What makes an RPG 'Video Gamey'?

[Vahnavoi]

Treating something as 'first of all, real' means that even if there is something unanticipated by the designers, the mandate is for the (GM/players/author/etc) to fill in those gaps as if the thing were more real than the rules are capable of establishing.

Sure. Which is something that most tabletop games don't do nor even seriously try for. Due all the difficulties of doing it, authors don't try to codify it in books and game masters don't try to reach it at tables.

So what is called "videogamey" is in fact just gamey. That was the point. The distinction is real. The term used for it is misleading. It isn't tabletop versus videogames, or even fiction first versus mechanics first, it's just realism versus non-realism.

Whereas treating something as 'first of all, mechanics' instead would hold that if you find such a gap, you should figure out a reason why that actually isn't a gap at all and that the specific mechanical way of resolving the situation should still apply.

Most tabletop game masters and players manage to achieve this simply by not thinking about it too much and proceeding to roll more dice.

[NichG]

I think this highlights one of the hard things about RPG design. Mainly, the purpose of rules. Now there are several purposes for them, but one I want to highlight is the part where they help a player and GM get on the same page.

Let's take your fireball example up above. This description says that a fireball works as normal underwater and in space. But what if you view a fireball like that, and another player views it as conjuring fire from the elemental plane? What if another views it as just bringing forth the fuel mixture magically, but not the oxidizer? What if the GM views it as making the air rich in O2, and then providing a flame that ignites it?

It doesn't though, but maybe this is actually kind of the point I'm making?

If you read it carefully, it produces things at a 'certain rate and pressure'. That means if for example you're 10ft below water it works, if you're 100ft below water the radius might be reduced but the intensity increased and you'd get sonic shockwaves that could also hurt someone, and if you're 2000ft below water then the fireball just doesn't even go. And it would be just as true if you tried to cast a fireball in a chamber pressured at the ambient pressure 2000ft below, but filled with air. And if you cast it in space, it should actually be bigger but less intense. And so on.

Treating what I wrote as a description of reality, you'd be expected to reason those things out to figure out what happens to a fireball underwater or in space - just like if someone said 'we have this model that ideal gasses behave like PV=nRT, but you have to figure out what happens when you compress water vapor suddenly past its freezing point pressure' then to answer the question you have to go beyond the model rather than saying 'well the model says PV=nRT so therefore...'

This is what I take from the previous comment about the difference between '(the abstraction of) 10d6 fire damage represents (the reality that) the character can throw a fireball' vs '(the abstraction of) a Fireball spell represents (the reality that) the character can cause 10d6 fire damage'.

This leads to the question: Is it important for the players to all be on the same page with how an ability, such as the spell fireball, functions?

It feels like people say that if the answer is yes, then the rpg is video gamy. If the rules tell you exactly what happens, and you aren't expected to extrapolate, then each player can agree on what occurs when the fireball is cast.

I think this is a secondary consideration of the deeper thing that a formal rule system is one particular way to reliably create agreement, and that happens to align well with the needs for making video games. But there are other ways to create agreement that wouldn't feel the same as 'the rules are the physics'.

Sure. Which is something that most tabletop games don't do nor even seriously try for. Due all the difficulties of doing it, authors don't try to codify it in books and game masters don't try to reach it at tables.

So what is called "videogamey" is in fact just gamey. That was the point. The distinction is real. The term used for it is misleading. It isn't tabletop versus videogames, or even fiction first versus mechanics first, it's just realism versus non-realism.

Most tabletop game masters and players manage to achieve this simply by not thinking about it too much and proceeding to roll more dice.

Video games exemplify this because in video games there basically is no choice but to do it this way because of technological limitations. Many tables do take a stance of treating the fictional reality as real-as-presented as opposed to putting the mechanical rules first - whether its hard or not to do, whether it can be done perfectly, that's all an aside - you can still reasonably hold it as a goal or as a mandate for how decisions at the table should be made. But with video games, there's not even try to do this quite yet. So until that changes, 'video gamey' can refer to the shape cut out in the design space due to that practical technological constraint.

[Jakinbandw]

It doesn't though, but maybe this is actually kind of the point I'm making?

If you read it carefully, it produces things at a 'certain rate and pressure'.

I had been talking about fireballs in dnd. I assumed you were too. If I read what you wrote carefully, It doesn't say what ignites the mixture, so whether it can work in space, or underwater is still unclear. If it's ignited by a spark, then it may work in space, but may not work underwater for example, however since the description doesn't say, it still allows for misalignment of expectations.

I think this is a secondary consideration of the deeper thing that a formal rule system is one particular way to reliably create agreement, and that happens to align well with the needs for making video games. But there are other ways to create agreement that wouldn't feel the same as 'the rules are the physics'.

Such as?

[NichG]

I had been talking about fireballs in dnd. I assumed you were too. If I read what you wrote carefully, It doesn't say what ignites the mixture, so whether it can work in space, or underwater is still unclear. If it's ignited by a spark, then it may work in space, but may not work underwater for example, however since the description doesn't say, it still allows for misalignment of expectations.

