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I wrote a manifesto today, proclaiming the return of Simulationism. I'm sharing it today because the essay references a lot of folks I first met here at TheRPG site, including Brian Gleichman and John H. Kim, and bashes on Ron Edwards a bit, who is of course the ancient foe of our own RPG Pundit.

If anyone is interested, you can check it out here: https://arbiterofworlds.substack.com/p/a-manifesto-in-defense-of-simulationism

Fellow simulationist here. After getting depressed by more and more "big" names like the Big D and Pathfinder(1) ditching simulationist stuff (like absolute DCs for skill checks, etc., especially in D5), and many new high-production-value lineups like Fate(2) having complete disregard for the playstyle, this article sparked some hope that others like me do exist in the open...

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1) They still have some sample DCs, but they made the awful act of creating top-down designed nonplayer entities...
2) Political standings aside, their books ARE well made for a small publisher.

QuoteThe first theory was called the threefold model and it was created by Mary Kuhner in 1997 and thereafter popularized by John H. Kim. According to the threefold model, there are three styles of playing RPGs: dramatist, gamist, and simulationist. Kim explains the three styles as follows:

        "dramatist": is the style which values how well the in-game action creates a satisfying storyline. Different kinds of stories may be viewed as satisfying, depending on individual tastes, varying from fanciful pulp action to believable character drama. It is the end result of the story which is important.

        "gamist": is the style which values setting up a fair challenge for the players (as opposed to the PCs). The challenges may be tactical combat, intellectual mysteries, politics, or anything else. The players will try to solve the problems they are presented with, and in turn the GM will make these challenges solvable if they act intelligently within the contract.

        "simulationist": is the style which values resolving in-game events based solely on game-world considerations, without allowing any meta-game concerns to affect the decision. Thus, a fully simulationist GM will not fudge results to save PCs or to save her plot, or even change facts unknown to the players. Such a GM may use meta-game considerations to decide meta-game issues like who is playing which character, whether to play out a conversation word for word, and so forth, but she will resolve actual in-game events based on what would "really" happen.

Our own jhkim?

Respect!

I really value immersion, something brain-damaged Edwards seemed incapable of, and incapable of comprehending. I think simulation is vital for that sense of you-are-there immersion. It does not need to be as robust a world-sim as ACKS, but there needs to be a simulation element.

QuoteI'm not cherry picking — Edwards goes on and on about how terrible Simulationists are. The full thread has to be read to be believed. By 2004, Edwards had gone further and condemned everyone who enjoyed simulationist RPGs as "brain damaged."

I might be wrong about this, but did not Edwards later revise his stance on Sim, in an essay entitled "Simulationism: The Right to Dream?" I think this is when he finally crystalized his model. It's been years, but I seem to recall in that essay he treated Sim as an equal third leg in the triad.

Also, and I might be wrong about this as well, but wasn't the "brain-damaged" comment directed specifically at World of Darkness games and players?

As for Sim games, I would place Traveller at the top of the list. 

Quote from: Aglondir on March 07, 2023, 11:46:06 PM
I might be wrong about this, but did not Edwards later revise his stance on Sim, in an essay entitled "Simulationism: The Right to Dream?" I think this is when he finally crystalized his model. It's been years, but I seem to recall in that essay he treated Sim as an equal third leg in the triad.

Also, and I might be wrong about this as well, but wasn't the "brain-damaged" comment directed specifically at World of Darkness games and players?

I think you're definitely right about 'brain damaged', which referred to players of 'Storyteller' railroad games who could only look for the pre-written railroad to follow.

Here's the Simulation essay - http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/ - I recall him actually becoming MORE hostile to Simulation after that came out though, with comments on The Forge about it being a dysfunctional play style. He never really seemed to 'get' it. He never seems to have felt you-are-there immersion or understood why people valued it.

Quote from: amacris on March 07, 2023, 10:56:40 PM
I wrote a manifesto today, proclaiming the return of Simulationism.

For most of the last ten or so years, "simulationist" has been a slur on forums, and a trigger word to pile on the downvotes on the false democracy boards.  I'm glad to see you raise a flag, that's for sure.

As regards the Gygax thing, I think you stretch a bit.  He calls it realism-simulation, and it's pretty obvious that if your idea of tabletop games is researching capabilities of different troop types across centuries, and then rolling out real battles or hypotheticals that would be interesting (once you are convinced your system will give a good enough guess in a conflict of men who were separated by time and/or space, in hypothetical conflict)... then you might be a bit cross with a guy who comes in with dragons, griffons, and elves, and gives them attributes which he finds mechanically interesting, when those mechanics are there for a reason.

How would a late-1970s Gygax have responded to the idea of "simualtionism" being an invented term to slam anyone who maintained high levels of verisimilitude in his hypothetical world?  It was in the era where words were being invented for the purpose of slicing up societies, be they the size of nations or comic-book stores, so he'd doubtless recognize the type of verbal trickery, but on which side of this would he come down?  Even in 2002, on enworld, Gary Gygax was opposed to incorporating a host of example factors in the combat simulation, but that's very different from having a reasonably accurate way of modelling large scale combats that occur off screen, or allowing for high level economic simulations of nations to answer questions the DM might have, etc.  Clearly, when there was an opportunity to either model something with a system or just handwave and choose whatever is the most dramatic, the latter would be greatly preferred. 

But, why?  My take is, that way, when something dramatic does happen, it's real in the context of the game.  If the game has enough rules to simulate something, then your interactions with it as a thing are rewarded.  But maybe the real truth is something else.

Anyway, great read.

I was interested that the essay didn't discuss what I've sometimes seen as a common critique levelled against Simulationism, which is less of a disagreement of principle or theory and more about sheer (lack of) practicality of play.

Put simply, in practice, most Simulationist games which want to create an immersive experience that has the feel of an objective, complex, living world do so by using a massive volume of rule options and cases, and by requiring players and GMs to track massive volumes of data, from timekeeping to resource usage to distance travelled and off-stage historical and political events (it's no accident that Ascendant is nearly 600 pages long). The plain fact is that a lot of gamers, even back during the first days of AD&D 1e and 2e, simply didn't have any interest in investing the amount of time and mental energy required for this, which is exactly why those subsystems mostly disappeared from D&D in the third edition and afterwards.

The gamers of what might be called the "Joss Whedon" school of roleplaying (I consider Whedon the most egregious example of a creator who builds his world solely in terms of how exciting the next idea he gets is) tend to be mostly interested in depicting and resolving in-game conflicts as immediately as possible, and are only interested in the coherence and objectivity of the conflicts' setting just so far as (and no farther than) absolutely necessary to make those conflicts feel real, exciting, and important. "Simulationism", I think, got somewhat unfairly defined as any interest in worldbuilding/world-managing consistency for its own sake beyond that requirement, which is also where the acrimony comes from -- we always see as "obsessive" any interest in a topic beyond what we ourselves find interesting.

I am finding either extreme of narrativeism or simulationism unpalatable, but I do not need my pretend elf game constrained by academic theory.

The rules are not the game. The rules are tool for the GM to create a game with. If the world is poorly defined, how can anyone sensibly answer "what does your character do?" I do not believe that the goal of a pen and paper roleplaying game is to simulate a world anymore that it is to tell a story. The story will emerge from the choices we make and those choices are constrained by how the world works.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on March 08, 2023, 01:37:29 AM
I was interested that the essay didn't discuss what I've sometimes seen as a common critique levelled against Simulationism, which is less of a disagreement of principle or theory and more about sheer (lack of) practicality of play.

Put simply, in practice, most Simulationist games which want to create an immersive experience that has the feel of an objective, complex, living world do so by using a massive volume of rule options and cases, and by requiring players and GMs to track massive volumes of data, from timekeeping to resource usage to distance travelled and off-stage historical and political events (it's no accident that Ascendant is nearly 600 pages long). The plain fact is that a lot of gamers, even back during the first days of AD&D 1e and 2e, simply didn't have any interest in investing the amount of time and mental energy required for this, which is exactly why those subsystems mostly disappeared from D&D in the third edition and afterwards.

The gamers of what might be called the "Joss Whedon" school of roleplaying (I consider Whedon the most egregious example of a creator who builds his world solely in terms of how exciting the next idea he gets is) tend to be mostly interested in depicting and resolving in-game conflicts as immediately as possible, and are only interested in the coherence and objectivity of the conflicts' setting just so far as (and no farther than) absolutely necessary to make those conflicts feel real, exciting, and important. "Simulationism", I think, got somewhat unfairly defined as any interest in worldbuilding/world-managing consistency for its own sake beyond that requirement, which is also where the acrimony comes from -- we always see as "obsessive" any interest in a topic beyond what we ourselves find interesting.

I agree with you that Simulationism tends to be condemned for requiring complex rules. The degree of complexity someone wants in their game is very much an aesthetic choice that has a lot of influences from how skilled your GM is to how invested your fellow players are to how fast you can read. BUT -- and this is, I think, the important part -- there is no *inherent* reason that Simulation has to be rules-heavy.

Consider Kriegspiel, the wargame used to train Prussian officers. Kriegspiel had two variants, "rules-based" and "free" Kriegspiel. Rules-based Kriegspiel was similar to e.g. Ascendant, with lots of rules for everything. Free Kriegspiel relied on an objective referee to evaluate the outcome of the player choices. But what Free Kriegspiel DIDNT have was a "storyteller" saying "it would be so dramatic if there was bad weather suddenly so that the cavalry have to fight in the mud". Nor did it have a "everyone has to have fun GM" saying "well, Colonel Guderian is outnumbered, we should probably give re-balance the scenario to make it more fun for both sides." Those things simply didn't happen because the goal of Kriegspiel was to accurately simulate war to train officers.

It happens that I, personally, am more of a rules-based than free Kriegspieller, and my games reflect that. I would never dispute that! But Simulationism is bigger than me, much bigger, it's a big tent and there's room for Simulationists who, like a free kriegspiel referee, use their expertise and judgment to run a rules-light game whose comittment is towards simulating its fantasy world.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on March 08, 2023, 01:37:29 AM
I was interested that the essay didn't discuss what I've sometimes seen as a common critique levelled against Simulationism, which is less of a disagreement of principle or theory and more about sheer (lack of) practicality of play.

Put simply, in practice, most Simulationist games which want to create an immersive experience that has the feel of an objective, complex, living world do so by using a massive volume of rule options and cases, and by requiring players and GMs to track massive volumes of data, from timekeeping to resource usage to distance travelled and off-stage historical and political events (it's no accident that Ascendant is nearly 600 pages long). The plain fact is that a lot of gamers, even back during the first days of AD&D 1e and 2e, simply didn't have any interest in investing the amount of time and mental energy required for this, which is exactly why those subsystems mostly disappeared from D&D in the third edition and afterwards.

The gamers of what might be called the "Joss Whedon" school of roleplaying (I consider Whedon the most egregious example of a creator who builds his world solely in terms of how exciting the next idea he gets is) tend to be mostly interested in depicting and resolving in-game conflicts as immediately as possible, and are only interested in the coherence and objectivity of the conflicts' setting just so far as (and no farther than) absolutely necessary to make those conflicts feel real, exciting, and important. "Simulationism", I think, got somewhat unfairly defined as any interest in worldbuilding/world-managing consistency for its own sake beyond that requirement, which is also where the acrimony comes from -- we always see as "obsessive" any interest in a topic beyond what we ourselves find interesting.

Incidentally, I *despise* Joss Whedon's style of storytelling, and JJ Abrams, and so on. I took a screenwriting course a couple years ago and one of the things they taught us was "there is no backstory except what's in the script" "at any given point your protagonist should always do what's most dramatic." I thought that was horrible advice. I don't like movies and TV shows written like that, and I don't like RPG campaigns run like that.

Quote from: Venka on March 08, 2023, 01:26:56 AM
But, why?  My take is, that way, when something dramatic does happen, it's real in the context of the game. 

I think that feeling of 'real' is very important, and connected to the feeling of immersion I value.

I've seen discussion of errant simulation re I think the board wargame Afrika Korps. The game is a super detailed operational level simulation and simulates stuff like Italian troops needing extra water to boil their spaghetti. I think you had to allocate fuel to individual scout planes. The reviewer asked whose perspective it was intended to simulate. Not Rommel's - IRL a lot of the decisions that needed to be made in the game would be made by logistics officers far lower down in the command chain than him. So in terms of "You are Rommel" it was actually a worse simulation than a less detailed one would have been.

Quote from: amacris on March 08, 2023, 03:26:43 AM
Consider Kriegspiel, the wargame used to train Prussian officers. Kriegspiel had two variants, "rules-based" and "free" Kriegspiel. Rules-based Kriegspiel was similar to e.g. Ascendant, with lots of rules for everything. Free Kriegspiel relied on an objective referee to evaluate the outcome of the player choices. But what Free Kriegspiel DIDNT have was a "storyteller" saying "it would be so dramatic if there was bad weather suddenly so that the cavalry have to fight in the mud". Nor did it have a "everyone has to have fun GM" saying "well, Colonel Guderian is outnumbered, we should probably give re-balance the scenario to make it more fun for both sides." Those things simply didn't happen because the goal of Kriegspiel was to accurately simulate war to train officers.

It happens that I, personally, am more of a rules-based than free Kriegspieller, and my games reflect that. I would never dispute that! But Simulationism is bigger than me, much bigger, it's a big tent and there's room for Simulationists who, like a free kriegspiel referee, use their expertise and judgment to run a rules-light game whose comittment is towards simulating its fantasy world.

Absolutely! Personally I have gone over to using a lot of Free Kriegsspiel techniques in my world-simulation. Eg I often resolve off-screen battles by setting the stakes, then rolling a single D6. Usually '1' is "worst result for players" and '6' is "best result for players".  I got really sick of the kind of stale stories you tend to get from dramatist play, where eg all NPC good guys are completely incompetent and only the PCs can save the day. Equally bad of course is the Ed Greenwood style where omni-competent NPCs will always save the day while the PCs look on admiringly.

BTW Alex have you come across "Combat As Sport vs Combat As War" (https://www.enworld.org/threads/very-long-combat-as-sport-vs-combat-as-war-a-key-difference-in-d-d-play-styles.317715/ (https://www.enworld.org/threads/very-long-combat-as-sport-vs-combat-as-war-a-key-difference-in-d-d-play-styles.317715/)) ? That dichotomy seems to map well to the two kinds of 'Gamist' play you describe. John Kim's "Set up a fair challenge" vs Gleichman's "challenge player skill (without regard to fairness)".

JHKim's Gamist: the style which values setting up a fair challenge for the players (as opposed to the PCs). The challenges may be tactical combat, intellectual mysteries, politics, or anything else. The players will try to solve the problems they are presented with, and in turn the GM will make these challenges solvable if they act intelligently within the contract.

Gleichman's Gamist: the style which values the application of objective player skill in order to resolve situations defined as important to the group. These situations may be based upon combat, mysteries, puzzles or anything else where skilled play may make a difference in outcome although that difference doesn't always need to be as simple as obvious victory/defeat.

You say Retired Adventurer calls them the "Classic" and "OSR" cultures, but that doesn't feel right to me considering much of my OSR gaming is published megadungeons with pretty clearly graded threat-by-level (PC level & dungeon level). I think the strongest example of Kim-Gamist 'fair challenge' play would be 4e D&D, drawing on precedents in 3e D&D.

Edit: Just reread RA, I first read it in '21. I agree there is a distinct module-based 'Classic' style which is the main style at Dragonsfoot, and that this differs from OSR play, which looks back to a lost 'pre module' era of megadungeons. Classic emerged out of early organised play and the published modules derived from that. It is a Challenge/Gamist form. OSR is also primarily Challenge/Gamist. But some of the distinctions look a bit off to me. The OSR standard is the Megadungeon, and the question "How deep do you want to go?" where the Classic standard is "What module shall we play?"

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on March 08, 2023, 01:37:29 AM
Put simply, in practice, most Simulationist games which want to create an immersive experience that has the feel of an objective, complex, living world do so by using a massive volume of rule options and cases, and by requiring players and GMs to track massive volumes of data, from timekeeping to resource usage to distance travelled and off-stage historical and political events (it's no accident that Ascendant is nearly 600 pages long). The plain fact is that a lot of gamers, even back during the first days of AD&D 1e and 2e, simply didn't have any interest in investing the amount of time and mental energy required for this, which is exactly why those subsystems mostly disappeared from D&D in the third edition and afterwards.

The gamers of what might be called the "Joss Whedon" school of roleplaying (I consider Whedon the most egregious example of a creator who builds his world solely in terms of how exciting the next idea he gets is) tend to be mostly interested in depicting and resolving in-game conflicts as immediately as possible, and are only interested in the coherence and objectivity of the conflicts' setting just so far as (and no farther than) absolutely necessary to make those conflicts feel real, exciting, and important. "Simulationism", I think, got somewhat unfairly defined as any interest in worldbuilding/world-managing consistency for its own sake beyond that requirement, which is also where the acrimony comes from -- we always see as "obsessive" any interest in a topic beyond what we ourselves find interesting.

My counterpoint to this criticism is that the point of the rules is to reflect the setting of the campaign. But the level of detail it does this at is a preference. In short, if you want to bring a world to life OD&D works just as well as GURPS with all the options. There are differences. You will have a lot more rulings and make more notes with OD&D than you would with GURPS for instance.

Rules can be an effective shorthand for communicating how a setting works. But at the end of the day it boils down to players describing what they want to do as their characters and you as the referee adjudicating this and describing how the circumstances change.

My view is that when you start introducing metagaming to this cycle you start to move away from the point of tabletop roleplaying, considering things as a player outside of the setting rather than acting as a character in a setting. Whether it pursuing game logic because of a quirk in the rules or the desire to predetermine an outcome in pursuit of a coherent narrative (story).

An important point to consider as well is "what are you simulating?"

I don't think I'd get many arguments that WEG Star Wars is virtually the platonic ideal of Star Wars in RPG form, yet its got two different forms of meta-currency (character points and force points) for PCs to spend to bend the game results to their desires, so its not really simulating a world so much as its simulating the genre conventions of the Star Wars universe. Guidelines to keep conflict in the "sport" vs. "war" range for the PCs wouldn't be at all out of place there either because, even if the correct answer is "run away" the PCs must have a reasonable chance to successfully run away (or you hear the enemy commander say "take them alive" so the correct answer might instead be "surrender now and escape later") or its not going to feel much like Star Wars.

But while that's a pretty good way to simulate Star Wars, I'm not sure it really falls under what is being defined here as simulationist style play.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 08, 2023, 07:43:58 AM
An important point to consider as well is "what are you simulating?"

I don't think I'd get many arguments that WEG Star Wars is virtually the platonic ideal of Star Wars in RPG form, yet its got two different forms of meta-currency (character points and force points) for PCs to spend to bend the game results to their desires, so its not really simulating a world so much as its simulating the genre conventions of the Star Wars universe. Guidelines to keep conflict in the "sport" vs. "war" range for the PCs wouldn't be at all out of place there either because, even if the correct answer is "run away" the PCs must have a reasonable chance to successfully run away (or you hear the enemy commander say "take them alive" so the correct answer might instead be "surrender now and escape later") or its not going to feel much like Star Wars.

But while that's a pretty good way to simulate Star Wars, I'm not sure it really falls under what is being defined here as simulationist style play.

I've seen that kind of thing called "emulation" to distinguish it from "simulation".  I think that's as accurate a term as any.  Though the line between emulation and simulation is necessarily sometimes blurry.

Which is a good segue into what for me is the key point in all this:  The absolute silliest statement in all of the Edwards stuff, quoted in the Amacris' essay, is that bit about a game needing to drive exclusively towards exactly one method to be any good. The "science" of design  to the extent that there is any) is to break the game down into its atomic parts and analyze them.  The art of design is to make choices from the tools you have to work with, for a specific case at hand.  Edwards tries to get around this by using some sleight of hand to claim faulty methods when in many of his examples what we instead have are slapdash design or even no design at all. 

I would say it this way.  Every role playing game worth the name is at least an "emulation" of something. You get some way along the "emulation" line and you cross gradually into simulation, maybe without even knowing it. 

There has to be context in which to to make a decision. I won't go as far as Estar and say that the point of rules is to reflect the setting, as that implies to me that it is the sole point of rules.  I will agree entirely that a fair chunk of the rules should reflect the setting, as soon as there is one.  Nor is this limited to cases of generic or universal systems.  For example, GURPS certainly better reflects a setting after it has been applied to one, even more so after the GM has tweaked it and/or decided what to include or not include.  However, even as generic as it is, GURPS already reflects certain assumptions about the kind of settings it is going to reflect and how it does it impinges on how the setting comes across.  But in the bigger case, there will be some emulation of something in the rules, and it isn't difficult for this to cross into simulation at points.  The only exception I can think of, conceptually, is a game so focused on theme to the exclusion of all else, that it's emulation is a transparent veneer.  We can argue if such a game even exists, but to the extent one does, for me it's not an RPG, because it has lost all context.  Such an entity would be the opposite of Estar's view, if I'm understanding him correctly.

I'm always looking for "good enough" simulation.  That's the point, roughly, where the emulation is very solid, way past the veneer stage, anchored in just enough simulation to give all the GM and players a common point of reference as characters, players, and as people in general.  If that sounds vague, it's because it is.  It's the art of the point where the simulation attaches to mechanics and setting, as well as gameplay and the foundation of the emergent story.  Of if you want the negative definition, it's the point at which these elements come together to move past mere theme.  Thus my attention on naming things what they are. 

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 08, 2023, 07:43:58 AM
An important point to consider as well is "what are you simulating?"

But while that's a pretty good way to simulate Star Wars, I'm not sure it really falls under what is being defined here as simulationist style play.

   This is why I think 'simulationism' needs further division into 'genre simulationism' and 'reality simulationism', although the relationship between the two is more analog than digital.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 08, 2023, 08:14:12 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 08, 2023, 07:43:58 AM
An important point to consider as well is "what are you simulating?"

I don't think I'd get many arguments that WEG Star Wars is virtually the platonic ideal of Star Wars in RPG form, yet its got two different forms of meta-currency (character points and force points) for PCs to spend to bend the game results to their desires, so its not really simulating a world so much as its simulating the genre conventions of the Star Wars universe. Guidelines to keep conflict in the "sport" vs. "war" range for the PCs wouldn't be at all out of place there either because, even if the correct answer is "run away" the PCs must have a reasonable chance to successfully run away (or you hear the enemy commander say "take them alive" so the correct answer might instead be "surrender now and escape later") or its not going to feel much like Star Wars.

But while that's a pretty good way to simulate Star Wars, I'm not sure it really falls under what is being defined here as simulationist style play.

I've seen that kind of thing called "emulation" to distinguish it from "simulation".  I think that's as accurate a term as any.  Though the line between emulation and simulation is necessarily sometimes blurry.

I agree. I've used the term "emulation" before to describe it.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on March 08, 2023, 08:33:10 AM
   This is why I think 'simulationism' needs further division into 'genre simulationism' and 'reality simulationism', although the relationship between the two is more analog than digital.

Genre Sim is commonly called Dramatism. Emulate the genre to tell similar stories.
Reality Sim is commonly called World Sim or just Simulation. Emulate the world in which the stories take place.

Edwards saw them as the same (Sim), where the GDS model distinguishes them.

I've seen "simulationist" used as an antonym of abstraction in relation to 80s and 90s rpgs like BRP, Shadowrun, ST system, etc. In this use, simulationist refers to an rpg that tracks individual attributes and skills like strength, charisma, computer use, driving, lockpicking, hit points, mental points, etc in a fair amount of detail. Whereas a more abstract design would be RISUS' clichés like "space pirate" or "dashing rogue."

My preference is for more abstract design because I can't really be bothered with nitty gritty skill choices. I always feel like I'm gimping myself somehow or the system isn't realistic enough.

I enjoy all three legs of GNS in varying degrees.

I think it is important to note that S is usually genre simulation, and that it need not use very many rules or data to do so.

It's like GURPS, I like GURPS *to a point*. That point is when the modelling work becomes greater than the fun at the table. Ditto Traveller.

In engineering and sciences (social and physical) we know that all models are broken, but if they work within the scope of the domain to be modelled, then they are 'good enough'.

I've been arguing that GURPS is a story game for years now :D  Though, when it comes down to it character creation is a huge part of what GURPS is and the point system is entirely based on story concerns.  It utterly sucks as a balance tool.  The designers just consider a point total as an interesting boundary to work around.

My games all fall into the simulationist end of things.

All this ink (electronic and otherwise) spilled, when you could boil it down to:

Rule of cool, and rule of funny.

Now if you'll excuse me I wanna see if my PCs try to kill a bad guy with an Instant Fortress.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on March 08, 2023, 12:03:59 PM
All this ink (electronic and otherwise) spilled, when you could boil it down to:

Rule of cool, and rule of funny.

Stop putting so much thinking into it! Just get drunk and throw the dice at each other.

Quote from: amacris on March 07, 2023, 10:56:40 PM
I wrote a manifesto today, proclaiming the return of Simulationism. I'm sharing it today because the essay references a lot of folks I first met here at TheRPG site, including Brian Gleichman and John H. Kim, and bashes on Ron Edwards a bit, who is of course the ancient foe of our own RPG Pundit.

If anyone is interested, you can check it out here: https://arbiterofworlds.substack.com/p/a-manifesto-in-defense-of-simulationism

Thanks, Alexander! And it's nice that you've got a link to my own page. You might specifically mention that I have an essay specifically about explaining Simulationism here:

https://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/threefold/simulationism.html

Quote from: S'mon on March 08, 2023, 09:22:45 AM

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on March 08, 2023, 08:33:10 AM
This is why I think 'simulationism' needs further division into 'genre simulationism' and 'reality simulationism', although the relationship between the two is more analog than digital.

Genre Sim is commonly called Dramatism. Emulate the genre to tell similar stories.
Reality Sim is commonly called World Sim or just Simulation. Emulate the world in which the stories take place.

Edwards saw them as the same (Sim), where the GDS model distinguishes them.

Yup. I think Edwards' model is extremely counter-intuitive. "Genre emulation" is clearly a different goal than simulation of a fictional reality.

As for Simulationist games being overly complex, I agree that it is potentially a problem -- but I don't think it is inherent. Some gamist designs have also had endless patches and erratta and tweaks in the name of balance (cough Star Fleet Battles cough). I think the real problem is that sometimes simulationist RPG designers don't know where their center is, so they can't settle on the right level of abstraction.


Abstract simulations are still fully simulations. That's just as true in authentic real world simulations used for testing and training. Decades ago, I was a particle physicist, and we had different levels of simulation. Some simulations were more detailed and were more useful for certain tasks, but would take forever to run . Other simulations were higher-level, ran faster, and were more useful for long-term studies or getting a bird's eye view.

In RPGs, playing out the consequences of actions in a true "what if" mode can be fascinating, and deserves more attention and recognition. (I talk about this more in the essay linked at the top.)

I tend to roll my eyes whenever GNS comes up in a discussion, because while I'm sure it has value in game design, that isn't what's going on the majority of instances where people mention it during a conversation about tabletop games. It's pretty shit as a classification for people who play games.

The term "role-playing game" indicates a certain level of importance placed on gamism. People are playing a game. It follows that they expect to enjoy themselves in so doing. The "role-playing" descriptor implies a certain amount of narrativism, and it seems to be the narrativist elements that distinguish role-playing games from wargames. I'm sure someone who wanted to be contrary for the sake of contrarianism could use a wargame to tell a story, but that seems to miss the point of wargames. Likewise, removing narrativist elements entirely seems to miss the point of role-playing games. Simulationism enters the picture because as humans we like it when things make sense. The three ideas constrain each other.

I probably enjoy the simulationist elements more than either the gamist or narrativist aspects of the hobby, but there is a limit. Try to make your game simulate everything and you'll find out nobody can actually play because they're too busy simulating.

I was going to add a thread after I got Macris' subscription mail on this topic.

First, I think it's really strange how the GNS model is treated as if it was the result of a physics experiment at the cern particle accelerator. At best it's just a model, one way of looking at the world, which may or may not be useful. I really don't think it's a good model. For anything involving the social world, there are lots of ways to model what's going on and those models are more or less valuable, and more or less predictive. The GNS model is very value laden but doesn't even really describe things well.

Who narrates what, when, and what's the scope is a good model also - GM, fortune (dice), player.

Simulation is a weird thing because nearly all games when they do whatever they do well use it. If I'm playing Fate, and we're trying to figure out whether my Aspect "Burly Circus Strong Man" lets me roll to throw a building, we'll probably decide no, because (in this example) the setting is mostly real world and circus strong men can throw buildings. This system just described that produced this result was in fact simulating "mostly real world with circus strong men"

What about the One Ring game. I ran it and it's corruption/shadow mechanics combined with long time frames, etc., produced a game story/feeling that was very much like the movies/books. Like WW veterans, the characters had sacrificed for their community but were worn by care. That seems to me like its simulating Tolkien fiction.

Quote
I'm sure someone who wanted to be contrary for the sake of contrarianism could use a wargame to tell a story, but that seems to miss the point of wargames

Many wargamers do exactly that, to varying degrees.
Even a very simulationist wargame is exploring 'what if' stories.. otherwise the battles would play out exactly the same.
With imagined battles, there is often a narrative, indeed military wargames are often exploring potential future narratives.
To the extent that our hobby comes from Braunstein wargames that became fantasy roleplaying, we are all here because of stories from wargames..

Problem of simulationism is that it tends to be on the complex and slow side, qualities that are not attractive to new players, or even some old ones like myself. I started my RPG life with simulationist games (Gurps and Shadowrun) and loved 'em back in my teens, but nowadays in my 40s? Hard pass. My real life wouldn't permit taking hours to create chars, resolve combats, memorize intricate rules exceptions, etc. These days I only play modern stuff like PbtA and nu-OSRs (Mothership, Beyond the Wall, etc) as they're usually simple to learn, fast to prep and quick to play.

That being said, that's a good article and I'm all for simulationism getting more spotlight. The more different playstyles getting played, the better state the hobby will be.

Quote from: PencilBoy99 on March 08, 2023, 02:47:02 PM

What about the One Ring game. I ran it and it's corruption/shadow mechanics combined with long time frames, etc., produced a game story/feeling that was very much like the movies/books. Like WW veterans, the characters had sacrificed for their community but were worn by care. That seems to me like its simulating Tolkien fiction.

