Quote from: soviet;728279OK, so what support do your games of D&D, GURPS, and Call of Cthulhu give to narrativism? By which I mean: What freedom do players have to add their own content to the game world or negotiate the potential stakes of their own actions? How much authority does the GM have? Does the GM have the authority to fudge dice rolls in secret? How important are the characters' goals, relationships, and personalities to what happens in play? How important are the players' decisions as to where the game goes next?

Never really given it much thought, since I don't think in terms of Narrativism. But Nothing in D&D prevents you from making relationships, goals and personalities important in play. There is also nothing in the mechanics that impeded making the players decisions impact where the game goes next.

Now if Narrativist, you are looking for mechanics that give the players powers traditionally held by the GM, those are not really going to be found in games like CoC and 2E. But this doesn't go against anything I have been saying.

I am not saying you can't have games with these things, that better serve your interests. And I am not saying mechanics don't matter. Clearly having mechanics that empower players to control plot, drastically impacts play. That isn't something I am denying. I am denying the three grouping category of GNS as an ideal model for designers. I think the definitions and divisions are questionable and I believe the focus on one agenda and coherence is deeply flawed. You can see this with a game like Savage Worlds. Which has things like bennies in it, so I Guess it is kind of narrativist, but then it also is trying to simulate genre physics as well (plus it has what you might call gamist content). My problem with this, is it is an artificial way to dissect play and games. You are forcing games into artificial categories the same way the social styles sales program I mentioned forces people into artificial categories. Once you have a model, it is easy to fit things into it. Cut anything into 2, 3, 4, 5 or six groups that are well definied and you can easily do that. But it segregates the natural play experience. People find things they like are suddenly only allowable in an N game, or only allowable in a G game or only allowable in an S game, because holders of the theory decided to place each of those things into one of the three categories. So I just think the theory doesn't hold up in my experience. When these elements get separated and put into systems devoted to G or N or S, I don't enjoy it. So I just can't accept that this ought to be held up as the measure of good game design.

Now, all that said, if you like games that fall into the N category of GNS and find making games toward that works for you. I am fine with it. All I have been saying is I don't like how so many proponents of GNS demand that others adhere to their idea of coherent design using GNS, and belittle games that don't worry at all about that. My own personal gaming philosophy is the best games are composed of mixed elements that allow for a broad range of playstyles and appeal to a wide audience because gaming groups tend to be made up of varied players.

It goes back to my point about d&d editions. If you examined 2E and said, it is clearly striving for a narrativist agenda, so lets bake in tons of narrativist options and build a game focused on N, you would have a game that probably loses interest from everyone who liked 2E (even those who found its promise of a good story enticing).

Quote from: estar;728269It my opinion and experience that in RPGs the rules are subordinate to the content.

That the content i.e. the roleplaying of an individual character is what defines the experience of a tabletop roleplaying campaign. The game i.e. the mechanics are not critical to that experience.

I have never seen bad roleplaying fixed by rules. I have seen bad rules fixed by good roleplaying.

This is not a statement of fact, but rather a statement of preference. For some people in some games, the rules do make a big difference to their experience.

While I disagree with the expression of GNS because I think it is muddle-headed and confused, I agree with the principle that different people play for different things at times.

I enjoy the games that you describe - but I also enjoy other types of games.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;728288Now, all that said, if you like games that fall into the N category of GNS and find making games toward that works for you. I am fine with it. All I have been saying is I don't like how so many proponents of GNS demand that others adhere to their idea of coherent design using GNS, and belittle games that don't worry at all about that. My own personal gaming philosophy is the best games are composed of mixed elements that allow for a broad range of playstyles and appeal to a wide audience because gaming groups tend to be made up of varied players.

To be fair, players are constantly belittling games that aren't their preference - with or without GNS.

Still, I agree with you at least to the extent that "coherent" games are not necessarily better. (That was an addition of Ron's not present in the Threefold Model.) However, I'm not convinced that mixed games are necessarily better in any objective sense either.

Quote from: jhkim;728301To be fair, players are constantly belittling games that aren't their preference - with or without GNS.

Still, I agree with you at least to the extent that "coherent" games are not necessarily better. (That was an addition of Ron's not present in the Threefold Model.) However, I'm not convinced that mixed games are necessarily better in any objective sense either.

