"Gamism," The Forge, and the Elephant in the Room

[Gentlegamer]

OK. I'm going to try to disprove this one by counter example.

May I provide another?

The Giant's Bag - An Account of a "Wilderness Adventure" in Fantasy Wargaming (played by Ernie and Gary Gygax, refereed by Rob Kuntz)

That is an experience no other medium than a role-playing game can deliver, including board games, card games, miniatures games, or video games. The participants in that scenario are all very classical 'gamists' whose 'in character' motivation is nothing other than simple treasure hunting.

 

[innerdude]

OK. I'm going to try to disprove this one by counter example.

Old School Tomb of Horrors. It is a RPG scenario and something that can only really be run in a RPG.

However it's pure gamism and all about Step On Up. That stuff about staying in character? Unnecessary and not used by many groups for that module. After all, PCs won't survive. About the story? The story is barely there. It's all about Step On Up in an absurd situation.

So you can have an RPG without many narrativist trappings. Tomb of Horrors demonstrates how.

On the other hand an RPG is an RPG. The game is part of the name. And you can only get rid of the game by getting rid of the rules (not that there's anything wrong with freeform).

I'd therefore argue that Narrativists like RPGs because they are Gamist - i.e. they provide an arena for conflict and a mechanism for conflict resolution. And this is more fundamental than Gamists liking RPGs because they are Narrativist.

I disagree that you can have an "RPG" without Narrativist trappings. An RPG without any sense of narrative essentially negates the purpose of having a GM at all. You're treating a mechanically derived situation as nothing more than a "challenge" to be overcome, and the GM is just AI at that point, and nothing more.

If your definition of "RPG" includes that playstyle, that's fine, but more and more I'm of the belief that the style of play you describe needs its own descriptor. It's not precisely "roleplaying," but something else. Yes, it uses the mechanics of an RPG to create what happens, but the results of that play style are far more peripheral, or contiguous to that of a board game; it's exploration of "challenge" and "wit" to gain prestige with peers.

I also remain thoroughly unconvinced that the format of an RPG provides better Gamist experiences for Gamists than something else. What is it about the structure and sociality of "Playing an RPG" that makes Gamism "better" than doing it in another venue?

 

[Neonchameleon]

I disagree that you can have an "RPG" without Narrativist trappings. An RPG without any sense of narrative essentially negates the purpose of having a GM at all. You're treating a mechanically derived situation as nothing more than a "challenge" to be overcome, and the GM is just AI at that point, and nothing more.

And that's what Tomb of Horrors for all practical purposes is. Except that a DM is far more flexible and responsive than any AI anyone has ever come up with. And can take ideas and run with them.

If your definition of "RPG" includes that playstyle, that's fine, but more and more I'm of the belief that the style of play you describe needs its own descriptor.

Why? Dungeons and Dragons got there first. Tomb of Horrors was published in 1975. D&D developed out of tabletop skirmish games. If you don't like that people stay close to the roots of D&D, fine. But given that this has been part of the RPG hobby for more than 35 years, who the hell are you to try to enforce another name on this group and kick them out of the RPG hobby?

If you want to call what you do "non-gamist roleplaying" then fine. But if you don't like D&D having prior claim, then you are the one who needs to change.

I also remain thoroughly unconvinced that the format of an RPG provides better Gamist experiences for Gamists than something else. What is it about the structure and sociality of "Playing an RPG" that makes Gamism "better" than doing it in another venue?

Flexibility. In a tabletop RPG you can literally try anything you can think of and are (a) bound only by your imagination and the physics of the world and (b) not pulling the results out of your ass. You need someone with the flexibility of a good DM to cope with genuinely innovative plans that undercut the assumptions of the game. And teamwork. Firing ideas off each other. Always good.

To take one famous scene, there is no boardgame or computer game in existance that will allow you to make a plan involving using a wheelbarrow and a storm cloak to pretend to be the Dread Pirate Roberts unless it has been set up to let you pretend to be the Dread Pirate Roberts using a wheelbarrow and a storm cloak. D&D or other tabletop roleplaying game? Not a problem.

 

[SSquirrel]

Who are you competing against? Competing against each other is a bad thing at the table. But IME most gamists aren't competing against their fellow players. They are competing against the challenges thrown by the gameworld.

You just called a large chunk of the action that happened in many World of Darkness games I played in badwrongfun. Not to mention my friends who played Amber always seemed to be against each other. I never played that one tho.

