Gamist Goodness

[LordSmerf]

Recently i've been wanting to play a Gamist game.  Something that's all about powering up your character and very Players vs. DM oriented.  I know that some of you have played such things before.  What i'm looking for here is 1)the types of games you played that did this, and 2)what they did well and what they could improve upon.

As always, your time and input are appreciated.

Thomas

[Mike Holmes]

Old school D&D did this very well, of course. Plain ole, "go to the dungeon, kill some creatures, take their stuff, go to town, and power up," cycle is classic. I think that Donjon is an attempt to outdo that in a way, but in a way that introduces some elements that I don't agree are conducive to purely Gamist fun. T&T, of course is being extensively discussed for just this reason. Rune is often bandied about as a newer sort of Gamist RPG.

What I find most RPGs don't do well, in terms of Gamism, is to create arenas of intense strategy. Take D&D for a start. What do you have as decision making elements, really? Basically, it's all about managing a very few resources. These come down to Equipment, Hit Points, Magic (replenishable, and non-replanishable), and, if the GM's monintoring it, logistics stuff like food and water. In fact, this is so much the case that at one point I was going around saying that D&D didn't have a combat system. It has a resource management system.

Basically, the whole game devolves into an excercise in knowing how far you can push your luck. Do you have enough resources to make it through the next encounter? If so, press on. If not, go home and incur the losses associated with recouping your resources - the cost of a room at the inn, often.

Quite often, this is all too easy. That is, the recuperation costs are minimal in most cases (especially later in a D&D career). So a party could go to the dungeon, sack one room, and then go back home again. Leaving very little chance of failure. In fact, the only thing preventing players from selecting this option is that it's not real efficient (you do lose some money paying for the uninjured to rest at the inn), but moreso it's boring. In effect, pushing your luck becomes the challenge. Like a dare in which the GM is prodding the players to see how far their bravado will take them.

In fact, often to prevent really hardcore strategists from doing the "one room at a time" dungeon, GMs have to resort to threats like the inhabitants getting better organized with each trip, or, worse, leaving (in which case, what? we cease to play?).

This is just poor game design in the larger Gamist sense. T&T fixes some small things, but really isn't all that much better. In fact, in both these games, "tricks and traps" become a large part of play in an attempt to engage the players in what are small sub-games, effectively, that have nothing to do with the rules per se. Player ingenuity is tested directly in what are, basically, mind games. This isn't a bad thing, but it's not a result of the system at all. Any game can include these (indeed books of these were good sellers because they could be used in any system usually with small modification).

Donjon, while fun for how it turns certain paradigms on it's head, has basically all the same amount and types of strategy as these games.

Rune, OTOH, takes an interesting new direction. Basically, realizing that resource management for a one unit wargame is pretty simple, they actually placed most of the strategy in the GM's hands. See, in all the other games I've mentioned, the GM is a referee. Having unlimited power, there's no way that they can compete in any legitimate sense. The best you get is GM's trying to make a dungeon (or challenge) that's so tough, and creatively designed, that the PCs die. But not so tough that the players thought that it was an "unfair" challenge. Well, Rune has a point system for all of this. So, this informal GM challenge becomes formalized. And then Rune takes the final step, and ensures that all players will get to expericnce the strategic part by rotating the GM.

This makes Rune one of the only RPGs that comes close to being as tactically and strategically interesting as the wargames from which they came. Some few RPGs go into such tactical detail, that even one unit becomes interesting to play on this level. Hero System is one example. Players actually have quite a few choices each time their character gets to move (and chargen is challenging to an extent as well). So, from that perspective, it has elements of an interesting Gamist game.

Other systems struggle between the "Realism and Playability" debate, which it turns out is really all about trying to play Gamist and other modes simultaneously. To be sure, one could make an RPG that was too complex even for a hardcore Gamist to enjoy. But I don't know that we've seen it. And I'm including Rolemaster, and worse in this evaluation. If you really want to dedicate to Gamism, there's way more that can be done than has been, IMO.

TROS does miraculous things with dice in this way (Burning Wheel, too, with scripting). The combat has so much Gamist strategy to it that I'm surprised it doesn't get commented on more often. Here's a game that is fairly complex in it's strategy, but creates that complexity with elegance. Like Chess or Go, it's "Simple to learn, difficult to master". So I think that we can see that there are ways to include intense strategy without making a game slow and tiresome. If you're looking for a way to go, I'd just focus on games like these, and torque up the pressures and focus.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Do a search on Tunnels & Trolls here at the Forge. You'll see a GM (me) developing skills about player-GM conflict, in the good sense, pretty much from scratch.

Best,
Ron

[LordSmerf]

Thanks Mike, Ron.

I looked at some of the Tunnels and Trolls stuff a while back (Kill me a player character (spit)) which is what really got me started down this road.  Now i must admit that i like Narrative play as well, but i find that i have a Gamist craving that crops up every now and then that must be satisfied.  Turn based tactical combat with other thinking minds is something i enjoy.  T&T seems a little too abstract for the combat preferences i'm looking for.  Hex or square maps (ala D&D3e) resource management, bonuses from tactical decisions, etc...

I'll look to the T&T stuff you recommended Ron, as it may help me better formulate what i'm looking for...

Thanks again.

Thomas

[Ron Edwards]

Seems to me that D&D3E would be exactly what you're looking for. I don't know 3.5 at all, so deciding between 3 and 3.5 is up to you.

For inspiration, neat stuff, and all manner of what I consider to be the most constructive approach to playing 3E, see Monte Cook's website.

Best,
Ron

[C. Edwards]

Monte also has a nice review of 3.5 and the differences between it and 3E.

-Chris

[rafial]

Some people may disagree, but I've found Savage Worlds to be a very rewarding system for Gamist play.  The aspects I've found compelling:

 * For me, the rules provide enough crunch for tactical interest, but are simple enought to avoid having to stop play for endless rules flipping

 * The explicit encouragement in the rules to allow players to run both their characters and their allies in combat situations really emphasizes the 'mini-wargame' aspect of it all, and provides interest to me, since as a player I've now got multiple moderately detailed units instead of the single highly detailed unit of D&D.

As to whether SW really is gamist or not, all I know is we spent at least 20 minutes post game last session debating whether or not my character, who is becoming the heavy, should take Frenzy or Sweep as his next level up option. :)

[LordSmerf]

I was hoping to avoid D&D since i have yet to truly satisfy my Gamism with it...  It does come close sometimes...

Anybody got a link to Monte Cook's website?  Or should i already know it?

Thomas

[hix]

It was new to me too: http://www.montecook.com/

Steve

[M. J. Young]

Multiverser does have the support within it for crunchy combat; you can include all sorts of modifiers to success through skill use, equipment, and tactics. It's a bit up to the referee and the players, though, so you'd have to have some feel for how the group goes on that.

One advantage is that you can move from the more gamist situations to the more narrativist play fairly smoothly without changing games. I do that quite a bit in my play.

--M. J. Young

[hix]

I just remembered that Ron designed a game for the Gamism essay, "Black Fire".

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/22/

Re-reading it, it looks like fun - but rough and possibly not the GM vs Player vibe you were wanting. I think I'll pitch it to my group though.

Steve.