In CRPGs, simulation IS the DM, and CRPGs are adventure sims

[gurugeorge]

I've just been trawling around reading peoples' thoughts on tabletop, CRPGs and stuff, and two musings have been coalescing in the cloaca of my cerebellum, FWIW:-

1) since the DM's job in the classic OSR context is basically to referee a dungeon simulation, with the rules and dice rolls representing resolutions of those aspects of the virtual/abstracted world (including the players' notional virtual bodies, capabilities, etc.) that respond to player's decisions (and more importantly, are out of players' direct control, just as the "laws" of nature as we find them irl), then in a CRPG context, simulationism in the game is basically doing the same job. If the virtual world presented in the CRPG behaves much as you'd expect a somewhat abstracted, compressed version of the real world (or real world + whatever consistent magic rules, etc.) to behave, pending your interaction with it, then that is basically all the rules you need for roleplaying (i.e. pretending to be a character in that virtual world). This is the same idea as "reactivity" as descended from Ultima 7 and carried on by Larian (the virtual world is "prepped" for any damn fool thing that it might come into someone's head to do), it's also the same thing as the "immersive sim" concept (minus the first person perspective) and it's also the same thing that Ted Peterson or whoever it was meant with Daggerfall being "the game as DM."

2) a fairly tight dungeon crawl with a goodly amount of combat makes most sense in the context of tabletop, otherwise the resource management gets too unwieldy for a bunch of friends pretending to be rangers and wizards or whatever. But a CRPG doesn't suffer from the same sorts of limitations. I was thinking about this in the context of recent commentary on BG, how it had open empty areas - some people think that's pointless, but I think that was actually one of the things that made BG a hit. What the CRPG allows, is the possibility of the game expanding from being a dungeon crawl simulator to an adventure simulator, to include part of the outside roaming, with all the immersive roses-smelling that entails (that might otherwise be handled quite perfunctorily in a traditional context, merely referred to), interaction with factions, big evils, princes, having relationships and romances, etc. (Of course this is the danger point at which games seem to be drifting away too far from their roots, bringing in unwelcome casuals with alien agendas, etc., but it's not necessarily all doom and gloom, if held in the right perspective.)

The question is how does narrative fit in? So the CRPG is an adventure simulation and kinda-sorta a game (by virtue of the necessary abstraction and simplification the simulation requires), but we also want it to have a story, to have some kind of beginning, middle and end. Again, in the toy world of the dungeon crawl, all that stuff is out of purview, fairly irrelevant - you're in there for whatever reason, to get the x, kill the y or whatnot; what gives you that goal is outside of and irrelevant to that simulation. But in the CRPG, it potentially has the wider context, so the adventure is part of your own wider virtual life, the wider life of the region, the realm, etc. And in that context, then the narrative is more like history-in-the-making. It would be a reflection of how others see the lived life you lived through (in encountering the big bad or whatever). So like history, again, it's selective and picking out certain aspects of a whole net of circumstances as particularly important (with your actions as the hero(es) being particularly salient). Point here being that from your character's point of view, it's just the life they're living, they're not conscious of it being a story. It's a story from the point of view of the notional others in the game world, and from the point of view of you as the player. Not sure where I'm going with that, but I think keeping that observation in mind ought to "guide" writers (and/or, in the not-too-distant future, the AI DM) in an appropriate way.

 

[luj1]

If you are suggesting that CRPGs are meant to simulate an adventure, I don't think anyone will argue against you.

However, saying that is not enough to differentiate them in my opinion. Wargames are also meant to simulate a campaign.

 

[gurugeorge]

If you are suggesting that CRPGs are meant to simulate an adventure, I don't think anyone will argue against you.

However, saying that is not enough to differentiate them in my opinion. Wargames are also meant to simulate a campaign.

I think the differentiation is in the difference between, say, a campaign, a dungeon crawl and an adventure. The rolepaying is the same "thing" in all three contexts - in all cases you're pretending to be someone in that virtual world (e.g. a general, a dungeon delver and an adventurer, respectively), and dealing with its hard realities, as represented by the rules - but its flavour changes depending on the amount of resources you have to juggle and the scope and scale and timeline of what you're doing.

