in that 4E has moved more away from storytelling and more into combat, but that doesn’t mean that you still can’t tell a story in 4E.
And also, there’s hardly anything you can do now that doesn’t involve attacking…
The one thing I loved/hated was the way rituals was done. I loved the rituals concept, but I hated the fact that it now takes my wizard 10 minutes to unlock a door with no way to speed up the process in 4E without a House Rule* when it used to take him 1 standard action in 3.x off of a scroll.
Scenario: Group of heroes is being overwhelmed by a horde of undead, blocking the way they entered the chamber and a way of escape. Their only other escape is a locked, heavy stone door they have managed to reach. Their rogue has attempted to pick the lock and has been unsuccessful and now has to help sure up the defenses.
3.x Solution: Arcane spellcaster casts Knock off of a scroll to unlock the door. The rest of the team backs up while fighting defensively and gets out, then shuts and locks the door.
4e Solution: The other characters can take a shot in trying to unlock the door with their Thievery skill or try and bash it down, but it means a lapse in defense. They can chance making a rally against the undead horde while the wizard sets up and performs a 10-minute ritual to unlock the door, or they can succumb to the undead horde.
* There may be a way now. I haven’t read all the way through Adventurer’s Vault yet.
Even the most storytelling type of game has to have some gamist things to it or it would be a bunch of people talking (which is ok too, but hardly a game, inho).
Scenario: Group of heroes is being overwhelmed by a horde of undead, blocking the way they entered the chamber and a way of escape. Their only other escape is a locked, heavy stone door they have managed to reach. Their rogue has attempted to pick the lock and has been unsuccessful and now has to help sure up the defenses.
That’s the point though, in 4e it should be a concious thing by the DM to either make the lock pickable or bashable or require fighting (to the death maybe) to perform the ritual. Still, things don’t always go as intended and sometimes players need to fail so I do see why you are annoyed here.
Kazum, thx for bringing that up, pacifist characters don’t work at all anymore unless they ahve a bunch of attacks that don’t do any dmg and just apply affects. Either way it isn’t ideal for that concept.
Personally I spent a lot of time trying to make 3.5 more realistic when I played it and my house rules got ridiculous. I learned that I don’t need a life simulator to tell a good story. That depth of rules does slow down the game and breaks the mood and all the book keeping in 4 can do that at times (thank god for alea).
Nope, what I was saying is that I wish fluff wasn’t so specific.
I don’t know, I still don’t see how it’s a big deal to ignore the stuff written in italics. Fluff is, by its very nature, something that can be skipped over without any impact on the mechanics. If you want Astral Blades of Death to instead be ribbons of dancing light, knock yourself out. Either way, it’ll be a level 23 encounter power that deals 6d6 + wisdom damage.
Nope, what I was saying is that I wish fluff wasn’t so specific.
I don’t know, I still don’t see how it’s a big deal to ignore the stuff written in italics. Fluff is, by its very nature, something that can be skipped over without any impact on the mechanics. If you want Astral Blades of Death to instead be ribbons of dancing light, knock yourself out. Either way, it’ll be a level 23 encounter power that deals 6d6 + wisdom damage.
Right, but it brings me out of it when have to take Astral Blades of Death and consciously change it. I stay immersed if I just have to describe a generic power A anyway I like, it still does 6d6+wis it just doesn’t have a name or fluff.
In the end your right of course it doesn’t take much (if anything) but it does take enough for me to break the immersion. It’s that discontinuity in a movie that you can’t stop thinking about and ruins a perfectly fine movie because you stopped suspending disbelief.
Blah, I don’t know.
Thanks everyone for replying btw, I needed the outside opinions, it helps me think! =D
Which would preserve a sense of immersion more? (a) Lists of powers labeled “Fighter Power 1, Fighter Power 2, etc”, along with the damage numbers and effects; OR (b) Lists of “fluff” descriptions, with nothing about damage dice and effects.
Do I really have to try to take seriously a post that seems to say that there are three kinds of role playing, but that only one of these is REALLY role playing?
Does anyone still buy that Gaymist/Narrativist/Storytellerist stuff?
I’ve actually got a long, long, long post in the works that delves into this specifically, as part of an overall RPG theory. Suffice it to say that this guy’s blog post really seems to miss the point of G/S/N Forge Theory as I understand it.
Short version: Gamism / Simulationism / Narrativism are not player-types, but they’re play-types, or styles of participation in a game. You’re not “gamist” or “simulationist”: the game itself is. Different games can focus on different things and have different strengths and weaknesses, appealing to different play-styles. When they’re used together well, you generally get a good game. When they’re used together poorly, you get a really schizophrenic game (where you might roll percentile dice and consult a scoring matrix to determine a hit-location [good simulaitonism, poor gamism] and then for another task you spend “cool points” to see how well you do [good gamism, poor simulationism]).
Gamism finds enjoyment in the simple act of participating in aspects of the game itself which are fun.
+ Simple gamist participation often involves enjoying things like rolling a great number of dice, succeeding at a difficult task, or getting a critical or double or trump.
+ Advanced gamist participation comes from mastering the rules of the game, both on the conflict resolution side and the character creation side.
Narrativism finds pleasure in aspects of the shared story which the game is telling.
+ Simple narrativist participation often comes from enjoyment in describing actions well, unraveling a mystery, or meeting other interesting characters.
+ Advanced narrativist participation seeks to help cultivate, contribute to, and shape the long-term over-arcing story that a particular game generates in a way that is fulfilling.
Simulationism tends to be at its best when the game actively attempts to immerse the participants within the “reality” of the game’s “world” as that participant understands it.
