*The setting* as the focus of "simulationist" play

[Malmuria]

In play that is setting-sim, as I have outlined it in the OP, the GM establishes factions, NPCs, and the like with dramatic needs - these are what produce the "living world", as setting-sim is often described. Players make headway in the game by identifying these dramatic needs (eg working out what motivates the various faction, or NPCs) and then engaging with them.

There can be RPGing in which no dramatic need is present at all - @AbdulAlhazred has identified classic dungeon crawling as an example, and I reckon classic hexcrawling could also be an instance of this - but I don't think that sort of RPGing is all that common. I think some degree of drama, even pathos, is pretty popular!

Trophy Dark I've skimmed. Its a game with a strong and fairly simple premise. I think its maybe going to depend on how you play it, and I don't think I'm really qualified to comment much since I haven't, and honestly don't have a complete recollection of all the details of how it frames its process of play.

But, I don't think that narrativist character-driven play requires that the SETTING, the THEMES, or the COLOR need to be defined by or relative to the characters and their dramatic needs. The focus of the trajectory of play, what that talks about, does.

So, another way of defining character-driven vs GM-driven or other forms would be whether or not play challenges and potentially transforms who the character is. And does so at the behest and direction of the player. Classic D&D DC play doesn't do that. Its about an environment, the characters are simply assumed to be greedy adventurers risking their lives for gold. No other sort of motivation is ever contemplated in D&D pre-2e at all. Alignment is just a set of proscriptions. Anything else is mere color. I mean, you can IMPOSE other motivations, sort of, via GM action. Mostly those will be in the form of possible added rewards. Maybe some players will respond to "the town is in danger, you must save it" or somesuch. Pretty thin stuff from a story perspective.

Now, consider BitD, the setting and color are quite well established, as are the themes. The game casts the characters as a crew of scoundrels, but WHY, how they operate, what that means to them, their goals, etc. are all up to them. The system gives you some help, vices, and traumas in particular, plus a rival and enemies/allies you can build off of, but your character's motivations are pretty much your own to author, and the GM is bound to respond to those signals with story elements, which are not prepped ahead.

I don't think I quite understand the distinction here. Isn't greed something that can motivate a character? Why is greed a dramatic need in BitD but not in classic Dnd? Another motivation in classic dnd is exploration, very much in a colonial sense (charting an unknown territory, etc). These aren't very 'elevated' motivations, but are still motivations. Similarly, the crew sheets in blades in the dark tell us a lot about what a crew's goals are and how they go about those goals. Namely, through heists. That's all before the players even write anything on their playbooks and crew sheets.

I think perhaps the difference is in the focalization rather than in dramatic need vs setting. B/X characters have the "dramatic need" of wanting money and power--indeed, the game links the two together in parallel expression (xp for gold)--but the game world doesn't warp itself to always provide opportunities for those...sometimes a room is empty, sometimes there is no secret door. Whereas in Blades, it is assumed that the GM will provide cult-y type opportunities for your cult crew, and not hawker-type opportunities. Moreover, who the pcs know and what they've done in the past will be relevant to future scores.

 

[Manbearcat]

I don't think I quite understand the distinction here. Isn't greed something that can motivate a character? Why is greed a dramatic need in BitD but not in classic Dnd? Another motivation in classic dnd is exploration, very much in a colonial sense (charting an unknown territory, etc). These aren't very 'elevated' motivations, but are still motivations. Similarly, the crew sheets in blades in the dark tell us a lot about what a crew's goals are and how they go about those goals. Namely, through heists. That's all before the players even write anything on their playbooks and crew sheets.

I think perhaps the difference is in the focalization rather than in dramatic need vs setting. B/X characters have the "dramatic need" of wanting money and power--indeed, the game links the two together in parallel expression (xp for gold)--but the game world doesn't warp itself to always provide opportunities for those...sometimes a room is empty, sometimes there is no secret door. Whereas in Blades, it is assumed that the GM will provide cult-y type opportunities for your cult crew, and not hawker-type opportunities. Moreover, who the pcs know and what they've done in the past will be relevant to future scores.

So here is a Mouse Guard way to look at this and a contrast with that:

* The players take on the role of a member of the Mouse Guard (maybe a Patrol Guard, a Captain, or a Tenderpaw). As the Seasons churn toward the rest and respite of Winter, these Ranger-Knights take on Missions throughout The Territories to keep the 8 communities, the outlying settlements, and the connective, topographical tissue between safe, secure, and infrastructurally/logistically/social-fabric-wise connected. The dangers to The Territories and what The Guard cares about are Animals, Mice, Weather, Wilderness.

This is what is the game is about.

