This is in response to Mike Holmes' and subsequent posts on the D&D spells and gamism thread, because it's a more general topic.

Ron's essay is right on as far as the earlier gaming culture goes, as I remember it anyway. You walk into a room at the public library, circa 1977: one table has Legions of the Petal Throne, a bunch of minis, and the Ready Ref Sheets from Judges Guild. A second table has the 'blue book' D&D basic set and In Search of the Unknown, plus a few copies of Dragon magazine. A third table has the 'white box' rules plus the first three Arduin Grimioires and a hand-drawn map on graph paper.

All these people think they're playing the same game. Some people move from table to table, week after week, with the same character. No biggie.

I miss this world terribly, but I guess it probably won't ever come back.

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I got into 3e for a time because I thought it would recreate a gaming community like that earlier one, and there was a brief period - it only lasted about six months this time, starting from the release of the first 3.0 PHB - when that happened, at least a little, if you looked for it. There was chaos, rules patches because stuff wasn't out yet, various ad hoc updates of old rules and supplements, lots of new players, lots of house rule DMing, the whole bit. It ended almost as fast as it began, but it was there, and I enjoyed being able to belly up without preliminaries at the hobby shop and just play through the anarchy a few times before it was all over.

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But all that said, 3e is a very gamist system (which means: it supports gamist play). The fights that made me finally give it up were specifically over feats and PrC's. In D&D-type games (note: not all games!) I tend to have a strong old-school bent: players stay in Actor stance, do not let any metagame considerations influence your treatment of your own character. (In other words: Simulate first, Game second, and only when you can do it within the context of your Simulation.) D&D itself could support this style of play to a certain degree because progress was fixed by class and the whim of the DM in handing out magic items. The player could tweak the system (18/00 strength and thrown daggers) in certain ways, but basically what you got was dependent on what the DM gave you, so you didn't exercise intelligence in the development of your character - only in the playing of it.

Once you have Feats and Prestige Classes, though, as in 3e, this becomes untenable. Players are led by the system to think about their character as a game-defined entity from the moment of creation far, far into its future. I have had a lot of conversations with old-school D&D DMs who have updated to 3e about this problem (see the older posts on the Necromancer Games message boards for a lot of exemplars of this type) and their solution is simple: kill the characters of offending players who 'cheat' in this way, by constant metagame exploitation. Just like we did in the old days with 'monty haulers!'

I don't think that one has to be an RPG theorist of the caliber of many of you to see the problem here: the DM wants an old-style Sim experience, with players immersively identified with their characters in a dungeon-crawling sort of story, while using player intelligence within the limits of that character conception and story to solve various tactical, resource-allocation, and puzzle-type problems. The player, confronted with this more modern system, sees the character itself as something he or she can put input into - having Feats is essentially allowing characters to award themselves their own magic items, in old-school D&D terms - and so immediately starts thinking in Gamist terms about the character. Old school DM gets angry and kills his PCs, goes back to 1e, and gets off the 3e boards, then stomps off to Dragonsfoot and grouses about how D&D's gone to hell now. Players get miffed because they never got to explore ('break', 'minimax') the potential of the new system to its fullest. Etc.

I've been Ron's "GM Herbie" for many years, the guy who can take any system, get under the hood, and make it serviceable for the style of play I wanted in a reasonable amount of time. Back in the seventies, we all had to be GM Herbie if we wanted to be good, I think - at least if you played 'D&D' in the sense I outlined above. But 3e, and even more so 3.5 (a LOGICAL DEVELOPMENT of 3.0 which the new players like better and the grognards hate - partly in relation to the dynamic above, partly because there are certain core 'D&Disms' that are sentimental that 3.5 loses - from my limited compassing) is not that D&D, and if you understand the system you're crazy to want it to give you that experience. Yeah, you can chop wood for your fireplace with a handsaw, but what exactly does that prove?

What's the question here? Not sure where you want this thread to go. I still play a fair amount of 3E, so if there's something in particular you're wanting to discuss..

