Gamism, Simulationism, and Roleplaying Games

Glador the warrior again bashes the  horned and scaled creature that looms over him with his broadsword, drawing a new line of crimson on its leathery hide. The creature doesn’t blink, howl, or in any other way indicate that it feels the sting from the mighty blow. Glador’s companions are inside the cave, battling it out with the creature’s spawn, but the warrior faces down the broodmother himself at the mouth of the cave. The cliff’s edge looms ominously

The creature snarls and launches head-first toward Glador, leading with its sharp, deadly horns. The creature impacts Glador, its horns piercing Glador’s full plate armor. But it doesn’t stop there. It charges forward another five feet, right to the edge of the cliff, taking the fighter with it.

Glador feels the ground disappear from under his feet as he begins to plummet. Forty feet later, he hits the rocky ground at full speed and collapses to the dirt.

As the battle continues in the cave, Glador climbs to his feet, dusts off his armor, grabs his broadsword, and runs as fast as he can toward the trail leading up to the cave. He is not unhurt, but he is far from done with this fight…

If you live in the real world, the scene above sounds ridiculous. And yet, this exact scenario plays out in roleplaying games on countless tabletops throughout the world. The creature, stronger than Silverback Gorilla, probably should have simply crushed poor Glador in the first round of combat. When its horns pierced Glador’s suit of armor, they should have driven deep into his internal organs, poking bloody holes in them, forever stopping his heart while rendering his liver and kidneys un-donatable. And that unbroken forty-foot fall ending on the hardened earth alone would be enough to kill nearly any person regardless of how heroic they are. In fact, actor Kevin Smith who played Ares in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess (not to be confused with the Kevin Smith who made all those charming Askewniverse movies), who was in excellent physical condition, died when he fell from a prop tower in New Zealand. The tower was somewhere between 15 and 18 meters, which roughly translates to a 40 to 50 foot fall (in other words, roughly comparable to Glador’s).

As it plays out, Kevin Smith has nothing on Glador. As a mid-level character, he can simply absorb the 12 Hit Points of damage from the fall. It takes half his regular movement to stand back up, and the only thing keeping him from the ongoing fight is a short job up the hill.

This is the perfect example of the tension between gamism and simulationism. Gamism is a term used in roleplaying game design that means the rules are designed to be “balanced and fair,” and give the player characters a chance of success. Simulationism is another term in roleplaying game design that means your character is a real person living in a real world, albeit one that happens to have monsters and magic in it. The rules act like the physics within the world the characters live in.

In the quest to make the game balanced, fair, and fun, many roleplaying games, including the world’s most popular one, end up creating characters who are not merely heroes but superheroes who could go to-to-toe with Wolverine or the Incredible Hulk and probably walk away on top. While falling damage has always been ridiculously forgiving, things have become so slanted in favor of the player characters in recent years that any notion of verisimilitude flew out the window like your childhood parakeet whose wings you swore were clipped. This level of ludicrousness makes games more akin to amusement park rides, where it feels like there’s danger, but there isn’t. Not really.

Whether you’re a GM or a player, you have little control over the struggle between gamism and simulationism, other than choosing to play a different game. You can try and change the tone of play yourself, but without a major rules overhaul, that task is nearly impossible.

I’ve been a professional game designer for the past 26 years, and I’ve talked to thousands of gamers about their favorite roleplaying games. Over the past decade or so, the number one complaint I hear is that modern roleplaying games don’t feel challenging anymore, monsters aren’t scary, and there’s no fear of dying. Truth be told, many players intentionally lay recklessly and face no real consequences. They’re wanting a return to the days when making dumb decisions leads to unintended consequences that feel realistic, pretty much killing the idea that this is truly interactive storytelling, or representative of living in a fantasy world, and instead more like playing a video game. This is the reason so many people have turned their backs on modern systems entirely and gone to the OSR (old school renaissance, which basically means playing games that were originally released no more recently than the early 1990s.).

If you ask me, people are growing tired of their player characters being superheroes. While they don’t necessarily want gritty or punishing systems that make you regret rolling up a character in the first place, they do want the world to have a more realistic feel and they want it to be challenging again, like it was before the entirety of game design philosophy became “Let the wookie win.”

While I’ve done my part by creating in the Daring & Dread roleplaying game, a revised version of 5E designed to bring challenge back to the game, I’m calling on designers everywhere to start taking the idea of simulationism more seriously. When you create a game mechanic for a roleplaying game, the first thing you should be asking yourself is whether or not this mechanic could actually occur anywhere in the real world. If the answer is no, then you’ve not only succumbed to unfettered gamism, but you’re also detracting from the overall enjoyment of your game.

Blue Dragon image © 2015 Dean Spencer, used with permission. All rights reserved.