From Simulation to Stories
Synergistic Relationality and Directionality (and other buzzwords)
I want to expand on my prior conception that there is an inherent relationality and directionality to the coexistence of simulationism, gamism, and narrative. Specifically, I want to identify how that proceeds.
At its foundation, the game in its playing is a world, perhaps imagined, but certainly real. The game is not merely the rules, because when the rules lead to outcomes that don’t make sense within the world of the game (e.g. “there’s no rule you can’t trip an ooze!”), we recognize that those rules are wrong because they fail to accurately model the reality of the game world. This is why we place simulationism first: because all of the games rules, procedures, and occurrences happen within the context of that simulated reality, and that reality, not the rulebook or even the rule of cool, takes precedence. This is the source of the joy of discovery that is to be found there, the beauty of finding something unknown within the world, experiencing improbable glories, witnessing the truth of that world. In its extreme, the DM might take this truth out of even his own hands and settle it on random tables to experience this discovery himself, though he still must interpret and apply those results sensibly.
That world is modelled by rules, the rules of the game. And if I sound dismissive of them above, do not take it such, for I regard them very highly, for the rules are often the mediator of our experience, through which we can perceive the world of the game. It is not the case that we ignore the rules when they conflict with that reality, but that we revise and refine and perfect them, that they may be a better model — this is the work of a scientist, and with it comes the satisfaction of correctness, of knowing that a thing is well conceived and in its proper place. We cannot merely follow the rules when they conflict with the world, or we relegate our experience to that of a mere boardgame. Thus we see clearly that the rules model the world, and gamism properly proceeds from simulationism in play — not that simulationism overwrites the rules, but that it is their truest origin.
From the world, the rules exist as a model. By acting within the rules, characters emerge, and their deeds form some story. If we instead sought to place the story before the rules, we elevate the story to the level of the world, as something that we must preserve alignment with. Thus the story becomes not something that we create but something we discover. Discovery is not a bad thing in and of itself, and indeed is the proper approach to things outside oneself that are revealed through play, but to apply that to a story is to make the game a railroad where the DM preserves some outcomes not because they are true within the world but because they tell the story the DM wants told (or in games where the players could do such a thing, the story a given player want told). Telling a story the way you want it told is all well and fine . . . but it makes the characters into thespians on a stage, instead of autonomous powers who drive developments in their own right. It seems both more appropriate and more effective to such desires to write a book rather than a campaign (which is not to disparage writers of books at all, simply to state that they serve a different end and fulfill different joys).
That point seems likely to be more contentious, so I will be clear: even a DM who leaves the players free rein, and simply steps in to prevent their untimely demise, ultimately leaves them unfree. As a hovering parent who refuses to let children fail, and thereby learn and improve, such is the DM who must paternalistically safeguard the immediate fun at the table at the cost of long term development. At best, such a DM only allows predictable stories that we might encounter elsewhere; they are never struck by unforeseen tragedy or unreasonable failure, despite how often such things happen both in real life and in any game in which PvP is an option. Indeed, in games with PvP it seems well understood that for the referee to save someone from the consequences of their actions is not only blatantly unfair but an aberration of the rules. That holds true in games without PvP as well (though my D&D will certainly allow it).
The world exists in the game, its essence our simulation. From the world, we have rules that guide play. Play happens, and out of play a story emerges. (To touch on what was previously described as the fun of spectacle, I am considering revision to argue that good stories give rise to spectacle, but I have yet to precisely pin down the derivation.)
The above all having been said, and perhaps most contentious of my claims, I think this directionality is reversed when one switches from running a game to building a setting. In that case, a coherent and complex world for the game is the outcome and culmination, not the origin of all motives. This can be seen in the simple fact that, when designing a world, there is no world to properly derive that from unless one wishes to use reality unaltered. So instead, we begin by looking at the sorts of stories we wish to tell. The characteristics of such stories shape the mechanics we feature in our game, which as the physics-engine of our game, determines what the world we create should look like.
The obvious critique is that only a minority of games feature handcrafted mechanics precisely tuned to the setting in question — people just say “we’re playing D&D” and use the D&D rules (the exception being games such as Traveller that both have a strong default setting and whose rules are in excellent alignment therewith). To that I simply respond that the choice of system is the choice of the genre we wish to experience. If I want to see stories about arbitrage trading on the edge of a space empire, I’m better off using Traveller rules than D&D rules, but even if I do use D&D rules they will end up becoming more Traveller-like in order to be able to tell the sort of stories I want to tell. And if I decide to use RAW D&D 5e for that, I have chosen the wrong rules. Likewise, if I want a game where no one will have to suffer character death, I should choose a system (or houserule it in) so as to make death an impossible outcome. Thus we create the rules-framework of our game, which contextualizes our later gameplay and any rulings we find it necessary to create in play.
So we see that in designing the setting, we begin with genre, and genre determines rules. From the rules then, we can imagine what the world might be like. Most homebrew settings for D&D have elves and dwarves and pseudo-Vancian spellcasters, after all; the existence of such rules demands their impact on the setting. Ascendant is actually a really excellent example of this phenomenon, with many of the designer’s notes in the rulebook making clear how he intentionally modelled “comic book physics” rather than real-world physics when the two were in conflict, and then how he created the setting from the rules that emerged.
To attempt to begin with a setting, and then define rules to create it, is generally a laborious exercise that often ends up tied to the genre and not the setting itself (e.g., most Star Wars games can fairly trivially be adapted to run space operas in general, and that’s not a bad thing — that’s the result of what I describe above, that genre precedes rules).
So to summarize the above framework, one might conceptualize it as such:
Game Setup: Narrative Concept => Rules Framework => Simulated World
Game Play: Simulated World => Game Rules => Narrative Outcomes
And it is critically important to understand that done rightly, no component exists to the exclusion of another, but rather each component strengthens those around it. The best RPG story emerges from rules-respecting play in the context of a simulated world, and the best rules are in alignment with the world they simulate, because the world was built to take them into account and to create the desired genre.
Fantastic. Exceptionally well-put.
Wonderful article. Clears up on a lot of misunderstandings in the relationship betweeen rules, world and the emergence of play, meaning and narrative.