Since it works 'at a certain pressure' when the external pressure is greater than that, nothing can come through. Whether it ignites or not is a separate matter - as I described it, it would ignite underwater just fine.

Such as?

- Every time there's an ambiguity, the table as a whole votes and moves forward with the result. Everyone will be in agreement after the mediation process.

- You have a single-player or single-author experience where the author simply decides based on their own judgment.

- You preview the scenario and actions before actual play and come to an agreement about how each thing will work, and then actual play is just acting out that pre-agreed upon plan

- You agree to use the real world as reference, so when its unclear you can resolve that by looking things up or even going and doing an experiment

- You're playing in a universe whose metaphysics all of the players are familiar with from previous experience playing together, and you have a norm about what constitutes standards of evidence and argument in order to say that a particular thing should work a particular way.

[Jakinbandw]

Since it works 'at a certain pressure' when the external pressure is greater than that, nothing can come through. Whether it ignites or not is a separate matter - as I described it, it would ignite underwater just fine.

I feel there is ambiguity, as you never state what ignites the fuel. That said I don't really want to argue about it, and I would be interested in seeing an RPG written in that style, where there are no rules for damage, or anything, just an explanation of the physics of the world. I seem to remember something like that being created for FMA once, where they got down into how each magic circle functioned, and the exact changes it created as well as how and why, but it was more of an experimental thought project, and not marketed as an rpg.

- Every time there's an ambiguity, the table as a whole votes and moves forward with the result. Everyone will be in agreement after the mediation process.

- You have a single-player or single-author experience where the author simply decides based on their own judgment.

- You preview the scenario and actions before actual play and come to an agreement about how each thing will work, and then actual play is just acting out that pre-agreed upon plan

- You agree to use the real world as reference, so when its unclear you can resolve that by looking things up or even going and doing an experiment

- You're playing in a universe whose metaphysics all of the players are familiar with from previous experience playing together, and you have a norm about what constitutes standards of evidence and argument in order to say that a particular thing should work a particular way.

I notice that none of those options are available to a person writing a game, only to individual groups. Unless you are trying to suggest that writers don't concern themselves with expectation alignment?

[NichG]

I feel there is ambiguity, as you never state what ignites the fuel. That said I don't really want to argue about it, and I would be interested in seeing an RPG written in that style, where there are no rules for damage, or anything, just an explanation of the physics of the world. I seem to remember something like that being created for FMA once, where they got down into how each magic circle functioned, and the exact changes it created as well as how and why, but it was more of an experimental thought project, and not marketed as an rpg.

Oart of what I'm saying is that if you take 'we are representing a world that should be real' as a primary consideration, whenever there is ambiguity there is also a specific principle by which that ambiguity is to be resolved (that is, to work out what would make sense given the underlying fictional reality, rather than what would make sense given the written form of the rules) even if the rules don't explicitly spell out how it should be resolved. Yes, that may in fact mean that people might disagree about how it should be resolved, but that's not actually a non-starter for having a game run according to those principles.

Here I wrote the 'rules' purely in natural language descriptions of physical processes to make an extreme point, but practically speaking what you'd have would be a two-layer system where there are mechanical glosses which are meant to be taken as examples of 'how could you resolve this physical reality?' rather than being taken as defining that physical reality. So you'd say 'a fireball is a microscopic portal to a pressurized region in the elemental plane of fire' but also 'a fireball is a 20ft area blast dealing 10d6 damage, with a Reflex save halving the damage'. But the 'realism' principle applied to this would be that when the former text suggests that the effect should be different than a 20ft area blast dealing 10d6 damage, then it should take precedence over the specific mechanical example. Whereas the approach that feels more video-game-like is when its the reverse, and the specific mechanics are taken to have higher priority than the description of 'what actually is a fireball?'.

Neither is an inherently invalid way to play, but (for me) I have a preferred balance between those considerations and I might well describe a game that is unbalanced towards making the mechanics less ambiguous at the cost of making the underlying fictional reality become more absurd or forced as 'video-gamey'. Because in that case, the designers failed to make the two things harmonious in a way that has a lot in common with the compromises one must make when developing standalone video games that have to run on their own.

But, if the designers happen to make the mechanical glosses less ambiguous but also at the same time manage to align them well with that underlying fictional reality so that the fiction doesn't have to be distorted in order to achieve it, then I wouldn't describe that as video-gamey even if it ends up being less ambiguous or more objectively computable. There's a practical limit there which is that eventually these things will be in tension at some level of detail - its not like you can hand a group of players a modified Schroedinger equation for magi-physics and just have them compute everything from first principles - so there generally are tradeoffs. And in the case of those tradeoffs, for my tastes at least, its a good trade to allow some ambiguity into the rules in exchange for the flexibility to actually behave as if what you're interacting with is a world rather than a ruleset. Personally, 4e falls too far on the side of 'the abstractions are the reality' for me, 3e straddles the boundary depending on how it's run (if a GM is willing to quash nonsensical things like infinite economic exploits, its fine; if the GM runs pure RAW, it'd be too video-gamey for my tastes), and something like Nobilis is well enough into the 'allow ambiguity to let the world be a world' zone that (for my tastes) it has room to afford more mechanical detail, even if it doesn't really need it.