IOW, I think looking at it this way gets away from the fruitless to-and-fro about how and in what respect it's the rules that differentiate the games. The rules are all "the same," in the sense that they're all simulationist in every context, there is no other point to rules other than to present a virtual world whose "natural laws" are outside your control, a set of hard realities that you interact with and make decisions about.

And so in that context, what the computer does is open up the possibility of such a "game," from being a simple dungeon crawl (as in OSR stuff) to being a wider adventure that includes other aspects of the virtual world, a wider set of resources to juggle, a wider set of decisions to make, etc. All that would be too much to deal with in a tabletop simulation, but a computer can handle it, it can create a much bigger virtual world than a mere dungeon.

And that's what people are chasing, that feeling of being in an adventure that threads through a bigger part of the virtual world, as opposed to a series of one-shot dungeon crawls with just a sketchy context. That's the annoying attractiveness of the genre, as it's developed over the years.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

Bro I like when they have females in the game with big boobs.

 

[luj1]

No offence but if you can't express yourself simply, you don't understand it well enough.

 

[luj1]

I think the differentiation is in the difference between, say, a campaign, a dungeon crawl and an adventure. The rolepaying is the same "thing" in all three contexts - in all cases you're pretending to be someone in that virtual world

That is not what roleplaying is about. Else Quake would fulfil the criteria for being an RPG. Roles = warrior, knight, mage, thief, etc., which are tactico-thematic designations.

 

[gurugeorge]

I think the differentiation is in the difference between, say, a campaign, a dungeon crawl and an adventure. The rolepaying is the same "thing" in all three contexts - in all cases you're pretending to be someone in that virtual world

That is not what roleplaying is about. Else Quake would fulfil the criteria for being an RPG. Roles = warrior, knight, mage, thief, etc., which are tactico-thematic designations.

Playing a role (in an RP game) is not the player (sitting in the chair) steering an avatar that has a notional role in the virtual world, playing a role is the player pretending to be that character in the virtual world, which means that their knowledge of what's going on in that virtual world (therefore their knowledge of their options for possible action) is shrunk (so to speak) to what's explicitly depicted by the rules.

That's what makes it different from reading a book, or playing an fps. As a roleplayer you have no meta knowledge, and (paradoxical as it may seem) you don't know that what you're doing is playing a game. The rules represent the only reality you know, not a game. Fundamentally, that's what "immersion" means, it means being bounded by the rules, living within the rules, engaging with them (parallel to the way you engage with physics limitations in the real world, for example - and this speaks to how immersive sims are roleplaying games, or game-world reactivity becomes part of CRPGs).

If you compare and contrast with an fps, your knowledge is (e.g.) "ah the red key that will get me out of this level must be over there through that thingy." That's meta knowledge, knowledge that you're playing a game, etc.

For that to turn into a roleplaying situation, there would have to be some explicit rule in the virtual world itself that red keys are such-and-such and do this and that, and have a logical rationale for being where they are. But there is no such rationale in an fps, it's simply a puzzle (the puzzle of how to get to it and progress to the next level). But an fps can indeed shade into something more like a roleplaying game - for example, if you move away from "get the red key" to "install the tracking device" or whatever.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

What about NPCs?

 

[std::namespace]

question is how does narrative fit in?

the question is why are you looking for analogies?
a narrative is a narrative
a sim is a sim
a rule is a rule
a die is a die

that's what people are chasing

ronk!

 

[gurugeorge]

question is how does narrative fit in?

the question is why are you looking for analogies?
a narrative is a narrative
a sim is a sim
a rule is a rule
a die is a die

that's what people are chasing

ronk!

Not sure what you mean by "looking for analogies" - and that last quote is what I'm talking about, where immersion is your mind being comfortably enclosed within the rules that represent the virtual world that you (as the character) have to deal with.