Why are you posting on a board dedicated to a game that is based on a hacked tabletop wargame centered around Step On Up play simply in order to tell people who like this style that they are having BadWrongFun?

Why are you calling RPGs with a competitive aspect badwrongfun?

This whole thread is just one big example of why I think GNS theory is useless. It has never impressed me or made me think anything about any of the games I play. Trying to pigeonhole everything just makes me less interested, unlike I think it was Pemerton, who loves diving into the analysis.

Oh and before I get asked why I'm reading a GNS thread if I hate GNS Theory, I was curious what the elephant in the room was and now, like a train wreck, I can't look away.

 

[BryonD]

OK. I'm going to try to disprove this one by counter example.

Old School Tomb of Horrors. It is a RPG scenario and something that can only really be run in a RPG.

However it's pure gamism and all about Step On Up. That stuff about staying in character? Unnecessary and not used by many groups for that module. After all, PCs won't survive. About the story? The story is barely there. It's all about Step On Up in an absurd situation.

So you can have an RPG without many narrativist trappings. Tomb of Horrors demonstrates how.

On the other hand an RPG is an RPG. The game is part of the name. And you can only get rid of the game by getting rid of the rules (not that there's anything wrong with freeform).

I'd therefore argue that Narrativists like RPGs because they are Gamist - i.e. they provide an arena for conflict and a mechanism for conflict resolution. And this is more fundamental than Gamists liking RPGs because they are Narrativist.

But you have not demonstrated it at all.
Yes, you could run Tomb of Horrors in exactly that matter with every bit of the narrativist elements removed.
But what you would be left with would truly be a "GAME".

I could run Descent or play WoW and in every way produce exactly the same experiences you have described. But they don't provide the same experience as a RPG does when *I* play it.

Oh, and for the record, Panda Bears have BEAR right there in the name.

And hitting a little closer to home. WoW is an MMORPG. So I guess if that standard works then it isn't that you are claiming that removing narrative elements detracts from the game so much as, perhaps, that ADDING them doesn't bring anything. Which may be your view. But if it is then you are missing out on what a lot of us REALLY enjoy. Now it may be that you are part of the great majority of society and simply don't enjoy that. No complaint there. But if that is the case, I don't see any reason to consider you comments as a meaningful contribution to a conversation aimed at people who do.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You just called a large chunk of the action that happened in many World of Darkness games I played in badwrongfun. Not to mention my friends who played Amber always seemed to be against each other. I never played that one tho.

Mea culpa. I thought I earlier brought up the example of Paranoia which is pretty much pure PVP - I'd in no way call consensual competative play badwrongfun. I would however call making other people irrelevant bad.

But you have not demonstrated it at all.
Yes, you could run Tomb of Horrors in exactly that matter with every bit of the narrativist elements removed.
But what you would be left with would truly be a "GAME".

Most of them are removable. To remove an equivalent number of gamist elements from a game you'd have to throw the dice and resolution mechanics out of a game. This is because Tomb is at the end of the scale.

So I guess if that standard works then it isn't that you are claiming that removing narrative elements detracts from the game so much as, perhaps, that ADDING them doesn't bring anything. Which may be your view. But if it is then you are missing out on what a lot of us REALLY enjoy.

And you've missed what I am arguing entirely. I'm not a pure gamist. I'm arguing against Innerdude's attempt to round up the gamists and push them all off the boat. As I would equally fiercely any attempt to say that D&D was just a game and the narrativists should go away. Or the simulationists. I believe that his attempts here are worse than opening another edition war (as if with 5e we needed to) and are based on flawed notions of what D&D is and how deeply the gamist side is entwined in the whole. If he'd been arguing to throw the narrativists off the boat I'd have taken Arneson and Braunstein as step-on-up play at its finest and said you couldn't do that without the narrative.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

 

[S'mon]

In D&D the point is to go up levels and get more powerful by overcoming challenges. It's a game, at its core. Running it as a simulation where the player doesn't actually care whether their PC overcomes challenges & levels up is rare, IME. There are other RPGs where success is not the main object of play, but it's at the heart of D&D.

 

[pemerton]

I once read a pretty good summary of what Edwards did in developing the GNS. I can't find it at the moment, so I'm going to re-summarize it: Basically, Edwards had a real passion for a narrow slice of Dramatism. He defined that narrow slice as Narrativism. This left him with a bunch of dramatist play-styles that no longer fit in Narrativism, so he basically shoved most of those into Simulationism (which he didn't appreciate or understand very well).

