Hi I am the Middle-Aged DM and I am a recovering simulationist, it has been 322 days since I last made my players haggle with a merchant over the price of 50 feet of rope and dry rations….. Now don’t get me wrong I have no problem grabbing a 10 foot pole and a sac of chickens and BECMI’ng the shit up, it’s just that I am slowly getting a sense of what my preferred play style is both as a DM and a player. In some ways it is like going through a kind of gaming puberty or nerdberty if you will.
As a gamer I had been so accustomed to a certain way of playing based on early D&D and the prevailing attitudes on what constituted good role playing and you know a “proper” game. This really shook out as you talking, thinking and acting like your character while wandering around and interacting with the setting that the DM had provided. So if you were just entering a town after several hard days of travel you would probably stop and talk with the guards at the gate, possibly haggle over an entrance fee, then make your way to an inn where you would talk with the stable boy about caring for your horses and then into the inn itself where you would chat up the barman, flirt with barmaid/DM and probably get wasted; or similarly, traveling from the butcher to the baker and onto the candlestick maker gathering the necessary info to find the plot or move story foreword.
Now there is nothing wrong with this style of play, I had fun with it for years, but I always felt slightly frustrated with it, like the pacing was off or something. It is really hard to put my finger on it. Things started to evolve for me the more I read and heard about the so called “story games” with their emphasis on the narrative and collaborative story building. I started viewing the gaming session as a series of scenes, either generated by me or the players, for both combat and non-combat encounters, with Q&A filling the gaps in between. I think this is part of the reason I am still rather fond of 4th edition D&D as its focus on set piece battles and narrative style works well with this kind of mind-frame, and why a lot of my fellow old-timers hated it so much.
In the aforementioned play examples instead of having the players haggle with the merchant I tend to skip that scene unless there is some sort of interesting complication or interaction to be had. Mundane equipment and dealings I let slide and just hand wave or throw it back to the players to tell me if anything interesting or noteworthy happened. Now if it is something more interesting like say poison or some gear for a scheme or job they got cooking then we might flesh that out a little more (cause I can certainly smell a complication percolating) with some narration and Q&A followed by some skill roles and we see what happens.
I have also shifted to being more right out on front street with information and sometimes give it as part of the scene set up or through the Q&A or again asking the players what the information they a re looking for might be. I don’t really worry about breaking verisimilitude or immersion as both are again very subjective experiences and not necessarily under the control of the DM or other players. I find I get just as much or more “role playing” and character interaction as before with a little less awkwardness. In my last Dark Sun session I started the session with he players locked in battle (a little media res if you will) except I asked them who it was they were fighting and why? Then we built the scene from there and it set the tone and focus for the rest of the evening.
I guess what it boils down to is the age old debate of simulationism vs. narrativism, which is constantly being flamed back and forth over the forums and interwebs, often disguised and in displaced forms. People tend to argue this issue way past rationality into a black and white stance, when we are really talking shades of grey as simulationism and narrativism are opposite end points on a spectrum or continuum of play styles (with neither being superior). It comes down what your preferred play style is and I guess mine has shifted a bit to the narrativist side of the spectrum.
I used to be a simulationist when I was younger (and do exactly as you described), but I’ve outgrown that now.
You know… there’s still room for that kind of experience, if you’re low level and investigating a town, and where each and every character you’re meeting is very pertinent. But those experiences are few and far between.
Ultimately, time is limited and I just want to maximize the amount of fun we have in that period of time and want to keep the pace moving. And I want them to experience an interesting story, not a story about shopping, training, or heaven forbid worrying about how much XP I have.
I’ve asked GMs recently if we can just move it along. I LOVE roleplaying, but I don’t love roleplaying over unimportant and uninteresting crap. Especially if it doesn’t involve most of the players.
To reduce simulationist tendencies, always ask yourself, “Would this be an interesting scene in a movie?”. If the answer is no, fast forward and conclude the transaction with a die roll, a quick sentence from the players, or tell them what happens.
So narrative “scenes” are definitely my preference now as well.
It’s odd, how many years does it take to be a good GM? Geez. I have to admit though, these days the supporting material is MUCH better than when we started. The supporting material now trains you much better to be a GM imo.
I think this kind of exploration of style, preference, and performance is exactly what is required to improve as a game group. Thanks for sharing your realization.
I don’t feel that simulation has to automatically default to tracking every moment of the day, but terms do evolve on us when we are not looking. I see the divide as being more one of narrativist games choosing to focus on emulating a given style of fiction or film, complete with conscious use of tropes and external guidance to either experience or explore a story arc. Simulationist games in my view, focus on representing the world so that the cycle between character action and the setting’s reactions allow the story to develop on its own.
Anyway, that is not the point of your post so I’ll drop that line of thinking there.
Good post~
hey thanks for reading. i think all the time I have been spending on the WOTC forums have begun to color my perceptions of simulationism as typically it is used as a hammer of unfun by, what seems to be controlling game masters, and usually to deride 4th edition or player creativity. i should probably find other places to lurk
Ha! Maybe~ Every group needs something to deride or there would be nothing to talk about, right? Seriously though, the stereotyping you describe exists for each point in the gamist-narativist-simulationist triangle, so every forum will likely have a little of it. We cannot escape. It’s like a giant ringlike spaceship rolling after us to crush us into paste…
I find it hardest to get into the narrativist mindset of the three, and that is where the lack of fun lurks for me. GM control in the form of scripting scenes and story outcomes, or worse the ability of players to buy or change outcomes to further that story are stifling for me. That said, I have no illusions that this is an equilateral triangle.
The self-exploration aspect of your post is important though, and I hope you continue to report on it.
Yes, gone are the days of shopping trips and tavern scenes unless the merchant or innkeeper is getting shot up by hobgoblin bootleggers. I don’t want to simulate a character and the world he’s in; I want to narrate a hero’s short but exciting life using some dice!
This is an interesting topic. Personally, my desire for simulationism fluctuates with game system, the group I am playing with, and the medium (ie face-to-face, or online).
I think you are right in that fluctuation, it makes me think of a playstyle confidence interval; like i fall here on the simm-narr spectrum but my style covers this range on the spectrum depending on certain facotrs.
middleagedm has been doing a bang-up job mixing story game elements with adventure games like 4e D&D. The emergent story from that mix is a lot of fun and not pre-determined like a lot of D&D games can be (e.g. “delve” style). When you make a few modifications to the approach to D&D such that a player’s ability to affect what happens in the game is not dependent on their character’s fictional ability to do those things, it can make a big difference in the game experience. Character development and in-character interaction is huge all while everyone collaborates to make each session and the emerging fiction more fun than the last.
To quote from another blog (lame mage), “If you think about it, since the very dawn of RPGs players have been playing adventure games but GMs have been playing story games. GMs have always had the power to affect the game outside of any particular characters they control. It’s what GMs do.” Given that middleagedm has mostly GMs at his table for the awesome Dark Sun game, this mixing of story game elements and D&D is really sweet.