 

[std::namespace]

you are equating a real dm with game simulation, its an analogy
there is no reason to do this
its wrong to do this!
they are not analogous even in concept, there is no reason to "compare and contrast" kek them
its muddy thinking that dumb people, women, and social """sciences""" grifters practice

as i see it, your post is some musing on philosophical concepts of the human condition in ... gayming

that's what people are chasing, that feeling of being in an adventure that threads through a bigger part of the virtual world, as opposed to a series of one-shot dungeon crawls with just a sketchy context

this is also wrong: probably the fundamental, core philosophical desire is ESCAPISM from status quo (escapism is a wrong word though imo, i dunno which one is better, antiboredom? probably not)
it doesnt matter if its adventure through a virtual world or a one-shot dungeon crawl, chess, dice - they are the same in the eyes of the motivation of your brain
most people will prefer an adventure because its implies human social context and most people are monkeys living in clans since time immemorial so it fits them most of the time
but not always either!
sometimes i want to rape and kill and sometimes i want to cuddle, some people get hard from eating literal shit... the same people get hard from vanilla too

 

[Max Damage]

There's no unified standard for RPGs or tabletop modules for that matter, expanding beyond dungeon crawler or other relatively limited scope also has its problems and limitations. Most of simulation in RPGs isn't actually real either, and even games like Dwarf Fortress only simultaneously process very limited part of its setting (and still run into eventual FPS death once it has to account for way too many actors).

 

[gurugeorge]

you are equating a real dm with game simulation, its an analogy
there is no reason to do this
its wrong to do this!
they are not analogous even in concept, there is no reason to "compare and contrast" kek them
its muddy thinking that dumb people, women, and social """sciences""" grifters practice

as i see it, your post is some musing on philosophical concepts of the human condition in ... gayming

that's what people are chasing, that feeling of being in an adventure that threads through a bigger part of the virtual world, as opposed to a series of one-shot dungeon crawls with just a sketchy context

this is also wrong: probably the fundamental, core philosophical desire is ESCAPISM from status quo (escapism is a wrong word though imo, i dunno which one is better, antiboredom? probably not)
it doesnt matter if its adventure through a virtual world or a one-shot dungeon crawl, chess, dice - they are the same in the eyes of the motivation of your brain
most people will prefer an adventure because its implies human social context and most people are monkeys living in clans since time immemorial so it fits them most of the time
but not always either!
sometimes i want to rape and kill and sometimes i want to cuddle, some people get hard from eating literal shit... the same people get hard from vanilla too

But a real DM and game simulation are the same thing, just in different media, in different situations. It's not that they're "analogous" - it's that they're essentially the same thing.

DM = referees the player's interaction with the "laws of nature" of the virtual world of the tabletop game.
Computer = referees the player's interaction with the "laws of nature" of the virtual world of the computer game.

They're both the ongoing presentation to the player(s) of a world system that has its own funny little ways, its rules and laws, that the player has no control over and has to contend with, just like the real world - hence, a simulation. The fact that one is done by a human in a social context and the other is done by a computer in, say, a single player context (though it could also be a multiplayer context too) is inessential, except for the fact that the computer version is sophisticated in different ways from the human version (the human is more attuned to the social aspect, and the number-crunching perforce has to be kept within reasonable bounds for that context; the computer is better at crunching lots of numbers and ongoingly simulating a bigger virtual world, but it can't - yet - interact socially, can't be sensitive to the player getting bored, etc.).

As to the escapism point, sure, but escapism into what? Into another world. Well, what's that world like? It's a place that has its own particular rules, some of which cancel out because they're similar to the real world, some of which have to be explicitly spelled out e.g. a chest is a common object in the real world too, so the player knows there might be something in it, because in the real world chests are things that often contain other things in them; upon finding a chest in the game, the rules part arises in terms of exactly how it's dealt with if there's a lock on it, or a trap - those aspects are peculiar to that simulation and have to be spelled out (OTOH the chest might turn out to be a mimic, and that too is a thing peculiar to that simulation, and its funny little ways have to be spelled out).

