What WotC is simply trying ot address is probably one of the biggest legitimate complaints directed at 3e/3.5 is that it's too burdensome to prepare a session.    All of those fiddly bits are great fun when a player is dealing with them for one character, but they get out of hand very quickly for a GM running more than a handful of NPCs during a game.  I think the idea here is simply to produce drop-in monsters that are easy for GMs to pick and use.

Quote from: CalithenaPierce -

That response misses the point, because the fight I'm talking about (woe to me for picking this terminology...) was occurring within AD&D as well as across the spectrum of other games.

I know that. One of my favorite early modules was Assassin's Knot. Shocking, isn't it?

That doesn't take anything away from my point. The gamist battle both within and without early D&D is over. Since 3.5, latest, D&D is gamist by default, and everything else is peanuts. So, you either drift D&D, and you will have to push harder than ever to do that, given how coherent the game now is. Or you play peanuts.

Because I'm serious, James: This is a gamist monoculture. In the 80s, bunches of RPGs could sell a couple tens of thousands of copies. Nowadays, Greg Stolze proudly announces that 3 months or so after launch REIGN is approaching the magical 1000. Whoop-di-doo.

PS: Wow, theory backlash FTW. Could people relax a bit on this fine Monday morning on the Pacific coast?

Quote from: The_ShadowFor all those aggressively lowbrow types who won't even admit terms like simulationism and gamism, you are being disingenuous. It's patently clear what these terms mean.

No, actually it's not.  Are we talking about the GDS model or the GNS model, for starters?  I'm not sure that your definitions quite matches either model.

Quote from: The_ShadowPersonally, I find rulesets that attempt to hardwire a particular playstyle far more of a constraint. Of course, all rulesets do this to some extent, but some more than others.

All games do this.  I think that many RPGs aren't games per se, but rather  things you can make games with.  Players who complain about GMs or other players are likely struggling with trying to use the same RPG to play different games from the other people at the table.  Sometimes you can have concurrent games running in the same game session, but sometimes the goals of the games are contradictory and it becomes a meta-game of who gets to play their game and pursue their goals.

Quote from: The_ShadowI'll wait and see whether 4e can support, for example, my preferred old-school sword'n'sorcery vibe better than 3e, but I'm not that optimistic.

On this, we agree.

Quote from: The_ShadowBRP, on the other hand, can be tweaked to any flavour of fantasy - low/high magic, S&S, epic, with minimal effort, while D&D stubbornly remains D&D. Which is fine, and more power to those who dig it. But as I said above, it is for those who like the ruleset to determine the setting, i.e. it leans toward gamism, rather than for simulationists like myself who like to be able to emulate different flavours/genres.

Well... at this point D&D is actually a family of games, rather than one in particular.  Some are more alike than others, and some better suited for different flavours of fantasy than others.

I agree that you want the rules of a game to lend themselves to the type of simulation you want.  That will lead to more enjoyable games and more interesting narratives.

It seems to me that WotC is focusing the design on the meta-gaming aspects of D&D, calibrating the framework and mechanics to make it easier to run straight tactical challenge play. Even though that isn't my preferred style of play, I'm actually pleased the 4E looks likely to be a more focused and streamlined game than 3E. I may even buy it, even though I don't play 3E, because it will offer a distinct type of game from the traditional play I can get from Moldvay Basic or Castles and Crusades.

My bigger concern is the tone and sensibility of the game. I can't stand the graphic design and feel of 3/3.5 books, so I'm likely going to be out in the cold with the new edition. But who knows, maybe WotC will support off-shoot settings that cater to a more sword and sorcery feel than the dungeon-punk/ heroic destiny stuff in currently publishes.

The terminology, if it was ever useful, is hopeless now, but I think what Calithena and The_Shadow are talking about is basically along the lines of the division between Stratego & Battleship on one hand, and (say) Napoleon at Waterloo (SPI) and Midway (AH) on the other.

Philosophically it comes down to whether the audience's interest in the game is based more on the mechanical interaction or on the way the game represents the subject it's based on. There's a strong and a weak version of the latter interest.

The strong version: simulations are analytical tools. That is, you can use a simulation to answer why Lee lost at Gettysberg, or whether Caesar's legionary army could have defeated Alexander at his peak. I think this is easily overstated, but it has some validity--you won't necessarily get a definitive answer out of a simulation, but it can point you toward areas for additional research or even R&D.