Well, I started another thread asking about a particular D&D mechanic, which I analyzed as primarily Gamist in justification, and then we got on to talking about Gamism in D&D more generally. Then Ron reminded us that it's hard to figure out just what 'D&D' meant, in the early days. So I separated out that discussion and gave some of my reflections on the thing as a separate thread.

I guess I am arguing that 3e is a gamist system in ways that the older constellation of systems which got called D&D back in the day weren't, or weren't necessarily at least, and that lots of old-schoolers who are playing 3e in an explicit attempt to recreate kid/high school/college D&D fun are therefore using a system which is bound to generate (and does generate, as you can see from the 3e message boards where old-school D&Ders hang out) conflicts in the 'social contract' of the game, especially when newer players learn what seems like model behavior based on the 3.0/3.5 rules and then annoy and maybe get swatted by their DM for engaging in it.

You may agree, or disagree, or wish to correct or modify my claims, in which case discussion may ensue. But I guess I'm not really asking a question so much as offering an answer based on something that came up in another thread.

Hrm...interesting analysis, but I disagree.
I believe the old D&D games are gamist, to a high degree, and that 3E does indeed recapture that attitude and style of play. The shift occurred much later in the hobby.

Back in the day, the idea was "what magic items do I want" and "what monsters do I need to fight"? This has, of course, been replaced (or diluted) by feats and PrCs in the modern edition, but it is not much different -- the character has always been a game piece to which you add particular powers by adventuring in order to level up.

The Sim-styled D&D you speak of, where the characters are played in full-on Actor-only stance, and tactical decisions based on game knowledge avoided, I see as a later addition to play and the standardized assumptions of how RPGs are played and interacted with.

Why do I say this? When I read through the old 1st edition AD&D modules it is quite obvious that players were expected to treat their characters not as a character, but as a full-on tactical vehicle that needed to be optimized to avoid its loss -- Which spells is my character likely to need? What equipment do I need to prepare (and what can I carry)? Which subtle references to game text am I missing in the "riddles" and "clues" of the adventure? In short, how do I beat the module given the game elements I have or know I can acquire? (and how do I acquire the latter?)

So whence came the shift to Simulation?
Good question. Any takers?

A friend of mine and I began making up on the spot rules and adding narrative-simulationist elements into the board game Heroquest when we found the rules too limited. They were completely ad-hoc to what we thought would be the most realistic manner given the setting.

So, as I believe rules systems are just the required thread for human play (at least in adults ;)). System of course matters in its ease-of-use and comprehensiveness, as well as the extent of narrative elements it can contain (checkers has an incredibly small narrative potential, chess has slightly more, stratego even more due to its more humanized figures, while on the other end of the scale, improvisational acting has an indefinitely high level of narrative potential, games like Universalis would have somewhat less, etc.), I feel that a game's system can promote a gameplay style, but that the tendencies of the players will make it more or less gamist.

I would guess that the players you are gaming with are probably just more inclined to min-maxing. If the bulk of their RPG'ing was done on a console or PC, then their characters are little more than disposable weapons platforms. If you want to encourage them in a more simulationist manner, have them gain their feats and Prestige Classes through roleplaying. If a player wants their character to get Smithing, they damned well better look for a smithy who's willing to take on an apprentice. If a thief wants to learn a new thief skill, then you could have them study with the guild, daringly attempt to use the ability they wish to learn until the GM believes the player can sufficiently RP the ability for the character to "earn" it, or have secret codexes of feats hidden all about. The latter could be used for other classes, too. BTW, I stole it from Sly Cooper. Even their pursuits for different Feats could be adventures in and of themselves. Say an elf character needs to seek out an ancient archer in order to gain a new feat, well, then the whole party has to pick its way through a spider-infested enchanted forest. A lot of kung fu movies have the hero fight and adventure his way to study under some ancient master in order to learn some powerful technique to beat his foes. I see these special abilities as great sources for roleplaying if used correctly.

Nowhere in the social contract does it state that a player must necessarily treat their character like some kind of monster car what with the widgets and optimizations. Make them work for those shiny Feats!