 

[AdolfSatan]

Aren’t you overanalyzing it a bit? You also make it sound like you’ve never played PnP. There’s plenty of adventuring apart from the dungeon crawl. A clever DM could easily direct a detective/murder story without any fighting.
Hell, two of my favorite experiences were one-shots that had nothing to do with dungeoneering. One was a kidnapping (from the kidnappers side), and another an infiltration. Both demanded plenty of resource management and ad hocs.

(escapism is a wrong word though imo, i dunno which one is better, antiboredom? probably not)

Entertainment.

 

[gurugeorge]

What about NPCs?

NPCs are notionally other living entities, living in the same world as the player's character, and they're presumed to have their own motivations, will, etc. In a tabletop context, that's boiled down to things like "guard," "bandit," "villager" or whatever, and anything that isn't relevant to the dungeon crawl can be abstracted away. A CRPG presenting an adventure simulation offers more scope for them to be more fleshed out because it's presenting a much larger and more complex virtual world.

 

[gurugeorge]

Aren’t you overanalyzing it a bit? You also make it sound like you’ve never played PnP. There’s plenty of adventuring apart from the dungeon crawl. A clever DM could easily direct a detective/murder story without any fighting.
Hell, two of my favorite experiences were one-shots that had nothing to do with dungeoneering. One was a kidnapping (from the kidnappers side), and another an infiltration. Both demanded plenty of resource management and ad hocs.

I haven't played tabletop, I'm just an interested observer. But I think the OSR idea (which is the type of tabletop I'm focusing on for comparison) is a hankering for a more simplified, clearer type of rules-based experience, because the kind of experience you're talking about can verge into LARPing or amdram improv - and I'm not saying that's bad thing, but it just means that it's difficult to circumscribe rules for it. Then it's more like a negotiation between the players and DM, so it's meta, it's out of the context of presenting a virtual world that has its own rigidity.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

What about NPCs?

NPCs are notionally other living entities, living in the same world as the player's character, and they're presumed to have their own motivations, will, etc. In a tabletop context, that's boiled down to things like "guard," "bandit," "villager" or whatever, and anything that isn't relevant to the dungeon crawl can be abstracted away. A CRPG presenting an adventure simulation offers more scope for them to be more fleshed out because it's presenting a much larger and more complex virtual world.

Yes, but my implicit question was "how to 'simulate' them" in our CRPG/simulation. In the TTRPG the DM interpret them, but how to do that in a CRPG?

 

[roguefrog]

RPGs are abstractions, nots simulations. Everything from the armor system, movement, skill checks, combat...all abstractions. And it is exactly as it should be. They shouldn't try to be simulations.

For example, in a D20 system my armor class is 20 and you have to roll a 1D20 to hit fool. That's pure abstract mechanics. The same system has rolling 1 as always a critical failure even if you have enough bonuses to still hit and 20 always hits even if their AC is 5000. This doesn't work in a simulation, which would try to mock real laws of physics to be as close to realism as possible. RPGs don't work that way obviously because they use abstract systems AKA rules.

 

[luj1]

RPGs are abstractions, nots simulations. Everything from the armor system, movement, skill checks, combat...all abstractions. And it is exactly as it should be. They shouldn't try to be simulations.

This is the only truth

 

[gurugeorge]

RPGs are abstractions, nots simulations. Everything from the armor system, movement, skill checks, combat...all abstractions. And it is exactly as it should be. They shouldn't try to be simulations.

For example, in a D20 system my armor class is 20 and you have to roll a 1D20 to hit fool. That's pure abstract mechanics. The same system has rolling 1 as always a critical failure even if you have enough bonuses to still hit and 20 always hits even if their AC is 5000. This doesn't work in a simulation, which would try to mock real laws of physics to be as close to realism as possible. RPGs don't work that way obviously because they use abstract systems AKA rules.

Just because something's abstract doesn't mean it can't be a simulation. It can be a simulation to a certain grain (because it has to be relatively quick and easy to calculate in a social context with some friends, for example).

You can have games with rules that aren't simulations, but an RPG pretty obviously is a simulation, it's modelling a sort of toy, counterfactual (e.g. s-f, fantasy) reality, under time/energy/attention constraints. The element of chance abstractly represents all the unknown factors (e.g. a 1 representing all the various ways things can go horribly wrong, like the expert swordsman slipping on a banana peel, or being distracted by a flash of light at the wrong moment, etc.) - the player doesn't need to know what they are in detail (the friction coefficients involved or whatever) because there's no point to that level of detail in a PnP context, it would only bog things down.