This, of course, is a complete mess.

Other than the fact that I don't agree it's a complete mess, this overlaps quite a bit with my post upthread (#52):

I think the biggest reason for hostility to Edwards' analysis is that he treats White Wolf and 2nd ed AD&D-style play - "storytelling" play - as a version of simulationism that misdescribes itself.

High concept simulationism is the "official" term for this sort of play, in which theme and plot are pregiven (generally by the GM or the module author), and the players then taking their PCs through that plot, contributing a bit of characterisation and other colour but not fundamentally shaping the story. It should be noted that Edwards is not per se hostile to this sort of play (and nor am I): as he says, Call of Cthulhu is the poster child for this sort of game, and (at least in my experience) a well-GMed CoC game is hard to beat.

Now for some players, there is already trouble at this point - because, for them, high concept play is seen as radically different from mechanics-heavy play of the RQ/RM variety - and so they balk at it being put in the same category as purist-for-system simulationism.

But that is an issue mostly just of terminology. Where the real trouble starts, I think, is with the "storytelling" idea - what Edwards' diagnoses as the self-misdescription of certain essentially high concept simulationist games. A misdescription, because in fact it is crucial to these games (as presented, at least) that the GM have control of the story, and that the players' contributions be colour only. (Of D&D modules, I would put a number of Planescape modules in this category - especially Dead Gods and Expedition to the Demonweb Pits - and also a number of 2nd ed Ravenloft modules.) These games therefore tend to produce illusionism (ie the GM controls things from behind the screen, while creating the illusion of player choice mattering to the story).

Now, for many players it seems that this sort of play is highly enjoyable. It is very common for illusionism of various sorts to be defended on these boards, for example, or even put forward as an inevitable feature of all RPGing. But, although Edwards' states that his essays are meant to be neutral as to playstyles, and although there is nothing in his definitions of high concept simulationism and illusionism that is inherently pejorative, it is obvious (I think) that he regards illusionist play as tending very strongly towards dysfunctionality (and Edwards elaborated his views on this in the notorious "brain damage" episode.)

But (in my view) it's not as if Edwards has made some sort of simple error here. Rather, it's a point of deep interpretive disagreement. From Edwards' perspective (which, on this point, I share), there is a radical difference between a GM making a decision because it makes for a good story (which is "dramatism") and the game being designed so as the agency of all participants, channelled in a certain way by the rules, will produce a good story. The first subordinates the agency of the players to the choices of the GM. The second doesn't. The first has the players exploring the GM's story, not creating their own.

But from the point of view of those who enjoy adventure path play "for the story", or who enjoy illusionist play, but who dislike RQ or RM or similar purist-for-system games, then I'm sure that the "simulationist" classification spanning both approaches to play is unsatisfactory.

That's the nature of interpretation and criticism - it's evaluative, and hence controverisal.

TL;DR: GNS subordinates or marginalises a certain sort of play - which, in D&D terms, I think of as 2nd ed era play. But that's not an oversight. It's a key feature of the system, which was designed to try and understand the balance-of-power issues that some see that style of play as particularly prone to.

 

[pemerton]

Although, often folks play such games to have a fun evening with friends, and the "winning" aspect, while present, is an occasional benefit, not something that all around are trying especially hard to do.

Sure, but the same can be true of an RPG. How many people play hard core T&T? I mean, Every time you blast a monster with your magic you have to say "Take that, you fiend!"

 

[pemerton]

You just called a large chunk of the action that happened in many World of Darkness games I played in badwrongfun. Not to mention my friends who played Amber always seemed to be against each other.

<snip>

Why are you calling RPGs with a competitive aspect badwrongfun?

I think you've misunderstood Neonchameleon. It's the OP who's saying that competitive RPGing isn't really RPGing.

This whole thread is just one big example of why I think GNS theory is useless. It has never impressed me or made me think anything about any of the games I play. Trying to pigeonhole everything just makes me less interested, unlike I think it was Pemerton, who loves diving into the analysis.

Fair enough. But GNS doesn't have anything bad to say about your friends playing competitive WoD or Amber. The OP was criticising GNS because GNS says that competitive play is one healthy way to play an RPG.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled train wreck!