Simulating Tolkien fiction is not exactly the same as simulating playing a character in Middle Earth. Naturally, there will be some overlap. 

Likewise, any "feel" will operate on multiple levels, sometimes with radically different sources and outcomes.  You can, for example, have a very simple combat game where most participants in a fight of any seriousness either die or are seriously injured. It will "feel realistic" in that sense, even though the simplicity means that it grossly glosses over distinctions in fighting techniques, equipment, etc.  That's due to limitations in the model introduced by making it fast paced.  Or you can have a more complex combat game where it takes 30-240 seconds per decision in game time to represent 5 or less seconds of combat, accounting for shock, adrenaline, fatigue, etc.  It will lose some of the tense and terror feel while gaining some other feel aspects in a "movie in slow motion".  Do you want the feel of sudden death or the feel of seeing the trainwreck coming and nothing you can do about it, like a viewer of said slow-motion fight scene?   

Quote from: amacris on March 08, 2023, 03:26:43 AMBUT -- and this is, I think, the important part -- there is no *inherent* reason that Simulation has to be rules-heavy. ...it's a big tent and there's room for Simulationists who, like a free kriegspiel referee, use their expertise and judgment to run a rules-light game whose commitment is towards simulating its fantasy world.

Is there an example you can think of where a game is both rules-light and explicitly Simulationist in intent?

The challenge of running a game on the "Free Kriegspiel" model is that the referee has to be knowledgeable and quick-witted enough to make necessary judgement calls reliably, accurately and consistently -- the whole point of a high-volume rule set is to lower the number of situations where the referee has to make a judgement call that players may dispute.

Quote from: Stephan TannhauserIs there an example you can think of where a game is both rules-light and explicitly Simulationist in intent?

Maybe something like The Regiment?

http://www.onesevendesign.com/regiment/the_regiment_alpha_2_1.pdf

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on March 08, 2023, 03:25:43 PM

Quote from: amacris on March 08, 2023, 03:26:43 AMBUT -- and this is, I think, the important part -- there is no *inherent* reason that Simulation has to be rules-heavy. ...it's a big tent and there's room for Simulationists who, like a free kriegspiel referee, use their expertise and judgment to run a rules-light game whose commitment is towards simulating its fantasy world.

Is there an example you can think of where a game is both rules-light and explicitly Simulationist in intent?

The challenge of running a game on the "Free Kriegspiel" model is that the referee has to be knowledgeable and quick-witted enough to make necessary judgement calls reliably, accurately and consistently -- the whole point of a high-volume rule set is to lower the number of situations where the referee has to make a judgement call that players may dispute.

I can't think of any mass-published examples, but I've played in a few games that were like this. I agree that it puts a burden on the GM to make reliable and accurate calls, like Free Kriegspiel. On the other hand, in a game for fun between friends, it's fine if the GM doesn't live up to some ideal.

In tabletop RPGs, small-scale simulationist games have tended to use at least semi-complex mechanics like BRP, GURPS, HarnMaster, etc. - though these aren't necessarily more complex than many other RPG systems used for gamist or even dramatist games.

-----

The two big tabletop examples like Free Kriedspiel I can think of were for cases where the scale was so big that normal RPG mechanics couldn't handle it.

One was a campaign in undergrad run by my friend Craig that he called "The God Game" in the late 1980s. It was set on modern-day Earth, where some two dozen people get superpowers on the level of Superman. It was specifically intended as a "what if" about how these characters would change the world, which would highlight how simulation is very different from comics. There were NPCs from different cultures and countries - including some from Soviet Russia and India. He used some of the stats and definitions from the DC Heroes game, just to give concrete numbers -- but everything was diceless.

Just a year or two ago, I had another friend running a similar "what if" game -- this one being about a rush into space. The game premise was that an astronomical event was going to make the surface of the Earth completely devoid of life in five years. Humanity's only chance for survival is to colonize space. The premise was far-fetched, but the idea was we were going to role-play different world leaders, scientific leaders, and astronauts in how we would try to accomplish this. Everyone had 2 to 4 characters - some as small-scale types in space, and some as world leaders on Earth. Again, everything was diceless with the GM judging the failure and success of different actions.

-----

I can think of live-action role-playing games that were similar. Some larps rely on a dramatic premise that the players have to buy into. However, some are what the Nordics call "immersionist" and have a strict "what if" premise, where the interesting part is what will happen to these characters. The intent is that there is no non-dramatic way out, and just playing your character is forced to interesting action. These are sometimes called a "cage" or "crucible" -- where the PCs are forced into a  difficult situation that they can't leave.

Quote from: S'mon on March 07, 2023, 11:36:30 PM
I really value immersion, something brain-damaged Edwards seemed incapable of, and incapable of comprehending. I think simulation is vital for that sense of you-are-there immersion. It does not need to be as robust a world-sim as ACKS, but there needs to be a simulation element.

I think that in some quarters "Simulation" gets a bad rap because a lot of people assume: Simulation = Real World Reality.

But that 's not the case. In my opinion: Simulation = Game World Emulation.

i.e. The underlying rules of the game world, whatever genre that may be.

I do not like kitchen sink settings precisely because they generally have no underlying rules other than the 'rule of cool', which I find to be very immersion breaking during play.

Quote from: Jaeger on March 08, 2023, 04:47:20 PM

Quote from: S'mon on March 07, 2023, 11:36:30 PM
I really value immersion, something brain-damaged Edwards seemed incapable of, and incapable of comprehending. I think simulation is vital for that sense of you-are-there immersion. It does not need to be as robust a world-sim as ACKS, but there needs to be a simulation element.

I think that in some quarters "Simulation" gets a bad rap because a lot of people assume: Simulation = Real World Reality.

But that 's not the case. In my opinion: Simulation = Game World Emulation.

i.e. The underlying rules of the game world, whatever genre that may be.

There's a huge difference between world and genre. A fictional world doesn't have an inherent genre. One can see this plainly by the variety of genres that are set in the real world. There's the true crime genre, historical romance, military action, scientific thriller, celebrity biopic, etc. -- all within the same world.

I think it's important to distinguish between simulation of a fictional game world, and emulation of genre fiction.

It's the difference between "let's have a game like comic book superheroes" and a simulationist premise like "what would happen if people really did have superpowers?"

Quote from: jhkim on March 08, 2023, 05:38:37 PM
I think that in some quarters "Simulation" gets a bad rap because a lot of people assume: Simulation = Real World Reality.

But that 's not the case. In my opinion: Simulation = Game World Emulation.

i.e. The underlying rules of the game world, whatever genre that may be.

There's a huge difference between world and genre. A fictional world doesn't have an inherent genre. One can see this plainly by the variety of genres that are set in the real world. There's the true crime genre, historical romance, military action, scientific thriller, celebrity biopic, etc. -- all within the same world.

I think it's important to distinguish between simulation of a fictional game world, and emulation of genre fiction.

It's the difference between "let's have a game like comic book superheroes" and a simulationist premise like "what would happen if people really did have superpowers?"

It would be literally impossible for me to agree with you more than I am agreeing with you in this moment! Emulation of genre fiction is I think Narrativism or Dramatism. Simulation of a fictional game world is Simulationism.

By the way, going back and re-reading all the work you did on the Threefold Model was really a pleasure. That era of Usenet discussion had ugly flame wars but in retrospect it was a golden age for internet debate. You've done the community such a favor by preserving it all in an easy to find format.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on March 08, 2023, 03:25:43 PMIs there an example you can think of where a game is both rules-light and explicitly Simulationist in intent?

This is one area where RPGs have fallen behind their boardgame and wargame cousins. If you look at some of the more recently designed miniature games like 02 Hundred Hours or board wargames like Skies Above the Reich, you will see some well designed simulations that are also easy to learn and play.

There's a general goal in wargaming today where a good design is one that provides maximum playability while still producing plausible results. You don't want M5 Stuarts taking out Tiger tanks from the front, but you also do need to match the exact probability 1:1.

RPG designers seem so adverse to making their games more simulationist that some will refuse to use the term "realistic" just to avoid being associated with the very concept of simulationism.

Quote from: amacris on March 07, 2023, 10:56:40 PMIf anyone is interested, you can check it out here: https://arbiterofworlds.substack.com/p/a-manifesto-in-defense-of-simulationism

One place where I disagree with this article is the assumption that Gygax's rant against simulationism was somehow a response to wargamers. It may not be obvious to readers today but in the late 1970s, there were other RPGs, such as Runequest and Chivalry & Sorcery, which were advertising themselves as being "more realistic than D&D" (and they did so in the very pages of Dragon Magazine!). So this paragraph in the DMG was Gygax just defending his design against his competitors by creating the impression that "realistic" games where automatically overly complicated and unplayable. In this he was hugely successful as that idea is predominant today.

(https://i.imgur.com/gwsKKwo.jpg)
This ad is from Dragon #41, 1980

Quote from: hedgehobbit on March 08, 2023, 06:56:42 PM
This ad is from Dragon #41, 1980

I'm attracted to that ad, and thank you for posting it, because I think the pleasure of realism is a very good goal for TRPGs.

Realism is the only possible source of meaning. We can see this with virtually any film or television programme. Imagine if it were filmed upside down, reverse polarity, lacking 1 gravity, where the characters are replaced by stick figures, and the dialogue is in reverse pig latin. Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it? The opposite of realism would be television static and noise, total meaninglessness.

Even a space opera like Star Wars only works because it taps into the reality of mythic archetype and plausible human behaviour. Deduct those two and what value is Star Wars? Something to distract toddlers?

All genres depart from realism in one sense, but approach realism in another. Genres envelope real human feelings that associate with and are elicited by certain tropes and cues. I agree that genre sim = emulationism, while realistic sim = simulationism are good nomenclature, so as to distinguish these two types of play.

In my terms I'd say that a simulation is what I'd call an Agenda: a set up of a particular circumstance grounded in realistic physics, politics, and psychology, for the purpose of determining how that circumstance will evolve over a set period of time, and in whose favour. Simulationism therefore apes science, even if it requires artistry.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on March 08, 2023, 06:56:42 PM

Quote from: amacris on March 07, 2023, 10:56:40 PMIf anyone is interested, you can check it out here: https://arbiterofworlds.substack.com/p/a-manifesto-in-defense-of-simulationism

One place where I disagree with this article is the assumption that Gygax's rant against simulationism was somehow a response to wargamers. It may not be obvious to readers today but in the late 1970s, there were other RPGs, such as Runequest and Chivalry & Sorcery, which were advertising themselves as being "more realistic than D&D" (and they did so in the very pages of Dragon Magazine!). So this paragraph in the DMG was Gygax just defending his design against his competitors by creating the impression that "realistic" games where automatically overly complicated and unplayable. In this he was hugely successful as that idea is predominant today.

(https://i.imgur.com/gwsKKwo.jpg)

This ad is from Dragon #41, 1980

Thanks for pointing out, that's a great insight.

Quote from: silencio789 on March 08, 2023, 02:59:15 PM

Quote
I'm sure someone who wanted to be contrary for the sake of contrarianism could use a wargame to tell a story, but that seems to miss the point of wargames

Many wargamers do exactly that, to varying degrees.
Even a very simulationist wargame is exploring 'what if' stories.. otherwise the battles would play out exactly the same.
With imagined battles, there is often a narrative, indeed military wargames are often exploring potential future narratives.
To the extent that our hobby comes from Braunstein wargames that became fantasy roleplaying, we are all here because of stories from wargames..

(https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0225/4035/products/5PH-Rulebook-Cover-Front_500x.jpg?v=1619082059)

P.S. It's really good. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on March 08, 2023, 03:25:43 PM
Is there an example you can think of where a game is both rules-light and explicitly Simulationist in intent?

My Majestic Fantasy RPG. Although I dislike using Simulationist as a label. But my focus is in the same ballpark as Amacris describes in his article. I prefer to call what I do as running a sandbox campaign with a focus on players trashing my setting.

Quote from: jhkim on March 08, 2023, 05:38:37 PM
I think it's important to distinguish between simulation of a fictional game world, and emulation of genre fiction.

Given the example below, I don't think it is important to make a distinction.

Quote from: jhkim on March 08, 2023, 05:38:37 PM
It's the difference between "let's have a game like comic book superheroes" and a simulationist premise like "what would happen if people really did have superpowers?"

They are two different setting. The world of comic book superheroes is one where where wearing a domino mask and glasses are effect disguises. It may not make sense in regards to real world logic but it make sense in terms of comic book logic. And if you know the genre then you can run a campaign where players play characters having adventures in a world of four color superheroes WITHOUT TRYING TO REPLICATE THE STORY STRUCTURE OR NARRATIVE BEATS OF COMIC BOOKS. If the referee does their job then the campaign will naturally unfold in a manner we see how comic book unfold. It won't replicate a comic book story but rather like D&D and epic fantasy it will feel like you were adventuring in a four color world.

In constrast it is a different thing to imagine a setting where people really did get superpowers. You get Marvel New Universe or Watchman but it won't be a four color world of superheroes.

The crucial element of Amarcris is getting at that instead of trying to make rules that make a story or play out as a decent wargame/boardgame. You focus on the setting first, make sure your rules fit the envisioned setting at the level of detail that interests you. That the campaign is focused on pretending to be character within that setting having an adventure. Not focused on metagaming as players to create a particular story with a particular narrative structure.

This approach works with any type of setting no matter how fantastical it is. It could work with Toon. It is not about running a campaign with GURPS with all the options as the ideal.

One observation on a likely reason for simulation as defined here largely falling away from ttrpgs may simply be that it is one of the areas where video games just flat out do it better even in an open world sandbox. All that processing power can crunch the rules and give it to the players via an easily digestible UI.

MegaMek, for example, handles all the environmental physics of Battletech (including any advanced rules you want to use) such that all the players have to input are their movement (with the program accounting for terrain effects automatically) during the movement phase and the targets of their weapons during the attack phase.

Or as a much larger example, Minecraft. Sure the physics of mining out a 1 meter cube of stone in seconds isn't that of our world and you can carry ridiculous amounts, but it's rules engine essentially generates the biomes of a literally Earth-sized area down to 128 meters beneath sea level, populates it, accounts for weather and day/night cycles, hunger, the need for light sources, crafting, combat, trading, etc. and it never forgets or resets any changes the player(s) make to the world within the confines of its own physics.

Basically, the simulation aspect is one of the areas where ttrpgs really cannot offer a superior product to what a computer game can... whereas ttrpgs still can outdo video games in free form narrative/dramatist (no constraining dialogue wheel; wide open chargen), social (being at the same table looking across at friends is a vastly different experience than chatting with them over a headset as you stare at a screen) and even gamist aspects (say what you will about smooth video game play, there's just something viceral about miniatures you can actually touch and physical dice you hold in your hands... that physicality... that video games just can't match).

Thus, since they can't really compete on simulationism, there's less motivation to really push those elements. Instead you just get the bare bones simulationism needed to support the areas ttrpgs can compete at.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 09, 2023, 06:20:56 AM
All that processing power can crunch the rules

Why do you think simulationism is about crunching a detailed set of rules?

You are making the same mistake that so many make that what we do is about playing a set of rules. The rules are an aide, the point of what we do is to run campaigns, even if they are a single session, where players pretend to be characters having adventures in some imagined setting. The reason this works along with being fun and interesting is that a human referee is part of the process in a specific way. Namely, the referee describes the circumstance, the player describes what they try to do, and finally, the referee adjudicates and describes the changed circumstances. This loop is repeated through the life of the campaign.

Having a good system means running a campaign takes less work and the referee can use their limited time for other things involving the campaign. But what form it takes and how detailed it gets is a preference not a requirement.

Simulationism is about how one runs a tabletop roleplaying campaign not a description of the rules being used. I get that thanks to Ron Edwards there are some preconceived notions out there about what Simulationism is. That Edwards and others seem obsessed with the idea that the right system can magically fix the issues a campaign is having.

Simulationism means that as a referee your rulings and the system you use reflect the reality of the setting you described to the players. It means that the players can only do things within the campaign that their characters can do. But it also means that the players can do ANY thing their character can do within the setting. It doesn't matter if you never made a ruling on that type of action before or if it is not addressed in the system. If it something reasonable that a character can do then as the referee you figure out the mechanics of how to make it happen, rather than saying no you can't do that because it not in the rule.

Conversely, with simulationism, it is fine to say no you can't do that because characters existing in the setting can't do that. If you are playing in a medieval setting and there are no supernatural or fantastic elements in play then your character can't flap their arms and fly away.


The rulings and rules could be at a fine level of detail like with GURPS with all the sourcebook in play. Or it could be quite abstract like running a campaign with only the 3 LBBs of OD&D. You can run simulationist campaigns with either extreme or anything in between.

And I have personally done just that running my Majestic Wilderlands setting pretty much the same regardless of the system I used for 40 years with multiple groups of different individuals.

The systems that don't work out well for me, like Fate, are those that have metagaming as an integral part of their system. Mechanics that the players use not as their character but as themselves to influence the direction of the campaign.

Also more abstract systems that don't explain how they are tied to the reality of setting also don't work out well with my style. OD&D used to be in that category but after reading up on the various histories of how it was developed I can see how stuff like hit point and armor class grew out of miniature wargaming. So that no longer an issue.   Other more abstract systems are opaque to me. Some I haven't put the time in to understand others come off as a cute dice game rather than something that can be tied to the reality of the setting.

For me D&D 4e is a good example of cute dice and mechanics that are more a boardgame than something that can be tied back to the reality of the setting. The Fantasy Trip likewise I have issue with as well. But both are excellent game in of themselves. Just not good tools for someone who wants to run a simulationist campaign.

Finally, folks are deluding themselves if they think they can write a set of rules that completely describes a setting with all it possible nuances. CRPGs handling simulationism better is an illusion. Their ability to effortlessly crunch dozen of factors is hampered by big metagaming flaw. That you literally are unable to do anything unless the algorithm allows you do. See a cool mug in World of Warcraft? Unless they made it a movable item you can't grab it. Want to weave a basket out of some reed swaying next to a brook. Nope unless they coded that in.

With tabletop RPGs with a human referee, the answer to both especially with simulationism is yes. Yes, you can grab that mug, yes you can weave a basket out of those reeds. It may not a good basket gave how your character is described but certainly, an attempt can be made.

So yes humans can't compete with software algorithms when it comes to level of detail. But that not what simulationism is about. It is about what you do with the rules you do have.

P.S. I really dislike using simulationism to describe what I do. The term has so much baggage in the minds of the general hobby that in my opinion not worth trying to change. The term I prefer is sandbox campaigns. Which does have its own issues but not as bad as simulationism.
-Sorry Amacris

Social interaction is still much better done by a GM than by a computer I think. And simulation includes talking, hopefully.

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 12:44:52 AM

Quote from: jhkim on March 08, 2023, 05:38:37 PM
It's the difference between "let's have a game like comic book superheroes" and a simulationist premise like "what would happen if people really did have superpowers?"

They are two different setting. The world of comic book superheroes is one where where wearing a domino mask and glasses are effect disguises. It may not make sense in regards to real world logic but it make sense in terms of comic book logic. And if you know the genre then you can run a campaign where players play characters having adventures in a world of four color superheroes WITHOUT TRYING TO REPLICATE THE STORY STRUCTURE OR NARRATIVE BEATS OF COMIC BOOKS. If the referee does their job then the campaign will naturally unfold in a manner we see how comic book unfold. It won't replicate a comic book story but rather like D&D and epic fantasy it will feel like you were adventuring in a four color world.

In constrast it is a different thing to imagine a setting where people really did get superpowers. You get Marvel New Universe or Watchman but it won't be a four color world of superheroes.

I'll admit that my example might not be the best one, but I can suggest other examples. You cited Watchmen, but that wasn't something I was thinking of. I was thinking simulationist RPGs that I played in with superpowers. I'd point to many Astro City comics as examples of different genres within a more four-color world, where one comic might be about a girl moving to live with her cousins in the country and getting to see rural superheroes, while another is about someone trying to decide between a big city career versus getting involved in the local neighborhood.

I still maintain that there's a difference between an RPG that is set in a four-color superhero world and an RPG that emulates four-color superhero comics. For example, I could run a police procedural RPG in a four-color world where the PCs are non-superpowered police - like the Mutant City Blues RPG that uses the GUMSHOE system. Or I could run a professional wrestling RPG campaign in a four-color world, either taking a wrestling RPG and adding in powers or using a superpowered RPG and add in framework from such games.

These are genuinely set in the same world, but they won't have the same feel as a game that emulates superhero comics.

I think the example of D&D supports my point. There are a lot of different ways to play D&D, and not all of them produce the feel of an epic fantasy story -- and that's fine. Some D&D games are challenging dungeon crawls of working through tactics and puzzles while collecting treasure, while others have characters tied into the setting with trees of NPCs and political machinations, while others are about epic quests and hilarious quips while fighting.

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 12:20:42 PM
These are genuinely set in the same world, but they won't have the same feel as a game that emulates superhero comics.

Yeah, I agree with jhkim and disagree with estar, I think. You can have non-superhero comic style games in a superhero comic universe.

Goblin Slayer is a great example - the protagonist is very much NOT the 'main character' of the setting. The setting is a standard epic questing fantasy world with Japanese MMORPG elements and has demon lord smashing epic heroes. But all the protagonist wants to do is kill goblins. It has had a lot of influence on my Faerun Adventures D&D campaign, where the PCs are low fantasy protagonists in a high fantasy world. While Gareth Dragonsbane & the NPC Heroes of Bloodstone are Saving the World, the PCs are squabbling with goblins and ghouls over gold coins.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 09, 2023, 06:20:56 AM
One observation on a likely reason for simulation as defined here largely falling away from ttrpgs may simply be that it is one of the areas where video games just flat out do it better even in an open world sandbox. All that processing power can crunch the rules and give it to the players via an easily digestible UI.

MegaMek, for example, handles all the environmental physics of Battletech (including any advanced rules you want to use) such that all the players have to input are their movement (with the program accounting for terrain effects automatically) during the movement phase and the targets of their weapons during the attack phase.

Quote from: S'mon on March 09, 2023, 11:29:19 AM
Social interaction is still much better done by a GM than by a computer I think. And simulation includes talking, hopefully.

I agree with S'mon, but it goes a lot farther than just social interaction. The computer simulation will tend to be extremely bounded. In a computer game, you can't do things that are outside the rules -- but humans can try to do so many things that it's impossible to cover in a ruleset. To me, one of the great strengths of RPGs is that you can try things that aren't in the rules.

Even if we're talking about just environment physics, there are a lot of questions that aren't covered. A long time ago, I played in a paired MechWarrior RPG / Battletech wargame. In the RPG, one of the things we considered was whether we would try to set traps or similar to deal with an impending attack. (I can't remember exactly what happened - I think we didn't do it, but we considered it.) An interesting question might be how battle mechs deal with such improvised traps - but it's likely not covered in the rules.

And now I'm picturing the Ewok's traps in Return of the Jedi.

Quote from: S'mon on March 09, 2023, 11:29:19 AM
Social interaction is still much better done by a GM than by a computer I think.

I'm not so sure of that, myself.

See, single-player videogames (Fallout 2, Arcanum, Planescape: Torment, etc) have your PC's charisma, intelligence, alignment/personality traits, etc affecting dialogue options for some time now. So, for eg, having a dumb PC will reflect in your dialogue. Considering that world consistency is a desired quality in a simulation, it seems those games are better at representing your character characteristics in a more verossimile manner than the usual GM-fiat based alternative that tabletop RPGs offer, where many times the most persuasive player gains advantage on social situations irrespective of his/her character traits.

Further, online PvP games like DayZ, Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown have incorporated real-time dialogue for quite some time. In these, differente PCs/teams can speak directly to each other in-setting, with consequences that go from mere bartering of resources, temporary truces and alliances, to ugly shootouts ensuing. Quick example:

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 12:20:42 PM
These are genuinely set in the same world, but they won't have the same feel

Yes you are correct they won't which will be the point of doing those kinds of campaigns. How things will go in a four color comic setting if the players are part of the police doing Law & Order type stuff.

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 12:20:42 PM
but they won't have the same feel as a game that emulates superhero comics.

You are going to have to define what you are thinking of when you say "a game that emulate superhero comics". Otherwise we will arguing in circle.

I took it to mean a story game that has metagame mechanics in addition to others that ensure that the session flows narratively like it would in a comic book.

My point, which I admit I didn't fully explain, is that beyond the narrative beats, comic book characters have motivations and plans even in the more silly comic books stories. By roleplaying characters with similar motivations and plans in similar circumstances you will get something that feels like being a superhero in a four color comic book. Except you are making your choices on how to gaslight Lois Lane, Jimmy Olson, etc. again into not thinking that Clark Kent is really Superman.

Narratively the result will be different than a comic book story, but in terms of verisimilitude, it can be spot on. And plays into one of the big appeals of RPG "What would I do in similar circumstances."

Quote from: Itachi on March 09, 2023, 01:48:21 PM
verossimile manner than the usual GM-fiat based alternative that tabletop RPGs offer, where many times the most persuasive player gains advantage on social situations irrespective of his/her character traits.

What you are describing is a problem with the human referee. The solution is to teach folks to be better referees. Preferably without needing to have 40 years of life experience. Changing the rules will not fix problems like but just introduce new complications. Coupled with the fact it will become it own thing as the limitations of CRPGs force the games into becoming their own thing with their own conventions.

Quote from: Itachi on March 09, 2023, 01:48:21 PM
Further, online PvP games like DayZ, Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown have incorporated real-time dialogue for quite some time. In these, differente PCs/teams can speak directly to each other in-setting, with consequences that go from mere bartering of resources, temporary truces and alliances, to ugly shootouts ensuing.

See Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Campaign circa 1972. What you describe was solved in the very first roleplaying campaign ever ran. Tabletop roleplaying was developed from Dave Arneson's experience with many on many roleplaying style wargames starting with Wesely's Braunstein.

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 01:59:23 PM
What you are describing is a problem with the human referee. The solution is to teach folks to be better referees. Preferably without needing to have 40 years of life experience. Changing the rules will not fix problems like but just introduce new complications. Coupled with the fact it will become it own thing as the limitations of CRPGs force the games into becoming their own thing with their own conventions.

Getting a better referee isn't even an option for many players outside of larger urban areas, particularly as FLGS continue to fold.

When your only options (unless you want to run something yourself, which isn't always practical) is a couple 5e games with mediocre GMs, a railroady GMPC-loving Vampire GM, and Magic the Gathering tourneys (which are what is actually supporting the FLGS)... and finding an online play group (or joining a guild on a simulationist online game); which of those is going to provide the instruction to produce these better GMs you speak of?

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 01:59:23 PM

Quote from: Itachi on March 09, 2023, 01:48:21 PM
Further, online PvP games like DayZ, Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown have incorporated real-time dialogue for quite some time. In these, differente PCs/teams can speak directly to each other in-setting, with consequences that go from mere bartering of resources, temporary truces and alliances, to ugly shootouts ensuing.

See Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Campaign circa 1972. What you describe was solved in the very first roleplaying campaign ever ran. Tabletop roleplaying was developed from Dave Arneson's experience with many on many roleplaying style wargames starting with Wesely's Braunstein.

The point you seem to miss is not "TTRPGs have always had that" its that "Computer games can now do it too (and have for a while), with more realistic simulations including near photorealistic video and ambient sounds in real time" which is just one of the reasons you don't see nearly the focus on simulationism in ttrpgs that you used to; because its never going to be the draw you want it to be compared to its computerized competition.

The majority of people with a hardcore interest in simulationist play who aren't ttrpg diehards have long since moved on to video games that provide all the simulation they desire right up to and including realtime communication with squadmates and proximate enemies in multiplayer environments. Younger players will never even be looking at ttrpgs for simulationist play because the type offered is never going to come close to competing except with a master-tier GM (who are exceedingly rare).

People who come into the ttrpg hobby these days are coming for the things that video games can't do better... and these days that's not simulation.

Which is why I say again, these days simulationism in rpgs only really matters to the degree its absence breaks player immersion. Basic hand-wavium techniques even average GMs can pull off are generally are good enough to handle most of the simulationist concerns of most players so long as the fluff text is descriptive enough.

Quote from: Itachi on March 09, 2023, 01:48:21 PM

Quote from: S'mon on March 09, 2023, 11:29:19 AM
Social interaction is still much better done by a GM than by a computer I think.

I'm not so sure of that, myself.

See, single-player videogames (Fallout 2, Arcanum, Planescape: Torment, etc) have your PC's charisma, intelligence, alignment/personality traits, etc affecting dialogue options for some time now. So, for eg, having a dumb PC will reflect in your dialogue.

I guess that matters to you. It doesn't matter to me. I care about the NPC's motivations & personality, not whether the PC has INT 8 and should talk in pidgin English like in Neverwinter Nights 1. I tend to treat PC attributes as player resources, not limitations.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 09, 2023, 02:37:00 PM
which of those is going to provide the instruction to produce these better GMs you speak of?

For my efforts? I am starting with the 13,000+ folks who downloaded Blackmarsh. A drop in the bucket in terms of the larger hobby but you have to start somewhere.

Plus there is the tool that ignited the recent burst in popularity for D&D, youtube, and other video services. I have a plan after my initial release for a series of videos showing and explaining how this stuff works. It not a shortcut by any means but it will make what I do far more accessible to a greater number of folks.

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 01:59:23 PM
The majority of people with a hardcore interest in simulationist play who aren't ttrpg diehards have long since moved on to video games that provide all the simulation they desire right up to and including realtime communication with squadmates and proximate enemies in multiplayer environments. Younger players will never even be looking at ttrpgs for simulationist play because the type offered is never going to come close to competing except with a master-tier GM (who are exceedingly rare).

People who come into the ttrpg hobby these days are coming for the things that video games can't do better... and these days that's not simulation.

Which is why I say again, these days simulationism in rpgs only really matters to the degree its absence breaks player immersion. Basic hand-wavium techniques even average GMs can pull off are generally are good enough to handle most of the simulationist concerns of most players so long as the fluff text is descriptive enough.

You are making the assumption that simulationism is about the detail, it isn't. Which is why I call what I do sandbox campaigning. Amacris may call it simulationism but his goal is basically the same, running campaigns where players are free to trash the setting in whatever manner they see fit.