Fair enough. I think mixed games work better for your typical group which is going to be made up of players wanting different things. That said, i don't think focused design is objectively worse than broad scope design. However if you are making a game like D&D where you have a huge playerbase, i think a narrow design scope is a bad choice.

I think personally the scope of a game has no connection to how good a game will be, but the wider the scope, the more people will find something in it they enjoy.

That being said, I like both wide scope games and narrow scope games depending.

Quote from: soviet;728258So while AD&D 1e and D&D 4e are both primarily gamist games, the play experiences are very different.

1e and 3e are both Gamist plus Simulation.
So, mechanically, is 2e, but it adds in some Dramatist GMing advice.
4e is Gamist + Dramatist. It doesn't like Sim at all.

I think that's the difference. 3e and 4e are both charbuild games, so the Gamist element is pretty similar, but IME they play very differently, because 3e uses a process-sim framework and 4e uses a dramatist framework. This is why 3e still 'feels like D&D' despite its clunkiness and battlegrid, while 4e doesn't. 4e feels like this, only in extreme slow motion!

Quote from: soviet;728279OK, so what support do your games of D&D, GURPS, and Call of Cthulhu give to narrativism? By which I mean: What freedom do players have to add their own content to the game world or negotiate the potential stakes of their own actions?

Player can add whatever their characters can add to the game world in a tabletop roleplaying games. Narrative mechanics have nothing to do with the roleplaying of an individual character and when present in a game are part of what the player does. Not as part of the player acting as his character.

What happens in my games is that if the player makes a case for something that ought it be there then I declare it is there or assign a random chance for the proposal to be true. It not involved but simply recognizing that there is only so much time to go into the details.

Quote from: soviet;728279How much authority does the GM have?

Complete authority in two areas; the setting and adjudication of actions. Because the player's information about the two are incomplete it requires a referee with a final say to work.

With that being said it is a gathering of friends and the "Don't be a dick about it rule" very much applies. For me I don't mind been told what the rules say while refereeing and encourage players to question me and offer their opinion about my rulings. If one of my players has a good idea for a detail of my setting I will incorporate it. What story games try to do with narrative mechanics are not necessary at my table.

Quote from: soviet;728279Does the GM have the authority to fudge dice rolls in secret?

It is the referee decision on how an action is to be adjudicated is final. If he rolled something and decided otherwise then that is his call. However overuse of fudging is often not a good sign of how the refereeing is managing his campaign.

Quote from: soviet;728279How important are the characters' goals, relationships, and personalities to what happens in play? How important are the players' decisions as to where the game goes next?

Considering I run and manage sandbox campaigns and wrote quite a bit on the topic. I would say both are quite important. The campaign wouldn't happen without the players deciding something that furthers their goal even it is something as mundane as kill things and take all their stuff.

I let go of the idea long ago that the players should be or do anything in particular in accordance to my wishes. The only two requirements for my games is that your character must plausibly fit into the setting I run. And that you play as if you are there as your character.

If the player crafts a distinct personality and deeply immerse himself that absolutely fabulous. If Joe shows up and plays Joe the fighter out to kill things and take their stuff that is likewise absolutely fabulous. I have successfully ran games with both types of players sometime with them in the same group.

Quote from: soviet;728282I see rules as a positive tool that can create or strongly reinforce a particular mood or type of play. It's not about fixing bad roleplaying, it's about making good roleplaying even better.  The rules by which you determine the content of the game cannot help but influence the nature of that content.

My experience is that rules neither help or hinder roleplaying. It solely stems from the interest of the player and the encouragement of the referee. System that "aid" roleplay do so by being fun for that particular group. For another group it will be utter and complete failure. For a third group they will be indifferent.

For example there is nothing special about Dogs in the Vineyard that makes it better at handling moral dilemmas. The author's well crafted hype attracts players looking to roleplay moral dilemmas so it become a self feeding of cycle around the game. The mechanic itself a cute euro style game that many find fun. But it has no more to do with simulating moral dilemmas than Carsonne is about the simulation of medieval resources. It just dressing on a fun game.

In the end it works Dogs in the Vineyard is a steady seller for the author and people have fun with it.

The job of the mechanics in a roleplaying game is to make the  adjudicating the actions of the players easier in a given genre or setting. That it. For Dogs in the Vineyard the dice pool mechanic does that job for moral conflicts.

Quote from: jhkim;728296This is not a statement of fact, but rather a statement of preference. For some people in some games, the rules do make a big difference to their experience.

