D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[Ovinomancer]

Given the context, I don't think so. I was responding to the following exchange:





Basically, D&D cannot/shouldn't offer dramatism, because that will exclude OSR. Never mind that the OSR has several games of its own. That is no longer about the game, but about the entitlement to exclusivity in a game that is not really a part of the OSR to begin with! That really is an issue of people, not of the game itself any more.

This is the problem to showing up late to the conversation. @Crimson Longinus has been repeatedly denying narrativism as a valid play approach, comparing it to dramatism and suggesting they are the same. In the bit you just quoted, you snipped out CL saying, again, that GDS is better than GNS, and you've missed the entire context that CL has been arguing to include drama, not narrativism. So, in that CONTEXT, CL is actually arguing to remove games from consideration, and in CONTEXT @Campbell is pointing this out.

So, yeah, you owe an apology for accusing the wrong person.

 

[Campbell]

What I was responding to was the call to classify Story Now and Dramatism under the same umbrella which I feel would have a sort of erasure effect. This should have been clear from the overall context of our conversation.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Fair enough, but again it proves that GNS narrativism is bizarrely specific and narrow and simulationism absurdly broad with next to no unifying features. I would never, ever associate Powered by the Apocalypse with any sort of simulationism. It absolutely is not a simulationist engine by any sensible definition of the word.

See, I think this is more indicative of how you view it than anything else... 'Simulationist' in GNS terms seems to me to be a fairly coherent concept. That is it indicates an attempt to evoke, within the experience of playing the game, some specific effect or aspect. So, maybe it is a specific superhero milieu, for example. I'd note that this means you CAN sometimes look at a given game element and consider that it may serve more than one agenda! So, a game that is, say, giving you all the Story Now kind of tools, but then heavily restricts what sorts of stories you can tell via mechanics, genre conventions, setting, or whatever, may be as much Simulationist as it is Narrativist, and its even possible that the experience it is simulating DEPENDS ON the very elements of Story Now to enable its simulation aspect, like in LotR if you want to simulate it one of the key points might be personal Will and the will to take up a duty, but also to 'do your own thing' in defiance of power. Story Now techniques can definitely support that! So I'm not sure things are as specific and narrow as they are often made out to be, they are just less MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. I have never spoken to Ron Edwards, so I'm not sure what his opinion on that is. Maybe this is one of the considerations that has led him to move on from GNS. Frankly I'm not sure if that moving on has taken the form of discarding things or is more a question of evolution of concept space.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What I was responding to was the call to classify Story Now and Dramatism under the same umbrella which I feel would have a sort of erasure effect. This should have been clear from the overall context of our conversation.

Yeah, I know that's what you meant.

I don't know, I didn't mean to exclude anything or anyone, merely slightly rearranging the boundaries of the definitional baskets. (And it's not like invented the GDS! I merely said it makes more sense for me.) But however you do it, too dissimilar thing end up in the same basket by someone's viewpoint. I definitely feel that non-story-now dramatic concerns are pretty marginalised in GNS with narrowly defined narrativism basket and 'all the rest' simulationsm basket. Perhaps there just should be more than three baskets?

 

[niklinna]

I don't think the fact its not the only one doesn't make it a valid one. Its not only that it lumps too much in, but that it lumps in a couple of major categories that all evidence I have are considered outright contradictory by probably the majority of people. I don't think its asking too much of a model to not do that.

Lumping would be saying that all Simulationism is alike and there is no conflict. Edwards was responding to the Threefold Model, and he did in fact point out that hey, this Simulation category isn't the monolith you think it is. That is, he actually asserted the thing people here are hung up on: There are different kinds of Sim play and they are very much at odds in particular ways. But they are still all involved in simulating something, and that is the relevant distinction relative to Gamist and Narrativist concerns, and Edwards was also quite explicit about that.

 

[niklinna]

Personally I don't see any great need to assume that Story Now is the only form a Narrativist agenda can take. That is, I think that you cannot say a game is really narratively focused unless the narrative has significant dramatic leeway within play. So, the premise and the milieu, and the process of play must allow for things like players who decide how characters react to events within the game. That further implies that the sequence of events is not fully determined beforehand (which I think is pretty much a given for all RPG play to at least some degree). It also implies that whichever participants make decisions about character reactions are able to make EFFECTIVE decisions, at least potentially. By effective I mean they matter dramatically (I guess it is possible they might have very little impact on the direction the plot takes, as in my Doomed Station example).