Failrate,

I think you've missed the point of discussion here...the idea isn't "How do I fix/stop/repair this?" but "From whence does this come?"

Calithena believes the earlier incarnations of D&D are not drifted so heavily to Gamism based on her experiences of the game at that time. I disagree and believe that D&D's main focus has always been Gamism, based on the modules and play assumptions inherent in the rules.

However, upon consideration, I might concede that 2nd Edition moves away from the Gamist traditions and attempts to behave more like the Simulation Calithena recalls, even though its mechanics remain almost entirely unchanged on the whole from its predecessor.

If Calithena is anything like me, we are discussion a period of time well before there were any such things as "console games" or even "PCs," but I don't doubt the wargaming roots from which the hobby arises has a great deal to do with the Gamist aspects of D&D, including treating characters as pawns.

Perhaps 2nd Edition was a reaction (of sorts) to the change in play-styles by various groups of the preceeding years -- away from the Gamist-centered dungeon-crawl and towards the Simulationist-centered Exploration of Setting (or Character).

As to your suggestions, this is the application of Drift (the encouraging of a different style of play than the game presents) to the game, and consider: many players may take serious umbrage at having to do extra work for those feats, since the book's rules say they get them automatically.

In fact, if one makes the adventures all about acquiring those powers/feats, one runs exactly into Cali's problem: optimization of character rather than experience of character.

The game must become predicated upon the gaining of new powers and abilities -- that is, the storylines will focus upon the gain of those powers and how they come about, thus forcing the players and GM to make long-term plans about their characters' abilities and powers.

As well, this brings new problems to the fore: suppose the character fails in the quest to find the ancient archer with the secret trick shot feat? The rules say the character gains a feat for levelling up, period -- now what?

If you keep Drifting the game, to cover for things like this, they eventually become a jumbled, unsatisfying mess, and sooner-or-later a new system is written which attempts to accomodate the actual play desired by the players.

In regard to min-maxing and gamist play in general: this is a completely valid style of play, and one which D&D supports and encourages in its various incarnations. Why should anyone who prefers that style of play be forced into Simulationist modes, as you suggest be done?

And ultimately, any suggestion which dismisses the desire for Gamist play in favor of a different rule-set which adds extra/different restrictions upon a character is rightfully upsetting to a player, who may not wish to play in a non-Gamist fashion. For those who do want to change the way play happens, why not play a game more suited to the desired style? This is the question Drift asks.

In this case, I'm still asking the question above: With D&D, when did the assumed style of play change from G to S? Not with 2nd Edition, I believe, as I see that as a reaction to the change. How did it come about?

Good thoughts, Greyorm. Calithena's a she, but I'm using her name, and I'm a guy. But I don't mind.

I agree with you that if you focus on the wargaming roots, D&D almost by definition has to begin, in the early mists of time, as a Gamist game. The thing is, LOTS of people were playing it as a Sim-Gam hybrid with the Sim aspect dominant, at least in the period just before AD&D got released. And I know lots of old-school, early AD&D and pre-AD&D DMs, who don't mind clever tactical use of the rules and situations, but insist on Actor stance. And do so in the context of the familiar old style adventures, kobolds on giant bats, deep caverns, the whole works.

I think that there are different default assumptions of the game depending on who you were playing with. If you want to say AD&D was ultimately Gamist rather than Simulationist in intent, I might agree, ultimately: but I'd add the caveat that the lighter rules in 1e actually supported Sim play better than the heavier ones in 3e do.

Anyway, when someone sits down making a first level character, and thinks not 'who is this guy and what do I want him to become,' but 'what are this guy's numbers and what sequence of feats and PrCs will make him the sickest ten and twenty levels down the road', which is the kind of thinking 3e encourages (and 1e does not, since advancement is all pegged to what the DM gives you - magic items, experience, etc.), I lose interest. That's not to say that other people might not have fun with this kind of play, but I can't enjoy role-playing where the character is just a weapons platform.

