Classic Play and Asymmetry

I've been typing up a lot of stuff lately, then revising it or throwing it out. Partly this is due to a dearth of actual play on my end - other than having two wonderfully enjoyable games at Grogmeet this month - but partly it's just that I keep straying away from my Golden Rule. It's not enough, for me, just to avoid the sort of Angry GM performative internet anger I could so easily slip into. On top of that, I feel I actually have to try to say something insightful about topics that get me all riled up without descending into a sort of toxic rant. That means I'm constantly chasing what frustrates me about, say, the Kenku Structure, without achieving any actual catharsis about anything. So here's a sort of "thought for the day" style post, just briefly following up a train of thought to make sure I've actually posted something.

These (giant) dice will determine your fate...

Modern play and classic play in ttrpgs are often distinguished using the concepts of narrativism and simulationism, which stand opposed to one another. The idea is that modern play tends towards creating a shared narrative that hits the beats of a good story - for instance, by reducing lethality, because having a main protagonist die halfway through to a random goblin arrow, unless it carries some sort of deep message, doesn't make for a good story - while classic play is more about simulating what would actually happen in the play scenario, not necessarily with physical realism, but more in the sense of keying into gameable, rather than narrative expectations. In classic play, for instance, enemies will run away because it's what sapient creatures can be expected to do when clearly outmatched, rather than going kamikaze to provide a satisfying fight scene.

These labels are both anachronistic and extensionally imperfect - they don't fit all the cases of either style of play, and neither one lines up entirely either with how people used to play back in the day, or how people play now. Even coming up with the brief gloss above was tricky. But I'm not going to dwell on their imperfections here. Instead, I'm going to propose an alternative way of slicing the issue that further fleshes out our picture of what is going on, and one that does so in a structural way.

It strikes me that in modern play, the GM and the players can be said to be playing different games, in a way that the classic GM and their players are not. The modern (that is narrativist) style of play revolves around the GM curating a narrative, and the players following it and reacting to it. The GM plays half their game away from the table, creating characters, set-pieces, links between scenes etc., and half of it at the table, where their main job becomes conducting players from one scene to the next. The players' game is reacting to the scenes placed in front of them, and finding the link to the next scene (often these are essentially the same thing, e.g.: persuade the uncooperative NPC to tell you where the quest item is located). This is the clearly asymmetrical conception of the GM as storyteller, and the implied role of the players as ferreting out the story.

By contrast, the classic GM and their players are playing essentially the same game: Throw everything together and see what happens. In the ethos of classic play, the GM is an impartial referee, who pulls no punches, but who also never tips the scales against the characters. The much vexed issue of the "players vs GM" game makes sense in light of this impartiality; the players have their characters, and the GM has theirs, many of whom will oppose the PCs' actions, and the GM plays to win for their NPCs just as much as the players do for their PCs, although never to the point of being partial in their rulings.

Put another way, even where they aren't operating on the same rules (Tunnels & Trolls, The Black Hack etc.), the PCs and the NPCs in classic play will be operating on the same logic. NPCs will be canny, unscrupulous, ruthless and mean, within the limits of their assigned personality, if it gets them what they want, just as the PCs will be in the hands of their players. This is why many OSR publications advise you to write in their statblock what the NPC wants - in the absence of such, they are liable to become just a vehicle for plot, rather than a moving part of the scenario.

The two examples I used above can be explained using this symmetry/asymmetry model. In the modern-style, PCs are much more robust than enemies, in combat-heavy games at least, because the plot revolves around having a stable cast of PCs to serve as the protagonists, which can't happen if they keep dying. Here asymmetry is being used to support the structure of the narrative itself. In contrast to this, classic games tend towards having weaker PCs, because having PCs that are much tougher than their enemies (or much more likely to survive a brush with death, e.g.: through death saves) creates an asymmetrical logic within the fiction, where the PCs are much more likely to initiate life-or-death combat or leverage violent threats than NPCs, played with a rational degree of caution, would be. The point here is not that the classic style simulates reality better, although it does, but that playing the same game becomes difficult if the power dynamic is destabilised like this; it becomes difficult to have a satisfying game of "see what happens" if one side can act far more recklessly than the other side is allowed, namely because so many scenes will devolve to threats and violence of the basic, knock-down drag-out sort. The way to deal with this is to curate scenes to adapt for it, but then we're off to the races with the GM playing their own game, and the players tagging along.

Would it help to confuse them if we ran away?

The clearer example is actually the second one. The point of having e.g.: a group of bandits or wolves run away to fight another day isn't primarily because that's realistically what those enemies would do. In fact, it's just the symmetrical style of classic play: The GM is treating those enemies as they would player characters under their control, and doing what players would do if they were clearly outmatched. The fact that this mirrors reality, and that players can therefore form reliable expectations based on reality about how hostile creatures will behave, is actually a secondary benefit; these expectations are formed because the NPCs work on the same logic as the PCs, and the players can therefore model their responses with a reasonable degree of accuracy by thinking what they would do in the given situation.

Note that this consistency of behaviour is actually one clear-cut advantage classic play has over modern play: Enemies in a modern game are difficult for players to predict, and therefore difficult to strategize for in interesting ways, because they are liable to act inconsistently, fleeing or kamikaze-ing, or otherwise acting out of character according to the demands of the plot, rather than anything the players can predict or understand. This is one instance of prioritizing plot over gameplay, a sacrifice that seems to be at the heart of the asymmetrical modern style.

In both of the above cases, I feel like we state the difference imperfectly when we say that one style is focused on simulation over narrative, and vice versa. I think the difference is actually over symmetry, over whether or not we're all playing the same game. As I see it, simulation is secondary, as regards classic play, to the intrinsic fairness of symmetry and the consistency of expectations. What these values of classic play underpin is gameability - the ability of players to understand and enact the things their characters can accomplish, and therefore to engage in the creative plotting and scheming that makes the game of "seeing what happens" so interesting.

I'm not saying that narrative-focused play can't be fun. For one thing, I think that about the only way to run a deeply entertaining one-shot adventure is by adopting the narrative style, because of the tight framework for such games. And there are people out there who don't share my preferences and expectations from ttrpgs. I'm not defending the "Some players want to be railroaded" stance - that argument is bullsh*t, and it astounds me that it gets broken out with the frequency that it does. But there are those out there that chafe at having whole sessions of undirected exploration where nothing much happens, and who enjoy the thrill of a good set-piece. And I myself have definitely had fun in such games.

Inevitably, though, I have a "However".

However... it seems to my untrained eye that there's an uneven amount of game distributed between these two styles. The one, the modern style, apparently incorporates two games - the one played by the players and the one played by the GM - yet it feels like it barely adds up to one game, really. What it actually seems to add up to is a story, where one person is the storyteller, and the rest are listeners who occasionally roll for initiative. On the other hand, the classic style is a game we all play together, and one that apparently has boundless potential for every player, not just the boundless control a storyteller has over their story. Not only does that add up to a full game, it's a potentially indefinite, unlimited sort of game, one that could go in any direction, including the premature deaths, anti-climaxes and improper pacing that this entails.

I'm unabashedly a fan of classic play, much as I've tried to be somewhat even handed here. What I hope to have done is to throw a light on a potential new way of looking at classic play that offers a better insight than the poorly fitting garb of simulationism it often seems to get stuck in. The point is not that classic play is about simulating outcomes, it's that it offers an even playing field, because the GM isn't meant to engineer any preconceived outcomes, so they don't need to leverage asymmetry to help them do so. This is how it supports the game of "see what happens", a game everyone at the table plays - and, in my book, the best a ttrpg can aspire to.