FATE, ironically, is both somewhat ambiguous (at least in the sense that the GM is just making up what happens from whole cloth in basically every case) and it feels kind of video-gamey to me, because the particular abstraction that FATE uses (tag things for + to dice roll) abstracts over a lot of the details and nuances that actually matter to why a world feels like a world. So its kind of a worst-of-both-worlds point for me.

I notice that none of those options are available to a person writing a game, only to individual groups. Unless you are trying to suggest that writers don't concern themselves with expectation alignment?

I'm suggesting that the issue of 'expectation alignment' is just a separate one from the constraints of a video game and 'video game feel'. That having resolution-algorithm-style formal rules can enable expectation alignment just happens to correlate with the fact that when you write a video game your only vehicle for expressing anything is in the form of resolution-algorithm-style formal rules. It may remain true that someone pushing for expectation alignment also tends to, in a correlated manner, push for design decisions that tend to make something feel more video gamey. But expectation alignment is not the definition of videogamey feel.

That is to say, I'm arguing that its possible to have a TTRPG experience in which expectations do happen to align, but it doesn't feel like a video game - that the alignment of expectations itself is not what gives rise to a video game feel. Whether or not game writers can intentionally go about trying to produce that result and how they would do so is an unrelated discussion.

[Telok]

What makes an RPG Video gamey

If I can go through a TVTropes video game page like "the computer is a cheating bastard" or "our rules are not your rules" and start using it like a check list for the ttrpg in question.

[gbaji]

I'll be honest, I still don't understand your definition. Is a wizard casting a fireball a flashy effect (Wizards should be able to make big explosions!) with basic mechanics wrapped around it? Or is something that wizards can do in the setting, and the mechanics are there to represent that? Those don't seem like opposites, so I feel that I'm getting something wrong.

I think Galain mentioned something later that touches on this a bit. I'm going in an even simpler direction. If a wizard casts the spell "fireball", and the spell "creates a ball of fire x feet in radius, doing y damage", then I expect that to otherwise act as a "real" ball of fire would, if one actually were generated via some means. In other words, despite the fact that magic is generating some effect, the effect itself should act in accordance with "normal" physical laws of the universe.

One of the most common failures (and yeah, often in various computer/video games) is area effect attacks hitting only foes and not friends. IIRC, the entire discussion that lead to me talking about a set of feats being "video gamey" was in reference to firing into melee rules. And a number of the feats I was looking at were things that hit "all enemies in X area", or "hit desired enemy no matter how far away" kind of things.

It's not that the effect is "flashy". It's that it doesn't behave like how it would if we were to actually generate said effect. Again, forget that "magic" is what causes the effect. How does the effect behave once it's created? That's the part of this I'm looking at. And when the method to resolve that effect is more about convenience than realism, that's what I was talking about as well. And I'm also more going in terms of how things work in the game "by default". You can certainly also have special spells/abilities that "break the rules". But then that's what it does. If every AE in your game avoids doing damage to anything but enemies, then that's "by default", and is unrealistic to me. And maybe part of this is that I really want players to have to actually work to use things like AEs and to make them useful. Same thing with archery in general (which is what brought this up, sorta). If you can fire into melee safely every time, then there's no need to work in any way to get a "clean shot" on an enemy. No need to move to the side so you can have a clear line of fire. No need to make sure you position yourself so the enemy has to run across a field to get to you. Just fight anywhere you want, and your archer is at full effectiveness, all the time, every time. No need to lure enemies into a kill zone for AEs either. Just engage in melee and let your spell casters blast away full power. No problem, right? That's what I find unrealistic. Now if you have a special ability or feat that allows "this shot" or "this spell" to hit only enemies, but with some cost (can use X/day or whatever), that puts it back into "magic can do this" category. So yeah, I suppose part of this goes to a "game balance" issue for me as well. I want players to have to actually engage their brains and think about an encounter, what the terrain looks like, what abilities and weapons/spells they have, and then actually have to use that stuff to make the best use of what they have. Some games go to great length to make all abilities useful all the time. Which means there's no actual reward to the players for good planning. And less reward for gaining "special" feats or spells or whatnot that allow them to break those rules sometimes (which I think was labled a "feat tax" when I mentioned it in that previous thread).

Whether "video gamey" was the best term to use, on the other hand, is certainly a completely valid subject for debate.

Same is mostly true with weapon based martial arts. Modern Olympic fencing has a lot of rules on right of way and touch, that work well for the sport. But if they're fighting with actual weapons, it didn't matter if the opponent didn't have technical right of way, you still got stabbed.

Well. In theory modern fencing right of way rules are supposed to simulate the concept that anyone attacking someone else who didn't want to just die in the attempt, needed to move the other persons weapon aside via some means first. Of course, in practice it does result in folks "playing to the rules", and doing things like "half hearted" beat attacks, knowing they're going to get hit, but knowing also that they have "right of way" and will therefore score the point. Something, you would *never* do if actually fighting someone "for real".