* The players build their member of The Mouse Guard with some combination (depending upon how the lifepath works out) a Hometown, Parents, Senior Artisan, Friend/Ally, Enemy/Rival, Mentor. They all possess a Nature, Belief, Instinct, and a Mission-specific Goal.

Threatening and invoking and citing these things as nexus of conflict is what the game is about.

---

An alternative to this model is:

* The PCs aren't attached to a premise that propels every moment of play.

* The PCs don't possess a home, people, a nature/belief/creed/motivation that propels every moment of play.

* The setting has lots and lots and lots and lots of people and places with motivations (some discrete, some interconnected, many of low stakes/magnitude, some of high stakes/magnitude in terms of consequences).

* Its the job of the players, through their PCs, to explore that setting, find those peoples and places with motivations (that aren't natively PC-centered). Its the job of the GM to play those peoples and places with motivations, dropping hooks, relating relevant exposition when prompted, bread-crumbing intrigues/mysteries. Now, the players further job is to "get in on the action," onboarding and furthering setting goals they like and defying setting goals they don't like. This is the propulsive fuel for play.

---

I mean those are pretty different, right (in both orientation of the participants and the process of the play)? In the first, its the GM's job to "get in on the action" with "the action" being defined by the intersection of the bolded stuff at the top. In the second, its the player's job to do the "getting in on the action" with the action being the bolded stuff in the 3rd bullet point.

TLDR: The big differences are in (i) "where is the site (system, GM, players) of the say on what is the action" and (ii) "whose job is it to get in on the action of the party that decided (i)?"

 

[Malmuria]

So here is a Mouse Guard way to look at this and a contrast with that:

* The players take on the role of a member of the Mouse Guard (maybe a Patrol Guard, a Captain, or a Tenderpaw). As the Seasons churn toward the rest and respite of Winter, these Ranger-Knights take on Missions throughout The Territories to keep the 8 communities, the outlying settlements, and the connective, topographical tissue between safe, secure, and infrastructurally/logistically/social-fabric-wise connected. The dangers to The Territories and what The Guard cares about are Animals, Mice, Weather, Wilderness.

This is what is the game is about.

* The players build their member of The Mouse Guard with some combination (depending upon how the lifepath works out) a Hometown, Parents, Senior Artisan, Friend/Ally, Enemy/Rival, Mentor. They all possess a Nature, Belief, Instinct, and a Mission-specific Goal.

Threatening and invoking and citing these things as nexus of conflict is what the game is about.

---

An alternative to this model is:

* The PCs aren't attached to a premise that propels every moment of play.

* The PCs don't possess a home, people, a nature/belief/creed/motivation that propels every moment of play.

* The setting has lots and lots and lots and lots of people and places with motivations (some discrete, some interconnected, many of low stakes/magnitude, some of high stakes/magnitude in terms of consequences).

* Its the job of the players, through their PCs, to explore that setting, find those peoples and places with motivations (that aren't natively PC-centered). Its the job of the GM to play those peoples and places with motivations, dropping hooks, relating relevant exposition when prompted, bread-crumbing intrigues/mysteries. Now, the players further job is to "get in on the action," onboarding and furthering setting goals they like and defying setting goals they don't like. This is the propulsive fuel for play.

---

I mean those are pretty different, right (in both orientation of the participants and the process of the play)? In the first, its the GM's job to "get in on the action" with "the action" being defined by the intersection of the bolded stuff at the top. In the second, its the player's job to do the "getting in on the action" with the action being the bolded stuff in the 3rd bullet point.

TLDR: The big differences are in (i) "where is the site (system, GM, players) of the say on what is the action" and (ii) "whose job is it to get in on the action of the party that decided (i)?"

That makes sense, in terms of the distinction between those two sorts of play. But the part at the end does make me think again that the differences are less the result of "dramatic need vs setting" and more about the premise of the game as they arise through character creation and play. Though, mouse guard seems to focus more on internal wants/desires in its character creation than classic dnd (or blades in the dark, for that matter)

 

[pemerton]

Isn't greed something that can motivate a character? Why is greed a dramatic need in BitD but not in classic Dnd?

Roughly because of what @Clint_L posted just upthread.

Positing that greed is a dramatic need in Moldvay Basic is like saying that the "characters" in the boardgame Forbidden Island have a dramatic need of escaping the island. It's just a "lampshading" to make play go.

Christopher Kubasik's discussion of this back in his Interactive Toolkit is still pretty on point, in my view:

The basic plot form of a story is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition, and arrives at a win, lose or draw. All roleplaying games involve this basic plot in one form or another.

