Thread by @AlexandraErin

Noodling around with tabletop game design today and I think I've found a lens I like better than narrativist/simulationist/gamist: the story/world/game distinction.

I think it's probably easiest to explain this distinction in terms of death. If you make a game that doesn't have rules for dying -- character death will never be an outcome of any result from applying the rules -- that's a game where no one dies.

Some people encountering a game system like this for the first time will immediately go, "So in this world, no one dies? That's ridiculous. Why is the villain sending assassins after the heroes? They would surely know death is impossible in this world."

But the game system is not making an assertion about the world, it is shaping the kind of story that can/will be told using the game. It's a game where no one dies, but it's likely set in a world where people do die.

And when you use the game where no one dies to tell a story set in a world where people die, you may or may not be telling a story where people die. The villain takes out an informant before the PCs can reach them, the PCs decide to kill or spare a dangerous foe, etc.

A PC could even die a heroic death to resolve a part of the plot, but that would happen as a result of story decisions rather than because the game says so.

I'm not sure how much this distinction needs to be elaborated upon, because I suspect the people who try to interpret the nature of the game world through the rules meta are just not going to be happy with particular breaks from simulationism no matter how they're framed.

But I find it useful to think about as I work on framing rules to "simulate" the "reality" of action-adventure stories, particularly animated ones.

(Yes, yes, I know there's a famous RPG for cartoons, but it's "slapstick funny animal" cartoons, not action-adventure fantasy ones)

Further spinning this out, I think I'd call this the Three Layers model, with the idea that Story, World, and Game are the three layers of ludonarrative reality in a TTRPG.

Simulationism would hold that the world is most important/most real and that the other layers should serve it. Gamism says the game matters most and what the game says, goes. Narrativism says all is in service to the story.

My view is that all three layers are "real" within the construct of the game and they have different purposes, and when there's an apparent conflict between them, the goal should be to make sense of the conflict, not eliminate it.

For instance, a player playing Strike! might have a trick defined for their character that says, in effect, their character can win any argument by paying an Action Point.

That element belongs to the game layer, and on its face, it seems like it could flatly contradict the story and the world when it's invoked. But blocking the implementation of the rule because it doesn't make sense breaks the utility of the trick system.

So when that happens, when a player uses the game mechanic to derail a courtroom scene or whatever, the way you address it is not by deciding whether to obey the established reality of the world or of the game, but tell a story that brings them into harmony with each other.

Or to paraphrase many of my tabletop threads: things don't make sense. People make sense of things.

The facts of the world says the players are boned. The rules of the game say a player can unilaterally de-bone the situation. The story is how you explain that.

So to bring it back to death: there are MANY points in a cartoon like Avatar: The Last Airbender where someone definitely could have died, but didn't. The conventions of the genre (game rules) say no death. The reality of the world (people are mortal) says death is possible.

But they tell a story where people mostly get knocked around in fights instead of getting the sharp end of a spear or being run through with a sword, and thus succeed in telling a story where almost no one dies (and when they do, it's really unclear).

Under the D&D 5E rules, you can choose to leave an enemy incapacitated but stable and alive any time you defeat them through a melee attack, whether it's with your fist or an axe. So whether it's a (potentially) lethal blow or not literally depends on your narrative choice.

The people who sneer at breaks from simulationism will go, "Oh, so I can just cleave this guy in half with my axe but somehow he's alive and stable." and, I mean. No. If you leave him stable, you're obviously not doing that.

Now if you're making a game that's meant to allow for D&D-ish adventures in the vein of something like The Dragon Prince or Avatar: The Last Airbender, you can have combat rules that allow for people to fight with swords and daggers and lightning and fire...

...and just define the "defeated condition" that happens when you're out of HP or otherwise overcome not be defined as dead/dying. Or take a 5E-ish approach and let the attacker decide if it's lethal or not, depending on your desired level of grimness.

Is it "realistic" that you can defeat enemy after enemy with blasts of fire from your hands and they're all just "overcome" without suffering horrific burns and dying quickly or slowly?

No, but you shouldn't take for granted that this is the goal of the game system.