You are missing the point of why he doing this. It is not to revel in the details. The point of having rules consistent with the setting results in one less thing a player has to worry about when making plans. If they have read or experienced the rules then they have a sense of what the odds are. The rules do not have to be at the Nth level of detail to accomplish this goal.

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 09:45:56 AM
You are making the same mistake that so many make that what we do is about playing a set of rules. The rules are an aide, the point of what we do is to run campaigns, even if they are a single session, where players pretend to be characters having adventures in some imagined setting. The reason this works along with being fun and interesting is that a human referee is part of the process in a specific way. Namely, the referee describes the circumstance, the player describes what they try to do, and finally, the referee adjudicates and describes the changed circumstances. This loop is repeated through the life of the campaign.

Having a good system means running a campaign takes less work and the referee can use their limited time for other things involving the campaign. But what form it takes and how detailed it gets is a preference not a requirement.

Simulationism is about how one runs a tabletop roleplaying campaign not a description of the rules being used. I get that thanks to Ron Edwards there are some preconceived notions out there about what Simulationism is. That Edwards and others seem obsessed with the idea that the right system can magically fix the issues a campaign is having.

Simulationism means that as a referee your rulings and the system you use reflect the reality of the setting you described to the players. It means that the players can only do things within the campaign that their characters can do. But it also means that the players can do ANY thing their character can do within the setting. It doesn't matter if you never made a ruling on that type of action before or if it is not addressed in the system. If it something reasonable that a character can do then as the referee you figure out the mechanics of how to make it happen, rather than saying no you can't do that because it not in the rule.

Conversely, with simulationism, it is fine to say no you can't do that because characters existing in the setting can't do that. If you are playing in a medieval setting and there are no supernatural or fantastic elements in play then your character can't flap their arms and fly away.


The rulings and rules could be at a fine level of detail like with GURPS with all the sourcebook in play. Or it could be quite abstract like running a campaign with only the 3 LBBs of OD&D. You can run simulationist campaigns with either extreme or anything in between.

And I have personally done just that running my Majestic Wilderlands setting pretty much the same regardless of the system I used for 40 years with multiple groups of different individuals.

The systems that don't work out well for me, like Fate, are those that have metagaming as an integral part of their system. Mechanics that the players use not as their character but as themselves to influence the direction of the campaign.

Also more abstract systems that don't explain how they are tied to the reality of setting also don't work out well with my style. OD&D used to be in that category but after reading up on the various histories of how it was developed I can see how stuff like hit point and armor class grew out of miniature wargaming. So that no longer an issue.   Other more abstract systems are opaque to me. Some I haven't put the time in to understand others come off as a cute dice game rather than something that can be tied to the reality of the setting.

For me D&D 4e is a good example of cute dice and mechanics that are more a boardgame than something that can be tied back to the reality of the setting. The Fantasy Trip likewise I have issue with as well. But both are excellent game in of themselves. Just not good tools for someone who wants to run a simulationist campaign.

GET OUT OF MY BRAIN! (and stop relating my thoughts better than I do!)

Seriously, though, you are spot on with your explication of the role of simulation in RPGs.  Spot on!  I couldn't agree more.

I think part of the issue is, as you mentioned, people think of the game rules as the fundamental determinant of simulationism.  It has more to do with the applicability of the rules to the concrete actions and results the rules are meant to adjudicate.  To try to be more clear: how closely the rules and their results can be translated into events within the game world determines the level of simulation the rules provide.  For example, many early editions of RPGs were focused on directly asking questions about what happened in the game world physically, based on character actions ("How much can I lift?"  "How far can I throw this?"  "How  far can I jump?").  More narrative games elide those questions into more general results ("Can I jump the pit?"  "Did I open the safe?"), leading to the most narrative games which only address the narrative effect of character choices, and not the process that would have had to happen in the game world to achieve the effect ("Did I get the information on the castle?" or: *rolls*  "Did I persuade the king?").

I think there are two undersold issues.  The first is the effect that unified mechanics has on simulation (does 1d20 + skill, roll over, always provide a in-world description of what has happened within the fiction for an action to be accomplished?).  The second is the expectation that character actions will advance or contribute to a recognizable or identifiable (in the moment) "plot" or "story."  But I'll have to elaborate further... I'm already late for a meeting... LOL!

Quote from: S'mon on March 09, 2023, 02:50:05 PM

Quote from: Itachi on March 09, 2023, 01:48:21 PM

Quote from: S'mon on March 09, 2023, 11:29:19 AM
Social interaction is still much better done by a GM than by a computer I think.

I'm not so sure of that, myself.

See, single-player videogames (Fallout 2, Arcanum, Planescape: Torment, etc) have your PC's charisma, intelligence, alignment/personality traits, etc affecting dialogue options for some time now. So, for eg, having a dumb PC will reflect in your dialogue.

I guess that matters to you. It doesn't matter to me. I care about the NPC's motivations & personality, not whether the PC has INT 8 and should talk in pidgin English like in Neverwinter Nights 1. I tend to treat PC attributes as player resources, not limitations.

But those videogames are full of NPCs with motivations and personality, usually better realized than the average tabletop GM can do. See Irenicus in Baldurs Gate 2, Dak'kon in Planescape Torment, or Tiago in Disco Elysium.

Quote from: Itachi on March 09, 2023, 03:52:49 PM
But those videogames are full of NPCs with motivations and personality, usually better realized than the average tabletop GM can do. See Irenicus in Baldurs Gate 2, Dak'kon in Planescape Torment, or most NPCs in Disco Elysium.

Sure let's go with that.

• They were designed, written, and playtest by a group of professionals who honed their skills over the eyars.
• They were implemented by a different group of artists and software developers writing code and creating 3D Models
• The cycle between releases of games involving the same setting and same characters are years apart.

Versus
Tens of thousands of hobbyists who in the time they have for a hobby on a weekly basis manage to bring to life a world full of characters and adventure. Admittly the skills to do this on a bell curve so likely the average referee isn't doing something as compelling as Irencius, Dak'kon, etc.

But as it turns it is good enough. And while the bell curve of skill exist, I think it has been shifted thanks to internet and youtube. Because thanks to stuff like Critical Role, folks are thinking more about this. So the odds are your average referee is a more aware of this stuff than they were 20 years ago.

And that there is high end of the bell curve who are often share what they do. Which has never been easier than before. And there are the VTTs which work face to face to greatly expand the ability of a hobbyist to find new games and other hobbyists.

So you could only look that that middle part of the curve and throw up your hands and say "Oh it sucks. Why bother, just go back to computer games". I on the other hand look at the high end and think of ways to push that knowledge and skill down to the middle. Critical Role took major strides in that regard, other folks had their impact. It doable. Just hard work tho.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 09, 2023, 02:37:00 PM

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 01:59:23 PM

Quote from: Itachi on March 09, 2023, 01:48:21 PM
Further, online PvP games like DayZ, Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown have incorporated real-time dialogue for quite some time. In these, differente PCs/teams can speak directly to each other in-setting, with consequences that go from mere bartering of resources, temporary truces and alliances, to ugly shootouts ensuing.

See Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Campaign circa 1972. What you describe was solved in the very first roleplaying campaign ever ran. Tabletop roleplaying was developed from Dave Arneson's experience with many on many roleplaying style wargames starting with Wesely's Braunstein.

The point you seem to miss is not "TTRPGs have always had that" its that "Computer games can now do it too (and have for a while), with more realistic simulations including near photorealistic video and ambient sounds in real time" which is just one of the reasons you don't see nearly the focus on simulationism in ttrpgs that you used to; because its never going to be the draw you want it to be compared to its computerized competition.

The majority of people with a hardcore interest in simulationist play who aren't ttrpg diehards have long since moved on to video games that provide all the simulation they desire right up to and including realtime communication with squadmates and proximate enemies in multiplayer environments. Younger players will never even be looking at ttrpgs for simulationist play because the type offered is never going to come close to competing except with a master-tier GM (who are exceedingly rare).

People who come into the ttrpg hobby these days are coming for the things that video games can't do better... and these days that's not simulation.

Exactly this.

I'm an example myself, of a player who used to love simulationist RPGs in the past, but these days extract everything I want from simulationism from videogames. And I doubt my teenager son and his friends would prefer say, playing Harnmaster over Kingdom Come: Deliverance, or Gurps Swat over Rainbow Six Siege.

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 01:51:14 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 12:20:42 PM
but they won't have the same feel as a game that emulates superhero comics.

You are going to have to define what you are thinking of when you say "a game that emulate superhero comics". Otherwise we will arguing in circle.

I took it to mean a story game that has metagame mechanics in addition to others that ensure that the session flows narratively like it would in a comic book.

My point, which I admit I didn't fully explain, is that beyond the narrative beats, comic book characters have motivations and plans even in the more silly comic books stories. By roleplaying characters with similar motivations and plans in similar circumstances you will get something that feels like being a superhero in a four color comic book. Except you are making your choices on how to gaslight Lois Lane, Jimmy Olson, etc. again into not thinking that Clark Kent is really Superman.

Narratively the result will be different than a comic book story, but in terms of verisimilitude, it can be spot on. And plays into one of the big appeals of RPG "What would I do in similar circumstances."

What I mean by "genre emulation" is exactly what you say in my bolding of your post -- getting the feel of being in a four-color comic book. This is a subjective experience, so different people may have different answers about what gives them that feel. One person might like Game X for this feel, and another person might hate Game X and like Game Y instead. They can both be right for themselves, because such feeling is subjective.

You suggest Superman's player chooses how to gaslight his friends Lois and Jimmy.

To me, one of the more interesting takes about simulationist games is that as a player, I don't have to follow that script. I could choose to have Superman be honest with his friends instead. He might give up being a lawless vigilante and go public instead. That could have huge consequences for the world, which could be interesting to explore. However, it likely wouldn't feel like a four-color comic book.

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 05:34:15 PM

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 01:51:14 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 12:20:42 PM
but they won't have the same feel as a game that emulates superhero comics.

You are going to have to define what you are thinking of when you say "a game that emulate superhero comics". Otherwise we will arguing in circle.

I took it to mean a story game that has metagame mechanics in addition to others that ensure that the session flows narratively like it would in a comic book.

My point, which I admit I didn't fully explain, is that beyond the narrative beats, comic book characters have motivations and plans even in the more silly comic books stories. By roleplaying characters with similar motivations and plans in similar circumstances you will get something that feels like being a superhero in a four color comic book. Except you are making your choices on how to gaslight Lois Lane, Jimmy Olson, etc. again into not thinking that Clark Kent is really Superman.

Narratively the result will be different than a comic book story, but in terms of verisimilitude, it can be spot on. And plays into one of the big appeals of RPG "What would I do in similar circumstances."

What I mean by "genre emulation" is exactly what you say in my bolding of your post -- getting the feel of being in a four-color comic book. This is a subjective experience, so different people may have different answers about what gives them that feel. One person might like Game X for this feel, and another person might hate Game X and like Game Y instead. They can both be right for themselves, because such feeling is subjective.

You suggest Superman's player chooses how to gaslight his friends Lois and Jimmy.

To me, one of the more interesting takes about simulationist games is that as a player, I don't have to follow that script. I could choose to have Superman be honest with his friends instead. He might give up being a lawless vigilante and go public instead. That could have huge consequences for the world, which could be interesting to explore. However, it likely wouldn't feel like a four-color comic book.

(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZM_Sq7gN-6E/maxresdefault.jpg)

Depends on what day of the week it is...

We're really back to arguing GNS?

Nostalgia for the early 00s?

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 09, 2023, 02:37:00 PM
People who come into the ttrpg hobby these days are coming for the things that video games can't do better... and these days that's not simulation.
Which is why I say again, these days simulationism in rpgs only really matters to the degree its absence breaks player immersion. Basic hand-wavium techniques even average GMs can pull off are generally are good enough to handle most of the simulationist concerns of most players so long as the fluff text is descriptive enough.

Videogames have of course captured market share that used to belong to tabletop games. That's true of wargames as well as RPGs. So I don't think you are wrong -- but I think your attitude towards simulation is different enough that we are talking past each other.

I define a role-playing game as one in which you play from the stance of a particular character, and interact in the world as that character. I think story games (where you have an authorial stance) are their own genre, as different from RPGs as RPGs are from Wargames (where you manage pawns). This is a sharp disagreement with Ron Edwards and GNS, which I think is entirely wrong about stance.

I believe what makes RPGs special is their ability to afford their players the experience of agency in the world, an experience which is in short supply in most people's real lives. I call this the Agency Theory of Fun and wrote an entire book explaining how it is the basis of good gamemastering (Arbiter of Worlds).

I believe the best way to create agency is to set up a self-consistent world with clear causality that offers players of the game all of the choices they could make were the world the game is simulating real. For the choices to be meaningful, they have to carry have meaningful consequences that persist in the world state. To the extent that they cannot do things that their character could do in the world were it real, they've lost agency.

The ideal RPG is one that has sufficiently robust rules to reliably handle 80% of the action and has an intelligent, experienced GM to handle the 20% of the action that's outside the rules. Videogames can do the 80% better than any tabletop rulebook, but they cannot do the 20% at all. You need an RPG to do it.

Hence, by my definition, a videogame affords me far less agency than an RPG, because it circumscribes my choices far too narrowly. That is why I *don't* play videogames much anymore. I don't want to choose from a menu of options given to me by a designer. I feel like I'm stuck on a train on rails in even the most "open" RPG. What I'm interested in simulating isn't the ballistic penetration of Pz IV vs JS2 tanks. I want to simulate the free choices of a panzer commander, including the choice of switching to Team Russia, abandoning my tank to become a bandit, etc., whatever.

(For similar reasons, the majority of wargames that the US Army War College and RAND use to simulate future conflict are pen-and-paper wargames with rules that are played on the tabletop under the supervision of a GM. That way, the players have reliable rules while the GMs can make sure that the players can do all the things an actual commander can do, even if it's something no one thought of when the game was designed. Many of the most important outcomes of wargames have come from this dynamic.)

Anyone who dislikes my definition of RPG or doesn't agree with  me about what makes RPGs special, won't like my games at all. I'm OK with that. My games aren't for everyone. But the design goals I have espoused above are the accepted standard of what makes a good RPG on the Autarch discord. There *IS* a movement or group that values this, I make my living from catering to them. And they are not abandoning ACKS for, e.g. Dwarf Fortress. They complain that Dwarf Fortress doesn't let them do stuff that ACKS does.

I'm happy to accept that mine is a niche audience, but that doesn't mean it's not a real one with real preferences that differ from what other gamers want.

Appreciate your post.

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 05:34:15 PM
To me, one of the more interesting takes about simulationist games is that as a player, I don't have to follow that script. I could choose to have Superman be honest with his friends instead. He might give up being a lawless vigilante and go public instead. That could have huge consequences for the world, which could be interesting to explore. However, it likely wouldn't feel like a four-color comic book.

To digress for a second. I only started relatively recently started to use "trash the setting" as my ten cent summary of what I focus on with what I run and what I share.  Way back in the day, I was known at the DM who let players "trash" his setting. Kill the king, no problem. It won't be easy but I won't get bent and it will a fair challenge.

And the reason I digress is to highlight the "don't get bent" part.  Because in my experience people do get bent about folks trashing a setting.

To continue with the Superman example, to me that not a problem that you decided instead to be honest playing as Superman. To put what I said earlier in a different an important appeal of the RPG it ability to explore the "what ifs" about a setting. In Silver Age parlance, this is only an imaginary story. And as a I recall some of those "imaginary" stories were pretty good, especially the send-off for the original Earth-1 Superman "Whatever happened to the Man of Tommorrow?" by Alan Moore.

However some folks in the hobby don't enjoy that kind of flexibility for a given genre so they build systems that try to "load the dice" by metagaming. Which I dislike as a creative choice as I feel metagaming is one of the few ways of cheating in RPGs. It is the easy route out of the problem.

The better way in my opinion, is as an design or a referee is to paint a compelling enough picture of the setting that the players would naturally choose, for the most part, to follow along with how thing normally work out. Again with the example with the gaslighting over secret identity. to make it compelling I would put out the good stories that had that particular trope. Why they were good in a fun and interesting way. Paint a good enough picture that make a player (or a referee) go "Huh, I OK I see it now."

And if you choose to go public while playing Superman that OK too. And I would go into the different way that was an interesting choice in a four color world.

But the focus wouldn't on creating a specific narrative. Rather explain how character four world reacted and how that can be handled for different circumstances. Because in the original stories that how it manifested, a situation came up, character reacted in various ways. The strength of RPG is in its ability to take that information and use as part of bring a setting to life.

Unlike story game Simulationism would focus more on how character motivations interact for a given genre whether it is something ground or more fantastic like a four color comic world.

Quote from: Wisithir on March 08, 2023, 03:19:08 AM
The rules are not the game. The rules are tool for the GM to create a game with.

I agree with this. Like, alot.

Quote from: amacris on March 09, 2023, 06:31:35 PM
The ideal RPG is one that has sufficiently robust rules to reliably handle 80% of the action and has an intelligent, experienced GM to handle the 20% of the action that's outside the rules.

This seems close to the concept of the Semi-Free Kriegsspiel, which I think was the main inspiration for the Braunstein type play that led to modern RPGs?

I think I agree, but within the 80% you still often do need some GM adjudication. Eg the rules may say DC 10 for an Easy task, DC 15 for a Moderate task, DC 20 for a Hard task, but they may not tell you whether climbing that tree is Easy or Moderate, whether climbing that wall is Moderate or Hard. I generally find I am most comfortable with GMing a system where
(1) There is an established task-resolution mechanism, such as D20+Mods vs Difficulty Class/Target Number.
(2) I am expected to use my adjudication in implementing it, eg applying guidelines I set the DCs/TNs. (I like to keep myself honest & inform the players by announcing the DC pre-roll, which again fits the paradigm).
Which I think is the Semi-Free Kriegsspiel paradigm.

Quote from: Spinachcat on March 09, 2023, 06:21:51 PM
We're really back to arguing GNS?

Nostalgia for the early 00s?

No, most of the discussion is GDS - mid-90s!

GNS was always so silly/extreme that sensible people tended to misunderstand/misinterpret it as GDS, anyway.  ;D

Quote from: S'mon on March 10, 2023, 02:48:49 AM
No, most of the discussion is GDS - mid-90s!

GNS was always so silly/extreme that sensible people tended to misunderstand/misinterpret it as GDS, anyway.  ;D

That's what always happened to me — I've spent a decade thinking of GNS as affine-transformed Threefold. Regardless, I've always considered myself a Simulationist, as well.

While I think the labelling of the styles of play has borne some fruit, I think that as a theoretical basis, Justin Alexander's concept of Game Structures (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15126/roleplaying-games/game-structures) is a better theoretical framework: at least it (pace Edwards) is able to explain the success of (early) D&D (it taught dungeoncrawling to novice DMs, who could then branch out from there and fall back if their experiments on other modes of play didn't work). Also, his concept of "associated mechanics" (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17231/roleplaying-games/dissociated-mechanics-a-brief-primer) is a very important concept to nail down the concerns of Simulationist players, in that too much focus on dissociated mechanics will send a Simulationist player packing.

That being said, I do think that Macris's ACKS is a very solid playing system (I have several of the books) and it does scratch several itches I had with other fantasy systems — I mean, rules for magical research and creating hybrids right there on the core book? Great! A good adaptation of the Traveller trading structure to fantasy? Awesome! Actual rules for chases? Phenomenal! Unfortunately, recently the dollar has decided to shoot off into the stratosphere, so I'm going to have to wait for it to come down a bit until I can get my hand on Ascendant. In any case, I appreciate how those principles articulated in the manifesto are evidenced in his design work. Really solid stuff.

Quote from: Wtrmute on March 10, 2023, 07:30:28 AM
While I think the labelling of the styles of play has borne some fruit, I think that as a theoretical basis, Justin Alexander's concept of Game Structures (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15126/roleplaying-games/game-structures) is a better theoretical framework: at least it (pace Edwards) is able to explain the success of (early) D&D (it taught dungeoncrawling to novice DMs, who could then branch out from there and fall back if their experiments on other modes of play didn't work). Also, his concept of "associated mechanics" (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17231/roleplaying-games/dissociated-mechanics-a-brief-primer) is a very important concept to nail down the concerns of Simulationist players, in that too much focus on dissociated mechanics will send a Simulationist player packing.

That being said, I do think that Macris's ACKS is a very solid playing system (I have several of the books) and it does scratch several itches I had with other fantasy systems — I mean, rules for magical research and creating hybrids right there on the core book? Great! A good adaptation of the Traveller trading structure to fantasy? Awesome! Actual rules for chases? Phenomenal! Unfortunately, recently the dollar has decided to shoot off into the stratosphere, so I'm going to have to wait for it to come down a bit until I can get my hand on Ascendant. In any case, I appreciate how those principles articulated in the manifesto are evidenced in his design work. Really solid stuff.

I also like ACKS for the subsystems. I tend to have it around as a reference for when running 5e D&D etc.

Re Alexander, I think his concept of complete vs incomplete play structures was very important & insightful. The dissociated mechanics discussion (mostly re 4e D&D) was good too.

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 05:34:15 PM

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 01:51:14 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 12:20:42 PM
but they won't have the same feel as a game that emulates superhero comics.

You are going to have to define what you are thinking of when you say "a game that emulate superhero comics". Otherwise we will arguing in circle.

I took it to mean a story game that has metagame mechanics in addition to others that ensure that the session flows narratively like it would in a comic book.

My point, which I admit I didn't fully explain, is that beyond the narrative beats, comic book characters have motivations and plans even in the more silly comic books stories. By roleplaying characters with similar motivations and plans in similar circumstances you will get something that feels like being a superhero in a four color comic book. Except you are making your choices on how to gaslight Lois Lane, Jimmy Olson, etc. again into not thinking that Clark Kent is really Superman.

Narratively the result will be different than a comic book story, but in terms of verisimilitude, it can be spot on. And plays into one of the big appeals of RPG "What would I do in similar circumstances."

What I mean by "genre emulation" is exactly what you say in my bolding of your post -- getting the feel of being in a four-color comic book. This is a subjective experience, so different people may have different answers about what gives them that feel. One person might like Game X for this feel, and another person might hate Game X and like Game Y instead. They can both be right for themselves, because such feeling is subjective.

You suggest Superman's player chooses how to gaslight his friends Lois and Jimmy.

To me, one of the more interesting takes about simulationist games is that as a player, I don't have to follow that script. I could choose to have Superman be honest with his friends instead. He might give up being a lawless vigilante and go public instead. That could have huge consequences for the world, which could be interesting to explore. However, it likely wouldn't feel like a four-color comic book.

I don't know if I am using the term the same as you but I do a lot of genre in my campaigns and use the term genre emulation to describe it sometimes. The way my campaigns tend to run is fairly sandbox, character driven, and prioritize player choice, but I freely throw in genre elements. But I am also not overly precious about things like not breaking the fourth wall (I will often let players see beneath the hood specifically so they know their choice mattered in a given a situation). I would say these days my two big priorities are player choice and doing what works at the table (and not thinking too much about having a GM philosophy). I tend to view being a GM a bit like being a stand up comedian (where they hone what techniques work, through experience with crowds, learn to shape what they do towards different audiences, etc).

For genre emulation to me that can mean anything from using a system that is built with genre elements (one example of this is using grudge tables for a wuxia game), to doing things that make sense in a genre setting (I would never have soldiers pop out of the walls, seemingly out of thin air, in a game inspired by I, Claudius, but I would do so in a game inspired by Five Elements Ninja or the Crippled Avengers). I wouldn't say my games are particularly narrative, but I do include dramatic elements (and even give players dramatic ties at the start of play that I key to my grudge tables). I also will often try to have a cosmology that reflects the logic of the genre at times. System physics can matter here too. If I am trying to play a very gritty real world crime thriller campaign but my mechanics feel more like they belong in a game emulating Doctor Who, I am going to modify them.

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 04:08:48 PM

Quote from: Itachi on March 09, 2023, 03:52:49 PM
But those videogames are full of NPCs with motivations and personality, usually better realized than the average tabletop GM can do. See Irenicus in Baldurs Gate 2, Dak'kon in Planescape Torment, or most NPCs in Disco Elysium.

Sure let's go with that.

• They were designed, written, and playtest by a group of professionals who honed their skills over the eyars.
• They were implemented by a different group of artists and software developers writing code and creating 3D Models
• The cycle between releases of games involving the same setting and same characters are years apart.

Versus
Tens of thousands of hobbyists who in the time they have for a hobby on a weekly basis manage to bring to life a world full of characters and adventure. Admittly the skills to do this on a bell curve so likely the average referee isn't doing something as compelling as Irencius, Dak'kon, etc.

But as it turns it is good enough. And while the bell curve of skill exist, I think it has been shifted thanks to internet and youtube. Because thanks to stuff like Critical Role, folks are thinking more about this. So the odds are your average referee is a more aware of this stuff than they were 20 years ago.

And that there is high end of the bell curve who are often share what they do. Which has never been easier than before. And there are the VTTs which work face to face to greatly expand the ability of a hobbyist to find new games and other hobbyists.

So you could only look that that middle part of the curve and throw up your hands and say "Oh it sucks. Why bother, just go back to computer games". I on the other hand look at the high end and think of ways to push that knowledge and skill down to the middle. Critical Role took major strides in that regard, other folks had their impact. It doable. Just hard work tho.

You're still missing the point. It's not that TTRPGs lack good GMs on average or something like that, it's that videogames as a medium surpassed anything the tabletop environment can do in terms of simulation. Because of this, simulationism in itself is not an attractive anymore to many people, specially younger audiences that come from videogames. Ergo, games that thrived purely on it as it's main thing are out of fashion (eg: Gurps). And maybe that explains why games that still use simulation to some degree but coupled with other aspects or attractives keep doing fine, like the very Amacris' ACKS (that mixes it with OSR), or John Harper's Blades in the Dark (that mixes it with narrativism).

Quote from: jhkim on March 08, 2023, 05:38:37 PMI think it's important to distinguish between simulation of a fictional game world, and emulation of genre fiction.

It's the difference between "let's have a game like comic book superheroes" and a simulationist premise like "what would happen if people really did have superpowers?"

I agree 100%, but don't you think they should fall under the same pillar of Simulationism? The main thing with this pillar is the modelling of a fictional environment, be it according to story patterns (genre-emulation) or world patterns (world-sim). But aren't those simulations in the end?

Quote from: Itachi on March 10, 2023, 10:06:34 AM
....John Harper's Blades in the Dark (that mixes it with narrativism).

Blades in the Dark is not simulationist in the slightest, it's simpy a slighltly crunchier than usual storygame.

Are you sure? How would you classify these (Blades in the Dark) features then:

- simulation of your gang inner workings (hiring goons & specialists, aquiring assets like hideouts, better security, boats, training gear, etc)
- simulation of your gang outer workings (relationships tracks with other factions (https://bladesinthedark.com/sites/default/files/sheets/blades_sheets_v8_2_Factions.pdf), rivalries, alliances, truces, hold & expansion, heat level with authority, informants, fixers, smugglers, etc)
- simulation of your characters spiral into misery due to the life of crime (stress tracks, trauma, vices & porveyours, downtime projects & complications, etc)

If those are not simulation elements, I don't know what they are. The fact the game has elements from other "agendas", like the narrativist flashbacks & framework, or the gamist PC & Crew abilities, doesn't exclude it's simulation aspects.

Genre emulation (and yes, "emulation" is not the same thing as "simulation").
Blades in the Dark emulates heist fiction in a fantasy setting: you can't do anything else, anything that is not included in the genre "standard" simply cannot happen.
A proper simulation sets the world in a starting state, provides rules to interact with it in any possible way and leaves everything else at the players' mercy: for example, you could replicate any BitD campaign with D&D (how well and with how many house rules needed depends on the edition chosen), but you cannot use BitD to handle non heist games.

I never said Blades in the Dark is a simulationist game, and if my use of words implied that I apologize. I mean to say it features a degree of simulationism in it's elements: the factions relationships tracking, the vices and traumas of characters, the Heat score of crews, etc. could be ported as-is to most simulationist games out there (and were probably taken from those in the first place).

Is Blades in the Dark simulationist, narrativist, gamist, dramatist, whatever? I don't know, all I know is that I see elements from all those "pillars" while playing it and find the experience fun. Would I find it as fun if it was purely a simulation in all it's complex minutia and exception-based rules glory? Probably not, and that's the point I've been making here. Games that mix sim- elements with other "pillars" elements have seen more success than the games that go all-in on simulation, in the last decade or so.

True simulation is often process-based.  Effects-based often indicates emulation.  It's not definite, because the continuum of simulation is extremely wide, plus in a given game some sim elements probably run deeper than others.

That's one axis. Another is the level of abstraction the thing operates on. Abstraction tend away from simulation (sometimes passing through emulation on the way out) while concrete elements tend towards simulation (sometimes passing into overwhelming detail that swamps the boat). 

"Emulation of genre" is only simulation to the extent that the genre is itself a simulation. Trying to pin all of that under simulation is casting the net so wide as to make "simulation" a useless term. 

In fact, the purpose of an effects-based abstraction that maps to genre is usually to take that part of the simulation out, but leave its output in other parts of the system that may still be simulation.  Consider various encumbrance systems:

- List of equipment. Has encumbrance values.  Character has limits based physical capabilities.  When you try to carry too much, you get penalties that feed into other processes (e.g. combat, travel times, etc.)  Fairly concrete in many cases, only abstract in how physical capabilities are modeled (e.g. Strength score) and equipment "weights' substitute for mass, size, weight, etc.  It tends towards the concrete.  You handle encumbrance by managing the list and doing the calculations.  It's accounting, but the process is analogous to the thing simulated.

- Slot-based system that only tracks bigger or key items, the rest rolled into a convenient "bag" that is kind of rough and ready.  There's still some detail, but not to the granularity of the previous system, and it is not consistent.  The simulation model deliberately has gaps to make the accounting easier.  Still feeds into those other processes, though, in a fairly concrete way.  It resolves to something concrete.  That bag is there for emulation.  It's still got one foot in the sim door to make it feel right.

- Resource system where you roll to see if you have it.  Resources are maybe mapped somewhat to your physical capabilities in the mechanic.  Big strong fighter type has better chances to have a heavy item than scrawny wizard type.  Scrawny wizard has better shot at some more delicate things, perhaps.  Very abstract, concrete is almost non-existent, until we resolve to "fighter guy has a spare dagger or he doesn't".  Highly effects-based.  We are firmly in emulation mode now.