What's interesting is that I, and a lot of other people, have enjoyed a schizophrenic style of role-playing where you alternate between sequences that have heavy Sim with a little bit of Nar and then total spatterfests where it's all Gam with occasional token nods to Sim. I especially remember various incarnations of D&D and WFRP as running in this style. In such games it's almost as if you're playing two characters at once - a mobile weapons platform and a person with a history and various personal and political conflicts.

So I guess I partly agree with you, Greyorm, in that ultimately D&D has always supported Gamist play, and since its roots are in wargames, this has probably always been true. But I still hold that

1) Older versions of D&D are a better vehicle for Actor-stance, in-world simulationist play than the new ones

2) Lots of good old-school (as in early AD&D and OD&D) DMs prefer this style of play and treat it as a default assumption for their games, even in dungeon-crawl type adventures

3) Lots of fights that break out between older and newer D&D players in the 3.0/3.5 community are directly attributable to this difference.

I'm least sure about 3, because I think there are some other motivations for the common fights there as well, but I think it's at least partially true.

There is a good quest

Calithena wrote: Good thoughts, Greyorm. Calithena's a she, but I'm using her name, and I'm a guy. But I don't mind.

If you want to say AD&D was ultimately Gamist rather than Simulationist in intent, I might agree, ultimately: but I'd add the caveat that the lighter rules in 1e actually supported Sim play better than the heavier ones in 3e do.

Anyway, when someone sits down making a first level character, and thinks not 'who is this guy and what do I want him to become,' but 'what are this guy's numbers and what sequence of feats and PrCs will make him the sickest ten and twenty levels down the road'

I'm not an Exalted expert by any stretch of the imagination, but judging by the way people talk about the game, it sounds like they have a version of the feat-type system which is better integrated with daydreaming about character progress/thinking about 'what would be cool' instead of 'what do the rules allow' than do those in 3e. Or maybe Exalted just attracts a higher average caliber of player - I don't know.

I do know that my best experiences with Feats in 3e have been when the player thinks "What would be best for my character to have/be able to do next?", and comes at it from that angle. Sometimes I even granted out-powered feats to accomodate that, because I wanted that kind of play to be rewarded.

What this really says, to me, is that I, as GM, like my players to be integrated into their persona or story, and want them to be thinking about their characters in those terms. And I hate things like:

a) The fact that every 3e rogue basically ought to take Opportunist and Quicker than the Eye, because these give you such an advantage in combat that even if you had a completely different character conception you're at a decisive tactical disadvantage without them.

b) The fact that my friend's 'perfect warrior' character at the end of a long WFRP campaign he actually managed to survive wound up training as a Wizard's Apprentice, because there was nothing left for him to get really as a fighter-type character.

c) The fact that where players in my 3e game approached me three years ago with story and world-based ideas for their characters, now they approach me with "I want to be a Mystic Theurge, so to do that I need to take this class now, etc. etc."

Again - I think you understand this, but I'll say it anyway - my objection to this isn't an 'in principle' objection - it's just that the kind of games I want involve players to either identify with their character or with their character's story, and to be thinking about it in those kinds of terms. When the system starts dictating the character's decisions or story rather than the other way around, I tend, personally, not to like that. There are a lot of different ways I enjoy gaming, but when people get out of their individual creative zone and move into the game-exploiting zone, I find myself getting really annoyed really fast.

Except, paradoxically, in combat, when I don't care much at all, and I get off on pawn stance and the tactical challenges of battle - sometimes. I have to mull this 'schizophrenic' attitude (which comes naturally out of running 'immersive roleplaying' campaigns in the various versions of D&D that I've run them in) over and see whether it holds up under deeper analysis. In one way it's fine - you play the actor and/or author game for a while, and then switch to the pawn game when the fight breaks out - but that kind of play generates certain more subtle kinds of conflicts too. I might like those subtle kinds of conflicts, but I might not, and I just haven't thought all that through yet.

One really interesting idea that a friend of mine (Calithena's GM) is playing with right now is introducing a system of 'trumps' to allow the player to change the mode of play at certain times, so that the choice to go from (say) hardcore Sim to hardcore Gam would rest with the player, and you might even have very different mechanics to adjudicate the different kinds of situation.

