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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8619177" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well...I don't view it quite that same way. Rather, I see that as only one way among several. More my perspective is that game designers can approach things from at least three perspectives, which map more or less to the three aforementioned categories:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Determine the nature the world should have, what is "in the fiction" as Dungeon World puts it, and then extrapolate from that nature the way that the mechanics should work. (This is, loosely, "simulationist" thinking in design.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Determine the design goals you wish your game to meet, then develop what things must be "in the fiction" from that. (Loosely "gamist.")</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Determine the felt experiences and tone that the game should evoke, and then establish both what is "in the fiction" and what the rules should be to facilitate that. (Loosely "narrativist.")</li> </ol>In my experience, both approach #1 and approach #2 don't really put much thought into the narrativist angle--that's an exercise left to the player, more or less. There may be some narrativist thinking, in that (for example) many games will intentionally make it hard or even impossible to earn money outside of doing ADVENTURE! things, not because that would break the game per se, but because that's not "what adventurers do," which is a narrativist way of thinking about game design--becoming a wealthy paper-pusher or spice merchant is not really something most games have interest in actively supporting.And, to be clear, I think nearly every game engages in at least a little bit of all three, even games that are really overtly gamist. Further, sometimes a designer can be enacting two different things at the same time. E.g. "bennies"/"fate point" systems can lean pretty heavily into gamist territory, despite their inherent nature as narrativist tools (consider 4e's Action Points). Meanwhile, simulationist concerns undergird most desires for any economic stuff that is unrelated to what the vast majority of players will do (such as giving prices for various mundane trade goods like chickens and sacks of grain), but there can also be narrativist stuff wrapped up into that as noted above where "deftly execute large monetary trades" is theoretically a valid career path but is considered too boring to support, so the rules will often make it impossible to earn money (or at least meaningful amounts of it) from practicing a trade or buying and selling goods.My overall point, above, was more that many of the design decisions in the earliest forms of D&D were essentially open about their gamist nature, but as the hobby spread, this gamism wasn't as noticed by a significant chunk of the audience. This has, for example, led to the situation where people see HP as meat points, despite Gygax explicitly and soundly rejecting that interpretation. They do so on the basis of purely narrativist and/or simulationist perspectives. Some say, "well no one would call it 'cure wounds' if there weren't wounds to be treated, right?" This is an inherently simulationist argument, essentially saying that no one would have called the spell "cure wounds" unless the world itself actually had the spell removing physical wounds on physical bodies, and thus regardless of what the mechanics or story say, there must be wounds present that are being healed by the spell. Narrativist critiques are rarer (mostly because 3e fans tend to like simulationism and 4e fans tend to like gamism), but I imagine the idea would be something like "injuries only have meaning if they're actually something that matters to the protagonists, something they can perceive; you can't see or touch a loss of 'luck,' so hit points have to be rooted in physical injuries, in order for them to actually be what drives characters to make decisions."None of this passes any judgment about whether any of these three ideas is good or bad. As I've said elsewhere (possibly earlier in this thread), I actually value all three to some extent. Simulationism is just one I see as really cool polish on top of the other two things, rather than a critical component. Others, naturally, differ rather a lot on this front. All three approaches can lead to truly fascinating fiction content if leveraged well. E.g., I consider the 4e concept of "Investiture" to be a very clearly narrativist mechanic, driven by the fact that the designers wanted to give players the experience of deities who are distant for the general world but personally active for individual characters; yet it has the slight gamist touch that they specifically wanted to avoid the 3e solution of "yeah, your god can just pull the plug whenever they want." This mixed narrativist/gamist approach then leads in very interesting directions: the gods are not able to access the mortal world easily (leading to the development of the Primal Ban and the overall fleshing out of the Primal Spirits), and the gods have to be very picky about the people they choose to Invest in otherwise they might get burned and be unable to take their power back, and that then leads to finding an answer to the question "well...what happens if someone DOES turn coat?" Which led to one of my favorite classes in 4e, the Avenger. It is not a grid-filling class, as some have asserted. Rather, it is the (gamist) answer to a question induced by narrativist thinking about the kinds of stories the designers want to tell regarding specific things (in this case, gods and faith). And I love that sort of stuff! Likewise, a successful simulation can potentially lead to very interesting game mechanics, and central game mechanics to which one has committed can lead to fascinating story potential if leveraged well, or spawn new simulation opportunities once the mechanic has been accepted by a potential player as a valid tool to be reasoned about rather than criticized.</blockquote>

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