- And of course you can keep going to move right through emulation and out the other side, eventually dropping encumbrance altogether.

All of those options above are almost orthogonal to an encumbrance system built as "GM decides if you can carry all that stuff or not." Depending on how the GM decides, it might map fairly closely to one of those system, but it can also spring off in some other direction entirely.   

Quote from: Itachi on March 10, 2023, 11:28:31 AM
Games that mix sim- elements with other "pillars" elements have seen more success than the games that go all-in on simulation, in the last decade or so.

D&D 5th edition (a game that has practically nothing of the "N" of GNS....) is the name to beat in the industry by a huge margin, pure narrativist games are not even in the top 10, and FitD games barely reach, combined, one tenth of the market share of D&D.
They seem a huge hit if your main source of information is the rpg subreddit or other places hugely infested by forgies, but the real world disagrees.

Yep, which only corroborates my point, seeing as D&D 5e is far from a purely simulationist game (like Gurps, Rolemaster, etc). So we're in agreement here.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 10, 2023, 11:54:35 AM
True simulation is often process-based.  Effects-based often indicates emulation.  It's not definite, because the continuum of simulation is extremely wide, plus in a given game some sim elements probably run deeper than others.

Great definition, and I agree. But in the end of the day, isn't both emu- and sim- about mimicking or modeling patterns? And wouldn't this mimicking all fall under the "pillar" of Simulationism both on the GNS and GDS models? In other words, mimicking genres or worlds is all mimicking patterns in the end, right?

Just to be clear, I agree that genre-emulation and world-simulation are different things, but I see them falling under the umbrella of simulationism on the models cited (since both are about mimickry/modeling), while gamism is about gamification & strategizing, etc. and dramatism/narr being about character-driven drama and all that. (I could be wrong though, never gave much thought to those theories).

Quote from: amacris on March 09, 2023, 06:31:35 PM
Anyone who dislikes my definition of RPG or doesn't agree with  me about what makes RPGs special, won't like my games at all. I'm OK with that. My games aren't for everyone. But the design goals I have espoused above are the accepted standard of what makes a good RPG on the Autarch discord. There *IS* a movement or group that values this, I make my living from catering to them. And they are not abandoning ACKS for, e.g. Dwarf Fortress. They complain that Dwarf Fortress doesn't let them do stuff that ACKS does.

Hey, Alexander. I'm generally in agreement with you -- but this part feels off. I haven't played your games yet, but I've enjoyed other simulationist games like Traveller and HarnMaster - so I think I might. But I also enjoy a bunch of gamist games and dramatist games including story games and others. Those include some of my favorite games, like Monster of the Week and others. I don't like all games -- there are some that are definitely outside my taste range, but I can enjoy a pretty wide variety.

But here, you're effectively dumping on other RPGs in order to promote your style. There are a lot of different things that make RPGs special, I think. And to me, one of the things I hated about Ron Edward's GNS was how he disparaged games that other people liked, and made it out that his preferred games were somehow objectively superior and doing what RPGs are supposed to. I think you're edging too far in that direction here.

Quote from: amacris on March 09, 2023, 06:31:35 PM
I believe what makes RPGs special is their ability to afford their players the experience of agency in the world, an experience which is in short supply in most people's real lives. I call this the Agency Theory of Fun and wrote an entire book explaining how it is the basis of good gamemastering (Arbiter of Worlds).

I believe the best way to create agency is to set up a self-consistent world with clear causality that offers players of the game all of the choices they could make were the world the game is simulating real. For the choices to be meaningful, they have to carry have meaningful consequences that persist in the world state. To the extent that they cannot do things that their character could do in the world were it real, they've lost agency.

I agree that agency is important, and that it can be expressed through simulationism. But there are a lot of situations where if properly simulated, the players do *not* have much agency -- like if they are on a one-way path, or they are given a magically-enforced quest, or they are prisoners with only one choice of escape. It's important for simulationist agency that players have both knowledge and power to make significant choices. That is mostly on the GM, but I think it is important to recognize how rare that is, and support it in advice and preparation.

Some story game advocates suggest that the only way to have real agency is GM-like power over background, and while it's wrong, railroading continues to be a big problem in TTRPGs.

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 06:50:22 PM
Appreciate your post.

Thanks, and likewise.

Quote from: estar on March 09, 2023, 06:50:22 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 09, 2023, 05:34:15 PM
To me, one of the more interesting takes about simulationist games is that as a player, I don't have to follow that script. I could choose to have Superman be honest with his friends instead. He might give up being a lawless vigilante and go public instead. That could have huge consequences for the world, which could be interesting to explore. However, it likely wouldn't feel like a four-color comic book.

To continue with the Superman example, to me that not a problem that you decided instead to be honest playing as Superman. To put what I said earlier in a different an important appeal of the RPG it ability to explore the "what ifs" about a setting. In Silver Age parlance, this is only an imaginary story. And as a I recall some of those "imaginary" stories were pretty good, especially the send-off for the original Earth-1 Superman "Whatever happened to the Man of Tommorrow?" by Alan Moore.

However some folks in the hobby don't enjoy that kind of flexibility for a given genre so they build systems that try to "load the dice" by metagaming. Which I dislike as a creative choice as I feel metagaming is one of the few ways of cheating in RPGs. It is the easy route out of the problem.

The better way in my opinion, is as an design or a referee is to paint a compelling enough picture of the setting that the players would naturally choose, for the most part, to follow along with how thing normally work out. Again with the example with the gaslighting over secret identity. to make it compelling I would put out the good stories that had that particular trope. Why they were good in a fun and interesting way. Paint a good enough picture that make a player (or a referee) go "Huh, I OK I see it now."

The bolded part here is what I would call player buy-in to the genre. The players' choices aren't fixed because there are a lot of choices even within the genre, but they limit their choices to those that are within the genre. And I think that's a good way to run genre RPGs. I'm a big player of Call of Cthulhu which depends a lot on this. Players buy into the genre.

But let's be clear that those genre-based limits are based on them acting like they know they're in a story of the given genre. They are aware of stories of the genre and they are choosing to stay within the bounds of such stories. Those bounds can be seen as a nod to dramatism.

Taking off those bounds can also be interesting, though, which would be more pure simulationism.

---

About your metagame aside -- I enjoy some games with metagame rules like hero points or player authorship, but it is definitely a different sort of fun. At the extreme, it is similar to more avante garde plays where there is less effort in getting real-looking sets or costumes, so one can see the artifice of the staging more plainly. That isn't just being cheap, though, because it lets you do things that would be impossible in a more traditionally staged play.

Quote from: Itachi on March 10, 2023, 12:09:41 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 10, 2023, 11:54:35 AM
True simulation is often process-based.  Effects-based often indicates emulation.  It's not definite, because the continuum of simulation is extremely wide, plus in a given game some sim elements probably run deeper than others.

Great definition, and I agree. But in the end of the day, isn't both emu- and sim- about mimicking or modeling patterns? And wouldn't this mimicking all fall under the "pillar" of Simulationism both on the GNS and GDS models? In other words, mimicking genres or worlds is all mimicking patterns in the end, right?

Just to be clear, I agree that genre-emulation and world-simulation are different things, but I see them falling under the umbrella of simulationism on the models cited (since both are about mimickry/modeling), while gamism is about gamification & strategizing, etc. and dramatism/narr being about character-driven drama and all that. (I could be wrong though, never gave much thought to those theories).

Not really, though from my perspective GNS is a bad theory, and its treatment of simulation is the worst of a bad lot. Nor are dramatism/narrative exactly parallel.  (As an aside, part of the problem with GNS is that it wants them to be, in a "square peg, round hole" fashion.) 

I would suggest instead that both emulation and narrative (in the normal, useful sense of "narrative") cross all the GDS boundaries.  Or to confine it to emulation in particular, the simulation can emulate, the game can emulate, and the dramatics can emulate.  How each one goes about it is naturally somewhat different, but the result is similar.  Maybe not as satisfying for any specific individual in some specific case, but similar.  In fact, I don't think you can really approach satisfying genre emulation in  the meatiest sense of the phrase without having the emulation driven by all three.  (In some cases, the drama is being supplied by the groups' approach as opposed to the written, technical rules of the game, but in GDS/GNS terms, that's still the "system" being played.  Unwritten rules or even agreements/attitudes of the collective group are part of the overall RPG system in actual play.)

To more directly answer your point, though, an emulation mechanic isn't a model but the absence of one.  Or at least, it's the thing that is put in place because the simulation model is absent.  That's exactly where it gets complicated to discuss, though, because simulation is so wide and moves on those multiple axes of abstraction/concrete and process/effect and so on. So often some part of the emulation is simulation.  Teasing out where it ends is tricky.

A critical hit rule can easily be all three of GDS at once in the same package.  It's dramatic when it happens, and the uncertainty of when it will happen produces tension and surprise.  It's a game mechanic that the players can try to use to their benefit or at least take into account when deciding their optimum course.  It simulates that some blows are just that much nastier than others, and when that happens is not entirely under the attacker's control. (Your character could, for example, shoot to wound to capture a prisoner and end up killing with a head shot or an abstract equivalent.)  Certainly, the presence/absence of critical hits will have a direct effect on the emulation of the fight, and the details of how the critical hits work will push the emulation somewhere. 

Push it far enough, a critical hit rule will drop one or more of the GDS elements.  It's not enough to say that because critical hits are a model in Game X, that they are still a model in Game Y, when they no longer really simulate anything directly in the setting but simply add drama or game widgets to play with.  Maybe not the best example, because it is hard to conceive a critical hit mechanic that doesn't simulate at all, but I hope it clarifies what I mean.

Finally, there is a dilution threshold, where yes there may be some trace of a GDS element left, but not enough that most people would count it.  That can happen with any element.  With simulation, it often happens when all that's left is a vague name and some handwaving by the GM.   What others are calling "disassociated" is part of that, but I don't like the term for multiple reasons, not least because it blurs the details of what happens in that case and tries to collapse them down into a simple evaluation. 

Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 01:06:42 PM
But let's be clear that those genre-based limits are based on them acting like they know they're in a story of the given genre. They are aware of stories of the genre and they are choosing to stay within the bounds of such stories. Those bounds can be seen as a nod to dramatism.

I remember running Call of Cthulu The Haunted House for my then-wife. As soon as the weird stuff started happening, she legged it and never looked back! Her attitude was Why the Hell Would I Go In There?!   ;D It really brought home to me the importance of genre buy-in.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 10, 2023, 01:25:15 PMNot really, though from my perspective GNS is a bad theory, and its treatment of simulation is the worst of a bad lot. Nor are dramatism/narrative exactly parallel.  (As an aside, part of the problem with GNS is that it wants them to be, in a "square peg, round hole" fashion.) 

I would suggest instead that both emulation and narrative (in the normal, useful sense of "narrative") cross all the GDS boundaries.  Or to confine it to emulation in particular, the simulation can emulate, the game can emulate, and the dramatics can emulate.  How each one goes about it is naturally somewhat different, but the result is similar.  Maybe not as satisfying for any specific individual in some specific case, but similar.  In fact, I don't think you can really approach satisfying genre emulation in  the meatiest sense of the phrase without having the emulation driven by all three.  (In some cases, the drama is being supplied by the groups' approach as opposed to the written, technical rules of the game, but in GDS/GNS terms, that's still the "system" being played.  Unwritten rules or even agreements/attitudes of the collective group are part of the overall RPG system in actual play.)

To more directly answer your point, though, an emulation mechanic isn't a model but the absence of one.  Or at least, it's the thing that is put in place because the simulation model is absent.  That's exactly where it gets complicated to discuss, though, because simulation is so wide and moves on those multiple axes of abstraction/concrete and process/effect and so on. So often some part of the emulation is simulation.  Teasing out where it ends is tricky.

A critical hit rule can easily be all three of GDS at once in the same package.  It's dramatic when it happens, and the uncertainty of when it will happen produces tension and surprise.  It's a game mechanic that the players can try to use to their benefit or at least take into account when deciding their optimum course.  It simulates that some blows are just that much nastier than others, and when that happens is not entirely under the attacker's control. (Your character could, for example, shoot to wound to capture a prisoner and end up killing with a head shot or an abstract equivalent.)  Certainly, the presence/absence of critical hits will have a direct effect on the emulation of the fight, and the details of how the critical hits work will push the emulation somewhere. 

Push it far enough, a critical hit rule will drop one or more of the GDS elements.  It's not enough to say that because critical hits are a model in Game X, that they are still a model in Game Y, when they no longer really simulate anything directly in the setting but simply add drama or game widgets to play with.  Maybe not the best example, because it is hard to conceive a critical hit mechanic that doesn't simulate at all, but I hope it clarifies what I mean.

Finally, there is a dilution threshold, where yes there may be some trace of a GDS element left, but not enough that most people would count it.  That can happen with any element.  With simulation, it often happens when all that's left is a vague name and some handwaving by the GM.   What others are calling "disassociated" is part of that, but I don't like the term for multiple reasons, not least because it blurs the details of what happens in that case and tries to collapse them down into a simple evaluation.

Interesting point. I'll have to reflect some more on it later but it does make sense that emulation is achieved by all three factors (game, drama and sim) working in consonant, yes.

Perhaps this is another failure of the GNS model, that it never managed to fit the genre-emulation playstyle firmly in any of it's agendas. Which is weird considering it's one of the most celebrated playstyles among forge-inspired games.

Quote from: Itachi on March 10, 2023, 01:40:49 PM
Interesting point. I'll have to reflect some more on it later but it does make sense that emulation is achieved by all three factors (game, drama and sim) working in consonant, yes.

Perhaps this is another failure of the GNS model, that it never managed to fit the genre-emulation playstyle firmly in any of it's agendas. Which is weird considering it's one of the most celebrated playstyles among forge-inspired games.

I think it can't fit it in because to do so sweeps the legs out from under the whole shebang.  There's nothing particularly controversial behind the idea that to emulate some genres, you'll need to back away a little from simulation and game in favor of drama, maybe even to the point of adding mechanics for drama.  After all, Hero Points have been around a long time.  I'm not a huge fan of story games, so I can't speak from experience.  Having read Dungeon World and read about it, I'd hazard a guess that part of its success compared to other PBTA games is that it snuck a tiny bit of simulation back into the emulation--which strengthened the emulation.  Though it's kind of an odd case, given that what it emulates is something of a simulation game. :D

Burning Wheel, which I have run, is not entirely a story game.  It's trad game that pushes the mechanics as abstract as it can stand (and then pushes them some more), in order to chase drama all the time, to emulate a very definite feel.  So its using story game tricks in key spots but then reverting to traditional play elsewhere.  Then it drenches the whole things in tons of detail, some for pure simulation and some to fake it.

Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 01:06:42 PM
The bolded part here is what I would call player buy-in to the genre. The players' choices aren't fixed because there are a lot of choices even within the genre, but they limit their choices to those that are within the genre. And I think that's a good way to run genre RPGs. I'm a big player of Call of Cthulhu which depends a lot on this. Players buy into the genre.

But let's be clear that those genre-based limits are based on them acting like they know they're in a story of the given genre. They are aware of stories of the genre and they are choosing to stay within the bounds of such stories. Those bounds can be seen as a nod to dramatism.

Sounds good. The only thing I will add is that I really dislike creative coercion, no scratch that, I hate creative coercion. When I am a referee I feel resorting to that is cheating. In fact, the worst part creatively when I ran LARP events is the fucking railroading I was forced to do because of the real-life logistics. Staff needed to rest and east, getting stuff from one side of the camp to the next. But even there for my events, I tried to make it as much of a sandbox as I could given the constraints.

So being forced to railroad, I learned how to run a good railroad where the action and circumstances were compelling enough that the players will want to follow the rails.

Which brings me back to my approach to what we are calling genre buy-in. Rather than some metagaming convention. I work at creating a compelling enough situation and setting that in combination with the initial interest is enough to get the players to want to act as characters within the genre.

But more in support of your point the situation with genre buy-in it is like if players roll a 3 Charisma in OD&D. There isn't much in the way of mechanics around the OD&D attributes. So the effects that a 3 Charisma has is up to the player when they decide to roleplay. Some would ignore it, and some, like me, will incorporate that into how the character roleplaying despite the fact the mechanical nuances are minimal.

The first approach I mention is really for the players who are indifferent or on the fence about roleplaying in a different style.

Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 01:06:42 PM
Taking off those bounds can also be interesting, though, which would be more pure simulationism.

I ran a succession of Majestic Wilderlands campaigns in the mid 90s where the players played all mages, then all thieves, then all low powered city-state, then a campaign where they were all low powered characters living in a neighborhood of the City State of the Invincible Overlord.

---

Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 01:06:42 PM
About your metagame aside -- I enjoy some games with metagame rules like hero points or player authorship, but it is definitely a different sort of fun. At the extreme, it is similar to more avante garde plays where there is less effort in getting real-looking sets or costumes, so one can see the artifice of the staging more plainly. That isn't just being cheap, though, because it lets you do things that would be impossible in a more traditionally staged play.

(shrug) Sure and I get it but metagaming mechanics are so antithetical to how I run things that I despise them. And understand this is not a result of the debates around the Forge and storygames.

No it started in the mid 90s when Whimsy Cards came out. At first, it was kinda fun, then it became... kinda of silly and lame and finally came to the infamous Whimsy War session (infamous for our group) and while it was a lot of fun, in the end we all looked at each other and agreed to put the cards away. 

(https://is4-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/AeTSq6XfAkyvLCPEj_scpA/1200x675.jpg)

Then I tried Fate, Blades in the Dark with folks who knew their stuff as well trying it for myself as referee. And I found both (and others) to be lame and constricting. The game kept me from thinking about what I am going to be doing as my character to play some kind of dice game.

Quote from: amacris on March 07, 2023, 10:56:40 PM
I wrote a manifesto today, proclaiming the return of Simulationism. I'm sharing it today because the essay references a lot of folks I first met here at TheRPG site, including Brian Gleichman and John H. Kim, and bashes on Ron Edwards a bit, who is of course the ancient foe of our own RPG Pundit.

If anyone is interested, you can check it out here: https://arbiterofworlds.substack.com/p/a-manifesto-in-defense-of-simulationism

Great article.

Quote from: S'mon on March 10, 2023, 02:44:38 AM

Quote from: amacris on March 09, 2023, 06:31:35 PM
The ideal RPG is one that has sufficiently robust rules to reliably handle 80% of the action and has an intelligent, experienced GM to handle the 20% of the action that's outside the rules.

This seems close to the concept of the Semi-Free Kriegsspiel, which I think was the main inspiration for the Braunstein type play that led to modern RPGs?

I think I agree, but within the 80% you still often do need some GM adjudication. Eg the rules may say DC 10 for an Easy task, DC 15 for a Moderate task, DC 20 for a Hard task, but they may not tell you whether climbing that tree is Easy or Moderate, whether climbing that wall is Moderate or Hard. I generally find I am most comfortable with GMing a system where
(1) There is an established task-resolution mechanism, such as D20+Mods vs Difficulty Class/Target Number.
(2) I am expected to use my adjudication in implementing it, eg applying guidelines I set the DCs/TNs. (I like to keep myself honest & inform the players by announcing the DC pre-roll, which again fits the paradigm).
Which I think is the Semi-Free Kriegsspiel paradigm.

Yes, I agree completely. And I think it is no coincidence that Semi-Free Kriegspiel -> Braunstein -> RPG. 

Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 12:31:14 PM
Hey, Alexander. I'm generally in agreement with you -- but this part feels off. I haven't played your games yet, but I've enjoyed other simulationist games like Traveller and HarnMaster - so I think I might. But I also enjoy a bunch of gamist games and dramatist games including story games and others. Those include some of my favorite games, like Monster of the Week and others. I don't like all games -- there are some that are definitely outside my taste range, but I can enjoy a pretty wide variety.

But here, you're effectively dumping on other RPGs in order to promote your style. There are a lot of different things that make RPGs special, I think. And to me, one of the things I hated about Ron Edward's GNS was how he disparaged games that other people liked, and made it out that his preferred games were somehow objectively superior and doing what RPGs are supposed to. I think you're edging too far in that direction here. 

Oh gosh. I don't mean to disparage anyone's RPGs. I have a huge collection of RPG games that I think are excellent and nothing but respect for a great number of designers who have preceded me and been my contemporaries. I called out designers by name in every game I've written that I praise.

All I'm trying to articulate is an "essentialist" aesthetic position. According to essentialism, each artistic medium has certain advantages over other mediums; those advantages form the "essence" of that medium. For instance, movies can offer enormous spectacles of light and sound. They cannot offer a close and personal view of the actor in real time. Nor can they offer 20 hours of intricate story. So, when I evaluate the greatness of movies, I prioritize (and actively seek out) movies that offer me enormous spectacle. When I go see plays, I want players that are up close and personal dramas, like David Mamet. When I watch TV shows, I prioritize those that offer me long-form storytelling. And so on. Once photography became better at photorealism than painting, the "essence" of painting became capturing momentary impressions (impressionism) or impossible angles (cubism) etc. 

As an essentialist, I believe that agency in an open world is the essence of an RPG, and that's the position I articulate. If you disagree... that's OK. I don't have a monopoly on aesthetic truth. Most people today reject essentialism, partly because postmodernism rejects essentialism on a metaphysical level, and partly because essentialists do a bad job of explaining why X is the essence and not Y. Most people favor a purely subjective aesthetic theory where "everything is good to somebody" and "it's all just taste and opinion." And that's fine. I am not going to argue with someone who believes that.

I don't find subjectivity very helpful to me as a designer or consumer or gamemaster. So I have articulated a philosophy about what I like about RPGs that guides how I design them and run them and I hope that the predictability of my style and my openness about my philosophy helps guide people who'd like my games to play them, and helps people who'd hate them, steer clear of them and not waste their money. Does that make sense?

QuoteI agree that agency is important, and that it can be expressed through simulationism. But there are a lot of situations where if properly simulated, the players do *not* have much agency -- like if they are on a one-way path, or they are given a magically-enforced quest, or they are prisoners with only one choice of escape. It's important for simulationist agency that players have both knowledge and power to make significant choices. That is mostly on the GM, but I think it is important to recognize how rare that is, and support it in advice and preparation. 

I agree with this sentiment and discuss it in my book.

QuoteSome story game advocates suggest that the only way to have real agency is GM-like power over background, and while it's wrong, railroading continues to be a big problem in TTRPGs.

They absolutely make that claim and I think they are wrong because GNS theory is wrong. GNS theory dismisses what it calls "stance" as a second- or third-tier aspect of design, while I believe it is a central defining trait of an RPG. If you're in what they call "author stance" you're not playing an RPG, you're playing a story game, which is (IMO) as different a genre from RPG as RPG is from wargame. GNS treats "authorial agency" as identical to "actor agency" when they are distinctly different in my terms.

PS I recognize I am speaking in broad black and white terms here. Obviously the reality of all aesthetics and all games is shades of gray. Car Wars is both a wargame and an RPG. FATE is both an RPG and a storygame. And sometimes people want that hybrid experience and that's great. For purposes of announcing my simulationist manifesto, I think broad strokes are helpful in clarifying where I stand but I don't want to come off as a caricature of myself like folks sometimes do on Twitter due to the short form.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 10, 2023, 01:50:29 PMThere's nothing particularly controversial behind the idea that to emulate some genres, you'll need to back away a little from simulation and game in favor of drama, maybe even to the point of adding mechanics for drama.  After all, Hero Points have been around a long time.

The first game to have anything like Hero Points was the original Top Secret. But these points were only used to save a character from death. In effect, they were simply a replacement for hit points. But they were not created because they were needed for genre simulation, they were created because the rules system in Top Secret failed to simulate the genre that the game was ostensibly about.

Champions, OTOH, didn't have anything like Hero Points because that game was designed from the ground up to simulate comic book superhero combat. So there was no need to have a extra mechanic just to fix the game when the rules failed.

As for some sort of meta currency being required to simulate particular genres, I've long said that they are not only unnecessary, but actually inhibit what they claim to promote simply by virtue of their being a limited resource which encourages player to horde them (often to the point where the game rules add an additional complication just to force players to use them). There is nothing you can do with narrative devices that can't be done with just good GMing practices.

I'll even go one step further to state that all simulation is genre emulation. If you have a realistic military game, then your genre is milsim. If the game is going for a more Hollywood war movie feel, then that is a separate genre.

This is also why there will always be a genre defined limit on player action. You cannot run a game for any period of time if players are truly allowed to do anything they want.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 10, 2023, 01:25:15 PM
A critical hit rule can easily be all three of GDS at once in the same package.  It's dramatic when it happens, and the uncertainty of when it will happen produces tension and surprise.  It's a game mechanic that the players can try to use to their benefit or at least take into account when deciding their optimum course.  It simulates that some blows are just that much nastier than others, and when that happens is not entirely under the attacker's control.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 10, 2023, 01:25:15 PM
Push it far enough, a critical hit rule will drop one or more of the GDS elements.  It's not enough to say that because critical hits are a model in Game X, that they are still a model in Game Y, when they no longer really simulate anything directly in the setting but simply add drama or game widgets to play with.  Maybe not the best example, because it is hard to conceive a critical hit mechanic that doesn't simulate at all, but I hope it clarifies what I mean.

The example of critical hits doesn't seem directly to illustrate genre emulation. Also, here your "all three" description sounds exactly like the old GDS FAQ:

Quote4) Don't those categories overlap?
It is true that these goals are not constantly at odds. On the short term, a given conflict might happen to be both a fair challenge and realistically resolved. However, every game will have problems, including undramatic bits, unrealistic bits, and unbalanced bits. The Threefold asks about how much comparative effort you put into solving these.

Even a perfectly simulationist or gamist campaign will have dramatic bits in them. After all, people will tell stories about things that happened to them in real life, or even about what happened in a chess game they were playing. Similarly, a dramatist campaign will have some conflicts that are a fair challenge for the players, and some events that are realistic. But an equally-skilled gamist GM, who doesn't put excess effort into the quality of the story, will be able to make better challenges. Similarly, a simulationist GM, who focusses only on in-game resolutions, will be able to make things more "realistic" for that game-world.

For a critical hit mechanic, the specific implementation of a given critical hit mechanic might be more dramatic (or comedic), more realistic, or more tactically engaging.

---

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 10, 2023, 01:25:15 PM
I would suggest instead that both emulation and narrative (in the normal, useful sense of "narrative") cross all the GDS boundaries.  Or to confine it to emulation in particular, the simulation can emulate, the game can emulate, and the dramatics can emulate.  How each one goes about it is naturally somewhat different, but the result is similar.  Maybe not as satisfying for any specific individual in some specific case, but similar.  In fact, I don't think you can really approach satisfying genre emulation in  the meatiest sense of the phrase without having the emulation driven by all three.

Can you give a more specific example of this? Your example of critical hits didn't seem to relate at all to this part of genre emulation. As I would call it in GDS terms, genre emulation is textbook dramatism. You're trying to emulate a genre. There can be different methods of achieving that goal, but they're working towards the same outcome. In the end, how well one accomplishes that goal would be in how well the feel of the genre was conveyed.

What a (f)artful deconstruction to separate the drama, narrative, and simulation from the D&D game just so that you can complain about multitasking.

Quote from: amacris on March 10, 2023, 04:25:25 PM
As an essentialist, I believe that agency in an open world is the essence of an RPG, and that's the position I articulate. If you disagree... that's OK. I don't have a monopoly on aesthetic truth. Most people today reject essentialism, partly because postmodernism rejects essentialism on a metaphysical level, and partly because essentialists do a bad job of explaining why X is the essence and not Y. Most people favor a purely subjective aesthetic theory where "everything is good to somebody" and "it's all just taste and opinion." And that's fine. I am not going to argue with someone who believes that.

I'm fine to agree to disagree about this specific essentialist position. But what I wanted to emphasize is that I can disagree with this philosophy, but still enjoy your game. You earlier posted that if someone disagreed with your position, they "won't like my games at all". I doubt that's true.

Quote from: amacris on March 10, 2023, 04:25:25 PM
According to essentialism, each artistic medium has certain advantages over other mediums; those advantages form the "essence" of that medium. For instance, movies can offer enormous spectacles of light and sound. They cannot offer a close and personal view of the actor in real time. Nor can they offer 20 hours of intricate story. So, when I evaluate the greatness of movies, I prioritize (and actively seek out) movies that offer me enormous spectacle. When I go see plays, I want players that are up close and personal dramas, like David Mamet.

There are objective differences between media, but there are different ways to interpret those that can result in different tastes. I see your position as your taste, but other people might slice things differently.

Objectively, one can get a much closer look at the actor's face in a movie than one can in a typical theater, thanks to camera close-ups. Because of this, historically, movies prompted a huge shift in acting style to emphasize more subtle emotional cues in facial expression as opposed to emphasizing voice and body. Some actors also think that having to repeat an emotional performance five times a week for months on end results in a less intense performance, compared to capturing the best take once on camera.

Also objectively, one of the objective features of live entertainment is the audience knows the performers can make a mistake or get something unexpected. That can be used for drama -- but I think it is even moreso a big part of why improv comedy, magic shows, and circus are popular genres of live entertainment. I can enjoy Mamet plays, but (for example) the last play I saw in the theater was a local production of the comedy "The Play That Goes Wrong" which was hilarious. I've enjoyed the film versions of that -- but seeing it live gave an "in-the-moment" the feeling that things really could go wrong.

The point is that there can be different interpretations of objective differences.

Quote from: amacris on March 10, 2023, 04:25:25 PM

Quote from: jhkimI agree that agency is important, and that it can be expressed through simulationism. But there are a lot of situations where if properly simulated, the players do *not* have much agency -- like if they are on a one-way path, or they are given a magically-enforced quest, or they are prisoners with only one choice of escape. It's important for simulationist agency that players have both knowledge and power to make significant choices. That is mostly on the GM, but I think it is important to recognize how rare that is, and support it in advice and preparation. 

I agree with this sentiment and discuss it in my book.

Thanks. That's "Arbiter of Worlds", right? I'm sold on getting a copy.

Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 04:56:00 PM

The example of critical hits doesn't seem directly to illustrate genre emulation. Also, here your "all three" description sounds exactly like the old GDS FAQ:

I may be using genre emulation more broadly than GDS accounts for.  I'm talking about a particular set of rules applied to a campaign, run by a GM, in whatever system is applied at the table (both written and unwritten) to evoke what the GM (and possibly players thinking on that level) want to achieve.  That is, not "4 color comics" but "4 color comics the way we people here at the table envision them in the context of the setting in which we are playing".  Because my focus is trying to drag the theory kicking and screaming back to practical cases.

Any given critical hit rule, applied to that setting, almost assuredly will shade one way or the other in favor of simulation, drama, or game.  I don't disagree with that at all.  However, in context, I'm objecting to the idea that genre emulation is merely a special case of simulation  by pointing out that just because a critical hit rule could be in Game X for mere simulation, that it therefore makes it a simulation rule.  I'd have the same objection to collapsing all of genre emulation into drama. 

Not to mention there's always the danger when deconstructing something that the essence gets lost in the shuffle.  It's almost like thinking of a biscuit (unsweetened rising bread for you non-Americans) as nothing but flour, milk, egg, and salt--as if the mixing, heating, and chemical changes related to both didn't contribute to the final thing. 

Quote from: Dispotatic254 on March 10, 2023, 05:10:47 PM
What a (f)artful deconstruction to separate the drama, narrative, and simulation from the D&D game just so that you can complain about multitasking.

I kind of have to agree with this.

In the time and place I came up with RPGs, it was just a given that as a GM you're simultaneously trying to run a game that gives players freedom to decide what they want to do, while also being a fun game, while also being "realistic" enough for suspending disbelief, and also providing the experience of an interesting story.

And we held this ideal for good reasons, even if we weren't conscious of them in the moment. First, because as human beings, these are all itches we all have that all need to be scratched from time to time. And second, because as human beings, we are also unique and all have our own different preferences. But the only time your players are going to be carbon copies of you is if you're playing with yourself. And that's the only time one gamer's preferences are the relevant measure of actual play.

Players, perhaps, have the luxury concerning themselves only with the aspects of play they enjoy. GMs, on the other hand, need to be able to play any hand they are dealt. It's a tall order for sure. It's a lot to expect from a GM. That's why we keep working at our craft and trying to get better. If you're isolating certain aspects of the RPGs as not appealing to you, not important to you, not your thang, then you're not working on it, you're not getting better at it, and you're just not as good a GM as you could be.


So I propose via mid-80's bicycle movie analogy, that there are just two cultures of TTRPGs. Falling off the bike happens in both cultures.

The difference is, the culture I come from is like Rad where Cru Jones gets back on the bike and trying again until he learns to airwalk. Even if he has to take pointers from Aunt Becky.

Weird RPG theory adherents are like Paul Reubens in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, falling off his bike and claiming "I meant to do that."

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 10, 2023, 06:28:22 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 04:56:00 PM

The example of critical hits doesn't seem directly to illustrate genre emulation. Also, here your "all three" description sounds exactly like the old GDS FAQ:

I may be using genre emulation more broadly than GDS accounts for.  I'm talking about a particular set of rules applied to a campaign, run by a GM, in whatever system is applied at the table (both written and unwritten) to evoke what the GM (and possibly players thinking on that level) want to achieve.  That is, not "4 color comics" but "4 color comics the way we people here at the table envision them in the context of the setting in which we are playing".  Because my focus is trying to drag the theory kicking and screaming back to practical cases.

Any given critical hit rule, applied to that setting, almost assuredly will shade one way or the other in favor of simulation, drama, or game.  I don't disagree with that at all.  However, in context, I'm objecting to the idea that genre emulation is merely a special case of simulation by pointing out that just because a critical hit rule could be in Game X for mere simulation, that it therefore makes it a simulation rule.  I'd have the same objection to collapsing all of genre emulation into drama.

My impression is that the genre you choose before starting the game (if by "genre" you mean anything like horror/scifi/fantasy/pulp) is going to impact your dial for simulation before you can make any adjustments. How granular you want your skill system at the price of a robust class system seems to be the biggest indicator of that without getting all "storygame" about it.

Quote
Not to mention there's always the danger when deconstructing something that the essence gets lost in the shuffle.  It's almost like thinking of a biscuit (unsweetened rising bread for you non-Americans) as nothing but flour, milk, egg, and salt--as if the mixing, heating, and chemical changes related to both didn't contribute to the final thing.

Spot on metaphor!

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 10, 2023, 07:46:30 PM

Quote from: Dispotatic254 on March 10, 2023, 05:10:47 PM
What a (f)artful deconstruction to separate the drama, narrative, and simulation from the D&D game just so that you can complain about multitasking.

I kind of have to agree with this.

In the time and place I came up with RPGs, it was just a given that as a GM you're simultaneously trying to run a game that gives players freedom to decide what they want to do, while also being a fun game, while also being "realistic" enough for suspending disbelief, and also providing the experience of an interesting story.

And we held this ideal for good reasons, even if we weren't conscious of them in the moment.

Odd phrasing, but I get it.

Quote
First, because as human beings, these are all itches we all have that all need to be scratched from time to time. And second, because as human beings, we are also unique and all have our own different preferences. But the only time your players are going to be carbon copies of you is if you're playing with yourself. And that's the only time one gamer's preferences are the relevant measure of actual play.

Players, perhaps, have the luxury concerning themselves only with the aspects of play they enjoy. GMs, on the other hand, need to be able to play any hand they are dealt. It's a tall order for sure. It's a lot to expect from a GM. That's why we keep working at our craft and trying to get better. If you're isolating certain aspects of the RPGs as not appealing to you, not important to you, not your thang, then you're not working on it, you're not getting better at it, and you're just not as good a GM as you could be.

I don't have a problem with someone liking one element more than the others, instead of a cooked biscuit we might refer to something like a Neapolitan ice-cream cone where you can prefer the vanilla over the chocolate or strawberry, but you don't buy that ice-cream to throw out two-thirds of what's there just because its not vanilla... and in a sundae it would be covered in syrups and nuts and whipped cream anyway, and also more likely in a waffle bowl (food metaphors can get too complicated).

Quote
So I propose via mid-80's bicycle movie analogy, that there are just two cultures of TTRPGs. Falling off the bike happens in both cultures.

The difference is, the culture I come from is like Rad where Cru Jones gets back on the bike and trying again until he learns to airwalk. Even if he has to take pointers from Aunt Becky.

Weird RPG theory adherents are like Paul Reubens in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, falling off his bike and claiming "I meant to do that."

You've perfectly described why sincerity is better than irony right there.

Quote from: Dispotatic254 on March 10, 2023, 10:22:24 PM
I don't have a problem with someone liking one element more than the others, instead of a cooked biscuit we might refer to something like a Neapolitan ice-cream cone where you can prefer the vanilla over the chocolate or strawberry, but you don't buy that ice-cream to throw out two-thirds of what's there just because its not vanilla... and in a sundae it would be covered in syrups and nuts and whipped cream anyway, and also more likely in a waffle bowl (food metaphors can get too complicated).

That reminded me of that episode of Seinfeld about the muffins. The PCs recognized that the top of the muffin is always the best part. And so one of the NPCs decided he would make just muffin tops. And the idea was a flop. So he asked one of the PCs where he went wrong. She explained to the NPC that you have to make the entire muffin, not just the top, in order to make the top good. I mean you really can't have a top half without a bottom half. Hilarity ensued when they also learned it's not so easy to just throw out the stumps.

Maybe there should be a goal of RPG play called Muffinism.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 10, 2023, 07:46:30 PM
In the time and place I came up with RPGs, it was just a given that as a GM you're simultaneously trying to run a game that gives players freedom to decide what they want to do, while also being a fun game, while also being "realistic" enough for suspending disbelief, and also providing the experience of an interesting story.

I think there's an important point in here, which also explains why GNS theory "There can be only ONE (play agenda)!" was so destructive. Players typically want freedom of choice, and to be challenged, and a feeling of immersion, and a satisfying 'story' experience - though by the latter I mean something you can look back on with satisfaction, NOT the experience of in the moment story-creation promoted by Forgeists.

So in the classic dungeon delve, the players get to decide what to do, where to go, what tactics to use. They use their wits and PC resources to face the challenge. They experience the 'you are there' feeling, as if they were really walking the dungeon halls (unlike when eg playing a dungeon boardgame). At the end they return from the Underworld with their wounds and their boons, back to the World of Men. It's a miniature version of the Heroes' Journey - there's a satisfying 'story' there.

Quote from: S'mon on March 11, 2023, 02:33:46 AM
I think there's an important point in here, which also explains why GNS theory "There can be only ONE (play agenda)!" was so destructive. Players typically want freedom of choice, and to be challenged, and a feeling of immersion, and a satisfying 'story' experience - though by the latter I mean something you can look back on with satisfaction, NOT the experience of in the moment story-creation promoted by Forgeists.

100% spot on. I've been yelling at the Forge types for over 20 years over exactly that point. But the fact that you have to stop and clarify what you mean by story shows that their bad seeds are still bearing rotten fruit.

I reject the idea that there's only a story in hindsight. If you're reading a story or watching a movie or something, and you pause in the middle of it, you're perfectly aware that you are experiencing a story. And the same is true when you're playing an RPG. At any moment, in realtime, you're experiencing an unfolding story.

When you're doing Foregist story creation, it's actually less obvious to me and I think more a debatable point whether you're really experiencing a story in-the-moment. And it's because the act of authoring muddies the waters. If you're reading a thriller, how much nail-biting suspense can you really feel if you're scrawling onto the margin of the page what happens next?


And I think this is the real origin of viewing "railroading" negatively. Again, in the time and place I came up in RPGs, the GM was god. Period. End of story. Go cry about your "agency" somewhere else. But even though GMs could control every step of the way how the game plays out, they usually didn't. Because they wanted to be surprised, too. They wanted to experience an unfolding story and realized it doesn't work when you're simultaneously trying to author that story.

QuoteSo in the classic dungeon delve, the players get to decide what to do, where to go, what tactics to use. They use their wits and PC resources to face the challenge. They experience the 'you are there' feeling, as if they were really walking the dungeon halls (unlike when eg playing a dungeon boardgame). At the end they return from the Underworld with their wounds and their boons, back to the World of Men. It's a miniature version of the Heroes' Journey - there's a satisfying 'story' there.

Absolutely!

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 10, 2023, 11:20:53 PM

Quote from: Dispotatic254 on March 10, 2023, 10:22:24 PM
I don't have a problem with someone liking one element more than the others, instead of a cooked biscuit we might refer to something like a Neapolitan ice-cream cone where you can prefer the vanilla over the chocolate or strawberry, but you don't buy that ice-cream to throw out two-thirds of what's there just because its not vanilla... and in a sundae it would be covered in syrups and nuts and whipped cream anyway, and also more likely in a waffle bowl (food metaphors can get too complicated).

That reminded me of that episode of Seinfeld about the muffins. The PCs recognized that the top of the muffin is always the best part. And so one of the NPCs decided he would make just muffin tops. And the idea was a flop. So he asked one of the PCs where he went wrong. She explained to the NPC that you have to make the entire muffin, not just the top, in order to make the top good. I mean you really can't have a top half without a bottom half. Hilarity ensued when they also learned it's not so easy to just throw out the stumps.

Maybe there should be a goal of RPG play called Muffinism.

I haven't seen that episode myself but I unerringly believe that you have imparted deep and sage wisdom of the most puissant baking arts.

Quote from: S'mon on March 11, 2023, 02:33:46 AM

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 10, 2023, 07:46:30 PM
In the time and place I came up with RPGs, it was just a given that as a GM you're simultaneously trying to run a game that gives players freedom to decide what they want to do, while also being a fun game, while also being "realistic" enough for suspending disbelief, and also providing the experience of an interesting story.

I think there's an important point in here, which also explains why GNS theory "There can be only ONE (play agenda)!" was so destructive. Players typically want freedom of choice, and to be challenged, and a feeling of immersion, and a satisfying 'story' experience - though by the latter I mean something you can look back on with satisfaction, NOT the experience of in the moment story-creation promoted by Forgeists.

So in the classic dungeon delve, the players get to decide what to do, where to go, what tactics to use. They use their wits and PC resources to face the challenge. They experience the 'you are there' feeling, as if they were really walking the dungeon halls (unlike when eg playing a dungeon boardgame). At the end they return from the Underworld with their wounds and their boons, back to the World of Men. It's a miniature version of the Heroes' Journey - there's a satisfying 'story' there.

Right. The Ron Edwards approach of classifying games into one of three GNS categories is dumb, since the standard is hybrid -- which was originally recognized in the Threefold. But having the language to talk about "this muffin is too sugary for my tastes" is useful -- when one person might want a heartier bran muffin and one person wants a sweeter blueberry muffin.

This long predates both the rgfa Threefold and Edwards' GNS. Back in the 1980s, I remember playing in D&D tournament modules at conventions as a teenager, and I felt how artificial the tournament structure was to provide fair challenge -- but other people clearly liked it. Different dungeons have a different balance of elements. The 1980s tournament dungeons put a higher priority on fair challenge, with the goal of declaring a winner among different groups who tried to get through it.

Glenn Blacow published his fourfold "Aspects of Adventure Gaming" (https://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/blacow.html) in 1980 - of (1) Power Gaming, (2) Role-Playing, (3) Wargaming, and (4) Story Telling. Like the Threefold, he was clear that games had different hybrids of these.

Of the two D&D games I first ran at conventions back in 1985, one was a comedic romp (dramatist) - and another was a detailed dungeon with a focus on internal logic of layout.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 10, 2023, 06:28:22 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 04:56:00 PM
The example of critical hits doesn't seem directly to illustrate genre emulation. Also, here your "all three" description sounds exactly like the old GDS FAQ:

I may be using genre emulation more broadly than GDS accounts for.  I'm talking about a particular set of rules applied to a campaign, run by a GM, in whatever system is applied at the table (both written and unwritten) to evoke what the GM (and possibly players thinking on that level) want to achieve.  That is, not "4 color comics" but "4 color comics the way we people here at the table envision them in the context of the setting in which we are playing".  Because my focus is trying to drag the theory kicking and screaming back to practical cases.

To be clear, I use "genre emulation" to mean trying for the feel of a pre-existing genre of fiction like books, films, TV, etc.

It seems like you are using "genre emulation" to mean any game trying to achieve anything. Technically, one can say that there are genres of games (i.e. casino card games, Euro board games, etc.) and genres of simulation. But if one goes with that, then "genre emulation" just describes all TTRPGs that try to achieve anything. That makes the term less useful, IMO, because it doesn't describe anything that distinguishes some games from other games.

Quote from: jhkim on March 11, 2023, 03:02:30 PM
It seems like you are using "genre emulation" to mean any game trying to achieve anything. Technically, one can say that there are genres of games (i.e. casino card games, Euro board games, etc.) and genres of simulation. But if one goes with that, then "genre emulation" just describes all TTRPGs that try to achieve anything. That makes the term less useful, IMO, because it doesn't describe anything that distinguishes some games from other games.

No, that seesaws too far the other way, though I can see how what I said would create that impression.  I'm basically talking sub genre, or maybe sub, sub genre.  There's "heroic fantasy".  Then there's "heroic fantasy with a dash of sword & sorcery in a dungeon crawl" sub genre.  Or even mashups.  Mashups aren't technically a genre, but they are certainly genre emulation, in that when you start blending the sources, there is some fidelity to the various sources.

When I say that if I ran Star Wars, it would be using a customized version of the Toon engine as part parody, that's not a genre as such.  Yet, we could talk about what it would mean to tweak Toon in order to keep the parts of the space opera/space fantasy genre mixed in with wacky cartoons.  I'd be seeking emulation in a way that can be communicated.

I don't have a good word I think for how I approach games but simulationism is definitely discarded too easily. Stealing ideas a bit from the rest of the thread I think the closest wording to what I do would be "genre emulation" using modeling. The goal is not to model atoms colliding, but model everything that's important to the genre which might impact the players. That's going to feel like simulation but it relies more heavily on abstracting complex systems down to a few variables which are relevant in the context of the game.

IMO the ideal rules operate under a few ordered principles (minimally):

• The rules produce plausible results.
• The players have maximal agency within the world (within the limits of their character's capabilities).
• If players chase the incentives available to them, neither the game nor the world will fall apart.
• If the rules are taken seriously and played out at scale (even imagined at scale), the resulting dynamics cause the setting to naturally emerge.
• The rules model the fictional "reality" in some way, even if highly abstracted. ie: All mechanics are associative rather than disassociative wherever possible.
• All of this is balanced with the consideration of how to present interesting choices within the context of the rules which yield an engaging game that you can actually manage to play and enjoy at the table.

So the game comes first, but efforts must be made to bring the fictional world and the rules into harmony. My biggest pet peeve in a ruleset is when taking the rules to their logical conclusions results in absurdist conclusions about the world. You end up needing to take the rules less seriously to take the world seriously. In the worst cases, the players decide the opposite - to the the rules seriously but not the world. Players also start metagaming more - even if it's well intentioned. They start intentionally limiting themselves and their plans in the world because they're worried they'll "break the game". The best game gives me all the tools I need to model the important bits, let the players trash the sandbox and have fun, and I don't have to start inventing the rules myself to make it all "work" at the end of the day.

the more popular rules-light, narrativist games IME tend to become "mother may I" games. In a game like Delta Green you kind of know how the modern world works so you can have reasonable expectations about how things work and how people will react if your character takes a certain action. In a game where you're in a fantasy world with entirely different metaphysics though, it's so much harder to answer even basic questions without asking the GM. IMO a decent ruleset provides sufficient guidelines for all the common cases to let players and GMs develop a shared understanding of how the fictional world works.

I don't mind if things like armor is abstracted behind armor class or hit points model something like abstract harm. The important pieces are modeled and the game works. What I dislike is when the rules start introducing free-floating meta-currency or things like plentiful cure disease or resurrection spells/potions. If you follow rules like resurrection to their natural conclusion, you need to start inventing weird workaround solutions to narrative problems. If the king is assassinated, why not resurrect him? If wizards can become invisible, fly around, and bombard a castle from the sky, why do we have castles with open courtyards? I prefer systems that actually consider the consequences of the tools they place in the hands of players and sets expectations for the world appropriately.

A perfect example of great rules: If you roll 3d6 in order down the line and keep the attribute requirements for classes, paladins and other unusual characters are not merely rarer because the GM or the book says so - they're actually statistically harder to find among player characters. The demographics actually scale up on the GM side as well so you can get a good estimate for how many paladins would exist in a city (or fiefdom) of a given size. That lets you play more intelligently as the GM and make the world more reactive.

Personally I've changed my mind on modular design after ~20 years of GMing. I used to love it, but now I think modular designs hinder the kind of player where meaning and structure/consequences emerge from the rules. You need at least a few interlocking systems with enough complexity to get interesting results emerging from them. The world is an integrated place, not a disjointed one. Procedures, processes, and subsystems should be thought of more like the "engine" for the world. If I run 1 thousand iterations of your process (and I will over the course of a campaign), does it make sense? Does it make sense at scale as much as it does for an individual player character? These things need more consideration from games.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 11, 2023, 03:20:19 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 11, 2023, 03:02:30 PM
It seems like you are using "genre emulation" to mean any game trying to achieve anything. Technically, one can say that there are genres of games (i.e. casino card games, Euro board games, etc.) and genres of simulation. But if one goes with that, then "genre emulation" just describes all TTRPGs that try to achieve anything. That makes the term less useful, IMO, because it doesn't describe anything that distinguishes some games from other games.

No, that seesaws too far the other way, though I can see how what I said would create that impression.  I'm basically talking sub genre, or maybe sub, sub genre.  There's "heroic fantasy".  Then there's "heroic fantasy with a dash of sword & sorcery in a dungeon crawl" sub genre.  Or even mashups.  Mashups aren't technically a genre, but they are certainly genre emulation, in that when you start blending the sources, there is some fidelity to the various sources.

When I say that if I ran Star Wars, it would be using a customized version of the Toon engine as part parody, that's not a genre as such.  Yet, we could talk about what it would mean to tweak Toon in order to keep the parts of the space opera/space fantasy genre mixed in with wacky cartoons.  I'd be seeking emulation in a way that can be communicated.

Fair enough. Reading this, I'd distinguish between:

1) genre(s) to be emulated - including subgenre like Spaghetti Western, subsubgenre, and mashups of multiple genres
and
2) how the RPG tries to emulate that genre - like specific rules, GM techniques, etc.

I've encountered before claims that D&D is the perfect genre emulation... of the D&D genre. Which is obviously silly. D&D is fine, and it doesn't have to be called a perfect genre emulation to be a fun game to play.

For genre emulation to be meaningful, then there needs to be a genuinely open question about how well the game accomplishes that emulation.

To take your example of Star Wars using the Toon rules...  On the one hand, one could just take it as an experiment and see how the game turns out, maybe adjusting things based on general feel. On the other hand, if the point is defined to be genre emulation -- then there needs to be a target that could be either hit or missed. Describe the mashup genre between Looney Tunes and Star Wars without reference to anything about the RPG, and then the RPG could be judged on how well it gives the feel of that.

I am only on page 3 in reading this topic but the way I see it is every trpg is a simulation from the perspective that it is the very act and nature of playing a roleplaying game that by doing this you are engaging in a simulation. That is the fundamental nature of ttrpgs.

You are using a set of rules to help players engage with the fictional setting via their self made character avatars that they can then get into the persona of to then act and roleplay in that setting and the rules facilitate this process in the hopes of achieving some state of in game and setting verisimilitude where the events, actions, and consequences of the player avatar's actions become and are plausible.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 11, 2023, 07:42:02 PM

• The players have maximal agency within the world (within the limits of their character's capabilities).
• If players chase the incentives available to them, neither the game nor the world will fall apart.

I think there needs to be a clear distinction between the player's agency and goals, and the character's agency and goals.

Story game will often include mechanics where the player decides to make the character fail because it will give the player some sort of advantage later on. For me, this is the biggest distinction between a narrative game and a simulation: the disconnect with what the player wants and what the characters wants.


As for maximal agency, again this applies to the character moreso than the player. Take the earliest example in this thread:

Quote from: amacris on March 09, 2023, 06:31:35 PMI want to simulate the free choices of a panzer commander, including the choice of switching to Team Russia, abandoning my tank to become a bandit, etc., whatever.

If the players have all agreed to play in an RPG where they are tank commanders on the Eastern Front, then one player can't suddenly decide to switch to the Soviet side without destroying the game. Note that the game world isn't affected, but for all practical purposes the RPG campaign will end. Either the game needs to be split into two games or some of the players have to quit.

So I don't think a simulationist game needs to account for all possible player choices, just those choices that are within the genre that all the players agreed upon before play commenced. This applies to the selfish Superman example as well.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on March 12, 2023, 12:26:01 PM

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 11, 2023, 07:42:02 PM

• The players have maximal agency within the world (within the limits of their character's capabilities).
• If players chase the incentives available to them, neither the game nor the world will fall apart.

I think there needs to be a clear distinction between the player's agency and goals, and the character's agency and goals.

Ideally there need not be much of a distinction made because the player's goals and their character goals are in alignment, inasmuch as you can guarantee such a thing via ruleset alone. Your example of failing a test to gain a resource is a good example of what causes dissonance in the player's thought process. The rules should help the player "think" like their character to aid immersion or at least not get in the way.

As for agency, I agree that the rules need not cover every potential outcome. It's more important to explain a dynamic than to enumerate every possibility. However, once the ruleset has introduced an incentive then IMO it needs to follow this incentive to its logical conclusion and plug any holes that would, to use your example, encourage the players to defect. It's not quite the same thing but D&D's level loss for alignment change is an example of a rule that tries to plug a hole around alignment requirements which are baked into the rules (among perhaps other considerations). If players can change alignment on a whim without any consequences, alignment requirements cease to have meaning and the new incentive will be for players to act erratically.

Maximizing player agency IMO requires providing tools for the GM so they aren't totally left to fend for themselves if the players do something plausible within the setting. If characters are playing tank commanders, I'd still like some basic guidelines, processes, or procedures to help adjudicate outcomes outside of the main tank vs. tank scenarios. What happens in a combined arms scenario? What happens when commanders get out of their tank and are speaking with locals in nearby towns, get caught outside of their tanks with nothing but their sidearms, etc?

Many games lack proper tools. IMO a lot of modern "rules-light" games look more like "rules-incomplete" to me.

Quote from: jhkim on March 11, 2023, 03:02:30 PM
Right. The Ron Edwards approach of classifying games into one of three GNS categories is dumb, since the standard is hybrid -- which was originally recognized in the Threefold. But having the language to talk about "this muffin is too sugary for my tastes" is useful -- when one person might want a heartier bran muffin and one person wants a sweeter blueberry muffin.

I don't like sweets. So I totally get wanting less sugar in my muffin. The problem I'm having is in seeing this as a legit analogy to the sort of thing we're talking about here. Whatever we want to call it, simulationism, emulationism, realism, logical consistency, verisimilitude, I don't get is how doing less of that improves the drama/narrative/story/etc.

I accept we're doing hybrids. I accept there exists a theory that assumes hybrids. I get how these categories could be used to describe player preferences in broad terms. I even get how they could be used as areas in which a GM has strengths and weaknesses. I just don't see these big three or big four models say much beyond that. I don't see them translating to recipes.

I get how less sugar in my muffin gives it the less sweet flavor I prefer. I don't get how get how NOT tracking the number of bullets in Dirty Harry's gun would make the Do You Feel Lucky Punk encounter more dramatic/better for the story/more credible/etc.

So if I call out a GM or an RPG that handwaves tracking ammo, coming back with "Well, we don't care much for verisimilitude. For us it's all about the story," that's bullshit. Those things do not oppose each other at all in my view. They support one another. If you want to say, "Look, dude, we're just trying to have fun, and tracking ammo is just more work than we want to do," I'd say fine. That's an honest response. Bandwidth limits absolutely call for trade-offs. The benefits to drama, realism, and game (resource management) just aren't worth the extra work of tracking ammo. Fair enough.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 13, 2023, 12:33:11 AM

So if I call out a GM or an RPG that handwaves tracking ammo, coming back with "Well, we don't care much for verisimilitude. For us it's all about the story," that's bullshit. Those things do not oppose each other at all in my view. They support one another. If you want to say, "Look, dude, we're just trying to have fun, and tracking ammo is just more work than we want to do," I'd say fine. That's an honest response. Bandwidth limits absolutely call for trade-offs. The benefits to drama, realism, and game (resource management) just aren't worth the extra work of tracking ammo. Fair enough.

Yes.  If you dig deep into all the bits, you can end up with some decisions that look strange at first glance.  This is where breaking it down into the components is useful, but only if you put it back together again--and then test that hybrid in play to see how it works.

How my system is handling ammo would probably annoy every purist on the planet, not to mention some people that don't mind hybrids.  Yet, it works as designed.  We are semi-tracking ammo.  You fire an arrow.  If it hits, don't mark it off.  If it misses, mark it off.  If it is a critical hit, mark it off.  If you fumble, either the arrow broke (miss) or you stuck it in a friend (hit), mark it accordingly.  This leads to cynical comments about the unfortunate friend helping you with ammo retrieval.

After the fight, if you hold the field, you can recover most or all of your ammo.  It's a GM call, based on what the opponents were using, the environment, and often a die roll. In an underground cave, plenty of time, and your opponents had arrows left in their quivers, you just restock.  If you don't hold the field, then the GM makes a call to knock a few more out of your quiver, based on the length of the fight.  More often than not, it's somewhere in between, because some of your "hits" broke the arrow and some of your "misses" are recoverable.  You might also be able to salvage some broken arrows which can be repaired or cannibalized to repair a lesser number.

Sounds counter-intuitive, and it certainly doesn't map exactly to the simulation as a step-by-step process.  That's because it is working on at least two different abstraction layers:

- We need to balance simulation and handling time. This is a compromise.  We found that if you tracked every arrow, bolt, and sling bullet, when you held the field it hardly ever mattered except in really long fights or fights with cliffs, lots of vegetation, etc.  If we don't track them at all, or use something like an "ammo" die, it's too far from the simulation. When you don't hold the field, the GM has a pretty good guess as to how much you are down.  Sometimes it rounds off for or against you, but not enough to justify the extra handling time of doing it the long way.

- At this higher layer of abstraction, we are simulating that when you fire an arrow, you really don't know what's going to happen. It's a whole lot less work than rolling to check for every single arrow breaking or not (which is way too fine a grain for this system), yet accounts for the same dynamic in a rough and ready way.

- Critical hits are different because the system says that ammo from a critical hit is stuck in the target and cannot be easily removed.  This is simulation, game, and drama, in that it affects decisions by someone that has been hit, hurts to get it out, and takes proper skills to retrieve. There are player decisions to make, with consequences for possibly extra damage to the target.

- As a purely game thing, marking misses and not hits speeds play. The person who hit is rolling damage.  When they miss, instead they mark the arrow.  Averages the time between hits and misses.  The rationale is that misses break on armor, smash into a wall, disappear in the trees, etc.  The critical hit things goes against this, but there's already a bit of excitement and slow down around that event, and the player is excited to mark off the ammo as part of that.

- As a drama thing, nothing kills the drama of a fight like the conversation about ammo usage.  GM: "Did you remember to mark off the arrow?"  Player: "Don't remember." For some strange reason, the disappointment in the miss reminds the player to do that more than hitting does, and it compounds the disappointment at the same time. 

- The whole set of rules for ammo tracking are just a tool to set a baseline.  The GM always adjudicates.  OTOH, when you start getting really low on ammo, each player always has the option to track it explicitly.  When you are down to your last 5 arrows, you tend to be much more careful about the shots.  So not a big deal to track in those circumstances.  Each player can make that decision on their own terms.   I'm always happy to let the player decide where the threshold is.

- The system as described is not always transferable to other game systems.  Part of the reason that it works is because of the expected number of hits and misses tend to be fairly close to 50/50 for most characters, most fights.  The penalties to hit for greater than short range tend to be strong enough that players are hesitant to make that shot--which was also a design goal.  In a system where you wanted eagle-eyed elves or Robin Hood wannabees making incredible shots, the system would be counter-productive.

It may sound like one of those wacky set of rules from AD&D to that doesn't really map to any particular style, but that's because it started with a design to support other parts of the game, and then evolved with experience.

Great article!