To be fair on the flip side, I've also seen a lot of these sorts of touches count differently depending almost on the whim of the director. Some will call simultaneous and restart (cause they just don't like rewarding what they see as "sloppy" fencing). Some will rule right of way (but not necessarily the way you might have thought it was). Some will rule "first hit" regardless of right of way (different tolerances for how much time you actually have right of way for, or whether someone else's attack is a remise or counted as a new attack). Good fencers strive to always get "clean hits" (you establish right of way, attack, and hit without getting hit in return). It's the only way to actually guarantee you get the point.

You see the same sort of thing in any martial sport where there are "touch points" involved in some way. Um... Obviously not so much when the bout is to knockdowns, knockouts, or pins.

Sure, people could have picked a better word than "video gamey". A more fitting term is "disassociated mechanics" but that's a bit of a mouthful.


There's not many tabletop RPGs that are "very much b", but I'm sure that most TRPGs have a couple of "b" mechanics. The primary example of a TRPG that is "very much b" is of course 4E D&D, and unsurprisingly that's the RPG that is most often accused of being "video gamey".

There is, in fact, a fundamental difference; and that difference is that one of them runs on moon logic and the other does realistic physics. It's pretty hard to get more fundamental than that. But yes, players also commonly make fun of disassociations in video games.

Yup. I was speaking of "disassociated mechanics" then. Yeah, that's a mouthful though.

Also agree on the whole "HP mechanics are silly" bit as well btw. Doubly so when you have level based games, and HPs scale upwards with level. A highly skilled person should not be able to survive being hit in the head any better than someone who is less skilled, yet there you have it. It's more "fuzzy mechanics" really. The rationalization is that higher HPs somehow just means you are able to avoid taking serious wounds even while being "hit" more often (somehow?). But that doesn't explain things like falling damage, or "boulder fell on my head" or "trampled by a rhino" type situations (maybe you just "roll with it" better?).

Then again, I tend to also play more games with "flat" HP mechanics (no level based HP progression), or with "wound level" mechanics anyway (although some of those can trend towards silliness too). So that's just where my head is at with stuff like this anyway.

I guess it's just that for me, my willingness to suspend disbelief has some firm(ish) limits. And for me, anyway, it's that I'm fine with "magic creates this effect/change/whatever", but having defined that thing and what it is, we apply it to an otherwise "real world" to determine the result. I get that other folks have a "it's magic, so it doesn't matter" threshhold though. Different strokes and all of that.

[Jakinbandw]

I think Galain mentioned something later that touches on this a bit. I'm going in an even simpler direction. If a wizard casts the spell "fireball", and the spell "creates a ball of fire x feet in radius, doing y damage", then I expect that to otherwise act as a "real" ball of fire would, if one actually were generated via some means. In other words, despite the fact that magic is generating some effect, the effect itself should act in accordance with "normal" physical laws of the universe.

You know what, this actually does clarify things to the point where I can understand it. Thank you!

One of the most common failures (and yeah, often in various computer/video games) is area effect attacks hitting only foes and not friends. IIRC, the entire discussion that lead to me talking about a set of feats being "video gamey" was in reference to firing into melee rules. And a number of the feats I was looking at were things that hit "all enemies in X area", or "hit desired enemy no matter how far away" kind of things.

It was about firing into melee, you remember correctly.

It's not that the effect is "flashy". It's that it doesn't behave like how it would if we were to actually generate said effect. Again, forget that "magic" is what causes the effect. How does the effect behave once it's created? That's the part of this I'm looking at. And when the method to resolve that effect is more about convenience than realism, that's what I was talking about as well. And I'm also more going in terms of how things work in the game "by default". You can certainly also have special spells/abilities that "break the rules". But then that's what it does. If every AE in your game avoids doing damage to anything but enemies, then that's "by default", and is unrealistic to me.

I can certainly understand that perspective. I think everyone has their own hiccups and concerns here. For me, it's dungeons. I worked for a while at a mine as a vent technician, so I know about the importance of air flow, and every time I look at a dungeon I can't help but try to figure out the air flow, and most of the time my conclusion is that all the monsters in the dungeon should be dead of asphyxiation. Part of fixing this for me, was a core change to how the world worked with massive knock-on effects.

I ended up making human belief (humans are pretty much the only sentient race in my setting), and allowing perception to affect reality. People can breath fine in dungeons without airflow because people don't understand concepts like CO2 buildup and O2 depletion, and thus those effects are overwritten by a persons belief that they are breathing just fine. Lacks never run out of fish without some sort of natural disaster because everyone knows where the best fishing holes are and thus there are always fish to catch there.

This has negative effects too, Like when people get worried that their town is cursed, or a monster is stalking the night, then that can bring about curses or monsters to attack that town. It's also why advanced martials can do the impossible. They have slowly started to believe that they can do these impossible things if they put enough effort in. As their faith in their abilities increases there abilities themselves increase.