+ Simple simulationist participation tends to find enjoyment in the characters and conflict resolution behaving in “realistic” ways, such as a ten-thousand foot fall onto hard rock being fatal, or the ranges of weapons being in agreement with real weapons.
+ Advanced simulationist participation prefers methods of resolution which allow for extremely fine, realistic detail, such as rules for attacking different body parts with realistic injuries, or realistic affects on characters for being in different environments.
The differences come up like this:
Let’s say you’re in a fight with the Big Bad Evil Guy, and you make an attack roll, only to roll poorly. A game with a gamist perspective says you miss because those are the rules, but you might have hit if you’d bought more plusses to your attack. A narrativist perspective says you missed because that wasn’t the climactic finishing blow, but you can fudge it if it makes the scene better. A simulationist perspective tells you that you missed because of numerous in-game circumstances (including poor training, fatigue, poor footing, a skilled opponent, etc.), but your swing might have some other affect even if you missed (because nothing happens in a vacuum).
I find myself humbled again by your insight JK. I have to ask now, do you think games lend themselves towards certain types of play better then others? WoD’s storyteller system seems much more Narrativistic then d20, and Hack Master is definitely Simulationism heavy, and 4e seems more strongly gamist then 3e did. I think that was the point of the blog, though he does seem to have a different understanding of the 3 then you, and I like your definitions better, they are something I can relate to.
It’s tough to say, really. In my mind, those three types are together just a small part of overall what defines an RPG, and indeed, most games have aspects of all three in different areas of their rules, but I’ll give it a shot:
In my mind, the quintessential gamist moment would be in a situation like 3.5 D&D where the wizard fires off an Empowered delayed blast fireball after receiving numerous buffs from the party and chugging a bunch of potions and generally being absurdly powerful. Then the wizard’s player has to roll so many dice that he almost can’t hold them all. Everyone gathers around, because this could be the blast that finally kills the Big Bad Evil Guy and ends the fight. The wizard’s player starts shaking the dice while the other players yell, “Come on!” “No ones!” and “Don’t screw this up!”. He tosses them onto the table with a thunderous clatter, and everyone huddles around and possibly even helps as he starts counting up the result of that gargantuan pile of dice, the players cheering when they realize just how many 5s and 6s are there. And let’s face it: a lot of other games do this well. That’s the Crowning Moment of Awesome that people will remember for years, because he rolled so many dice and the numbers were so big. The actual numbers might be forgotten, but the simple act of rolling those dice was extraordinarily memorable.
Simulationism in itself is really wonky: when it comes to mechanics, some people expect simulationism to mean something like HERO System, where the amount of detail you can derive from a single roll is just incredible, though the derivations themselves can be difficult math or simply are time-consuming. For others, simulationism means that the world around them makes sense, and that the fictional world simply reacts realistically to the weirdness often rampant in RPGs (Eberron is actually a pretty good example of this, where magic replaces technology). The former seems to have been a greater focus in the gaming community early on (when you had groups coming up with hit-charts for AD&D and charts for different weapon-types vs. armor-types and weapon-speeds), while the latter seems to be a little more modern. (Disclaimer: I’m a strong advocate of the latter form of simulationism and a strong critic of the latter. In my mind, beyond a certain level, detail is insignificant, and is better arbitrated with hand-waving and description than mechanics. On the other hand, I find the intersection between the fantastic and the real to be extremely interesting, which perhaps explains my preference for Ultimate Marvel, the Heroes series, and the types of games I run.)
Narrativism is a whole ‘nother beast. Because really, RPGs have been saying since Day 1 that if something makes the game better, change it. Rule 0 has been cited when a GM wants to fudge a roll or change a rule because it’ll mean that a given encounter will just stink without it. In the modern sense, a narrativist game will try to give everyone the ability to do this. I’d consider games like Eden Studios’ Buffy: The Vampire Slayer to be very representative of this type of gameplay. The whole game is an attempt to recreate an episode of the titular television program with the rules, and it heavily relies on “Drama Points”, which allow a player to legally fudge a roll, make changes to a scene, or things of that nature. Whenever the rules give you a way to say, “Hey, wait a minute. That sucked. It didn’t make for a good story. I want to change it.” they’re narrativist.
Different games also intersect playstyles in different ways. The Storyteller system, at least the one I’m familiar with from oWoD (I’m relatively sure that the nWoD is similar, but I can’t speak with authority on it), had some strong simulationist aspects with a narrativist bent that sometimes came at the expense of gamism (the rules for blood in Vampire encouraged players to feed, and turned them into raving monsters when they didn’t, which took control and participation away from the player). I’d say that one of my favorite games Mutants & Masterminds (and the game I built based on it, d20 Advanced) is pretty simulationist in character creation, but handwaves away a lot of simulationism during combat in favor of gamism and ease-of-play. In one area where it doesn’t (knockback), it tends to get a little wonky. d20 games in general (many, but not all) have a big simulationist bent in character creation (encouraging you to customize and tweak your character to perfection), and differing degrees of simulationism in actual gameplay and resolution.
I’m not sure if that’s quite what you were looking for, but hopefully there’s something useful in all that rambling
I think I get it. Gamism is easy, it the mechanics, but Simulationism can be the mechanics it can be the (campgain) setting, and Narrativism is the DM and player interaction. It’s not that these things are different attributes that different players like or dislike more then the other it is that they truely are different aspect to the game. It’s an apple and orange comparison. Just cause something is conducive to one doesn’t mean it can’t be conducive to the others, and visa-versa. Or even that if something is conducive to one at some point that it will still be in another. It’s a flaw system of evaluation.