A fellow Simulationist here also. To me, as some have said before, the feeling of playing/gamemastering in a "real and breathing"
game world brings the greatest of immersion. I guess I´m just a braindead autist.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 13, 2023, 11:32:00 AM
- We need to balance simulation and handling time. This is a compromise.  We found that if you tracked every arrow, bolt, and sling bullet, when you held the field it hardly ever mattered except in really long fights or fights with cliffs, lots of vegetation, etc.  If we don't track them at all, or use something like an "ammo" die, it's too far from the simulation. When you don't hold the field, the GM has a pretty good guess as to how much you are down.  Sometimes it rounds off for or against you, but not enough to justify the extra handling time of doing it the long way.

Allow me to confess my sin. Not only do I not track encumbrance religiously. I also handle it inconsistently.

In principle, I'm actually an even bigger stickler than the rules for deciding what you can carry. It's not enough you keep enc within your weight allowance. You have to be able to explain exactly how you can carry everything.

What I generally find in practice is, players do not want to commit to having a potion in some awkward place just to justify how they can carry it. Because the moment they do, they realize they're admitting their character wouldn't be able to get at it quickly in a pinch. And so players tend to streamline their adventuring gear and supplies. And because armor in 1E just imposes lower movement rates regardless of encumbrance, I almost never find players actually in danger of being encumbered at the start.

Loading up on loot during the adventure is a different story. That's when I begin to track encumbrance.

So I don't lose an iota of "game"--encumbrance still serves the function of imposing a limit on how much loot PCs can take back and requiring players to prioritize the treasure.

I'd argue "simulation" is actually improved since I add the requirement of "make this make sense" and am not satisfied just with the numbers adding up.

And it aids in "drama" as well. The neglected step child of the Hero's Journey is the return journey. And for good reason. If you've just conquered the dungeon, why should walking back through it be exciting anymore? Well, if you got to go back through it but burdened, where you can't outrun wandering monsters, where you can't just leap that pit, where you might have to toss the idol to Satipo, that makes it all new again and worthy of continuation of the story.

And it saves half the work of tracking encumbrance.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 13, 2023, 01:02:44 PM

Allow me to confess my sin. Not only do I not track encumbrance religiously. I also handle it inconsistently.

In principle, I'm actually an even bigger stickler than the rules for deciding what you can carry. It's not enough you keep enc within your weight allowance. You have to be able to explain exactly how you can carry everything.

What I generally find in practice is, players do not want to commit to having a potion in some awkward place just to justify how they can carry it. Because the moment they do, they realize they're admitting their character wouldn't be able to get at it quickly in a pinch. And so players tend to streamline their adventuring gear and supplies. And because armor in 1E just imposes lower movement rates regardless of encumbrance, I almost never find players actually in danger of being encumbered at the start.

(snip)

I do similar things for similar reasons, with similar results.  I don't have armor directly affecting movement rates, but I do have armor hitting encumbrance, and then thresholds for light/medium/heavy encumbrance are fairly forgiving in numbers, but brutal in the results for extended movements.  So yeah, except when hauling treasure out (or unconscious friends), everyone moves heaven and earth to stay under medium.  And if fleeing for their lives, they start ditching things to get down to light.

The exception for me is because I have fairly nasty, semi-realistic restrictions on basic supplies (food, water, camping gear, medical supplies, etc), characters often are pushing medium when they go in.  They hope that they use enough of it so that by the time they come out, they've got treasure to take its place, but sometimes that doesn't work out so cleanly.

It probably makes a difference too that I'm using a silver-based economy, not AD&D "gold rush", with the characters flirting with destitute for the first few adventures.  Leaving some of your food in favor of some treasure is not the easy decision it would be in the typical D&D session, especially since some of that early treasure is of questionable value.  Of course, players getting too aggressive with trading food for treasure runs the risk of running out on the way back, which is equally true for you and me.  It's only the risk/reward calculus that changes a little.  On the other hand, some of those near destitute characters can't afford enough equipment to come anywhere near the encumbrance lines.  So those first few adventures going in, I can more or less ignore it.  Very handy for introducing new players.  :D

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 13, 2023, 12:33:11 AM

Quote from: jhkim on March 11, 2023, 03:02:30 PM
Right. The Ron Edwards approach of classifying games into one of three GNS categories is dumb, since the standard is hybrid -- which was originally recognized in the Threefold. But having the language to talk about "this muffin is too sugary for my tastes" is useful -- when one person might want a heartier bran muffin and one person wants a sweeter blueberry muffin.

I don't get how get how NOT tracking the number of bullets in Dirty Harry's gun would make the Do You Feel Lucky Punk encounter more dramatic/better for the story/more credible/etc.

So if I call out a GM or an RPG that handwaves tracking ammo, coming back with "Well, we don't care much for verisimilitude. For us it's all about the story," that's bullshit. Those things do not oppose each other at all in my view.

I agree that story and ammo tracking aren't inherently opposed. But I do think that there are different approaches that work for different people depending on the genre and their goals.

I think your example is an interesting one. To me, the whole point of that Dirty Harry scene is that there is tension over whether there is a bullet left in his gun or not. If we're playing an RPG where tracking ammo is part of the game, then the player marked off the bullet, so there's no tension. Everyone at the table knows that the gun is empty.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 13, 2023, 12:33:11 AM
If you want to say, "Look, dude, we're just trying to have fun, and tracking ammo is just more work than we want to do," I'd say fine. That's an honest response. Bandwidth limits absolutely call for trade-offs. The benefits to drama, realism, and game (resource management) just aren't worth the extra work of tracking ammo. Fair enough.

To me, the choice of ammo tracking isn't a simple fun/not-fun. It will depend on what sort of game I'm running.

For example, if I'm trying to emulate a gritty military action genre, then I'll probably track the exact weight of gear and the count of ammo. Then it serves a purpose of bringing the players into planning and tactics. On the other hand, if I'm emulating an over-the-top wacky action like Bad Boys or Hard Boiled, then I'll be looser about those things and go more for the "Rule of Cool".

Alternately, I might make the choice between the two based on the level of tactics/strategy that I'm trying for. I might go for faster conflict resolution that gets more to the bigger picture, rather than tracking action and ammo shot by shot -- so more like Memoir '44 or Up Front rather than Squad Leader.

Different games and priorities will mean different choices about the rules and practices.

Quote from: jhkim on March 13, 2023, 01:20:19 PM
I think your example is an interesting one. To me, the whole point of that Dirty Harry scene is that there is tension over whether there is a bullet left in his gun or not. If we're playing an RPG where tracking ammo is part of the game, then the player marked off the bullet, so there's no tension. Everyone at the table knows that the gun is empty.

I meant to address that too, and got sidetracked in my long post.  One of the main design goals of my system was to introduce more player uncertainty.  Ammo is one tiny part of that goal.  Specifically, I think it should be a rare character that knows exactly how much ammo they have left when the battle is winding down. I couldn't find a way I liked to give that exact result, but it being kind of vague once the battle was over is the next best thing.  And good enough, since I primarily care about another wave of foes arriving than I do about recreating running out during the fight.

Also, I think there is another nuance to the Dirty Harry scenes (plural because they revisit it in a later movie).  The bad guy doesn't know.  The audience doesn't know.  But it is strongly implied that, despite his nonchalant claims to the contrary, Harry does know. That's part of the point when he pulls the trigger on an empty chamber the first go around, and then kills the guy in the later movie who doesn't give in.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 13, 2023, 01:30:02 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 13, 2023, 01:20:19 PM
I think your example is an interesting one. To me, the whole point of that Dirty Harry scene is that there is tension over whether there is a bullet left in his gun or not. If we're playing an RPG where tracking ammo is part of the game, then the player marked off the bullet, so there's no tension. Everyone at the table knows that the gun is empty.

I meant to address that too, and got sidetracked in my long post.  One of the main design goals of my system was to introduce more player uncertainty.  Ammo is one tiny part of that goal.  Specifically, I think it should be a rare character that knows exactly how much ammo they have left when the battle is winding down. I couldn't find a way I liked to give that exact result, but it being kind of vague once the battle was over is the next best thing.  And good enough, since I primarily care about another wave of foes arriving than I do about recreating running out during the fight.

Also, I think there is another nuance to the Dirty Harry scenes (plural because they revisit it in a later movie).  The bad guy doesn't know.  The audience doesn't know.  But it is strongly implied that, despite his nonchalant claims to the contrary, Harry does know. That's part of the point when he pulls the trigger on an empty chamber the first go around, and then kills the guy in the later movie who doesn't give in.

While it's more bookkeeping for the GM, I'd say the way to handle that is to not let the player use any tool (not even scratch paper) to track ammo use while in combat (and then give them some other thing to mentally track of (ex. At the end of each of their turns roll two dice and have them multiply them; if they can give you both the rolled numbers and the answer at the start of their next turn they get a small benefit... now they have to hold four numbers, one their Ammo count, and pay attention to the rest of what's going on.

The idea is to skirt the edge of a player's short term memory capacity even as the GM keeps an actual tally of the limited supply. Maybe they can keep an accurate count, maybe they miss or add a shot or two because the number is close to one of the numbers they have to multiply and remember between turns.

But when you actually reach the point where "Do you feel lucky?" comes up it could be a legit question for everyone but the GM.

An even easier method for a more abstract level of combat would be that each round of combat involves, say, 1d4 shots that the GM rolls secretly (sorta like how the original AD&D arrow weights were for about equal to the number of shots a bowman could get off during the one minute combat round... the attack roll is for whether any of those shots actually land).

Each round the PC knows about 2.5 shots are being used, but a string of 1's or 4's could see you either with more or less shots left than you believed you had.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 13, 2023, 01:30:02 PM
Also, I think there is another nuance to the Dirty Harry scenes (plural because they revisit it in a later movie).  The bad guy doesn't know.  The audience doesn't know.  But it is strongly implied that, despite his nonchalant claims to the contrary, Harry does know. That's part of the point when he pulls the trigger on an empty chamber the first go around, and then kills the guy in the later movie who doesn't give in.

The way I've always played it and have always seen it played syncs up really well. Players are left to track their own ammo. It's not a given that all players will know how much ammo the one has. Maybe if they made it a point to pay attention and count. Same could be said for members of the audience watching Dirty harry. Not only that, as GM, I don't also track it; the player is on the honor system. It's just not something I want on my plate. And so that means in a situation like this, not even I as GM know whether Dirty Harry's got another shot. And so it's pretty neat that how what everyone around the table does and doesn't know corresponds perfectly to what their corresponding roles do and don't know.

It's interesting to see how people track arrows. My problem with ammunition is that it is only impactful if either the players or I put in a lot of effort tracking it. As a player, I eventually always forget. As a GM, I have better things to do and I'm already juggling more interesting considerations. Since tracking it is tedious, it basically gets dropped (similar to tracking poundage).

Even with very meticulous tracking, ammunition is not generally expensive enough to present a scarcity problem. In practice, having 100 arrows or 20 arrows is the same if you are only worried from moment to moment about the next shot you're taking in combats that last a few rounds at most. It's just way too many arrows either way to present a chance of running out except over a very long and grueling crawl. Once you take a step outside the arrow tracking world, you're now adopting an abstraction with a lot of tradeoffs either way.

I decided to give players a choice to explain why they missed a target whenever they have a clean miss. Either they're getting tired, they've failed to maintain their equipment properly, or they're just stubbornly stuck on too hard of a target so they've wasted the remaining ammunition in their quiver. All choices have their tradeoffs. The idea behind offering a choice is for the sake of the game (interesting choices make interesting games). Tying a miss to a big consequence ensures everyone is more worried about ammunition scarcity. Provisioning equipment for an expedition is much more interesting under a system like this because one way or another you're going to need equipment and potentially one or more backups for key equipment. All of this also reflects how people often explain away their failures in real life haha!

I like the modeling - more skilled archers miss less often, which also implicitly means they have better endurance drawing and loosing their arrows, as well as more experience maintaining their equipment in the field. A less skilled archer is more likely to neglect or abuse their equipment, overestimate their capabilities, and/or get stuck on a target and stubbornly waste shaft after shaft losing track of their remaining quiver arrows. I reused this for melee misses (melee of course cannot waste ammunition). People get tired, equipment starts to break down or gets used up, and more equipment is needed to keep everyone in tip-top shape. This equipment usage eventually opens up more space to carry loot. Altogether, I think it's a good pacing mechanism and makes people think a lot more about what they're carrying altogether. Sidearms are actually useful because maybe you've decided you're not doing a good job keeping your blade sharp.

In case anyone wants to use it in their game: Any d20 attack roll which would have hit if the target were unarmored is NOT a clean miss so no penalty. So generally if you'd hit AC 10 (plus whatever non-armor bonuses). By the time you hit Thac0 10 (or +10 attack bonus), you're mostly past the point of worrying about this stuff. Considering you're reaching name-level at that point, I think it's fine. You have people who fight your battles and sharpen your swords for you anyway.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 13, 2023, 01:02:44 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 13, 2023, 11:32:00 AM
- We need to balance simulation and handling time. This is a compromise.  We found that if you tracked every arrow, bolt, and sling bullet, when you held the field it hardly ever mattered except in really long fights or fights with cliffs, lots of vegetation, etc.  If we don't track them at all, or use something like an "ammo" die, it's too far from the simulation. When you don't hold the field, the GM has a pretty good guess as to how much you are down.  Sometimes it rounds off for or against you, but not enough to justify the extra handling time of doing it the long way.

Allow me to confess my sin. Not only do I not track encumbrance religiously. I also handle it inconsistently.

In principle, I'm actually an even bigger stickler than the rules for deciding what you can carry. It's not enough you keep enc within your weight allowance. You have to be able to explain exactly how you can carry everything.

What I generally find in practice is, players do not want to commit to having a potion in some awkward place just to justify how they can carry it. Because the moment they do, they realize they're admitting their character wouldn't be able to get at it quickly in a pinch. And so players tend to streamline their adventuring gear and supplies.

This is a big point for me. I dislike systems that discourage tactics or actions because the rules make it more effective to just do without.

Quote from: jhkim on March 13, 2023, 01:20:19 PMTo me, the choice of ammo tracking isn't a simple fun/not-fun. It will depend on what sort of game I'm running.

[...]

Different games and priorities will mean different choices about the rules and practices.

I agree with this.

As with all media, just like I want different things from different genres (horror x comedy movies, individual x team sports, euro x ameri boardgames, etc) I also expect different things from different TTRPGs. So sure, I'll want to track ammo on more gritty/sim games like Twilight 2k or Runequest, but not necessarily when playing narrative/drama games like Monsterhearts or Vampire 5E.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 14, 2023, 03:24:25 AM

Even with very meticulous tracking, ammunition is not generally expensive enough to present a scarcity problem. In practice, having 100 arrows or 20 arrows is the same if you are only worried from moment to moment about the next shot you're taking in combats that last a few rounds at most. It's just way too many arrows either way to present a chance of running out except over a very long and grueling crawl. Once you take a step outside the arrow tracking world, you're now adopting an abstraction with a lot of tradeoffs either way.

From a simulation perspective, this is part of what we've been talking about, though.  Simulated with some verisimilitude, arrows are not that cheap.  Historically, they were expensive and time consuming to make.  Transporting them was next on the logistics list of bad issues right after food and fodder.  No one carries 100 arrows on their person, either.  Though I can see some savvy players having a base camp with mules, and then we are back to some spare arrows going into the supply--right after the food.  Arrows are fairly large.  12 per quiver makes a lot more sense.

Not to say that any of that is necessary.  Double, Triple, Quadruple quivers of 20 arrows that cost almost nothing isn't a bad thing if you want to ignore all that.  Legolas isn't Dirty Harry, and neither one of them is random adventurer #11.  However, I think the contrast is another example of Lunamancer's point. 

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 14, 2023, 03:24:25 AM
Even with very meticulous tracking, ammunition is not generally expensive enough to present a scarcity problem. In practice, having 100 arrows or 20 arrows is the same if you are only worried from moment to moment about the next shot you're taking in combats that last a few rounds at most. It's just way too many arrows either way to present a chance of running out except over a very long and grueling crawl. Once you take a step outside the arrow tracking world, you're now adopting an abstraction with a lot of tradeoffs either way.

I got a good laugh out of the words "very meticulous" being used for something that is perfectly normal and obvious. Steven Mitchell hit on some reasons why you can't just assume a lack of scarcity. But I've got an even easier one. A PC picks up 6 magical +2 arrows. We're not supposed to be very meticulous in tracking them? How about if you're throwing even non-magical daggers? It's got the same RoF as a bow. In a dungeon crawl where visibility is by torch light, their range is just as good as any. And a strong fighter can put some muscle behind it more than making up for the lower damage die, so it will do more damage for those of us who very meticulously track hit points. Outside of Castlevania, who's carrying 100 throwing daggers?

I never understood why tracking how many arrows you shoot is any different from, say, tracking how many spells you cast. For most games, it's one arrow per attack, so the math is literally exactly the same.

I like abstract combat, so the ammo tracking is done "per volley" instead "per arrow", but the math is still the same: make an attack, mark it off. Just like any finite resource in the game.

If you hate all finite resources, fine, but I just don't get why ammo is treated as some special resource case in these discussions.

Quote from: Zalman on March 14, 2023, 11:15:11 AM
I never understood why tracking how many arrows you shoot is any different from, say, tracking how many spells you cast. For most games, it's one arrow per attack, so the math is literally exactly the same.

I like abstract combat, so the ammo tracking is done "per volley" instead "per arrow", but the math is still the same: make an attack, mark it off. Just like any finite resource in the game.

Volley is one of the things I was thinking of.

Imagine you're doing a nautical themed campaign. Sailing on ships. Following treasure maps to lost gold. Drinking rum. Talking like pirates. Getting scurvy, etc. You might have a sizeable crew of 0th level NPCs for operating the ship. And basic defense as well. International waters being what they are. If you've got 60 men on deck firing bows at the standard RoF of 2 for bows, understand they're pumping 10 gp worth of ammo off the bow every round to kill those bastard merfolk trying to sink your ship with their grapnels. That's going to cut into your booty.

QuoteIf you hate all finite resources, fine, but I just don't get why ammo is treated as some special resource case in these discussions.

All theory, no play makes Jack a dull boy.

In theory, ammo seems trivial. It's on the standard equipment list. It only costs like a percent of your starting gold. Even its encumbrance isn't that bad. The same is mostly true for spell components, though most of those are so insignificant in cost and encumbrance that they don't even get a listing in the manuals.

In actual play, though, shit happens. You find small numbers of magic arrows. Or you might even have to buy silver arrows because of that rumor you heard in the tavern about the werewolf. Or you might lose a whole sheaf or two when you get stuck in a quagmire (giggity). Or if a dungeon corridor gets flooded with water and you have to swim underwater. That's a good way to ruin a good number of your spell components as well as sodden your bow.

Quote from: Zalman on March 14, 2023, 11:15:11 AM
I never understood why tracking how many arrows you shoot is any different from, say, tracking how many spells you cast. For most games, it's one arrow per attack, so the math is literally exactly the same.

I like abstract combat, so the ammo tracking is done "per volley" instead "per arrow", but the math is still the same: make an attack, mark it off. Just like any finite resource in the game.

If you hate all finite resources, fine, but I just don't get why ammo is treated as some special resource case in these discussions.

In typical D&D, there's a big difference in the scarcity and importance of magic compared to most mundane ammo. A spellcaster might have less than a dozen spell slots. An archer might have a sheaf of 24 arrows in a quiver, and several more sheafs stowed away. A sling or gun user could have hundreds of bullets on their person.

Tracking down numbers from a hundred or more seems more work than tracking when you've used one of your 9 spells.

If a group has fun track everything, that's fine -- but I also can understand people tracking spells but not arrows/bullets. When I played 1E D&D, it was similar with material components. We would track rare and expensive material components, but we didn't track common stuff like pinches of fine sand or bits of spider web.

This discussion is circling back to the heart of the "complexity budget" concept.  One of the reasons that I don't have a lot of spell components in my system is because I do want to track ammo to some degree.  There's very little you couldn't easily track if it was one of only a handful of things.  Pick your poison. 

It's also not an accident that it is more palatable to track ammo in AD&D than it is in WotC versions.  Having a lot less spell slots to keep up with means more room to track something else.  Yeah, I get that we are talking different characters, but still the sum total adds up for the party too. Someone is keeping up with treasure found, for example. 

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 14, 2023, 09:39:42 AM
From a simulation perspective, this is part of what we've been talking about, though.  Simulated with some verisimilitude, arrows are not that cheap.  Historically, they were expensive and time consuming to make.  Transporting them was next on the logistics list of bad issues right after food and fodder.  No one carries 100 arrows on their person, either.  Though I can see some savvy players having a base camp with mules, and then we are back to some spare arrows going into the supply--right after the food.  Arrows are fairly large.  12 per quiver makes a lot more sense.

I think it's a problem when a rule system suggests that the world works one way, and the rules themselves say otherwise. Rules for older versions of D&D make arrows cheap, plentiful, and fairly easy to transport. If the rules are supposed to model the world (as in a simulation), I want those rules to help those details emerge naturally if you just play the game as presented. If I as the GM need to constantly invent contrivances that limit the use of bows or other equipment, then what value are the rules providing to me? I agree 12 arrows per quiver makes more sense - if that were enforced and the rules made it clear even through concrete guidelines that arrows are rare and expensive and hard to transport, I'd be fine tracking each arrow. In D&D it takes GM fiat to impose any sense of scarcity.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 14, 2023, 11:09:37 AM
I got a good laugh out of the words "very meticulous" being used for something that is perfectly normal and obvious. Steven Mitchell hit on some reasons why you can't just assume a lack of scarcity. But I've got an even easier one. A PC picks up 6 magical +2 arrows. We're not supposed to be very meticulous in tracking them? How about if you're throwing even non-magical daggers? It's got the same RoF as a bow. In a dungeon crawl where visibility is by torch light, their range is just as good as any. And a strong fighter can put some muscle behind it more than making up for the lower damage die, so it will do more damage for those of us who very meticulously track hit points. Outside of Castlevania, who's carrying 100 throwing daggers?

Tracking arrows is meticulous because it's modeling something that generally only matters on a timescale beyond the length of most combats, but we're doing tracking in combat. I can count on a single hand the number of times I've actually run out of arrows in a combat situation in my 20+ years of playing and I can't remember it being a deciding factor. I myself forget to mark arrows from time to time in an attack so I usually just have to estimate high on how many arrows I spent and reconcile when I remember. When I'm a GM, the reality is that I can't audit the players. If we're operating on an honor system, then the player already has a choice - skip tracking in shame, or track with honor and announce to the table "I have run out of arrows" at the appropriate time. Not much different than just baking that moment directly into the procedures/models.

If my table is playing a game with modern firearms, we're going to be tracking mags not bullets and I'd call bullet tracking fairly meticulous. We can just assume you've bothered to load the magazines prior to battle (or else why even carry them), and the important part of the model is asking when you need to reload since that will take time/actions and you might get caught in a bad spot where switching to your sidearm makes sense.

In a fantasy RPG, the quiver is effectively your mag and arrows are your bullets. The only thing that matters moment-to-moment in combat is whether or not I have enough arrows in my quiver to make my attacks, especially since nocking an arrow typically costs no time that is tracked. It doesn't matter if I have 20 arrows or 20,000. Of course, nobody carries 20,000 arrows, or even 200 arrows, but that's precisely my point. 20 arrows will get you through 10 rounds of attacking even at a 2:1 fire rate or 6+ rounds even using broken bow mastery rules from one of the AD&D supplements. How often are your combats going through 10 full rounds of shooting before the players get a chance to regroup, recover arrows, and rinse/repeat? This is to say nothing of the potential for scavenging from intelligent opponents if you win the battle.

As for magic or silvered arrows, I personally don't play with +2 magic arrows of any ample supply and prefer low magic. Silvered arrows you probably need to seek out an artisan and pay well. More significant magic arrows are in rare supply and are tracked individually (there is ONE troll-slaying arrow).If you're throwing daggers (as in actual daggers or knives), I track them individually because they're fairly bulky and throwing them one after another is going to take time and actions (akin to swapping mags), even from a brace. If you're throwing specialty throwing-daggers, I'd just track a brace of them the same way I'd track a quiver of arrows. Simple and conveys/models the dynamic well IMO.

If the goal is to model scarcity properly, you can do a 1:1 model (arrow tracking) and clamp down on supply hard. Alternatively, you can do an abstraction of some kind. Arrow tracking can't be done by players in isolation though - if you are tracking arrows per-player but don't track arrow supply in town, then that scarcity we've been talking about is not really modeled at all. If I can buy 20 arrows in town on the honor system and I track my arrows on the honor system then what is this model accomplishing? Somebody still has to voluntarily surface the fact that they've run out of arrows for it to matter.

Same basic argument applies to spells. A lot easier to notice somebody casting too many spells when there are like 5 spells per day and high level spells are way different than others. Compare that to tracking 20 spells per day and they're all uniform.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 14, 2023, 09:55:14 PM

I think it's a problem when a rule system suggests that the world works one way, and the rules themselves say otherwise. Rules for older versions of D&D make arrows cheap, plentiful, and fairly easy to transport. If the rules are supposed to model the world (as in a simulation), I want those rules to help those details emerge naturally if you just play the game as presented. If I as the GM need to constantly invent contrivances that limit the use of bows or other equipment, then what value are the rules providing to me? I agree 12 arrows per quiver makes more sense - if that were enforced and the rules made it clear even through concrete guidelines that arrows are rare and expensive and hard to transport, I'd be fine tracking each arrow. In D&D it takes GM fiat to impose any sense of scarcity.

Let's be clear here.  The  default rules for AD&D are not making arrows that scarce, by design.  It's a gold rush economy, so it would be rather pointless.  Those rules are tracking encumbrance.  So scarcity is more about running out in the dungeon when you can't get out, can't find any to scavenge, etc.  That's neither good nor bad, it's just the way it does it.  My point is that to the extent AD&D is a simulation at all, it's simulating something different than what others, including myself, are simulating.  Or sometimes not, as Lunamancer has detailed. 

So there's no particular virtue or vice in simulating scarcity or not.  It's all in the context of the design goals of the game and how the game is then applied to the intent of the GM's setting.  In other words, if you want to get the effects of making arrows scarce, then you can simulate that by doing the things I said before, and it will even add to the verisimilitude of a medieval fantasy setting. If you want the effects of making arrows scarce.  Otherwise, that would be a waste of time. 

Note also that all of my tweaks in this department are only partially based on simulation. I also have "player behavior" goals that to me add to ambience of the game, allow for player decisions, etc.  These goals are the ones I measure against when deciding if a rule is useful or not.  So when I tweaked the rules for arrow scarcity to the point that sometimes players made a decision not to "waste" an arrow on a low percentage shot, I knew I was in the ballpark.  When I tweaked the encumbrance rules to the point that players occasionally had to make a decision to take or not take something that was otherwise worth it to them, again, in the ballpark.  Simulation certainly contributes to that behavior, because it's a way to ground the players in something that make sense in the setting for their characters.  But I'm not hesitant to use other game or drama tricks when they suit that larger purpose, either.

As people mention arrows in this thread, my other thread on historical prices has the cost of the English longbow and a sheaf (24) arrows.  I've put it below in case you don't want to dig through it.

Either arrows need to be more expensive or longbows need to be cheaper as they are around the same price.


Item                                                 Year      Pound      Shilling      Pence      Total Shilling       Total Pence       Silver(g)      Gold(g)
Longbow – white                                      1341                               12           1.00                   12.00         16.188               
Longbow – painted                                    1341                               18           1.50                   18.00         24.282               
24 arrows (sheaf) steeled                            1341                               14           1.17                   14.00         18.886               
24 arrows (sheaf) non-steeled                        1341                               12           1.00                   12.00         16.188               
300 sheaves arrows                                   1359      21         5                          1.42                   17.00         18.870         1.644
400 sheaves arrows                                   1359      28         6             8            1.42                   17.00         18.870         1.644
500 sheaves arrows                                   1359      35         8             8            1.42                   17.01         18.879         1.645
600 sheaves arrows                                   1359      42         10                         1.42                   17.00         18.870         1.644
700 sheaves arrows                                   1359      49         11            8            1.42                   17.00         18.870         1.644
800 sheaves arrows                                   1359      56         13            4            1.42                   17.00         18.870         1.644
900 sheaves arrows                                   1359      63         15                         1.42                   17.00         18.870         1.644
400 painted bows, 200 white bows, 1000 sheaves       1359      145        16            8            2,916.67               35,000.00                       
200 painted bows, 400 white bows, 700 sheaves        1359      109        11            8            2,191.67               26,300.00                       
Painted Bow                                          1359                               36           3.00                   36.00         39.960         3.481
White Bow                                            1359                               18           1.50                   18.00         19.980         1.740

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 14, 2023, 09:55:14 PM
Tracking arrows is meticulous because it's modeling something that generally only matters on a timescale beyond the length of most combats, but we're doing tracking in combat.

I sense shenanigans. Should I start listing things that we track on a round-by-round basis that generally only matters on a timescale beyond the length of the round? This is simply an absurd yardstick. Anyone can make any argument they want without regard to the truth of the matter simply through specious tinkering of the timescale.

Allow me to suggest that the full length of the adventure is the only honest timescale for the purposes of this discussion. That's how often PCs get to re-up any ammo expended. That's the timescale they've got to economize to.

QuoteI can count on a single hand the number of times I've actually run out of arrows in a combat situation in my 20+ years of playing and I can't remember it being a deciding factor.

How often do PCs reach zero hit points compared to how often they very meticulously track hit point loss? The ratio is extremely low, and it's not by accident. Nor is it be careful and precise balancing of encounters on the part of the DM. It's because as PCs get closer to zero hit points, they make different choices, favoring courses of action less likely to result in further hit point loss. And so even lacking any sort of wound penalties or forcing morale checks on PCs, hit point loss has a real affect on the character. It just flies under most gamers' radars.

Why do you assume PCs are carrying so many damn arrows in the first place? Could it be because they don't want to run out? So even if they never even once run out of ammo, the potential to hit zero, which emerges from the tracking, has had an effect so profoundly ubiquitous that you just assume we start with that much ammo.

QuoteIf the goal is to model scarcity properly, you can do a 1:1 model (arrow tracking) and clamp down on supply hard.

Speaking for myself, it's not my goal. 1:1 tracking is the absence of a model. It's just counting how many arrows the guy has. Because details are cool and generic is the enemy of art.