Hi,

The parallel between 3E Feats and Exalted's Charms caught my eye. I won't claim to be an Exalted expert, but I've played it and am reasonably familiar with both the rules in Storyteller and the various discussions about how to convert it to other systems (there are a surprising number of these, but let's leave that discussion for another day).

What stands out to me first is that Exalted's Charms (analogous in the context of this discussion to Feats) tend, I think, to encourage players to make their selections based on present effectiveness rather than down-the-line effectiveness. The latter is also a consideration, obviously, but not prioritized in the same sense. Charms are open-ended in that you can acquire them more quickly (they're not necessarily level- or class-dependent), they are frequently scalable (effect depends on Essence expenditure), and (finally), they can be worked into Combos (multi-Charm maneuvers. During character creation, the players I gamed with (and I) found ourselves thinking in the fairly short-term about Charm acquisition rather than about ultimate mastery of a Charm tree. That is to say, an extra one or two Charms we might want to grab, not a huge wad of them. There wasn't the same feeling of scarcity that attaches to Feats. You can acquire a decent number of Charms without having to wait until you hit X level. In other words, Charms don't have the same opportunity cost baggage as Feats. In 3E games, by contrast, people seem to sweat a lot over Feat selection, because if you don't align your Feats properly, you run the risk of losing substantial effectiveness at higher levels. The system virtually forces you to plan your character progression to 20th level from the beginning.

The second point about Exalted, more pertinent to the discussion here, is that a lot of the game does indeed push players to think about the kewl FX factor. At least in my group, that push really had traction, right from the get-go with Charm and Spell names like "Scattered Pearl Hoofbeats" and "Death of Obsidian Butterflies." Nothing feels generic, and Charm selection seems rooted not just in effectiveness, but in character identity and connection to the setting. Conjoined with flaring auras, stunts, and general anime flavor, the system prioritizes character "flash" at least as much as, if not more than, effectiveness.

Best,

Blake

Our game has a similar problem; our GM is committed to a 'realistic' world, while one of the players is following the rules and coming up with 'unrealistic' results.

The 'problem character' began play as a Fighter, apprenticed to a blacksmith. He then went on adventures, put skill points in armor craft, and was frustrated that he was still an apprentice (despite his much better skill). In the mean time, he picked up levels of Wizard, but had to quest to a tower and find a teacher, which worked once (planned downtime), but never again.

It's amusing and frustrating, because everyone appreciates the illusion of depth that the world has. On the other hand, I remind the GM (away from the table) that you get skills and powers from fighting monsters, not practicing your smithing. Of course it's not going to make perfect sense. He accepts it, with incomplete grace.

Part of the problem is that the player has time management problems in real life- he over commits and continues to make promises (which, truth to tell he usually accomplishes, though often late or incompletely). So, as a player, it's difficult for him not to simultaneously work on seven things... it's how he runs his life, so why shouldn't his impressively statted character manage even more?

Fortunately, everyone enjoys the adventures and the game overall, so the minor disconnects are accepted as the hiccups that they are.

Um, looking back, this was quite a self-indulgent anecdote... I hope it's a useful example. Though, given the understanding you've had of each other's points, it's probably less than necessary.

incomplete grace

I am....Sean!

Maybe I should change my handle to my real name. Most of the gaming forums I'm on, nobody uses their real name!

More charms than feats might make Exalted better than 3e in having character conception drive ability choice - I don't know. I'd love to try the game, but I haven't - it's only a reading experience for me right now.

I wonder if I should say that older versions of D&D are 'less bad' for Sim play instead of 'better'. I think the general point stands either way, though.

I began running D&D late in 1980, and probably received the OAD&D core books for Christmas that year. However, I never played the game with anyone who had outside experience, and had no contact with any gamers outside our group for much of the first decade. I acquired all the OAD&D books and quite a few modules, but not a single gaming magazine in that time.

I think my perspective is a bit different.