But a computer can do it to a finer grain, to the point that, in a CRPG context, the job the DM did morphs into reactivity, immersive simmyness, etc. Something that's pretty close to the ultimate simulation would be the Holodeck idea of course, where all the rules are tacit and don't need to be pulled out, abstracted or explained - unless the rules of the depicted virtual world are different from the real world in notable ways (e.g. the Holodeck is simulating some kind of spooky, surreal realm or whatever). But it's all a continuum (with the only types of games outside that continuum being, again, pure puzzles about shapes, numbers, colours, etc - I'm reminded of the idea of alternative geometries, you have the kind of Euclidean geometry that models our world as experienced, but you can also have geometries with variant rules that don't represent or model anything experienced or real; the former is analogous to the RPG, the latter are analogous to other types of games).

 

[gurugeorge]

What about NPCs?

NPCs are notionally other living entities, living in the same world as the player's character, and they're presumed to have their own motivations, will, etc. In a tabletop context, that's boiled down to things like "guard," "bandit," "villager" or whatever, and anything that isn't relevant to the dungeon crawl can be abstracted away. A CRPG presenting an adventure simulation offers more scope for them to be more fleshed out because it's presenting a much larger and more complex virtual world.

Yes, but my implicit question was "how to 'simulate' them" in our CRPG/simulation. In the TTRPG the DM interpret them, but how to do that in a CRPG?

Well, the same as other aspects of the world, a certain degree of abstraction (e.g. you could model and quantify them as having attributes, roles in the world, goals, etc.).

 

[Ol' Willy]

RPGs are abstractions, nots simulations. Everything from the armor system, movement, skill checks, combat...all abstractions. And it is exactly as it should be. They shouldn't try to be simulations.

Abstraction is the substitute for actual simulation due to the limited capabilities of hardware and/or software

 

[Gandalf]

I've clicked on translate text and then read it in my native language to devle into those sentences with understanding. So, in different type of tabletop, cyoa, too, there are all sorts of scenarios, campaigns that have a plot? I don't know if I understood the question.

 

[gurugeorge]

RPGs are abstractions, nots simulations. Everything from the armor system, movement, skill checks, combat...all abstractions. And it is exactly as it should be. They shouldn't try to be simulations.

Abstraction is the substitute for actual simulation due to the limited capabilities of hardware and/or software

And in the PnP context, the even more limited capabilities of some friends, drunk, spending a few hours in a virtual fantasy world.

IOW, amusingly, the different lineages and classes of RPG and CRPG are defined by their various different "failure states" (is that the right term?) on the way to perfectly simulating virtual worlds

 

[gurugeorge]

I've clicked on translate text and then read it in my native language to devle into those sentences with understanding. So, in different type of tabletop, cyoa, too, there are all sorts of scenarios, campaigns that have a plot? I don't know if I understood the question.

The plot or story is a different aspect I think. You have the three aspects - the game aspect, the simulation aspect and the story aspect, and they're all closely related, but considered separately for convenience. For example, in sandbox games people famously "make their own story" - if the modelling/simulation was compehensive enough (for example, if every NPC was the sock puppet of a paid actor, or was an AI that closely modelled a human with motivations, capabilities, goals, etc.), then simply interacting with the simulation (with your own goals) would "make your own story."

But again, the split into three aspects is a failure to perfectly simulate - various limitations mean the simulation has to be split into three aspects that have to be treated separately. And to some extent a story is analogous to the situation I talked about above, re. a roll of 1 representing a whole bunch of unknown aspects that might lead to a miss. The story also abstractly represents a bunch of stuff that's "offstage" relative to the player's (in-game character's) awareness (e.g. all the conversations and interactions that the big bad had with his cronies, enemies and minions that led to him taking a certain course of action, which impinges on the player as a certain event that's "part of the story" - say, raiding a village).