QuoteAlternatively, you can do an abstraction of some kind. Arrow tracking can't be done by players in isolation though - if you are tracking arrows per-player but don't track arrow supply in town, then that scarcity we've been talking about is not really modeled at all.

If there were no scarcity, the arrows would be free. I can therefore "model" the arrow scarcity just by the price in town. It would feel kind of weird to model arrow scarcity during an adventure by deducting 2 sp's per shot. And it would only serve to kick the can down the road. Then the argument would be, "Bah! I don't bother to very meticulously track gold. I can count on one hand all the times my character ever ran out of gold! And even when I did, it didn't matter."

As an aside, I'm an econ nerd, and I actually have developed some systems for when the local economy matters. Even that doesn't require precise tracking because more arrows are constantly being manufactured, and some of them will be sold to NPCs. The only time I really need to worry about such things as the hard quantity supplied is if the PC party is going on a mass buying spree of arrows.

In that case, the DMG tells me that while still keeping up with their usual work, each blacksmith in town can produce up to 30 arrowheads in a month. If that total lines up with how many the PCs want, I know it will take at least a month, and it will only take that short a time if they are willing to pay extra, enough to outbid every last NPC who wants arrows. And I can figure that out by a percentage of the most valuable thing in town those arrows would otherwise be used to protect.

QuoteIf I can buy 20 arrows in town on the honor system and I track my arrows on the honor system then what is this model accomplishing? Somebody still has to voluntarily surface the fact that they've run out of arrows for it to matter.

Same basic argument applies to spells. A lot easier to notice somebody casting too many spells when there are like 5 spells per day and high level spells are way different than others. Compare that to tracking 20 spells per day and they're all uniform.

That's how hit points work in my games as well as every D&D game I've played in. I suppose we could stop tracking those, too. We could just have the number of Hit Dice a character or monster has be the number of hits it takes to kill it. Compare tracking just 5 Hit Dice to 20 hit points.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 14, 2023, 11:04:38 PM
Let's be clear here.  The  default rules for AD&D are not making arrows that scarce, by design.  It's a gold rush economy, so it would be rather pointless.  Those rules are tracking encumbrance.

Yes, arrows are not scarce in AD&D. I'm arguing that it's a questionable decision when using 1:1 arrow-tracking. My basic argument is one of significant figures. Tracking each arrow implies each arrow might be a deciding factor in some outcome. Tracking each quiver means emptying the quiver is what will decide the outcome. Under some circumstances, each and every arrow might make the difference. Under most circumstances if you just play the game the way it's presented, generally that's not what I've experienced. I'm arguing basically to round to the nearest whole number while arrow tracking believes the tens or possibly hundreds digit is worth tracking.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 14, 2023, 11:04:38 PM
So there's no particular virtue or vice in simulating scarcity or not.  It's all in the context of the design goals of the game and how the game is then applied to the intent of the GM's setting. If you want the effects of making arrows scarce.  Otherwise, that would be a waste of time. 

I agree there's nothing inherently good or bad in whether or not scarcity is simulated. I'm arguing that arrow-tracking is a system that works fine when arrows are genuinely scarce, and doesn't work so great when arrows are plentiful and cheap. Thus, I'm saying in most cases arrow tracking is simulation without any real impact. From the character's perspective, the only interesting thing about the ammo left in their magazine is whether or not the gun goes "bang" when they pull the trigger, or "click". Nobody at the table necessarily needs to know how many bullets are left in the thing until somebody either checks or pulls the trigger. To reference your earlier point, I'd prefer to focus complexity elsewhere in the sim and abstract this to one degree or another. The exact degree depends on genre, world, etc.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 14, 2023, 11:04:38 PM
Note also that all of my tweaks in this department are only partially based on simulation.

I agree here as well. My own system is an attempt at modeling what I think is interesting about the simulation but in a way that produces a satisfying game experience. I'm trying to do that by focusing on choices and consequences. Any given focus on any given aspect of the simulation is fine, to be totally clear about my position. I think resources though in particular, in a resource management game like say D&D, are aspects of the sim that benefit from a little abstraction and gamification.

My basic thesis and what makes my approach difficult to categorize is that I'm trying to model/simulate something with associative rules that are still workable at the table and satisfying to play. I sacrifice a little in perfect 1:1 accuracy for the sake of the game. I think what's important in modeling are the shaped of the curves and the relationships, the interactions between systems. Arrow tracking and scarcity. Arrow tracking and encumbrance. etc.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 15, 2023, 01:12:39 AM
I sense shenanigans. Should I start listing things that we track on a round-by-round basis that generally only matters on a timescale beyond the length of the round? This is simply an absurd yardstick.

Assuming we're discussing AD&D, all that spring to mind are HP and spell slots (and arrows). Spell slots are genuinely scarce, so it's fair to track at time of use just like a potion. HP is fairly disconnected from the sim. As for the only resupply happening at the start/end of the adventure, I'd question that. If the group brings a pack animal and cart with them on an adventure, they can bring as many arrows as they please. If the players scavenge enemies, won't they find usable arrows? The reason I've almost never run out of arrows is that it takes a pretty specific set of circumstances to run completely dry on arrows.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 15, 2023, 01:12:39 AM
How often do PCs reach zero hit points compared to how often they very meticulously track hit point loss? The ratio is extremely low, and it's not by accident. Nor is it be careful and precise balancing of encounters on the part of the DM. It's because as PCs get closer to zero hit points, they make different choices, favoring courses of action less likely to result in further hit point loss. And so even lacking any sort of wound penalties or forcing morale checks on PCs, hit point loss has a real affect on the character. It just flies under most gamers' radars.

I'd argue HP is just about tension/pacing and so it's about the game, not the sim. It affects player psychology only so long as the player suspends their understanding of the rules and tries to role-play their HP loss as if it's more than what the rules actually model. 1 HP is the same as full HP as far as your ability to continue fighting. All that matters round-to-round is the likelihood that the next round the incoming hits will drop you. Tracking HP tilts the percentages so the odds of survival drop as rounds wear on, but that's about it. You could model that a dozen different ways and it wouldn't necessarily need to track something like HP.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 15, 2023, 01:12:39 AM
Why do you assume PCs are carrying so many damn arrows in the first place? Could it be because they don't want to run out? So even if they never even once run out of ammo, the potential to hit zero, which emerges from the tracking, has had an effect so profoundly ubiquitous that you just assume we start with that much ammo.

I assume players carry around so many arrows because the rules make it pretty clear that they're cheap, plentiful, fairly easy to transport, and a great strategy. Given how often people need things like carts to haul loot out of a dungeon, it's reasonable to carry a spare quiver or two there. That's 60 arrows total (20 on you, 40 in the cart) and for only 5 gp each (OSE prices). Bring a porter and you won't even need to go back to the cart. Lose the quivers because the porter is swallowed whole? 10 gp. No big deal. I'll point out that I'm not arguing that you shouldn't model running out of arrows. I think that's an important part of the sim. I'm arguing AD&D with arrow tracking does not support this properly due to the way the game works (and the prices are structured).

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 15, 2023, 01:12:39 AM
If there were no scarcity, the arrows would be free. I can therefore "model" the arrow scarcity just by the price in town. It would feel kind of weird to model arrow scarcity during an adventure by deducting 2 sp's per shot. And it would only serve to kick the can down the road. Then the argument would be, "Bah! I don't bother to very meticulously track gold. I can count on one hand all the times my character ever ran out of gold! And even when I did, it didn't matter."

In the fictional world we're trying to sim, there's presumably no magic matter replicator responsible for the existence of these arrows so scarcity is being used colloquially here. If you neither control the supply nor the consumption of arrows and rely on the honor system however, you effectively do have a matter replicator because a player runs out of arrows when they decide to run out. There is dissonance between what the game ought to model about the fictional world and what is actually modeled. IMO it's a bigger problem for the sim than any abstraction, but YMMV. And yes, I'd say it's quite meticulous to track 1 GP per arrow in a game where GP = XP and it takes many thousands to make it past the first couple levels (during which you might fire maybe 100 arrows). You could just budget it and it would have the same effect. That's what you're going to have to do anyway when players get to name level and they have their little force of yeomen out there training. You're not going to be arrow tracking them, and it's doubtful you'll want to arrow track the local smiths.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 15, 2023, 01:12:39 AM
That's how hit points work in my games as well as every D&D game I've played in. I suppose we could stop tracking those, too. We could just have the number of Hit Dice a character or monster has be the number of hits it takes to kill it. Compare tracking just 5 Hit Dice to 20 hit points.

Depending on how much HP bloat you're dealing with (which edition), as the GM you have a decent idea how much damage people have taken or healed much like you have a decent idea how many spell slots the players are burning. I have had GMs who track damage on their side of the screen and it works pretty well in terms of immersion and preventing metagaming, though there are tradeoffs.

The 5 HD vs 20 HP thing is genuinely worth considering. Many wargames track nothing but a few hits and for most situations 1 good hit = death. I ended up using HP in my games but when I'm tuning numbers I actually worry about hits and how many rounds it will take to drop somebody (and the likelihood over time). For all practical purposes, the HP is just a decimal with my attuned level of precision. All of that is pure game consideration, not sim. The only question worth worrying about from the sim side is if we're properly modeling underlying reality to an acceptable degree. If a dagger is always better and more harmful than something like a dane axe, that's a sim problem AND a game problem. It's worth considering though that people hate HP bloat and I think it's the same basic significant figures problem. Tracking 1 HP does feel kind of pointless when you have 100 HP and hits tend to deal 4-12 damage. 1 HP when you have 10 is important because we've shifted the decimal point. Hopefully that makes it clear what I'm saying.

Your local economy sim sounds neat. I built something similar but working with quivers, obviously ;)

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 14, 2023, 09:55:14 PM
I think it's a problem when a rule system suggests that the world works one way, and the rules themselves say otherwise. Rules for older versions of D&D make arrows cheap, plentiful, and fairly easy to transport.

Weirdly, BX & BECMI D&D are relatively good on this, 5gp for a quiver of 20 arrows. That seems an historically justifiable price (5gp  being about £/$/e 500, or £/$/e 25 per arrow, in modern money), though 20 arrows in a quiver seems too much, and bows are relatively too expensive. A bow generally cost *less* than a quiverfull of arrows, and they weren't cheap either - a longbow could cost more than a cheap arming sword.

The 'arrows are free' rot seems to have come from AD&D 1e, where 12 arrows are only 1gp, and carried from there.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 15, 2023, 02:59:09 AM
Assuming we're discussing AD&D, all that spring to mind are HP and spell slots (and arrows).

And any number of buffs, anti-buffs, and multi-round actions, regardless of the system.

QuoteHP is fairly disconnected from the sim.

I would dispute that. I am aware of all the arguments and that that topic needs its own thread. I'm simply saying it's in dispute and cannot be treated as true for purposes of this discussion.

QuoteAs for the only resupply happening at the start/end of the adventure, I'd question that. If the group brings a pack animal and cart with them on an adventure, they can bring as many arrows as they please.

You can question it all you want. All you'd be doing is tinkering with the definition of adventure. Bring a cart, don't bring a cart, at some point you have to resupply. No matter what you call it, no matter how you spin it, that's the timescale upon which ammo will be economized.

QuoteIf the players scavenge enemies, won't they find usable arrows?

Sometimes. Not very often. Most monsters don't use weapons. The ones that do don't always have ranged weapons. And when you find ones that do, they're not necessarily hauling carts full of arrows in tow. Generally not enough to replace what's lost.

QuoteI'd argue HP is just about tension/pacing and so it's about the game, not the sim. It affects player psychology only so long as the player suspends their understanding of the rules and tries to role-play their HP loss as if it's more than what the rules actually model. 1 HP is the same as full HP as far as your ability to continue fighting. All that matters round-to-round is the likelihood that the next round the incoming hits will drop you. Tracking HP tilts the percentages so the odds of survival drop as rounds wear on, but that's about it.

If you agree that the hit point mechanism means a diminishing survival probability, how is that just an affect on psychology? How is it suspending understanding the rules to make different choices in the face of lower probability of survival.

QuoteYou could model that a dozen different ways and it wouldn't necessarily need to track something like HP.

If you can name even one, then do so. Because I'm strongly suspicious that there's going to be shenanigans as to what constitutes "something like HP." If survival probability is diminishing rather than fixed, there has to be something tracking where it's at. Like if a character begins with a 100% chance of survival, then after one hit is knocked down to 44%, then knocked down to 11%, then down to 2%, I would call that "something like HP."

Quote]I assume players carry around so many arrows because the rules make it pretty clear that they're cheap, plentiful, fairly easy to transport, and a great strategy. Given how often people need things like carts to haul loot out of a dungeon, it's reasonable to carry a spare quiver or two there. That's 60 arrows total (20 on you, 40 in the cart) and for only 5 gp each (OSE prices). Bring a porter and you won't even need to go back to the cart. Lose the quivers because the porter is swallowed whole? 10 gp. No big deal. I'll point out that I'm not arguing that you shouldn't model running out of arrows. I think that's an important part of the sim. I'm arguing AD&D with arrow tracking does not support this properly due to the way the game works (and the prices are structured).

Cheap? I wouldn't call 1-2 months salary cheap. Plentiful? Where in the rules does it say that? Easy to transport? The standard 60 arrows for war amounts to 120 enc. Added to whatever standard equipment a soldier is going to be carrying, that's not necessarily a nothing-burger. Great strategy? I don't know about all that. Frequent cart hauls of loot? I have so many questions

Going back for more arrows? I think there you've just ceded the argument. Great. You never technically run out of arrows. But making a trip to the cart and back, facing wandering monsters, is certainly a price to pay for almost running out of arrows. And there it is. It matters.

QuoteIn the fictional world we're trying to sim, there's presumably no magic matter replicator responsible for the existence of these arrows so scarcity is being used colloquially here. If you neither control the supply nor the consumption of arrows and rely on the honor system however, you effectively do have a matter replicator because a player runs out of arrows when they decide to run out. There is dissonance between what the game ought to model about the fictional world and what is actually modeled. IMO it's a bigger problem for the sim than any abstraction, but YMMV.

I've already stated in my previous post that I do, in fact, control supply (via blacksmith count) and consumption (assumed NPC consumption) within a flexible range so that I don't have to micromanage players restocking supplies. But I also indicated that if they do go hog wild, the cost in time and gold will skyrocket. A party of 6 with 4 bow-users who try to buy up 60 arrows each is going to eat up the monthly production of 8 blacksmiths. I'm not making up those numbers. It's in the rules. It's up to the DM to use them.

QuoteAnd yes, I'd say it's quite meticulous to track 1 GP per arrow in a game where GP = XP and it takes many thousands to make it past the first couple levels (during which you might fire maybe 100 arrows).

GP =/= XP. You can get XP other ways. And not every GP gained comes with an XP attached.
Training cost the first couple of levels won't leave you with surplus GP
And bow use is going to be under-represented in low level dungeon crawls.

QuoteYou could just budget it and it would have the same effect. That's what you're going to have to do anyway when players get to name level and they have their little force of yeomen out there training. You're not going to be arrow tracking them, and it's doubtful you'll want to arrow track the local smiths.

DMG requires a certain minimum number of smiths to support your henchmen, hirelings, and followers at that level. That's all hashed out in detail, no need to speculate over it.

QuoteDepending on how much HP bloat you're dealing with (which edition), as the GM you have a decent idea how much damage people have taken or healed much like you have a decent idea how many spell slots the players are burning. I have had GMs who track damage on their side of the screen and it works pretty well in terms of immersion and preventing metagaming, though there are tradeoffs.

All of this can be said of ammo as well.

QuoteIt's worth considering though that people hate HP bloat and I think it's the same basic significant figures problem. Tracking 1 HP does feel kind of pointless when you have 100 HP and hits tend to deal 4-12 damage. 1 HP when you have 10 is important because we've shifted the decimal point. Hopefully that makes it clear what I'm saying.

The purpose of 100 hit points has nothing to do with having a nail-biting battle where you come close to losing them all. It's for staying the course in longer adventures.

Take a crazy high level party or more or less typical makeup. Imagine them on a really long, continuous adventure. Wilderness, plane-hopping, whatever. No taking a week or a month or even a day off. Take a close look at the 1E spell recovery rules. I assume 12 hours of daily down time to set up camp, sleep, etc. Spellcasters can't replenish all of their slots daily. If a cleric uses and re-memorizes healing spells to maximize healing, and you account for other odd abilities within the party, such as a Paladin's lay on hand, add up total daily renewable healing, then divide it by the number of party members, it tops out at roughly 15 hp per party member of renewable daily healing.

That's it. No matter how many hit points you have, you really only get to lose 15 per day on average. That's all that's sustainable. Otherwise you will eventually run out. Having 30 hit points gives you a nice safety buffer above and beyond 15. Anything beyond that is for longevity of the journey. Same is true for any potions or spell slots beyond that which can be renewed daily. They're nice to have in case you're having a bad day. You can't rely on them as a regular thing.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 15, 2023, 10:04:21 PM
And any number of buffs, anti-buffs, and multi-round actions, regardless of the system.

My recollection of round-by-round tracking and the associated headaches are mostly from my time with 3e onwards. Invisibility is a good example - lasting 24 hours in 2e but mere minutes in 3e. Haste is 3 rounds + 1 per level in 2e so a minimum of 8 rounds by the time you can cast it. Most combats will be over by then (especially hasted). My last AD&D campaign ended in 2021 and I wasn't playing a caster in that one so perhaps I'm just forgetting, but I've taken a Wizard in 2e through lvl 12 and the durations weren't really a limiting factor. Never played a cleric or druid to name-level so maybe they have different worries.

QuoteGoing back for more arrows? I think there you've just ceded the argument. Great. You never technically run out of arrows. But making a trip to the cart and back, facing wandering monsters, is certainly a price to pay for almost running out of arrows. And there it is. It matters.

You're going to go back to the cart to sleep from time to time, yeah. It's unwise to sleep in the dungeon, after all. When you get back to camp, you're not going to be dry on arrows or any other resource (or else you're generally dead soon anyway). You face the wandering monster rolls no matter what because you have to go back and sleep. There is no additional intrinsic risk added by taking extra arrows or taking a cart.

If your resupply point is near the entrance to the dungeon, or held by a porter, that's quite different than if your only resupply point is in town, back through the wilderness. The cost and effort of setting up the equivalent of a makeshift FOB is fairly minimal compared to the costs of NOT doing it. It's easy to do even in the dungeon. You place your cache, do your work, and retrieve the cache on your way out. Rinse and repeat.

QuoteIf you agree that the hit point mechanism means a diminishing survival probability, how is that just an affect on psychology? How is it suspending understanding the rules to make different choices in the face of lower probability of survival.
...I'm strongly suspicious that there's going to be shenanigans as to what constitutes "something like HP."

Because there is no consequence until you hit 0, and not even any risk until you get low enough that you could drop from a bad round. If I'm at 40 of 50 HP, my marginal risk of death is functionally the same as if I'm at 50 HP in almost every situation. Your odds of death each round only increase when you're at low enough HP that the enemies you're facing could plausibly drop you (This is one reason why HP bloat is awful and the game is more exciting at lower levels). It's more important to do all the set-up for the battle (scouting, securing path of egress) than to actually fight it round by round past the early levels. The things that kill you are almost always the save or die situations, death traps, and ambushes which block retreat. Death from HP loss is not very common in my experience past early levels.

I think I've miscommunicated about HP, sorry. Modeling increasing statistical odds of death will require tracking a number somewhere. It just doesn't require tracking HP as a resource you lose through attrition. An example: roll 1d20 for every hit you take, and any single result less than the damage taken kills you. Each subsequent hit, roll 1d20 for each hit taken thus far and any less than the current damage kill you. Your odds of death increase over time as you take hits but attrition isn't the key factor. You'd probably want to pair with DR or something for fighter-types.

QuoteCheap? I wouldn't call 1-2 months salary cheap. Plentiful? Where in the rules does it say that? Easy to transport? The standard 60 arrows for war amounts to 120 enc. Added to whatever standard equipment a soldier is going to be carrying, that's not necessarily a nothing-burger. Great strategy? I don't know about all that. Frequent cart hauls of loot? I have so many questions
...A party of 6 with 4 bow-users who try to buy up 60 arrows each is going to eat up the monthly production of 8 blacksmiths...
...GP =/= XP. You can get XP other ways. And not every GP gained comes with an XP attached...
...DMG requires a certain minimum number of smiths to support your henchmen, hirelings, and followers at that level...

1-2 months salary of a peasant won't feel cheap to a peasant. Peasants aren't hauling treasures out of the underworld. The players are, and they will never struggle to pay for arrows beyond the 1st session or so. On the scale of the hundred or thousands you'll earn fairly quickly, a few GP is a pittance spent only infrequently. Compare arrows to anything else on the price sheet and they're cheap. In terms of encumbrance, you can bring a cart with a pack animal or draft horse. It will pay for itself in a session or two. You don't carry the encumbrance yourself - no need for 60 arrows on your person pretty much ever. You can carry any extras in the cart.

Generally, the GP that produces XP is the kind of GP you earn by shooting arrows. My point about GP and XP is that the rule is that you get XP for retrieving GP from the dungeon. The XP scale is a good ballpark indicator of how much GP the game expects you to collect by the end of level 1. Ditto any training costs.

If you clamp down on arrow supply, then that's great! If there are no arrows in town and they all need to be made on-demand, then there's a time cost and now the only question is whether or not time is costly (we'll get to that). Most games I've played, there are arrows in-stock someplace and you had mentioned a supply chain of some kind so I figured you were describing a situation like that.

My point about Yeomen is that you won't generally be arrow tracking them individually but rather as a unit. You'll take the scale, figure out how many arrows they use up per month training vs. deployed, and you'll figure out how many fletchers/smiths need to support them to keep them in fighting condition. That determines the recurring cost. This same scaling & modeling can be done on the micro-scale with budgeting quivers and it will largely have the same effect. You'll be thinking in quivers at scale anyway, so why not consider quivers at the micro-scale?

QuoteTake a crazy high level party or more or less typical makeup. Imagine them on a really long, continuous adventure. Wilderness, plane-hopping, whatever. No taking a week or a month or even a day off...

If time is at an extreme premium, then sure that can be a tax on resources. Let's explore that premise. What exactly is forcing my hand? I know GMs often hate the idea of the party sitting in town waiting for a bundle of arrows or taking a day off, but what's the problem? Is there an actual reason we can't stay in town for a month and recuperate between adventures? Is there some specific reason when we're encamped outside the dungeon that we simply must delve each and every day? We're generally better positioned to repel attackers while fresh and posted up in our encampment out in the open than we would if we tried to fight the enemies on their home turf in the underworld. If that were not the case, then why haven't they come out and killed us the first night we made our presence known? If we brought a cart we have what we need in terms of essential supplies. All I need to do is ensure our bills are cheaper than what we're taking in and we're making a tidy profit that sustains operations. No need to make HP sustainable if our GP is sustainable.

The kinds of situations I see most often that force this time pressure are contrivances from adventures or the GM acting for the sake of the game/story (not the sim). Even the designers know the resources only make sense if you somehow force people to go for long stretches of time without any opportunity to stop. If you force 10 combats without a chance to even recover arrows, yeah you'll run out. Why would I ever voluntarily burn more resources than my replacement rate unless there was a pressing need? You give me 5 spells per day, I'm limiting my engagements so I don't hit empty. If you give me 20 arrows, I'm limiting my engagements so I don't make more than 20 shots. The 20 shots aren't generally the bottleneck.

If arrows are super scarce and/or super expensive, tracking arrows can make sense. If HP remained low and healing/resurrection spells weren't really viable, then HP makes sense. If your good equipment is super expensive to buy and maintain (or you're operating at scale like at name-level), then GP makes sense. If spells are scarce but have big potential effects, spell slots make sense. AD&D makes the most sense at low levels near the start of the game where these premises are more true. As levels are gained, the game starts to fall apart (until name-level where things start making sense again because you have to scale).

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 16, 2023, 05:26:56 AM
You're going to go back to the cart to sleep from time to time, yeah.

If you're only tapping the cart when you go for a nap at night, then yeah, I could see you blowing through a sheaf of arrows. Not in a dungeon because dungeons generally are not the best environment for using bows. But under conditions where you can take full advantage of a bow's range, you will usually get 1 to 3 rounds of missile fire, depending on exact range, encounter distance, and movement rates involved, before enemies close to melee. That's 2 to 6 arrows per encounter. If you average 4 over 6 encounters, that's a sheaf. That's not an extraordinary amount of encounters for a day's adventure. If you encounter enemies who have arrows that you can collect later, the entire fight might happen at range, and you'd end up expending more than just the 2 to 6 arrows.

Quote1-2 months salary of a peasant won't feel cheap to a peasant.

It's not 1 to 2 months salary for a peasant. That's for a specially skilled mercenary. For peasants it's 5+ months salary. Arrows are far from cheap.

QuoteIn terms of encumbrance, you can bring a cart with a pack animal or draft horse. It will pay for itself in a session or two. You don't carry the encumbrance yourself - no need for 60 arrows on your person pretty much ever. You can carry any extras in the cart.

60 arrows refers to soldiers at war. You want to add horses, you're paying for horsemen archers or hobilars rather than foot archers, and you're now also paying for horses. And each horse counts as an extra man for purposes of determining how many blacksmiths you need to maintain their equipment.

QuoteGenerally, the GP that produces XP is the kind of GP you earn by shooting arrows. My point about GP and XP is that the rule is that you get XP for retrieving GP from the dungeon. The XP scale is a good ballpark indicator of how much GP the game expects you to collect by the end of level 1. Ditto any training costs.

Not really. I wouldn't expect PCs to have accumulated enough GP to afford training by the time they have enough XP to level. The idea is to get them to sell off their magic items. Money to burn is not high on the list of things I would expect low level adventurers have.

QuoteIf you clamp down on arrow supply,

I don't. I merely observe what's already in the rules. And even if I didn't, it doesn't matter. You made the claim that the rules don't fit the setting and are forwarding your own experiences as evidence. Well, your experience is not relevant evidence to your point if you are not observing these rules. And without evidence, all you have is a series of absurd claims.

QuoteMy point about Yeomen is that you won't generally be arrow tracking them individually but rather as a unit. You'll take the scale, figure out how many arrows they use up per month training vs. deployed, and you'll figure out how many fletchers/smiths need to support them to keep them in fighting condition. That determines the recurring cost. This same scaling & modeling can be done on the micro-scale with budgeting quivers and it will largely have the same effect. You'll be thinking in quivers at scale anyway, so why not consider quivers at the micro-scale?

No, that's not how I do things. I observe the guidelines in the DMG. When not involved in active engagements, the DMG assumes various smiths are doing basic repair, replacement, and upkeep in the background. But when actually deployed, anything lost must be replenished subject to the limitations of the crafting abilities listed for these smiths. In order to know what that is, I have to track those.

Do I track them individually? Yes and no. It's not the right question. Because when I'm engaging scores of troops, I'm having large numbers do the exact same thing at the same time. Firing off 6 volleys of arrows crosses off 6 arrows off of each archer. I don't need to literally track them individually in order to track ammunition with the exact same precision as if I did track them individually. And that is a direct scale invariance.

QuoteIf time is at an extreme premium,

"Extreme" is vague whether you underline it or not. But the real problem word here is "if." If time isn't at a premium, it's not an adventure. It's a leisurely stroll.

One thing I'll add in about the scarcity of arrows.

I've been going through the Calendar of Closed Rolls looking for prices of stuff in the middle ages and there were several instances of the King of England giving direction to gather a certain amount of sheaves of arrows from his Sheriffs and they were not able to fulfill the full amounts.

Once I looked into how arrows were made, there is a lot more to them than just the arrowhead.  The shaft has to be made of seasoned wood with the grain going a particular way.  Then it has to be turned by hand to be tapered, so the the rear diameter is 1/2 inch and the front diameter is 3/8 inch.  The feathers then need to be gathered from geese (peasants could actually pay their taxes with goose feathers) and tied/glued to the shaft.

Quote from: LordBP on March 16, 2023, 06:08:25 PM
One thing I'll add in about the scarcity of arrows.

I've been going through the Calendar of Closed Rolls looking for prices of stuff in the middle ages and there were several instances of the King of England giving direction to gather a certain amount of sheaves of arrows from his Sheriffs and they were not able to fulfill the full amounts.

Once I looked into how arrows were made, there is a lot more to them than just the arrowhead.  The shaft has to be made of seasoned wood with the grain going a particular way.  Then it has to be turned by hand to be tapered, so the the rear diameter is 1/2 inch and the front diameter is 3/8 inch.  The feathers then need to be gathered from geese (peasants could actually pay their taxes with goose feathers) and tied/glued to the shaft.

It depends. Which by the way is reason why you should really take with a grain of salt this idea of the price of a sheaf of arrows being the same as a longbow. Near as I can tell, there was a wide variety of methods for making bows and making arrows. For arrows, what you cite is on the most time-consuming end of the spectrum, which clocks in at around 2 hours per arrow. So a 12-hour work day will churn out only 6 arrows. On the opposite extreme, there were types of arrows and methods that would allow a fletcher to churn out 100 per day.

For bows, you also find a huge range. On the short end is 2 hours. Same as the long end for arrows. If you match that bow with those arrows, yeah, I could easily buy that their prices would be very similar. But on the opposite extreme, some composite bows could take up to 4 years to make. Now that's not going to be solid labor time. There's at least a 1 year lead in time where you just have to allow the materials to do their thing. But when it comes to the actual labor, it's a lot more than just 2 hours. And even just the prospect of waiting a year, tying up those resources,  There is just no way the idea that the price on that bow will be the same as a sheaf of arrows even remotely passes a smell test.

I look at it like this. About 20 years ago, I mail ordered this off-brand acoustic guitar because it was cheap. I'm not going to pay serious money for a guitar I don't get to play first. The base model was $60. I got the electric-acoustic version that was $90. My brother got the 3/4 size version for $30. But the strings I used in general at the time were the most top of the line strings I could find. $15 per set. A "sheaf" of strings, 6 per set, would be 4 sets. And that would cost $60. Same as the base-model of this guitar. And by the way, this combo works out phenomenally. It sounds great. And both my guitar and my brother's guitar are still in use today and stay in tune really well when you use good strings.

