Oh, characters can deal with all sorts of personal drama and trauma while the plot rolls merrily along on its predetermined course. "Narrativism" inside of Simulationism inside of Gamism (or perhaps another way around, and maybe with scare quotes on all for fairness), like a big RPG turducken.
Storyteller is really simple low granularity sim to which it easy to bolt on additions. And dice pools are fun as long as they don't get too large, (looking at you Exalted.) The fixed target number version is probably my favourite official RPG system. But sure, it is not particularly revolutionary.
Well, duh. Of course a fixed module cannot account that. But perhaps they should publish advice on how to build campaigns that do?
To repeat: it is integrated into the play advice, on pp 102-3 of the DMG and p 258 of the PHB.
And I've posited that this is one of the best explanations for why a more classic RPG paradigm persists. It is really hard to write material for Story Now play. I mean, not at all impossible, most of 4e outside of adventures is quite handy, but extensive setting with lots of metaplot and such, and detailed adventures of course, are just not useful. I think most people today have also been rather trained to consume vs to create. No RPG is likely to be PASSIVE consumption, but a D&D module is definitely closer to 'watching a movie' than playing Dungeon World is, which will really require active participation in multiple dimensions of generating world details, character motivations, and action descriptions, plans, etc. Marketing dollars seem likely to go to the classic game style, as it is better understood, and generates more spin off IP and whatnot. Notice how Indy games tend to be rather ephemeral, but D&D has FR, WoG, SJ, DS, DL, etc. etc. etc. that tends to kind of keep people engaged. I think at least half of why BitD has remained popular for a few years now is that Doskvol is actually pretty atmospheric and engages people's imagination. DW OTOH, each campaign is virtually just a throw away world.
My experience of ENworld is that most posters use "gamist" to mean having overt gameplay elements or even having overt metagame mechanics. They don't use it in Edwards's sense.
Cool. Where is that in the 5e DMG? I'm wondering if you can find something that passes the same robustness qualities applied to player created quests in 4e.
I cannot say how it is played elsewhere. The 2 longish 5e campaigns I played in mostly involved quite a bit of fairly gamist play. I mean, my 2 primary characters in those games DID have BIFTs and obviously a background, and I sometimes leveraged that. However I would say it was never a focus of play! IIRC the first game I set a goal for my character and tried to center the action on that (obviously the other players had their own agendas) but there were no profound dramatic needs involved, just "I'm doing this thing." In fact a lot of the adventuring was us being trailblazed into various scenarios that were at best very loosely related to anything our PCs really cared about. My character's entire goal was completely undermined as a result of one of them, and all his progress was just removed without so much as I got to even wager it against something. It was just plain pure gamist play with a veneer of characterization.
