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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9243217" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Your instincts are on-point.  There is one other potential vector for Gamism in Agon; Glory (which, for those who aren't familiar, is basically "hero score").  But, because of the nature of the game-at-large, Glory doesn't "get there."  [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] played excellent, session-in-and-session-out, but he didn't come away with the highest Glory.  I think he may have even come in 3rd of the 3 players?  But that wasn't because he played worse than the others nor they better than he.  It was a combination of (a) the lack of levers for skillful play (therefore not being able to really differentiate yourself in terms of skillfulness of play), (b) circumstance (which, in a game geared toward Gamism, will be overwhelmed by system and player input), and (c) the likely (it definitely materialized in our game) positive feedback loop of Glory attainment > Leadership > PC advancement. I would say that the minimum requirements for effective (in design) Gamism would be the following:* Clear goals, clear win/loss cons, as transparent a user interface as possible.  When these things are obscured, the integrity of challenge-based play becomes increasingly put under duress.  At a certain point, Gamism takes a dirtnap.* You cannot have Gamism without an intensity of tactical decision-space.  In order to achieve that, nearly all decision-points need to be able to be thoroughly weighed and they need to have a consequential weight to them, where both a clearly discernible fault line of "skillful play" and "unskillful play" emerge along with a spectrum of "least to most skillful play."  In order to make that happen, system has to work in concert with GM to generate impactful situation-framing and consequence-foregrounding where choices facing players are multivariate from both "course charted/action undertaken" and "resource(s) allocated and deployed (to amplify a line of play, to broaden prospective lines of play, and to mitigate consequences when they manifest)."* You can have Gamism without an intensity of strategic decision-space, but Gamism is more potent if strategic throughline is both present and potent rather than muted.  Basically take the above for tactical and map a throughline to it where longterm play loops have that same quality of decision-space and considerations for those longterm loops (and feedbacks) are integrated with the tactical.* Sufficient difficulty and (the right kind of) complexity to differentiate various levels of skillfulness in play.Agon has the first bullet point.  However, the second, third, and fourth just aren't present.  There just isn't enough "there" there in terms of Gamism necessaries (by design).  If the changes we discussed in the other thread were made, I still don't feel like it gets even close to a Gamist engine.  It definitely veers more toward Narrativism rather than High Concept Sim (neotrad here) and probably completely so if all of those changes were made (and its trivial to just hack them in).</blockquote>

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