It doesn't make a world that mirrors the real world, but it does make for an internally self consistent one.

And maybe part of this is that I really want players to have to actually work to use things like AEs and to make them useful. Same thing with archery in general (which is what brought this up, sorta). If you can fire into melee safely every time, then there's no need to work in any way to get a "clean shot" on an enemy. No need to move to the side so you can have a clear line of fire. No need to make sure you position yourself so the enemy has to run across a field to get to you. Just fight anywhere you want, and your archer is at full effectiveness, all the time, every time. No need to lure enemies into a kill zone for AEs either. Just engage in melee and let your spell casters blast away full power. No problem, right? That's what I find unrealistic.

I almost agree with you here, but I feel like we have different backgrounds when it comes to RPGs. I also want strategy and tactics to matter, but I also enjoy games on a higher power spectrum. The last two big games I've played (outside of homebrew FATE stuff) were the OSR game Godbound, and 5e. In Godbound there are multiple tactics that allow characters to freely attack others from outside their range, to the point where that becomes the default unless something directly prevents it. In 5e, similar situations came up all the time where I was doing things like walking up to monsters with Spirit Guardians and Sanctuary up and taking the dodge action each round to nuke down mass groups of foes in CoS. It was one tactic that worked pretty much every time.

So for me, to have interesting tactical encounters, I decided that both sides of the conflict needed to have options. That assuming two foes of roughly equal power, one side should not be able to consistently invalidate the other. Both should have multiple tactical options in a fight that allowed them a chance at victory.

And so we come back to shooting into melee. I find it provides a richer tactical experience to allow characters not in melee to be able to evade attacks than it does to penalize archers for shooting into melee. There is no longer a set of 'auto win' tactics that can consistently guarantee victory after victory. Battles turn on positioning now more than they have in previous games I've played. As a minor example, I was running an old adnd module for a friend in a lower level solo game, and for the 4 rounds combat lasted, every round there was movement and battlefield alteration going on as part of a constant struggle for tactical advantage. Meanwhile, generally in my experiences in DnD, fights are much more static, with relatively little movement or jockeying for tactical advantage, outside of the initial setting up conditions for the battle. Battles play out much the same way that the new video-game genre of auto-battlers do: You set the initial conditions, but then after that, there aren't any decisions to be made.

Though maybe another advantage my system has is that it's simultaneous resolution of actions in combat. So you never have perfect information when you try to figure out what you are doing in a round. You have to outguess opponents, and with player skill you can even survive rounds that would have killed you with clever tactical thinking. Archer rolled high enough to kill you? Too bad for him that you had already stunned his melee fighter and moved to a zone you can evade in, allowing you to negate that attack. I and my friends find it much more engaging than 5E's very rout combat.

Now if you have a special ability or feat that allows "this shot" or "this spell" to hit only enemies, but with some cost (can use X/day or whatever), that puts it back into "magic can do this" category.

I've always preferred the Effort model that I first ran into in Godbound. Characters have a set amount of effort, and abilities are either always on, require them to have a point of effort free for the duration they use the ability, require them to exert a point of effort, losing it until they can take a 5 minute rest, or requiring them to burn it, losing it until they take a long rest. It's a nice unified system that never leaves a player asking 'why can I only do this x times per battle but still have enough ever'?

Some games go to great length to make all abilities useful all the time. Which means there's no actual reward to the players for good planning. And less reward for gaining "special" feats or spells or whatnot that allow them to break those rules sometimes (which I think was labled a "feat tax" when I mentioned it in that previous thread).

As someone with Chronic Minmax Disease, I don't feel like mastery of character planning is something that should be the biggest deciding factor in a fight (or second, or even third). In my perspective, if a character without any special abilities can't reliably win against a minmaxed character through a higher tactical mastery at least half the time, then I'll be frustrated when building for it, and playing it. A player should be able to get better at the game and have it matter. But if they've messed up their build by not taking a required, expected special ability, then no amount of improvement in the game matters. All they can do is kill their old character and roll up a new one.

It's actually why I made sure my system allows for pretty intensive respeccing without letting it mess up the cohesiveness of the game. It makes it so that players can get better at the character building part of the game, and see improvements there. Right now a fellow player has realized that his character needs a higher Resilience stat, and so they are using the downtime rules to raise it up, allowing them to fix an oversight from character creation without punishing them for it in the long term.

[Talakeal]

I don't really think the correlation between "video-gamey" mechanics and "dissasociated mechanics" are necessarily the same thing.

4E has lots of both, but I don't think they are the same.

For example, tripping snakes, bleeding skeletons, and poisioning golems are all video-gamey things you find in 4E. They are not dissasociated.

The dissasociated stuff is mostly things like marking targets and the AEDU resource system, things that only exist on the mechanical level without representing something on the narrative level.

[Just to Browse]

I think all of those examples are actually dissociated, Talakeal. If a thing made out of rock, metal, or bone can be poisoned or made to bleed, it presents a disconnection between the IRL mechanic and the in-game world. If I saw any of those in a D&D game, I'd call it a video-game-y action.