However, if I ever suggested the price of a guitar is typically equal to four sets of strings, people would look at me like I'm crazy. It's not a generalizable data point. A "sheaf" of average quality strings is probably going to be in the ballpark of 5% the price of an average quality guitar.

So what's going on in D&D? What types and methods are being assumed for bows and arrows? It's spelled out in the DMG. Longbows and composite bows are assumed to be the kind that need the 1 year lead-in time and then takes up anywhere from 6-15 days of labor time. As sure as I can be of anything, there's no way that bow ever sold for the same amount as a sheaf of arrows. As for type and method for arrows, it's less clear. Only that a bowyer/fletcher/arrowsmith can make them, and that you need one of them for every 80 archers. And of course the note about how many arrowheads a blacksmith can make, but the blacksmith is assumed to be able to do that while keeping up with ordinary day to day demands.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 16, 2023, 08:41:22 PM

Quote from: LordBP on March 16, 2023, 06:08:25 PM
One thing I'll add in about the scarcity of arrows.

I've been going through the Calendar of Closed Rolls looking for prices of stuff in the middle ages and there were several instances of the King of England giving direction to gather a certain amount of sheaves of arrows from his Sheriffs and they were not able to fulfill the full amounts.

Once I looked into how arrows were made, there is a lot more to them than just the arrowhead.  The shaft has to be made of seasoned wood with the grain going a particular way.  Then it has to be turned by hand to be tapered, so the the rear diameter is 1/2 inch and the front diameter is 3/8 inch.  The feathers then need to be gathered from geese (peasants could actually pay their taxes with goose feathers) and tied/glued to the shaft.

It depends. Which by the way is reason why you should really take with a grain of salt this idea of the price of a sheaf of arrows being the same as a longbow. Near as I can tell, there was a wide variety of methods for making bows and making arrows. For arrows, what you cite is on the most time-consuming end of the spectrum, which clocks in at around 2 hours per arrow. So a 12-hour work day will churn out only 6 arrows. On the opposite extreme, there were types of arrows and methods that would allow a fletcher to churn out 100 per day.

For bows, you also find a huge range. On the short end is 2 hours. Same as the long end for arrows. If you match that bow with those arrows, yeah, I could easily buy that their prices would be very similar. But on the opposite extreme, some composite bows could take up to 4 years to make. Now that's not going to be solid labor time. There's at least a 1 year lead in time where you just have to allow the materials to do their thing. But when it comes to the actual labor, it's a lot more than just 2 hours. And even just the prospect of waiting a year, tying up those resources,  There is just no way the idea that the price on that bow will be the same as a sheaf of arrows even remotely passes a smell test.

I look at it like this. About 20 years ago, I mail ordered this off-brand acoustic guitar because it was cheap. I'm not going to pay serious money for a guitar I don't get to play first. The base model was $60. I got the electric-acoustic version that was $90. My brother got the 3/4 size version for $30. But the strings I used in general at the time were the most top of the line strings I could find. $15 per set. A "sheaf" of strings, 6 per set, would be 4 sets. And that would cost $60. Same as the base-model of this guitar. And by the way, this combo works out phenomenally. It sounds great. And both my guitar and my brother's guitar are still in use today and stay in tune really well when you use good strings.

However, if I ever suggested the price of a guitar is typically equal to four sets of strings, people would look at me like I'm crazy. It's not a generalizable data point. A "sheaf" of average quality strings is probably going to be in the ballpark of 5% the price of an average quality guitar.

So what's going on in D&D? What types and methods are being assumed for bows and arrows? It's spelled out in the DMG. Longbows and composite bows are assumed to be the kind that need the 1 year lead-in time and then takes up anywhere from 6-15 days of labor time. As sure as I can be of anything, there's no way that bow ever sold for the same amount as a sheaf of arrows. As for type and method for arrows, it's less clear. Only that a bowyer/fletcher/arrowsmith can make them, and that you need one of them for every 80 archers. And of course the note about how many arrowheads a blacksmith can make, but the blacksmith is assumed to be able to do that while keeping up with ordinary day to day demands.

I'm talking historical and not a certain game.

You can look at this book to see that at one point the cost of a sheaf of arrows and a longbow were about the same (within a couple of pence) in England (1350s).

Page 56 and 199 have the prices paid.
https://archive.org/details/calendarofcloser06grea/page/56/mode/2up (https://archive.org/details/calendarofcloser06grea/page/56/mode/2up)

Page 601 and 602 have the prices paid.
https://archive.org/details/calendarofcloser10grea/page/600/mode/2up (https://archive.org/details/calendarofcloser10grea/page/600/mode/2up)

Quote from: LordBP on March 16, 2023, 09:19:07 PM
I'm talking historical and not a certain game.

I'm talking historical, too. History is a diverse thing. And I'm taking it a step further to what time what place and what tech is being referenced by the game.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 16, 2023, 01:49:41 PM
If you're only tapping the cart when you go for a nap at night, then yeah, I could see you blowing through a sheaf of arrows. Not in a dungeon because dungeons generally are not the best environment for using bows.

My presumption is that the majority of the fighting is happening in the dungeon. If you're fighting in the wilderness, I would assume you're bringing your cart along, and that means you have a chance to top off your quiver between battles. How many battles are you facing in the wilderness that you are also electing to walk the entire time?

QuoteIt's not 1 to 2 months salary for a peasant. That's for a specially skilled mercenary. For peasants it's 5+ months salary. Arrows are far from cheap.

I don't care what profession we're using for comparison. The party doesn't work those professions - they're adventurers whose proceeds far outstrip the wages a mercenary or a peasant or almost any other mundane profession. The price of arrows is cheap or expensive relative to your income. A cheeseburger at McDonalds is cheap to most people, but they're expensive for people who are flat broke. Past the first session or so, players are already taking in amounts of gold that would be life changing for common folk. Hence the jokes people have made for decades about how people really should retire before mid levels anyway.

Quote60 arrows refers to soldiers at war. You want to add horses, you're paying for horsemen archers or hobilars rather than foot archers
...Well, your experience is not relevant evidence to your point if you are not observing these rules. And without evidence, all you have is a series of absurd claims.

You don't use the bow while riding the horse. You use a mule or a horse to pull a cart or carry your bags and the cart/bags have your surplus equipment. If you're at war you need a wagon train of supplies or you can't go far anyway.

I don't see how what I'm suggesting is absurd. Arrows come in quivers of 20 and are affordable relative to anything else on the price sheet. You spend 1 or 2 arrows per round, meaning you have 10-20 rounds of fire in a single quiver. You or the enemy won't generally survive 10-20 rounds in any single combat, so you have an opportunity to scavenge, recover, or refill arrows after any engagement. The goal is to avoid a prolonged or moving engagement in the first place. Any time you think you need gobs of arrows for some reason you can haul them in a cart (which I assumed was standard practice but apparently this is disputed). I personally find it more absurd that characters feel some kind of constant time pressure to push push push until exhaustion, that they don't bring any surplus supplies, and that animals and carts are not part of the core experience.

Quote"Extreme" is vague whether you underline it or not. But the real problem word here is "if." If time isn't at a premium, it's not an adventure. It's a leisurely stroll.

In a dungeon crawl: What is forcing me to delve until exhaustion? What is forcing me to never skip a day of delving so I'm constantly running low on spell slots and supplies? The kinds of things that force that tend to be contrivances of the GM or the adventure to make things challenging (aka not a simulation but rather a game). That's not a big deal in itself, but if we're constantly trying to actively undermine the players then that kind of antagonism is corrosive to a believable sim. If the GM tells me "it's an adventure, not a stroll" then I'm not really hearing a compelling argument for playing against my character's interests and walking myself into a problem when it's perfectly avoidable with a little planning and patience.

Maybe my experiences are totally aberrant. Maybe there are tons of tables out there sweating bullets about whether or not they can afford the next bundle of arrows in town at level 2 or 3. Maybe! If you tell me that's your experience, then ok! Not much point in debating your experience.

In my experience though, these are not concerns, arrows are not a limiting factor of the party, and a pinch of preparation and planning totally removes these arrow-scale considerations from affecting your group past the very start of the game (until name level).

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 16, 2023, 09:27:27 PM

Quote from: LordBP on March 16, 2023, 09:19:07 PM
I'm talking historical and not a certain game.

I'm talking historical, too. History is a diverse thing. And I'm taking it a step further to what time what place and what tech is being referenced by the game.

But you're talking about composite bows. Not the self bows used in England. Most people hear longbow and think English longbow, not a composite bow.

Quote from: S'mon on March 17, 2023, 07:27:10 AM
But you're talking about composite bows. Not the self bows used in England. Most people hear longbow and think English longbow, not a composite bow.

No. I talked about those, too. I covered the entire range and asked, okay, what is D&D doing. And the one in the PHB doesn't seem to be a self bow. And I don't think you get to speak for "most people." Are "most people" even aware of just how long a long bow is?

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 17, 2023, 07:58:15 AM

Quote from: S'mon on March 17, 2023, 07:27:10 AM
But you're talking about composite bows. Not the self bows used in England. Most people hear longbow and think English longbow, not a composite bow.

No. I talked about those, too. I covered the entire range and asked, okay, what is D&D doing. And the one in the PHB doesn't seem to be a self bow. And I don't think you get to speak for "most people." Are "most people" even aware of just how long a long bow is?

I was going by So what's going on in D&D? What types and methods are being assumed for bows and arrows? It's spelled out in the DMG. Longbows and composite bows are assumed to be the kind that need the 1 year lead-in time and then takes up anywhere from 6-15 days of labor time
Also, don't be a dick.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on March 16, 2023, 11:35:18 PM
My presumption is that the majority of the fighting is happening in the dungeon.

Saying you don't run out of arrows when doing things where a bow is of minimal use is like saying you don't run out of lamp oil outdoors in broad daylight. To make the claim that you don't need to track arrows, you absolutely must do so with the presumption that you're actually doing things the bow is good for. You don't get to choose the venue.

That does not preclude the dungeon. We've had "dungeons" that were a network of massive caverns covered with glowing moss so that light and space permit full bow function. So when you automatically have to pivot to wilderness the second it's suggested that bows might actually be useful, you're confessing that you know full well your argument does not hold.

QuoteIf you're fighting in the wilderness, I would assume you're bringing your cart along, and that means you have a chance to top off your quiver between battles. How many battles are you facing in the wilderness that you are also electing to walk the entire time?

The supply is what you have in your cart, not your quiver. The resupply occurs when you reach town, not when you reach your cart. The relevant timescale is the trek, not the battle. And yeah, if you've strayed outside of civilized lands, it's going to be a long walk.

QuoteI don't care what profession we're using for comparison. The party doesn't work those professions - they're adventurers whose proceeds far outstrip the wages a mercenary or a peasant or almost any other mundane profession. The price of arrows is cheap or expensive relative to your income. A cheeseburger at McDonalds is cheap to most people, but they're expensive for people who are flat broke.

I used the archer because using arrows is the nature of the profession. The fact that 1st level adventurers in your game are rich and can easily afford expensive things just means they can easily afford expensive things. If arrows were cheap, you wouldn't need to be rich to afford them.

QuoteYou don't use the bow while riding the horse. You use a mule or a horse to pull a cart or carry your bags and the cart/bags have your surplus equipment. If you're at war you need a wagon train of supplies or you can't go far anyway.

I don't see how what I'm suggesting is absurd.

It's because you miss key details that flip the conclusion on its head.

For instance, just right here, you stating that you can't go far without a wagon train. I can give the devil his due. It sounds reasonable on the surface. After all, supply lines are a vital consideration in war making. Fuck yeah, I want supplies. Juice me up with supplies. Cut me off from supplies and I'm not going to get far.

The problem is the fact that war wagons and carts o' plenty don't travel well over rough terrain. The second you go off-roading, they're going to slow you down. And even then, you better be sticking to hills, grasslands, and maybe deserts. Even if you just throw packs on horses, you're not getting through dense forest. In these cases, you can't go far with a wagon train.

So in truth the matter depends on terrain. Your claim is just not valid because it assumes facts not in evidence. It's absurd because we would have to assume our enemies in war just happened to put roads exactly where we want to send our soldiers. And for PC adventurers, the world would have to be so dungeon-delver friendly that we've got roads that are well-maintained, not overgrown, leading right up to the dungeon entrance where we can park our carts just outside.

QuoteArrows come in quivers of 20 and are affordable relative to anything else on the price sheet. You spend 1 or 2 arrows per round, meaning you have 10-20 rounds of fire in a single quiver. You or the enemy won't generally survive 10-20 rounds in any single combat, so you have an opportunity to scavenge, recover, or refill arrows after any engagement. The goal is to avoid a prolonged or moving engagement in the first place. Any time you think you need gobs of arrows for some reason you can haul them in a cart (which I assumed was standard practice but apparently this is disputed). I personally find it more absurd that characters feel some kind of constant time pressure to push push push until exhaustion, that they don't bring any surplus supplies, and that animals and carts are not part of the core experience.

In 1E, arrows come singly or in dozens. Quiver is not a fixed unit. It's just the thing that holds the arrows, and quiver will typically carry anywhere from 12 to 60 arrows, although on the higher end they're going to be packed in there and not loose for quick access.

Arrows are affordable IF you can afford them after you've invested most of your starting gold in a good bow. 1E is very careful in its pricing so starting characters actually do have to make certain choices. For fighters, the big choice is whether to get good armor or a good bow. Once the highest priority items are chosen, starting PCs typically have very little left over for odds and ends. A dozen arrows costs the same as a tinder box. A sheaf of arrows the same as a backpack. These are legit choices players have to make for starting PCs.

The RoF on a bow is 2. That means you get 6 rounds of fire out of 1 dozen arrows, 12 rounds out of 2.

1E makes the numbers super easy to crunch for how long a battle will last, because AC is equal to the number of hits in 20 you will take from a level 0, then you adjust that number upwards according to the skill of the attacker. So an orc, for instance, with its 6 AC being attacked by a 1st or 2nd level fighter will take 7 hits out of every 20 shots. With an orc's d8 hit points and an arrow's d6 damage, it's usually going to take a second hit to kill the orc. So we're already talking an average of a half dozen arrows to take down 1 orc. 4 orcs will run a sheaf out.

QuoteIn a dungeon crawl: What is forcing me to delve until exhaustion?

Well, first I never said it had to be a dungeon crawl. Second, exhaustion is vague. In the rules, fatigue applies to forced marches. Which is fine, considering wilderness adventures was one of the possibilities I listed. Or do you mean exhausting hit points, or exhausting arrows, or exhausting spells? Or is it just being used in a hyperbolic sense with no specific meaning at all?

Because let's be clear. I never said anything at all about going to the point of exhaustion. I just said there's a limit of how long a quest characters can take on, and hit points above and beyond those recoverable daily plus a safety buffer add to the staying power of the character. And that is the relevant context in which to analyze the higher hit point ranges.

QuoteWhat is forcing me to never skip a day of delving so I'm constantly running low on spell slots and supplies? The kinds of things that force that tend to be contrivances of the GM or the adventure to make things challenging (aka not a simulation but rather a game).

Same thing that's forcing you to go off to a dungeon, taking advantage of the complimentary valet parking for your cart, to lose all your hit points to 4 orcs just so you can say at least you didn't run out of arrows.

Which is nothing at all.

Nothing is forcing you to do it. You do it because you want the cartfulls of treasure guaranteed to all new characters on their first quest.

Well, if you want the cartfulls of artifacts and relics down on the 13th dungeon level, you better have some stamina in you, because you're not going to be able to run back to your cart every time you fall below 80% of your maximum arrows. There's no contrivance in that.

Just like there's no contrivance in that there are some places in the heart of the wilderness, full of dangerous creatures, where there are no roads for carts, no towns, that take several weeks or even months to get to, especially when you account for the possibility of getting lost, where it just so happens the thing you want could be found.

In fact, if it weren't that way, I would call it contrived. If there's something of great value with a nice clear road straight to it, why hasn't someone else already taken it? That it's suspended in stasis just waiting for adventurers to come along, that's contrived. Buried 13 levels deep where no wimp that can't stand to be more than an hour's walk from their cart will ever dare to go is a perfectly uncontrived reason why it doesn't look like a WalMart at 2AM on Black Friday.

QuoteMaybe my experiences are totally aberrant. Maybe there are tons of tables out there sweating bullets about whether or not they can afford the next bundle of arrows in town at level 2 or 3. Maybe! If you tell me that's your experience, then ok! Not much point in debating your experience.

In my experience though, these are not concerns, arrows are not a limiting factor of the party, and a pinch of preparation and planning totally removes these arrow-scale considerations from affecting your group past the very start of the game (until name level).

It's got zero to do with differences in experience. If that's all it was, you could at least understand what I'm saying. Like why some journeys would be long. Or why a longbow would even have a 21" range when lantern light only gives you 8". I mean that alone should have been a hint to you that making arguments about dungeon crawls to make a case about arrows is itself babbling nonsense. You should be able to see that regardless of what your personal experiences might have been. Even if that's the only way you've ever played the game, that absurdity is what you should be questioning.

But let's not get away your claim that the rules are at odds with the simulation here. That's the bit that's relevant to thread, not the finer points of D&D. The real problem is you continue to make bad assumptions that completely invert the conclusion, and every single one of those bad assumptions are contradicted by something that can be found in the rulebooks.

Quote from: S'mon on March 17, 2023, 12:12:43 PM
I was going by So what's going on in D&D? What types and methods are being assumed for bows and arrows? It's spelled out in the DMG. Longbows and composite bows are assumed to be the kind that need the 1 year lead-in time and then takes up anywhere from 6-15 days of labor time
Also, don't be a dick.

You're the one being a dick. If you can't be bothered to read the whole post, don't reply. That's disrespectful. Especially when you get it wrong.

Quote from: Lunamancer on March 17, 2023, 01:23:30 PMSaying you don't run out of arrows when doing things where a bow is of minimal use is like saying you don't run out of lamp oil outdoors in broad daylight.

Which is highly relevant given that dungeon crawling is the original style of play which classically pre-occupies much of the campaign. I acknowledged earlier there are specific circumstances where tracking your arrows may be the thing to do - frequent overland battles in deep forest would be an example, just as you're at risk of running out of water in a long overland trek through the desert. I pointed out players can avoid the problem and asked why they're walking into this problem.

Most published modules which sprint to mind keep the adventuring site relatively close to civilization. In B2, you can take a road about 3 miles east and only a quarter mile offroad to reach the caves of chaos. It's 15 miles by road from Gosterwick to Arden Vul (the cliffside road at the very end at least poses a challenge for carts). Barrowmaze and others do better, shortening the distance to something like 10 miles, but it's fully offroad through circumstances very dangerous for animals or a cart. Almost everything tends to be a day's worth of travel out of town or less.

QuoteIt's absurd because we would have to assume our enemies in war just happened to put roads exactly where we want to send our soldiers. And for PC adventurers, the world would have to be so dungeon-delver friendly that we've got roads that are well-maintained, not overgrown, leading right up to the dungeon entrance where we can park our carts just outside.

Since nations often trade, yes roads to strategic locations probably exist. Those roads aren't always the most direct route or the fastest route, but they're reliable. You don't need a road to the dungeon entrance, you just need terrain which renders it plausible enough to be worth the effort. If the game includes charts of things like your horse breaking its ankle from taking a bad step or your cart breaks an axle or whatever, that's fantastic! Exactly why you shouldn't bring a cart everywhere you go.

QuoteOr do you mean exhausting hit points, or exhausting arrows, or exhausting spells? Or is it just being used in a hyperbolic sense with no specific meaning at all?

Yes, resource exhaustion, not forced marches. If I'm level 5 or level 20 I just have to worry about whether or not my plan is sustainable and repeatable. That means optimizing for the resources that matter. If I can now lay on hands twice per day instead of once, that only really matters if I was pacing myself on the basis of that resource. Ditto arrows, HP, anything else. The limiting factor for an adventure is almost always spell slots, from my experience. Adding more arrows to the quiver just prevents the "gun" from going "click" when you pull the trigger, and if it ever went "click" in the first place you've probably screwed up somewhere along the way as a player or as a group. If you survive that mistake, your goal as a player is to eliminate that entire aspect of the game from ever surfacing ever again by applying a little forethought and planning. It's within your power. Once you are aware of this the only thing that re-introduces the problem to the game is the antagonism of the GM, or player laziness/error. Sometimes there are actual rules, which is a lovely thing to find.

QuoteBut let's not get away your claim that the rules are at odds with the simulation here. That's the bit that's relevant to thread, not the finer points of D&D.

I agree the finer points of D&D RoF rules are not crucial to the discussion, so we'll move on. I can understand what you're saying. I'm not sure if you can understand what I'm saying or why I'm saying it, especially since you suggest I'm babbling nonsense, saying things with no significance. You speak of respect but are not demonstrating it. I encourage you to engage more kindly and I'll do the same.

I'm not suggesting the rules are at odds with the simulation, I'm trying to highlight some things about the sim in AD&D (and other games). I'm suggesting the level of simulation introduced by arrow-tracking neither significantly impacts the game nor does it model anything meaningful about the underlying dynamics of the world. Sim rules tend to model some things in great detail and then totally drop other aspects of the sim that actually make the world interesting, that make these details meaningful, that make the world make sense. People run out of arrows in real life. Because arrows are expensive. Because recovering arrows is easier said than done. Because it's a lot of physical effort to actual lug around arrows, to handle the logistics I've described with a cart, because all of this is a playbook I can describe to you but putting it into practice in real life is a complex endeavor. The sim doesn't model this and tracking arrows 1-by-1 doesn't do anything to resolve the issue. That's my problem.

In an RPG, I'm the perfect master of my mind. Effort in RPGs is cheap, because you say you do a thing and it happens (or you roll). You say you wait for some time to pass and some time passes. You can eat nothing but gruel because you never have to taste it. You can pass a month in town because you're never bored - you're playing a game and you skipped the boring parts. You can run my playbook because characters never get tired, cut corners, or surrender their routines because they're pissed off about the dice game they lost last night. You never have to worry about sleepless nights, boredom, anxiety, or all the rest that drive people to engage in the world in ways which are suboptimal and create interesting bumpiness and texture. If these things ever come to the fore and start to matter, it's because the players decided to make this a problem for themselves. If you have arrow problems it's because you decided you wanted to have arrow problems. Or maybe it's because the GM is being a little antagonistic with the players (to the benefit of the game and to the detriment of the sim).

To incorporate these things into the sim properly requires things like event tables, rules that focus on the underlying dynamics of human situations, rules that make a player's translation of their will into their character's actions less perfect. People in real life fail to rotate and replenish their stock of supplies, they fail to maintain their equipment, they let their ego get in the way of their job. All kinds of mistakes. The questions asked by the game are trivial. Do you maintain your equipment, as of course you should? If you stand watch, do you get sleepy and fuck up? When you try to execute on your plan, do you forget something? Cut a corner because you get lazy? When you spend a month in town, do you get bored and do something stupid? Can you handle the absolute skin-crawling grime of camping in the wilderness and crawling through a grave for days on end without a chance to wash off the dirt?

This is all to say nothing about what happens when you play the rules straight and see what happens when you scale up. AD&D holds up wonderfully compared to almost any modern game. That's probably because of its roots in wargaming, and the statistical foundation of the game. You need to hit scale in AD&D for the rules to kick in and start doing the useful stuff it's trying to model. It's great when get there - a lot of fun. It's great at low levels where everything is so threadbare that sheer scarcity makes everything interesting (as you say, do I buy a backpack or a bow?). At the mid levels where the levels drag on and you're neither hitting scale nor facing scarcity? Not as good.

Not everything needs something like a stat. But it needs to raise issues to the fore that are the parts of imperfect reality which complicate otherwise perfect play. Have the rules challenge players in the kinds of ways you'd see an antagonistic GM do it, and make sure these rules scale. It needs to make sense so if I run 10 thousand iterations of the sim the world hasn't collapsed from all the wagon axles breaking on rainy days. I'd like to see more games attempt to model this a bit more, and try to do so with core rules that worry more about the dynamics and the modeling and how things scale than perfectly modeling or describing something like terminal velocity.

Quote from: Itachi on March 14, 2023, 09:35:11 AMAs with all media, just like I want different things from different genres (horror x comedy movies, individual x team sports, euro x ameri boardgames, etc) I also expect different things from different TTRPGs. So sure, I'll want to track ammo on more gritty/sim games like Twilight 2k or Runequest, but not necessarily when playing narrative/drama games like Monsterhearts or Vampire 5E.

This was the point I was trying to make about simulating a genre. If I was running a game based on a gritty dungeon expedition, I'd track arrows. If the game was about Robin Hood type characters, then tracking arrows wouldn't be a high priority on the things I'd need to simulate.

The main issue is that the more difficult you make one particular weapon to use, then the less likely players are to use that particular weapon. So if players are required to track each arrow and can only carry a handful, then bows will be less popular. Similarly, if the rules give swords a breakage chance and swords can be worn down which reduces damage over time, the players might switch to only using maces.

This means that tracking arrows cannot be considered without also considering all the other factors being simulated combat: armor wear, weapon damage, encumbrance, etc. You also need to consider the genre and feel the game is going for. IOW, whether you should track arrows or not has almost nothing to do with how expensive arrows historically were.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on March 18, 2023, 04:25:18 PM
This means that tracking arrows cannot be considered without also considering all the other factors being simulated combat: armor wear, weapon damage, encumbrance, etc. You also need to consider the genre and feel the game is going for. IOW, whether you should track arrows or not has almost nothing to do with how expensive arrows historically were.

That's kind of begging the question which is the heart of this topic, though.  You are arguing entirely from effects.  The desire to have simulation is to link to process (and thus causes).  In fact, bows are quite excellent weapons in many ways.  The reasons they aren't dominant is because arrow strings get wet, arrows are time-consuming to make, etc.  Swords are valued because of their versatility. If the system in question can't show that swords are versatile and that bows are sometimes fragile, then the system has artificially made bows relatively better than swords than they were in reality. This may or may not be a good thing for the effect you want.  If it is, you've got no issue.  If it is not, then you can try to get the effect you want by some other kind of change. Maybe this other change works well, maybe it doesn't.  Or you can impose some hint of reality on the process, and thus have the setting/system naturally lead to players not favoring the bow quite that much.

I don't agree with the Robin Hood example, either.  That's also begging the question.  You assume that the players in that genre should just be taking shots without any regards to running out of arrows.  Perhaps in some slices of a "Robin Hood" game that is even correct.  If I'm playing a Robin Hood game, I want closer feel to the first tales, which has the Merry Men using all kinds of weapons, considering their shots carefully, etc. 

Scarcity isn't the only factor.  And it's more or less relevant in one game or another depending on the goals.  But it absolutely is relevant in the kind of games that care about simulation at all.

Greetings!

Hmmm. Well, wagons and carts certainly have their uses. The Mongol armies regularly traveled with large strike groups traveling weeks or more ahead into enemy territory, accompanied only by running horses with multiple packs of *thousands* of arrows, and minimal supplies of water and easily-portable tools and supplies. Much of the Mongol's supplies featured cleverly designed or modified tools and implements that were collapsible--or you could break them down into a few different parts for easier transport on a horse. A month or more, behind such a force, would be a more extensive wagon train, with more supplies, heavier tools, rations, tents and the like.

Also, the Mongols customarily loaded horses down with packs of arrows. The Mongols would organize several thousand horses, solely loaded with arrows, and hide them in hidden valleys nearby to an upcoming battle. Wagons were not necessary for carrying arrows. The Mongols would have literally tens of thousands of arrows loaded up and ready to go for any army, preparing for a fight. The Mongols then just rotated their formations in a machine-like precision, forward, retreat, forward, retreat, always cycling back and getting more arrows. Using multiple, separate prongs of carefully led formations, the Mongols army could this keep up a continuous barrage of clouds of arrows--thousands and thousands--of arrows against an enemy force. Most enemies brought into this process were quickly and easily slaughtered, with very little casualties suffered by the victorious Mongol armies.

The Mongols were also very self-sufficient, and a force of 1,000 or even 10,000 warriors--(Known as a Tumen)--could travel, explore, and fight for a considerable length of time without needing a supply train. The Mongols were brutal and tough, and lived off the land. They could also drink mare's blood, subsist on birds, fish, and rodents, and most warriors could also craft adequate bows and arrows themselves, while in the field.

On horseback, the Mongols regularly traveled 40 to 70 miles in a day, every day, in any weather. Sometimes, even faster travel times were reached, especially by the fast-moving professional messengers of the Yaam System.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 18, 2023, 10:03:19 PMYou are arguing entirely from effects.  The desire to have simulation is to link to process (and thus causes).  In fact, bows are quite excellent weapons in many ways.  The reasons they aren't dominant is because arrow strings get wet, arrows are time-consuming to make, etc.

I don't know what you mean when you say I'm "arguing from effects".

-A bow can get ruined by water and arrows are expensive and bulky

-A sword can bend, break, rust, and get dull

-Armor can get dented, straps can be cut, it is exhausting to wear in combat, and rigid armor makes it hard to squeeze through tight spots.

-Even boots work better or worse in different conditions depending on whether or not they have hobnails.

There are millions of things a DM can model for his specific game. Not only will the choice of which things to model affect how the players play the game, but the decision to not model something will affect the game as well. Tracking arrows isn't special in this regard.

Also, there are a couple ways to handle arrows:

1-You can track them individually (if your combat system is suitably detailed enough)
2-You can track them abstractly with a per-adventure "Arrow Replacement Fee" of 100 gp
3-Or you can track them narratively, like the FFG Star Wars game, where the GM rolling well on an NPC attack might cause the player's bow to run out of arrows.

I'd say that the first two are sufficiently simulationist whereas the third method wouldn't be.

I generally like both quite crunchy skill-based simulative characters and various resources to simulate world outside of just my bias - but honest compared to Six Cultures article Mr. Macris - I do not think simulationism really constitutes separate culture, and let's say ACKS considering it's clear old D&D roots will fall - depending of DM/players prefered mode and mentality into Classic or OSR gameplay. (Fact that characters are basically limited to classic heroic D&D classes variant - will enforce that - it's not game about being ANYONE - but Adventurer Conqueror King after all).

And let's also note that within cultures specific characteristic of OSR is open game sandbox, it's in fact more important quality than old school D&D mechanics - which it shares with Classic.
So I'd make radical take and put all real sandbox games in one actual culture - and mechanical preferences are less important in this regard.