Dungeon & Dragons fulfilled this requirement brilliantly and simply. Characters wanted experience points and wanted to gain levels. Any other want they might have had – social, political or personal – was subsumed within the acquisition of levels. Did you want social recognition? A greater understanding of the ways of magic? Influence over people as a religious leader? Pretty much anything your character might have wanted was acquired by gaining levels.

Dungeon modules worked for this very reason. A D&D character who wanted to become a lord didn’t go off and court a princess. He became a lord by wandering around dungeons, killing monsters and overcoming traps. The game offered no rules for courting a princess, but did provide rules for becoming a lord at 10th level, after looting enough arbitrarily placed holes in the ground.

Modules disintegrated the moment a player got the bright idea of having his character become a lord by courting a princess. Suddenly the world opened up. Instead of getting what they wanted by pursuing a single activity – namely, overcoming traps and monsters characters now wanted to interact with people, gaining what they wanted through individual action and detailed plots.

The motivation behind hitting on the princess rather than crawling through a series of traps is obvious. First, and perhaps most importantly for some, the idea of wooing a princess was more fun than hanging out in a dungeon. Second, just because the rules didn’t say anything about wooing didn’t mean you couldn’t do it. As we all know, the minute an idea pops into a player’s head, he’s going to try it. Third, the goofiness of acquiring the title of lord by looting holes grated against the sensibilities of many players. They wanted to become lords in ways that made sense.​

B/X characters have the "dramatic need" of wanting money and power--indeed, the game links the two together in parallel expression (xp for gold)--but the game world doesn't warp itself to always provide opportunities for those...sometimes a room is empty, sometimes there is no secret door. Whereas in Blades, it is assumed that the GM will provide cult-y type opportunities for your cult crew, and not hawker-type opportunities. Moreover, who the pcs know and what they've done in the past will be relevant to future scores.

The gameworld of B/X D&D "warps" itself by providing endless opportunities for dungeon exploration and looting!

 

[pemerton]

the part at the end does make me think again that the differences are less the result of "dramatic need vs setting"

I think you may have misread the OP. Here is an extract, with some key terms bolded:

At least from my perspective, a recurring theme or element in discussion has been a contrast, between:

*Play where the players establish dramatic needs for their PCs, and these drive play (in part because the GM presents situations that speak to those dramatic needs);

*Play where the GM establishes the drivers of play.​

There are different ways of doing the second. One popular one involves the GM preparing, presenting and adjudicating a setting. One of my friends offered the following description of this way of using setting, which I though was pretty good. Here it is (as paraphrased by me):

In this sort of setting-focused play, what is central is the GM's orientation towards framing, and towards content introduction more generally. The GM is akin to a guide. (Which contrasts with the first approach above, where the GM is provoking the players to action based on the player-established dramatic need, and using the relevant system tools.) And the setting is the default protagonist: each NPC, each faction, each "side-quest" that the GM presents to the players, has its own dramatic need that propels play; and it's the players' job to get in on the action, and hopefully to find some overlapping interest with one or more of these setting elements.​

The contrast drawn is not between dramatic need and setting, but between player-authored dramatic need, located in the PCs, and GM-authored dramatic need, located in the setting elements.

@Manbearcat's post just upthread, with his bolded bits in Mouse Guard (vehicles for player-authored dramatic need, located in the PCs) and his bolded bits for generic setting-sim (vehicles for GM-authored dramatic need, located in the setting elements), seems to me to be illustrating exactly this contrast.

 

[Malmuria]

Modules disintegrated the moment a player got the bright idea of having his character become a lord by courting a princess. Suddenly the world opened up. Instead of getting what they wanted by pursuing a single activity – namely, overcoming traps and monsters characters now wanted to interact with people, gaining what they wanted through individual action and detailed plots.

But wouldn't a Blades in the Dark game disintegrate in a similar way if a character wanted to, say, hang out in cafes and find true love? Meaning, to what @Manbearcat said (or rather my reading of what they said), it seems less about the presence or not of dramatic need, and more about the premise of the game.

The contrast drawn is not between dramatic need and setting, but between player-authored dramatic need, located in the PCs, and GM-authored dramatic need, located in the setting elements.

Do the players in The Between, which contain very explicit playbooks and a very very specific genre (Penny Dreadful), really author their characters dramatic need? Again, the premise of the game is doing a lot of work to provide such needs.

I agree that different games treat those needs differently, along the lines you mention. But those needs are system-authored, it seems to me. It might be an academic distinction.

 

[the Jester]

I'm trying to grok how the setting drives play without everything being a hook, from the way the leaves change in the fall at the emperor's palace, to the beer served in the tavern. When I think about bringing the setting into focus, that's what I think of. If each element presented to the players must propel play, then the density of hooks becomes so high that you end up with option paralysis. If only certain elements are meant to propel play, then you are stuck with either the GM telling the players what is actually important, or forcing the players to interrogate every detail to figure what matters.