The weak version: simulations are educational tools. That is, you can use a simulation to effectively communicate a thesis or set of theses about a given situation, and you can also critique the thesis through the way it's represented in the simulation. E.g., even a simple wargame like Ancients is effective at communicating the importance of protecting one's flanks.

So if you look at a game like Battleship, even though it has pieces that look like warships, and you win by "sinking" the opponent's fleet, the game really says very little about naval warfare; in fact if someone opposed the military theme, it would be trivial to reimagine the game as an easter egg hunt or maybe a game about drilling for oil. But it's interesting that many variants of the game are designed not only to improve gameplay, but to represent elements of naval combat. In fact, Midway could be seen as an extreme variant that takes the basic "search" premise and adds movement, geographical objectives, resource management, and weapon ranges--all in ther service of representing actual factors in the battle. In the "game" direction, though, the primary criterion for any extension is whether it improves gameplay per se; if it does, then that's sufficient justification in itself, and any representational quality of the rule is basically post-hoc rationalization.

The development of European Chess and Chinese Xiang Qi illustrates this in some ways. Both games derive from a common ancestor which may have had some simulative qualities. However it's difficult to explain the differences between the games purely by differences in the military technologies being represented, or by different ideas of how best to represent a battle in game form. Instead each game seems to have hit a point where the introduction of new long-ranging pieces (to supplement the rook/chariot) "crystallized" it into a tight, fast-moving game where even a small move could have board-wide implications. Particularly in the case of European chess, the only plausible motivation for the change was that it made the game more interesting.

Good analysis Elliott -- we need to see more posts like this!

Quote from: StuartIt's been so long since I looked at Forge stuff, and their terms are so non-intuitive that I don't know what the heck you're talking about.  Gamist?  Simulationist?

Ignore the forge. Listen to John Kim:
http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/threefold/faq_v1.html

Quote from: SettembriniBUT having monsters solely defined by their battlefield role is erecting another meta-fence around it. The moment the Goblin tribe becomes a Mook tribe, it´s gotten harder to have them perceived as a Goblin tribe by the PCs.

I acutually uderstand it differently. You will have a goblin tribe right... and you will have goblin mook, goblin mastermind, goblin brute, goblin lurker and so on. Division of labour, you see...

Now in my opinion this actually adds a bit of setting feeling, because goblins aren't homogenous creatures. There is that evil goblin shaman (mastermind), who uses the other goblins for his own purposes. There is this big, bad and evil goblin ... chieftan (brute) who pretends he acutally rules the tribe. There are those poor young goblin warriors (mooks) and yes... here is the old, tricky goblin hunter (lurker), the only one who is not under the shaman influence.

The "roles" for monsters actually adds the dynamics to the monsters who so far has been only clump of statistics. Sure, you could build your own goblin society dynamics before, but I thinks this really helps. Structuring of reality helps to grasp it and use it...

But as usually this is tool, that can be used or misused. As any other tool...

Sounds like a great game, playing all those different goblins - what's it called?

Quote from: James J SkachSounds like a great game, playing all those different goblins - what's it called?

"GMing."

Quote from: Warthur"GMing."

:haw:

Thanx. But really, I base this on one of Noonan's Design and Development articles and I find it very refreshing. I add this approach to my game of Star Wars and so far its great. I currently have no D&D game running, but once I will, I will do the same...

Quote from: CalithenaSeems to me they are.

Will it work?

Settembrini mentioned the 'monster roles' as a red flag - for me too, a big red Gamist flag.

Will D&D4 crash and burn on the speedbump of ingrained Simulationist habits? Or are most of us really Gamists burning to get out?

(Or will the hyped-up Gamism draw current non-roleplayers into the hobby?)

The thesis hasn't been tested since the late 70's/early 80's, when AD&D1 and the convention tournament scene originally won the battle for the Gamists, but later lost the war so thoroughly that Simulationists presided over the hobby like Hannibal at Cannae for two decades.

By Gamism, you're saying competition between players will be encouraged, and players will be "scored" individually, like the old tournament modules you mentioned?

Then no.

I don't consider bragging about a "build" to be gamism, because the GM doesn't score individual players based on their build.

Also, emphasis on good builds isn't built into the system, and some tables openly discourage overly efficient builds as "munchkin".