I am not sure to what extent any of the people responsible for developing the whole GNS thing explored non-Story Now Narrativism. Certainly games were produced which have had significant narrativist focus in which the 'recipe' isn't exactly like what was originally presented by Edwards. One might consider those games to be less Narrativist in agenda, but I am not sure that's a very good conclusion. It might be better to consider that some elements are necessary, some are supportive, and some might easily be replaced by something else that works equally well, or were simply misidentified as being core. I think it would also behoove people to look at post-GNS ideas, as it is likely many of these points are ones that have already been addressed, since GNS is an almost 20 year old theory at this point!

This is interesting! Can you point out some specific examples of non-Story Now Narrative play?

 

[niklinna]

Yeah, I know that's what you meant.

I don't know, I didn't mean to exclude anything or anyone, merely slightly rearranging the boundaries of the definitional baskets. (And it's not like invented the GDS! I merely said it makes more sense for me.) But however you do it, too dissimilar thing end up in the same basket by someone's viewpoint. I definitely feel that non-story-now dramatic concerns are pretty marginalised in GNS with narrowly defined narrativism basket and 'all the rest' simulationsm basket. Perhaps there just should be more than three baskets?

There already are more than three baskets in the GNS model. Both Gamist and Narrativist have several subtypes that seem very different from one another, even though they do have certain things in common.

Narrativist, notably, does not have subtypes, and that has been a historical critique of GNS. But as @AbdulAlhazred pointed out, Narrativist play was a pretty new idea at the time, and maybe they had only discovered the one (Story Now) approach to it. Maybe there are other approaches to Narrativist play that do contrast with Story Now....

 

[Thomas Shey]

What I was responding to was the call to classify Story Now and Dramatism under the same umbrella which I feel would have a sort of erasure effect. This should have been clear from the overall context of our conversation.

That's probably me, and while I'm sorry it feels like erasure to you (I quite respect your right to have concerns here) from what I see Story Now is absolutely something that would have been included under r.g.f.a. Dramatism. In its pure form it seems like a somewhat specialized form of it, but I can't see how it makes any sense fitting somewhere else, and trying to exclude the rest of Dramatism into either Gamism or Simulationism so it can mostly have a branch to itself seems like kind of a hot take, honestly.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

See, I think this is more indicative of how you view it than anything else... 'Simulationist' in GNS terms seems to me to be a fairly coherent concept. That is it indicates an attempt to evoke, within the experience of playing the game, some specific effect or aspect. So, maybe it is a specific superhero milieu, for example. I'd note that this means you CAN sometimes look at a given game element and consider that it may serve more than one agenda! So, a game that is, say, giving you all the Story Now kind of tools, but then heavily restricts what sorts of stories you can tell via mechanics, genre conventions, setting, or whatever, may be as much Simulationist as it is Narrativist, and its even possible that the experience it is simulating DEPENDS ON the very elements of Story Now to enable its simulation aspect, like in LotR if you want to simulate it one of the key points might be personal Will and the will to take up a duty, but also to 'do your own thing' in defiance of power. Story Now techniques can definitely support that! So I'm not sure things are as specific and narrow as they are often made out to be, they are just less MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. I have never spoken to Ron Edwards, so I'm not sure what his opinion on that is. Maybe this is one of the considerations that has led him to move on from GNS. Frankly I'm not sure if that moving on has taken the form of discarding things or is more a question of evolution of concept space.

But this definition of simulationism is so broad that it is literally useless. Is there a RPG that wouldn't be simulationsm by these standards? Apocalypse World absolutely 'simulates' post apocalyptic world this way.

No, when I say I want simulationistic superhero mechanics, I mean I want the game mechanics that somewhat realistically represent what a person with hundred times the normal human physical strength and resilience could do!

 

[Thomas Shey]

Lumping would be saying that all Simulationism is alike and there is no conflict. Edwards was responding to the Threefold Model, and he did in fact point out that hey, this Simulation category isn't the monolith you think it is. That is, he actually asserted the thing people here are hung up on: There are different kinds of Sim play and they are very much at odds in particular ways. But they are still all involved in simulating something, and that is the relevant distinction relative to Gamist and Narrativist concerns, and Edwards was also quite explicit about that.

I'm sorry, but no. All it comes across is privileging what he cared about, and deciding the distinctions others did didn't matter. There's a difference between conflicts that matter only to proponents of a subcategory, and that were obvious to people who didn't even care much about the particular general category. Even the majority of the old school Dramatists agreed that genre emulation and the kind of world simulation lumped into GNS weren't the same thing. Yes, you can use the term "simulation" for them both, but you can call a lot of things Narrativism doesn't call a narrative such, too.