A player needs to be comfortable with the mechanics used to resolve actions. If not then his roleplaying will suffer perhaps to the point where he doesn't even want to be involved in the campaign.

Quote from: jhkim;728296I agree with the principle that different people play for different things at times.

My experience this occurs all the time. From campaign to campaign, from session to session, sometimes even within a session a player will do a 180 on his interest.

Quote from: pemerton;726287I have expereinced the flip-side of this.

In an AD&D 2nd ed game in the mid-90s, I built my cleric PC using a fairly deep knowledge of the system parameters and the PC build options. A new player built his fighter PC following the advice of the GM, who was in effect translating this guy's conception of his character into the formal mechanical language of the game.

In the first combat, my cleric was dealing with foes at an effectiveness ratio of about 4:1 compared to the new player's fighter. His immersion was pretty shattered as he discovered that his PC, whom the GM had told him was a warrior, was barely effective compared to me PC, ostensibly a priest.

I think games with very transparent PC build rules, eg Traveller or RQ or a somewhat stripped-back RM, are better at avoiding this problem.

Quote from: Benoist. . . or you just don't play with kits and weapon specs at level 1 and all sorts of shit that rig the game in favor of the guy who's read all the splats and squeezed every modifier he could get out of them. Just a thought.

The notion that those are "build rules" has blown my mind since I discovered that people had widely turned them into that. Which transformation explains 3E, I suppose!

Kits, when I saw them, struck me as just examples of how one could customize characters, as DMs had with discretion been doing since Day One.

Pemerton, what was to you the point of ensuring that your priest would be a better fighter than the warrior played by the dude who was big on playing an effective fighter? What do you think was the point to the DM of letting you do that and keeping the other fellow in the dark?

That just baffles me.

Quote from: pemerton;726631OK, what does abuse look like in (non-d20) CoC?

The same as in your example: I want to play a champion fencer, but the GM makes my character not as good as your nigh-untouchable one who is billed as an unathletic bookworm.

Quote from: Imperator;728101I have never seen such thing.

And Opaopajr experiences seem truly alien to me. And I fail to see how they are conducive to a significant advantage.

They might actually be alien to you. How often did you circle around tourney style players, from CCGs, minis, and RPGA/Living/Society? If your contact has been low, that's a blessing in my book.

Not that into this type of stuff in high school, but traveled lightly among such circles in college. Yet later worked in game stores, both FLGS and video games. It was a youthful experience I would not want to do again.

Age at least brings wisdom, as in not being afraid of one's own tastes and being upfront about them. Cuts through all the bullshit and tears drama that boggled my mind before. "It's a fucking game, dude. Cope."

Quote from: S'mon;728319I think that's the difference. 3e and 4e are both charbuild games, so the Gamist element is pretty similar, but IME they play very differently, because 3e uses a process-sim framework and 4e uses a dramatist framework. This is why 3e still 'feels like D&D' despite its clunkiness and battlegrid, while 4e doesn't. 4e feels like this, only in extreme slow motion!

Interesting assessment explaining D&D editions through GNS theory.

But the Bruderschaft music video link reminds me that with all the monotone industrial singing, I need to start my own industrial band with R&B diva yodeling. Maybe if I do a mash up of Whitney Houston's "I Will Alway Love You" and something Funker Vogt or :wumpscut:?

Quote from: soviet;728251But that's because the content is exactly the same. The point of different rule sets is that they drive the content in different ways and thus create different experiences. The rules are a part of the content.

Quote from: estar;728269I excised this rest because I believe this is the heart of our disagreement. It my opinion and experience that in RPGs the rules are subordinate to the content.

That the content i.e. the roleplaying of an individual character is what defines the experience of a tabletop roleplaying campaign. The game i.e. the mechanics are not critical to that experience.

Leaving aside both the Forge and the idea that rules can fix bad roleplayers for a minute, it seems a very mild statement to say that the rules can influence the content.  The rules often encode opinions on the relative importance of certain factors, and some rules primarily exist to serve up content.

When the kingdom's best swordsman is surprised by four dagger-armed goblins while unarmored, for example, what he decides to do next is going to be strongly influenced by whether the game is D&D 3e, Rolemaster or Burning Wheel.

If praying each morning to free yourself from sin gives you +2 for the day, that can affect the choices players make in how they characterize their PCs.  If relative social status is the largest single modifier to urban NPC reaction rolls, that shapes the game's content.

