It seems to me that "win condition" here is turning into something like happy with the outcome.
Success, in any case, you play the game for a while, achieve an objective or fail to.
Is that way off base? Does "win" /also/ have an unintuitive narrow jargon meaning?
I didn't mean a different system, I meant a different ethose of play. ....I'm not going to accept the proposition that a skilled GM can make a prepared story feel like narrativist play until I hear an account of how someone used those post-DL techniques in the context of a system like BW or a PbtA system and pulled it off.
So you /are/ insisting on system.
To me it just seems obvious that it can't be done. In a system like Cortex+ Heroic, for instance, the notion of ignoring or fudging a die roll or an outcome in the interests of the story doesn't have any purchase unless the GM just outright cheats or ignores the rules
"In the interest of the story" has no purchase, yet this is a "narrativist" game that's all about the story?
But that doesn't mean that everyone has done every one of them, or enjoys them.
I think it does mean the former, in that I doubt there could be a 'pure' experience of only one agenda without elements of the others. As far as enjoyment, it's often unexamined - and can even be ruined by examination - and people can identify what aspects of something they believe the enjoy with a lot less accuracy than you might think.
(For an obvious example "I enjoy smoking for the taste.")
My experience on these boards is that the number of ENworld posters who have seriously engaged in narrativist play is fairly modest. I don't know if you're in that category or not. At the risk of being too honest, you come across as being an experienced RPGer whose seen quite a bit of variety over the years; but the way you (at least seem to) relate to "roll vs role" and edition wars, and the claims you make about the place of a GM and what a skilled GM can pull off
I am very down on Role v Roll, CaW v CaS, GNS and warring in general. I don't buy into the drawing of lines in the sand, false dichotomies, and divisiveness in general.
As to the role of the GM and what a skilled one can pull off, well, our hobby is not like chess, it hasn't been codified and polished over generations, a lot of us are among the first generation of hobbyists, and made a lot up as we went along.
makes it seem to me as if you've seen a lot of simulationist play (ranging a wide spectrum from CoC-ish full immersion to HEROs-esque system-oriented simulationism to the classic post-DL adventure path) and probably a fair bit of gamist play (eg classic tournament-style "beat the dungeon" play) and probably a fair bit of gamist players trying to "wreck"/break the simulationist experience, and therefore needing the GM to rein them in.
(Back in the day, I did play in exactly one tournament - it was awful.)
But, yeah, not how /I/ see what I've seen.
What I've seen is a lot of gaming that doesn't fall neatly, or even haphazardly, into the artificial GNS divisions, and that, indeed, trying to pick one of those and pair the aspects of the other two off a gaming experience strikes me as profoundly limiting and likely to wreck said experience. For instance, the idea of 'gamist players' wrecking 'simulationist play' in the implied absence of narrativist play is nonsense. Because every TTRPG session /is a game/, there will be a "win condition" in there, somewhere - achieving victory in combat, or a goal in an encounter, or an overall objective - there /will/ be a setting the PCs inhabit, that the players at least occasionally glimpse from their PoV, there will be a narrative emerging from that which everyone at the table has contributed to in some sense. Nor will the experiences of those playing the game be limited to those three categories.
Though, again, we've lost sight of the claim that GNS is not supposed to be about creating divisions and positing exclusive monolithic modes of play. Yet we seem to be right back there, with you conjecturing that I haven't climbed onto the Narrativist monolith.
But I don't recall you ever posting about play from the narrativist point of view, nor talking about some typical systems that might support it like (say) DitV or PbtA or even narrativist-oriented Fate play.
I have played some FATE and posted about it, but I'm not surprised you missed it.
I don't /get/ to play a lot of indie games, of course, because, as I've often said, the big issue with playing or running a better game isn't finding the ideal system, it's finding a few other people who have found the /same/ better game.
I wouldn't be surprised if you've played in groups/at tables where GM duties are rotated fairly regularly, and everyone takes turns playing through everyone else's dungeons and scenarios.
Doesn't seem relevant. But more of that in Storyteller and 4e than in harder-to run eds, Hero, and the like... also I've very often seen a phenomenon where one system gets consistently run by one GM who is very enthused about it for a while, no rotating there.
rather than via playing a game where collective story creation is done by everyone simultaneously (but not all by being GMs simultaneously
Sounds like "Troup style play." Which is funny, because the definition of Narrativist seems intentionally narrowed to exclude Storyteller.
I half expect to see a capitalized "True" appended to it, at this rate.
it's a recurrent irritation for me on these boards that many posters seem to equate narrativist play with shared authorship of the "spend a point to make such-and-such true in the fiction" variety, where as - as The Forge essays noted 15+ years ago - there's no particuar connection between those sorts of mechanics and narrativist play in the sense The Forge is intersted in).
So, FATE, as well as Storyteller is off the list of narrativist-enough games? Or just that particular mechanic, itself, isn't necessary nor sufficient?
If the attempt at a summary bio and conjecture are way off I apologise. I hope they don't cause offence - they're intended in honest good faith.
You presented it in as un-offensive a way as possible.
But...
What I mean is that GNS laebs are not supposed to be us vs them categories - a person can sit down and enjoy a sim game, and then a gamist game; and even in play there can be shifts in GNS orientation from episode to episode (but not moment to moment).'
That's what I thought. So I don't see how that squares with the assertion that a system can completely block a style of play.
Most of the rest of your post seems to be devoted to insinuating that I can't have ever experienced Narrativist play, even though, we've just established, the very label is not supposed to be a monolithic exclusionary classification, and that, in all likelihood, play I've experienced has "shifted to narrativist" many times.
In fact, I don't even quite by the 'shifting' routine. A single play experience might shade more towards one than another at a given moment or over a session, but I can't see how any one can be entirely absent for an extended period, let alone how a game can be exclusively devoted to one.