I think video-game-y-ness includes all dissociated mechanics, but also other things like metagame and narrative conventions. Something like this:


(I'd also like to note that a lot of 4e constructs were immune to poison, presumably for this very reason. Helmed Horrors, Shield Guardians, and Stone Golems all come to mind. The constructs that didn't were things like Flesh Golems, which IMO is pretty reasonable. Bleeding skeletons are/were definitely a thing, though.)

[Talakeal]

snip

We are working on a different definition of disassociated mechanics then.

Dissasociated mechanics are, imo, more often associated with narrative systems rather than gamist systems, as they usual involve the players making a decision that affects the world without their characters doing anything. They are not simply gamist abstractions for ease of play like bleeding skeletons or tripped slimes.


To use an example from my system; every session each player receives a number of destiny points which they can use to reroll dice. This is a dissasociated mechanic, but doesn't feel "gamey".

At the same time, all 1 handed weapons weigh the same amount, regardless of if they are a dagger or an arming sword. This is not a disassociated mechanic, but it does feel "gamey".


Now, some things are both dissasociated and gamist, for example marks in 4E, as that plays very much like a board game mechanic that has no in universe explanation afaict.

[Telok]

To use an example from my system... all 1 handed weapons weigh the same amount, regardless of if they are a dagger or an arming sword. This is not a disassociated mechanic, but it does feel "gamey".

That's really just a low resolution encumberance mechanic. For gamey you want slot based inventory where stuff is 0, 1, or 2 slots and there's no "too much weight" function.

[Just to Browse]

The usual reference for associated vs dissociated mechanics is from The Alexandrian. To whit:

An associated mechanic is one which has a connection to the game world. A dissociated mechanic is one which is disconnected from the game world.

So "no in-universe explanation" is actually a hallmark of dissociation. If it's normal in your RPG for things made out of rocks to bleed, then the mechanism that inflicts a bleed status on a creature made out of rocks is associated. If it's not, then that mechanism is dissociated.

To the weapon example:

• If, in this in-game universe, all 1-handed weapons are magically bound by the gods to have the exact same weight, the system you're describing is associated. The decisions the players make are connected to the game world.
• If you've some crazy physics where mass isn't real and weight is determined by how much pain an object can create, that would also be associated.
• If all daggers are made out of super-dense metal and maces are made out of light metals, that's also associated just fine.
• On the other hand, if the player treats a dagger with the same weight as a mace, but their character considers those 2 things to be different weights, that's definitely dissociated.

In terms of GNS theory, conventional wisdom is that dissociation is common in both Gamist and Narrativist games.

EDIT: Though I want to add that some dissociated mechanics are definitely not gamist. Games like Wushu and the Sentinel Comics RPG, for example, have the player invent fiction under certain scenarios. Definitely not something I would call video-game-y.

[Talakeal]

The usual reference for associated vs dissociated mechanics is from The Alexandrian. To whit:


So "no in-universe explanation" is actually a hallmark of dissociation. If it's normal in your RPG for things made out of rocks to bleed, then the mechanism that inflicts a bleed status on a creature made out of rocks is associated. If it's not, then that mechanism is dissociated.

To the weapon example:

• If, in this in-game universe, all 1-handed weapons are magically bound by the gods to have the exact same weight, the system you're describing is associated. The decisions the players make are connected to the game world.
• If you've some crazy physics where mass isn't real and weight is determined by how much pain an object can create, that would also be associated.
• If all daggers are made out of super-dense metal and maces are made out of light metals, that's also associated just fine.
• On the other hand, if the player treats a dagger with the same weight as a mace, but their character considers those 2 things to be different weights, that's definitely dissociated.

If we're using GNS theory here, conventional wisdom is that dissociation is common in both Gamist and Narrativist games.

I have read that article many times, and reread it again today before making my post.

I guess I just fundamentally disagree with you on what Justin is saying.

Abstractions for the sake of play are, in my opinion, fundamentally different than the sort of thing he is describing and are present in every edition of D&D, not just 4E. I suppose if we really cared we could ask him.

[Just to Browse]

Justin Alexander frequently uses 3e D&D as an example of a game that is almost entirely associated, and has called other mechanics dissociated despite them being abstractions for the sake of play (e.g. skill challenges). You should be able to pop on his discord server and ask if you'd like, but I would not be surprised if he called the all-weapons-are-the-same-weight game system dissociated.

[kyoryu]

Justin Alexander frequently uses 3e D&D as an example of a game that is almost entirely associated, and has called other mechanics dissociated despite them being abstractions for the sake of play (e.g. skill challenges). You should be able to pop on his discord server and ask if you'd like, but I would not be surprised if he called the all-weapons-are-the-same-weight game system dissociated.

Justin has a lot of good ideas, but I think he's a lot off when it comes to 3.x and especially 4e.

Specifically, AED abilities for martials kind of map to reality. I've even seen high level athletes agree. There are certain things you can do as a baseline, and certain things that are so exhausting or painful that you can't. It's a lossy abstraction, for sure - a good "system" would look at fatigue, different types of soreness/overexertion based on body parts, etc. - but frankly it's a reasonable one. And it maps to reality a heckuva lot better than hit points do.