Similarly, if the chargen process makes sure that each PC has parents, a mentor, and a friend, with known locations and professions, the game is primed differently than a game whose chargen makes murder hobos.

The majority of content inevitably comes from the group, of course, and there's nothing stopping BECMI players writing PC backgrounds that include family. Even with a game that includes family in chargen, the group can of course ignore all this and go and play pirates.

Quote from: fuseboy;728478it seems a very mild statement to say that the rules can influence the content.  The rules often encode opinions on the relative importance of certain factors, and some rules primarily exist to serve up content.

You bring up some good points. My view is that particular RPGs are used in for particular kinds of campaigns because it save time and work for whatever the system addresses. You need to do a lot of work to use OD&D for a golden age space campaign. You need to do a lot of work to use Traveller fora dungeon crawl fantasy campaign.*  But it easy to use OD&D to run dungeon crawls and Traveller to run sci-fi campaigns.

It my experience that there are two broad types of mechanics. Rules to help you adjudicate the actions of a character and rules to help manage/generate setting detail. Setting detail includes character creation.

For example Classic Traveller makes it easier to run a sci-fi campaign revolving around a tramp freighter plying the spacelanes. It has support for other sci-fi tropes but not in as much detail until later expansions.

OD&D goes into detail dungeon adventures, wilderness adventures, and estabilshing strongholds. But it has little in the way of information on running campaign around politics or the clash of culture or religion. There are nothing that stops an OD&D campaign from having a political angle but the referee has to do more work.

Another comparison is OD&D can be used to run a Arthurian campaign. However it is a lot less work to use Pendragon.

Quote from: fuseboy;728478When the kingdom's best swordsman is surprised by four dagger-armed goblins while unarmored, for example, what he decides to do next is going to be strongly influenced by whether the game is D&D 3e, Rolemaster or Burning Wheel.

I agree that mechanical steps to resolve the swordsmen being surprised and the ensuing combat will be completely different. But the situation is universal, you as your character are surprised by four goblins with daggers, what do you do?

Well I could try to resolve it as follows (assume that setting details I describe exist before the encounter).

1) I get hit by two goblins in the initial surprise and but remain standing.
2) I grab the chandelier and swing at one of the goblins and knock him down.
3) As a result of the swing only one goblin can attack (and misses) and the other two have to move into position.
4) I draw my sword and step back so only two goblins can attack me.
5) One hits and one misses, the wounds are slowing me down.
6) I attack and down a goblin.
7) By the end of combat I am severely injured but all four goblins are down.

There is nothing in D&D 3e, Rolemaster, or Burning Wheels that prevents the above occurring. Now in a very lite system the combat is resolve by a single opposed roll and the above is just after the fact narrative. Or it could be a second by second resolution of the fight using GURPS. Or something in between like D&D 3e.

Now here is an important caveat, when I say it the same outcome. The characters are equivalent the initial situation is also the same. The goblin in the AD&D Monster Manual, is not the same as D&D 4e goblin in Monster Manual I, not the sames a the Goblin in Rolemaster, which is not the same as the goblin in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, and so on.

You could make equivalents but not by just yanking out 'as is'. Each the systems have a different implied setting even when dealing with the same genre/subsgenre.

Quote from: fuseboy;728478If praying each morning to free yourself from sin gives you +2 for the day, that can affect the choices players make in how they characterize their PCs.

If it is part of the setting that praying in the morning to free yourself from sin make you more likely to succeed on your actions then that needs to be represented in or added to your chosen rule set.

Quote from: fuseboy;728478If relative social status is the largest single modifier to urban NPC reaction rolls, that shapes the game's content.

Again that is a feature of the setting and if you are switching system and using the same setting then you need to add it or find its equivalent.

Quote from: fuseboy;728478The majority of content inevitably comes from the group, of course, and there's nothing stopping BECMI players writing PC backgrounds that include family. Even with a game that includes family in chargen, the group can of course ignore all this and go and play pirates.

Exactly and my contention the ability to do this makes mechanics irrelevant as far as the CAMPAIGN goes. People who think their lack prevents a game from featuring X, in this case families, are wrong.

These mechanics are useful because either it saves work or the group enjoys the resulting mini-game. Which to me is absolutely fine. RPGs are an leisure activity you should enjoy the game mechanics you use, leisure time is precious for many and they should save you work in doing what you enjoy.