[d&d4e] Puzzles in RPGs
Callan S.:
Misha, I really don't believe you've been arguing against doing it without prior warning all this time - I think you've been arguing against doing it at all, ever. Even the last sentence of your last post doesn't have a caveat toward letting the players see the idea in advance and decide for themselves - you just decide for them they wont like it, by arguing a GM/designer out of ever presenting it to them to begin with. Probably because you just don't like it.
But regardless what I believe to be the case, you've said your piece on the matter and so have I. So I'll leave it there...ah heck, I'll say this on 'gaps' - I could write a game that has gaps in it and they wouldn't be there to facilitate anything. They would just be gaps. A game where 'they are just gaps' is thus quite possible. Which is good reason not to be entirely certain that gaps in a game are facilitating anything. If it's possible for gaps to just be gaps, it's possible the gaps you think are facilitating something are just gaps that are gaps.
Cheers,
Callan
AzaLiN:
Game world and Gamism
If I'm not mistaken, in movies stories don't unfold naturally. They follow a certain plot arc- intro, ascending action, peak, reversal, climax and resolution- and it seems to me this isn't how things happen in real life except in rare escalating scenarios. The movie world seems to conform to the dramatic world.
Likewise, in Legend of Zelda Link to the Past, and other games, the world is designed to facilitate the game, not the other way around- although, certainly, the opposite approach is used elsewhere.
The Resident Evil mansion makes no sense. Its still awesome.
In a gamist game, the game world has to be illogical. Fact is, its illogical to get into so many fights with monsters or find ANY puzzles at all in a real medieval setting. NPC reactions to bloody, sword wielding maniacs in town, aggressive bargaining, shops, the idea of the PCs forming an adventuring party- they're all concessions to the drama or the gamism.
Thus, the gnoll puzzle doesn't violate how the game world works. It just needs to be made an understood part of that world, that, "in this world, when you come to a river with a 2 person boat, its a puzzle, and that's as natural as rain, much like insane villagers who won't tell you what you need to know until you collect the quest item or get revenge on the butcher for the food poisoning.' An abstracted world.
That being said, although when you combine gamism with world-logical-ness, you can go too far in either direction, but if you're trying to run gamist puzzles and you spend too much time focusing on the world being logical, then of course every puzzle will jarr the players like crazy. Likewise, in a gamist game, when NPCs start acting logically and the world starts working normally, that's also jarring.
A neat trick, borrowed from the Old School, is to have dungeons. Logical world, plus dungeons where logic doesn't quite apply and puzzles and random fights make sense.
Do GNS terms apply here?
A gamist world (puzzles) is one where everything's a competition and a challgenge, set up to facilitate the game.
A simulationist world is a consistent world that makes sense that you join with.
A narrativist world is one where you get what you want if you try hard enough, or want it badly enough, or its dramatic enough
and gamist-simulationist is one where the world is made of puzzles and challenges, and your a part of that world, working through it all like everybody else... That sounds sort of badass to me :D
Callan S.:
Well put, Azalin! That artificial structure that facilitates actually getting at what you want to get at. Otherwise the world just mosies on as it would - and much as alot of real life isn't particularly thrilling or enlightening, so to the game is not thrilling or enlightening. Except on rare "remember that one time, years ago" occasions that the nar and gamism essays already talk about groups who rely on that for their play forfilment.
If you can manage it, plausibly following the game worlds rules is nice. But I think it's better to suceed at that artificial structure and yet fail at plausible game world rules than to suceed at plausible game world rules and yet fail at having that facilitating structure. If someone wants to ignore that structure every time plausible game world following is harmed, I don't think they want gamism/nar.
Though I'll say your summing up of nar isn't really correct. I wont' say this is perfectly accurate, but if you have two compeating beliefs or desires but physical circumstances say you can only hold onto one, which do you choose? How does one choose between beliefs and desires? By what criteria? Only at the moment of play will we see the choice made.
otspiii:
The issue isn't realism, which I agree isn't especially helpful, but self-consistency. If monsters occasionally stop being monsters and start being puzzle pieces it makes it hard to plan ahead and strike a path of expected effectiveness, which destroys some types of gamist play. I guess it all goes into the flavor of gamism you want to provide; is the game the story of a team of adventurers going out into the world and seizing treasure/XP, or is it a series of semi-connected challenges you sequentially provide the players to overcome? Both provide gamist challenge, but they are both very different from each other. I have a slight objection to the latter, although this conversation has made me realize that it's more personal preference than anything else, but I do feel like the one big thing that tabletop games can do that video games and board games and so on can't is to reliably provide challenges that must be approached with creativity and ingenuity rather than computation and efficiency to solve. The Resident Evil mansion is excellent, despite being unrealistic, but forcing rigid Zelda-esque 'I'll only answer your question if you do this fetch quest for me' challenges on players feels like a waste to me. I guess my objection isn't that it doesn't work as an RPG, but that it would just work better as a video game. If you remove all the flexibility and intuition from a RPG system you just end up with a video game with really slow combat, so why not just play a video game instead?
Well, I guess there are plenty of reasons for that, like money, social interaction, the fact that you can design a RP campaign in a few hours in your room while a video game takes a full staff months to years to program, but still. Flexibility is the one thing roleplaying games can do better than any other type of game. Flexibility doesn't mean un-challenging, it's just good at setting up a different type of challenge. That said, I guess there is something to be said for streamlining everything other than the challenge you're specifically interested in providing.
But man, "Solve this math problem to continue" just seems like a pain in the ass to me, even though I really do enjoy them in a non-RPG setting.
Callan S.:
Well, making it it harder to plan ahead makes it harder - which is a good quality! And in terms of gamism, you play the game your actually presented with in the moment (or don't), not the game you imagined would happen - this doesn't destroy some types of gamism, it destroys the missplaced idea of what the game would be.
And here we don't end up with a slow combat, we end up with a reasonably difficult fox and goose puzzle (though azalin still hasn't attached a fixed solution to it yet, so he hasn't finished this work yet). I'm kind of thinking that if the self consistancy is damaged at all, the entire package collapses for you, Misha, and that's why your taking one breach and then saying ALL the flexibility and intuition are gone (which is a pretty broad sweep of the brush based on just one fox and geese puzzle, otherwise). Have a look at that link and see if 'the package', especially with it's resiliance against potential violation, is what you enjoy first and foremost.
I'm pretty sure narrativists breach that package regularly as well "My ex turns up just at this moment!?". Though I think alot of sim players have managed to absorb stuff like this until it becomes a game world rule (like a trope) that the ex turns up at so and so point as an act of game world causality rather than forcing a moral issue into play (forcing it in just as much as forcing in a fox and geese puzzle). So it might be hard to see and I might just be writing a distraction here.
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