I'm not a 3.x or 4e fanboy, to be clear. Neither are in my top 5 games. But when I came back to D&D in 4e, and was willing to accept hit points, frankly AED on martials was easier to justify.

But he's also gone to great lengths to defend 3.x as actually being a super accurate simulation. I think he definitely has a stance, and is deep into the confirmation bias on that subject.

A lot of his other stuff is really good though.

[Just to Browse]

I enjoy talking about AEDU but I don't want this conversation to veer off course, so I'd like to focus on Skill Challenges. I think skill challenges definitely abstract away things like materials, time, and options in a way that isn't connected to in-universe logic.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I enjoy talking about AEDU but I don't want this conversation to veer off course, so I'd like to focus on Skill Challenges. I think skill challenges definitely abstract away things like materials, time, and options in a way that isn't connected to in-universe logic.

I'd say that Skill Challenges don't have to break in-universe logic. The 4e implementation may have, but that's because (like with so many other things), the ideas were ok but the implementation was half-baked.

If each attempt has a narrative-appropriate cost (time, materials, etc) and consequence (not just increasing a bare counter of success/failure), then it's totally connected to the fiction.

A pure "use whatever skill, roll against a fixed DC, X successes before Y failures" model is more disconnected, but you can say the same thing about just about any mechanic if you strip off all the connections to the world and the underlying fiction.

[KorvinStarmast]

As I ponder the opening question, it strikes me that WBL makes D&D video gamey.
I realize that this is a bit of a recursive thing, since defeat monsters get loot get XP was/is a core game loop in dungeon crawls.

[Talakeal]

Personally, I think marks are the real disassociated mechanic in 4E. Way worse than martial AEDU or skill checks.

[KorvinStarmast]

I don't know if AEDU and skill cool downs in games like Warcraft III, Diablo III, WoW, DotA, or LoL are related, but they seem to run off of a similar pattern of logic. Just throwing that thought out there as regards the thread title.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Personally, I think marks are the real disassociated mechanic in 4E. Way worse than martial AEDU or skill checks.

For me, marks have alternative interpretations that don't disassociate as bad. But you need different ones per Defender.

Fighter marks can represent just an increased attention. You focus on one person, so if they turn their attention away, you take advantage of the opportunity to punish them. Maybe?

Paladin marks...are divine vengeance? Maybe? It's been too long since I looked at them.

[Talakeal]

For me, marks have alternative interpretations that don't disassociate as bad. But you need different ones per Defender.

Fighter marks can represent just an increased attention. You focus on one person, so if they turn their attention away, you take advantage of the opportunity to punish them. Maybe?

Paladin marks...are divine vengeance? Maybe? It's been too long since I looked at them.

Ok, but why can only one person mark a given target at a time?


And there are lots of other abilities called marks that may or may not actually be marks. Justin Alexander uses the Legion Devil as an example. I remember when we played the Ranger's Mark interfered with the defender's marks as well, but I believe that has since been fixed in errata.

[JNAProductions]

Ok, but why can only one person mark a given target at a time?


And there are lots of other abilities called marks that may or may not actually be marks. Justin Alexander uses the Legion Devil as an example. I remember when we played the Ranger's Mark interfered with the defender's marks as well, but I believe that has since been fixed in errata.

Why do Dodge bonuses stack, but Alchemical ones don’t? Or Profane? Or Insight? Or…
You get the point.

EVERY game has abstractions-where the line is drawn on what feels right or not is entirely subjective.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Ok, but why can only one person mark a given target at a time?


And there are lots of other abilities called marks that may or may not actually be marks. Justin Alexander uses the Legion Devil as an example. I remember when we played the Ranger's Mark interfered with the defender's marks as well, but I believe that has since been fixed in errata.

Why do Dodge bonuses stack, but Alchemical ones don’t? Or Profane? Or Insight? Or…
You get the point.

EVERY game has abstractions-where the line is drawn on what feels right or not is entirely subjective.

I agree with JNAProductions. Every game has some hybrid of things that are
a) narratively driven (ie tied directly to and arising from the underlying fiction)
b) retroactively explained (ie the underlying fiction can explain things, if read right)
c) purely "we had to draw a line for game purposes, but this doesn't conflict with the fiction if you read it generously"
And all of these are (generally, specifics may vary) fine and not disconnected.

Disconnected mechanics become more salient where there isn't a sane fictionally-coherent reason. Explicit plot armor is one--a mechanic that says you can't die unless you choose to is disconnected almost inherently. A mechanic that allows the player to dictate the fiction X times per session is disconnected from the fiction--it's pure author stance. But I'd not call it "video gamey". A mechanic where you smash the ground and create a crater...that goes away by the next person's turn, no matter the terrain (ie you can do it while flying, and it doesn't disturb thin ice)...that's disconnected. It's pure VFX. All of those are (IMO) disconnected.

Limits on how many people can mark someone? Meh. It's not perfect, but it's a tradeoff.