"Meant to" propel play might be too strong. I'd say that the stuff that matters is the stuff that the pcs engage with, with all the other stuff mattering to the background and setting, and maybe eventually to the pcs. For example, if the group ignores a hook about an evil wizard trying to control the local aristocracy and instead engages in a long distance travel adventure, never returning to the original community, then the evil wizard hook doesn't matter unless it develops in a way that affects pcs far away, where the party has gone.

 

[bloodtide]

I guess the first way is the player telling the DM what to do, and the DM being a blank slate just says "I will do as you say player". Guess that is fun for some DMs.

The second one where the DM just hangs "frames like a guide", and sits around waiting endlessly for the player to look at a frame and finally take some action or do something.

So I'm not really following the whole "Simulation" here....as both examples are that the DM should do nothing on thier own. The first one is just the DM doing what the player tells them too. And the second is the DM doing nothing but being a guide.

So....where is the point where the setting will interact with the characters....WITHOUT direct permission from the players?

 

[TwoSix]

So....where is the point where the setting will interact with the characters....WITHOUT direct permission from the players?

I think the third way would be, as mentioned:

It is sometimes assumed that the only alternative to this sort of play is "linear", railroad-y, adventure path-style RPGing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think I quite understand the distinction here. Isn't greed something that can motivate a character? Why is greed a dramatic need in BitD but not in classic Dnd?

Well, BitD characters are not generally motivated by greed, except as a sort of expected/auxilliary sort of motive. PCs start in that game as the lowest of the low in a crapsack world. So there's a strong 'survival fiction' (albeit in an urban environment) element, which usually manifests in terms of scraping for cash to simply continue to exist. Money is more just one of the resource games that you play, NOBODY really 'gets rich', certainly not unless you survive to higher tiers. In the game I was a player in my PC did end up with some saved coin, technically enough to retire comfortably, but we had to claw our way up to tier 5 to get to that point. I obviously would never say that there are no characters with the ultimate aim to become rich and powerful in narrativist play, its possible! However, you will probably find that play will lead more to a deepening of the character concept that probably leads to more interesting things. At the very least you will confront questions like "will I let my family die in order to get rich?" or something similar (I would certainly expect GMs to frame situations that produce those sorts of dilemma).

Nor is anyone stating that simulationist play has to be utterly devoid of dramatic needs, but they are going to be subservient to the notion of the 'plausible scenario' and just the basic fact that players are ignorant of a lot of significant factors that decide what will be addressed or not. As @pemerton noted, such play is focused heavily, IME, on a detailed methodical navigation of the environment in which the main focus of choices is generally on things like 'which way do we go?' or 'can we cross this stream?' or 'can we ally with this orc tribe?' etc. These kinds of questions, often tests of skill, are the locus of play.

Another motivation in classic dnd is exploration, very much in a colonial sense (charting an unknown territory, etc). These aren't very 'elevated' motivations, but are still motivations. Similarly, the crew sheets in blades in the dark tell us a lot about what a crew's goals are and how they go about those goals. Namely, through heists. That's all before the players even write anything on their playbooks and crew sheets.

I agree, BitD is a game where the FORM that the PC's actions take, and the arena in which they generally play out, is pretty circumscribed. But Doskvol is still, at least in the game I played and others I've witnessed some play of, just a sort of backdrop, and the real action is taking place in interpersonal space between the PCs and with NPCs and involves motives, fears, needs, etc. that are usually dramatic in nature. Obviously EVERY RPG has some sort of 'mental superstructure' in which 'the PCs take action' has to be incarnated. Otherwise you'd have Shops and Vegetables.

I think perhaps the difference is in the focalization rather than in dramatic need vs setting. B/X characters have the "dramatic need" of wanting money and power--indeed, the game links the two together in parallel expression (xp for gold)--but the game world doesn't warp itself to always provide opportunities for those...sometimes a room is empty, sometimes there is no secret door. Whereas in Blades, it is assumed that the GM will provide cult-y type opportunities for your cult crew, and not hawker-type opportunities. Moreover, who the pcs know and what they've done in the past will be relevant to future scores.

Sure, but EVERY SINGLE B/X character has that same 'need', and its hardly 'dramatic' (I mean, it can be made so, but the game doesn't try to do that). I agree basically with what you are saying here. I just express it in terms of Blades characters seem to be more psychologically complex, and their internal life is more directly relevant to the play of the game than with D&D. And that is by design, the game is deliberately made that way.