pawsplay
Hero
pemerton said:
All that distinction requires is that the two games have a different theory of personality for the character. In either case, you are attempting a "painterly" approach to characterization within the socially established goals of the game.
Unforunately, I do not find it handy. Furthermore, when someone else uses it, I find it even less handy than I try to use it myself. The conclusion I have drawn is that some elements of the vocabulary are not good tools for describing RPGs, or at least some RPGs.
And what is role-playing? If you posit it is portraying a character in a role-playing game, the definition becomes circular.
Are the categories mutually exclusive? While some modern RPGs are definitely not wargames or boardgames, the original nucleus of the hobby was called "fantasy wargaming." Playing D&D as a kind of "board game" is not problematic, and may enjoyable to some participants... indeed, most experiments with a new gaming system take exactly this form!
Let's say I "act" that go upstairs, whereas the GM "acts" that the innkeeper attempts to chase me outside. If the GM does not believe the building has a second story, we go off the map.
That's not what I was talking about it. But you are correct, that does sound like a metagame problem. However, it is still the same general class of problem; while the GM and player can agree on the rules, they cannot agree on the context and their attempts to cooperatively metagame become frustrated.
No, it's a player complaint about how they were interested in certain kinds of events about which they could narrate and which they could rationalize, but said events never materialized.
I consider that a superfluous, possibly meaningless distinction. Modern psychology cannot even say with any certainty whether there is or is not a core personality to real people much less imagined ones. Furthermore, the character I have in my head may not be the one you have in your head. What we share is expereinces at the table we agree upon. As long as we agree on those choices, it does not matter whether we are individually proceeding from a simulated personality with certain core traits or a personality intuited from events. I could even switch modes from one to the other and you would never know... a personality consistent with itself looks the same, regardless of the rationale for its birth.
I am not going to argue whether what you are talking about can be "true" or not. It simply does not matter. In terms of the text of our shared game, the two approaches are the same.
Project much? Really, I'm just glad someone responded to the thread.
I didn't even know you had a preference for narrativist play, only for Forgeist terminology.
I've been playing for about 23 years this summer. I started with D&D, then AD&D. I quite playing D&D in 1986 and did not resume until 3e had been around for months.
If I may be so bold as to make a suggestion: it might have something to do with certain meta-game constructs being defined in Forge terms that described deficiencies in your previous gaming experiences. For you, it filled a void. That's good.
However, it also has deficiencies. Mainly, it really fails to address some of the best gaming of my life, a period from when I was about age 13 to 14, during which I played a dozen or more games and engaged in marathon improvisatinal scenarios. G/N/S was the farthest thing from my mind... we were interested in fun.
In a more mature form, I retain much the same goals. I am looking for challenges. Puzzles, jokes, allusions, themes, conflicts, tactics, all sorts of situations that cause my brain to activate. I am not very particular about the sphere of challenge: what is important is the quality of it. Does it press me personally? Do I find addressing the challenge intrinsically rewarding? That challenge can be a storytelling one, or a strategic one, or simply coming up with a witty comeback. It can even be a social one: did I master the new set of rules sufficiently to game with my friends?
I am not denying salient differences in play styles. I am denying the Forge taxonomy. To me, G/N/S are cumbersome, vague constructs that get in the way of talking about salient differences. Nor am I denying your experiences; I have no doubt Forge concepts have been useful to you, as you report.
Here's the thing. Forgespeak is terrible for talking about D&D. Talking about G, N, or S is like trying to decide whether you want a pizza with crust, sauce, or cheese. Some people might like more or less, but you have to have them. And no one is going to claim pizza is going to be angelhair bolognese or the Chef's special glazed salmon. It's just a pizza. But it is what it is... and nothing else tastes quite like pizza, but pizza. And this is ENWorld. D&D is pretty big here. So trying to talk GNS here is like trying to speak Portuguese in southern Arkansas; someone will understand you perfectly and be gratified, but it's not a practical vocabulary. But a place where my analogy fails is that you could (theoretically) convert Arkansas into a Portuguese speaking region, but G/N/S simply does not have good terms for what happens in a good D&D game. Ron has great fun describing what can go wrong, but the only reason we don't hear about more pathological Sorcerer games is that only very experienced, perhaps even elite gamers are going to play Sorcerer in the first place.
I'd like to do better. I think there can exist an RPG theory or three that can describe a GOOD game of D&D in some other way than pretending the players accidentally played a different, better designed game by unspoken agreement. I think that's rubbish.
I think it would also be useful to describe why fantasy games and superhero games are winners, with vampires and occultists trailing right behind, whereas role-playing games based on the psycholocial tensions in a prison camp are perennial non-sellers. I think it's because fantasy, superheroes, and horror provide an intrinsically valuable immersive experience.
Furthermore, I think 4e will be fairly successful, despite its problematica mechanical design, simply because it encourages and facillitates an exciting and intrinsically rewarding immersive experience. Beheading orcs is essentially its own reward, yes?
There's a basic problem of epistemology, that it's very easy to divide anything into three to five elements and categorize. For instance, I could divide play into Wowist, Creepyist, and Realist, and I'll bet we could successfully classify most games played with little controversy and few games escaping categorization. Does that make my categories "real"? What about Fantasist, Empathist, and Manipulatist? Structuralist, Modernist, or Post-Modernist? Etc.
What does G/N/S get me? It gets me a vocabulary that calls a game about killing things and taking their stuff "incoherent!"