OAD&D was an emminently driftable game. It had a strong gamist engine, in which the experience system and the combat system were so tightly linked that most efforts to tweak it into a more "roleplaying-oriented" reward system failed to break the gamist element. However, it had a solid simulationist layer, and players who were comfortable with their character power levels could ignore the gamist engine and explore the world and the characters to their hearts' content. At the same time, the much-maligned alignment system was a simple narrativist insertion, which could create great moral conflicts if used well--it just tended to work against both the gamist and the simulationist priorities of the game to do so. Thus people did drift the game (we did, constantly, in every direction), and probably thought in doing so that they were playing by the rules.

I suspect that Arcana may have kicked up the level of gamism a bit, in an unexpected way. The admittance of the Cavalier and Barbarian classes and the Drow race meant that there were new character creation options which were more powerful than those to that point. These all had severe detriments to them, but detriments that were easy to ignore and required the referee to intentionally make trouble for the player character in order for them to function as intended--e.g., if you are a drow player character, there is an assassin seeking to kill you somewhere, and if you eliminate him, there will be another more powerful to follow; but what referee is really going to bring potent assassins against his player characters at bad moments when they're vulnerable? Thus there were a lot of players who wanted to play drow, or cavaliers, or barbarians, for the power levels.

I do think that 3E has gone solidly gamist; that is, it is a more coherent game that eliminates a great deal of the opportunity for drift. I suppose from the perspective of uniform play, that's a good thing--you can get into any 3E game and have a pretty good idea of what to expect. For those of us who drifted our games like coracles on the ocean, it's pretty disheartening.

I also think that the RPGA and convention competitions had a lot to do with it. I've read a lot of the modules, too, and the ones that were specifically designed for use in competition got progressively more gamist. I would compare the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which is very simulationist in many ways, with a later two-book set the name of which slips my mind (and is in a file cabinet in a storage unit across town at the moment) about the line of the kings (Llewelyn, or some similarly Celtic/Gaelic name), with its puzzles and challenges and combats at every turn--interpret the meaning of the magical song without getting dragged into the water by the imps; figure out how to get to the top floor of Ischabable's tower to retrieve the necessary incantations hidden somewhere up there; go to the tomb and find the hidden entrance to I don't remember what; fight things at every step along the way, to get where you need to be. It couldn't really be helped--it was about finishing with the best score, so there had to be challenge to it, but the very concept of role playing competitions required them to be gamist.

I think that the 3E advancement system is more gamist precisely because it allows more freedom of choice. In OAD&D, you decided at the beginning what class or classes your character would pursue, and he did those; if he wanted to become something else later, it was a big deal. In 3E, deciding what class to take at your new level is itself a tactical decision, in terms of choosing the best preparation for the challenges ahead.

Sean--you can change your screen name to your real name by contacting Clinton; or for now you can just sign your name on your posts, so we'll remember. You can add a sig file in your preferences that will automatically appear on all your posts, and I believe if you update it, it will update on all your old posts, but I'm not certain of that.

--M. J. Young

I don't have much to say, except that I do agree with the main premise that D&D 3rd edition makes character creation and advancement much more Gamist. On D&D boards you'll often hear discussion of character creation monopolized by what additional books of rules the DM will let the players bring to the table. In the old days, if you wanted to do something unique and interesting with your character, you had to work with the DM within the confines of the game world. Obviously a player can still do that, but the typical mode of play today instead seems to be 'hey, in X book there is Y ability that I can have when I meet Z prerequisites. Okay?'

Certainly in all the D&D books there's lip-service paid to the idea that any of these prestige classes or special feats must be approved by the DM, and that he is allowed to restrict them in Sim fashion (e.g. if you want to take the "Order of the Silver Bow" prestige class, you must find the Order of the Silver Bow and petition to be made a member to learn their secrets.) In actual play, this sort of thing often falls by the wayside, especially considering a character is expected to gain a level once every 13 challenges or so.

It's not that you have to handle character creation and advancement from a heavy Gamist stance, but all the tools that are put out there help you do so, and if you want to handle it a different way, you're on your own.