[Talakeal]

Why do Dodge bonuses stack, but Alchemical ones don’t? Or Profane? Or Insight? Or…
You get the point.

EVERY game has abstractions-where the line is drawn on what feels right or not is entirely subjective.

Those terms are gamist abstractions which represent magical effects that don't exist in real life.

Marks are a fundamental aspect of gameplay that determines the basic nature of mundane tactical combat.

Disassociated mechanics are not abstractions for ease of play, they are mechanics which exist purely on the narrative / gamist layer and which involve making decisions based on out of character information that has no equivalent in the fiction.


Nobody has ever really complained about magic items not stacking that I can recall, but minutes into our first game of 4E the marking system had everyone hating the game and hating each other.

Disconnected mechanics become more salient where there isn't a sane fictionally-coherent reason. Explicit plot armor is one--a mechanic that says you can't die unless you choose to is disconnected almost inherently. A mechanic that allows the player to dictate the fiction X times per session is disconnected from the fiction--it's pure author stance. But I'd not call it "video gamey". A mechanic where you smash the ground and create a crater...that goes away by the next person's turn, no matter the terrain (ie you can do it while flying, and it doesn't disturb thin ice)...that's disconnected. It's pure VFX. All of those are (IMO) disconnected.

Agreed.

Limits on how many people can mark someone? Meh. It's not perfect, but it's a tradeoff.

Maybe if they even tried to give some explanation in fiction for what the mark represents that would work better.

[JNAProductions]

Those terms are gamist abstractions which represent magical effects that don't exist in real life.

Marks are a fundamental aspect of gameplay that determines the basic nature of mundane tactical combat.

Disassociated mechanics are not abstractions for ease of play, they are mechanics which exist purely on the narrative / gamist layer and which involve making decisions based on out of character information that has no equivalent in the fiction.


Nobody has ever really complained about magic items not stacking that I can recall, but minutes into our first game of 4E the marking system had everyone hating the game and hating each other.

Today I learned that people cannot dodge attacks in real life, or at least no one can be any better at dodging than someone else.
I also learned that drugs that can affect your performance aren't real.

I won't say you're wrong to dislike Marking in 4E, because again, it's subjective.
But your opinion is not universal, nor is it fact.

[Talakeal]

Today I learned that people cannot dodge attacks in real life, or at least no one can be any better at dodging than someone else.
I also learned that drugs that can affect your performance aren't real.

Did you seriously not understand what I was saying or do you need me to go back and break my post down word for word?

But your opinion is not universal, nor is it fact.

Not sure about that as it was one of the prime examples of the person who invented to the term "disassociated mechanics".

[False God]

Disconnected mechanics become more salient where there isn't a sane fictionally-coherent reason. Explicit plot armor is one--a mechanic that says you can't die unless you choose to is disconnected almost inherently. A mechanic that allows the player to dictate the fiction X times per session is disconnected from the fiction--it's pure author stance. But I'd not call it "video gamey". A mechanic where you smash the ground and create a crater...that goes away by the next person's turn, no matter the terrain (ie you can do it while flying, and it doesn't disturb thin ice)...that's disconnected. It's pure VFX. All of those are (IMO) disconnected.

Limits on how many people can mark someone? Meh. It's not perfect, but it's a tradeoff.

To the bold, I think they're disconnected in the context of a strict rules-heavy game like D&D, but they're not in more narrative oriented games. When the game assumes that there is "a world" and the mechanics are how the game interprets its existence, yeah, elements like plot armor and destiny mechanics are disconnected from that specific fiction. In a game with a heavier focus on narrative gameplay, things like "I can't die until I give up!" or "With enough willpower you can bend fate." are absolutely connected to the fiction. Because these games aren't focused on randomized outcomes produced by "neutral" arbiters (ie: the dice). They're focused on specific outcomes, so you can beat the hero against the wall 17 times and slam their head through the floor and they can still stand up because they have "the will to fight". Because the game is about them maintaining the will to fight, not about how much damage they take(see: Princess the Hopeful).

----

A lot of this thread, as much of this forum does, over-focuses on this edition of D&D and its gamey or not gamey mechanics and quite frankly, I find every edition of D&D to be pretty high on the gamey chart. The fact that 3.5 is a 6 and 4E is a 7 doesn't make all that much of a difference to me. It's the relatively low narrative burden the game places on gameplay that makes the whole thing disassociated. That is to say: the rules basically dictate how you're going to act. The narrative element is superfluous and superficial, stripped away, the underlying game continues to function just fine as a purely mechanical construct. That to me makes the entire game disassociated from the worlds in which you're playing the game.

Games that cannot exist without the narrative element, where spells, abilities, special features cannot function without the narrative input from the player to determine, quite frankly, what they even do or how they interact with the world in this situation; games with soft mechanics that allow for non-deterministic outcomes are what make the game associated. You cannot play it without playing in it.

The fact that D&D stems from a wargame and was initially focused on dungeon crawling, inherently disassociated locales whose very existence is isolated from "the world" at large is I think really demonstrative of how highly gamey the whole thing is.