D&D 5E [+] Explain RPG theory without using jargon

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If "popcorn" is your reason (and I said this upthread) then it doesn't matter what you're playing. Monopoly is as good as 5e.
As others have noted, one doesn't need a single reason. Popcorn might be why one goes to the movies, but once at the theatre they might want the movie to be within certain very broad bounds (say G to PG13 with at least 30% positive on RT?). Hanging out with friends might be the reason one goes to the FLGS, but they still might want a game that falls in broad bounds (vaguely cooperative and encouraging of talking while playing?). Not wanting to be eaten by bears or freeze to death doesn't mean that getting out in nature can't be "the reason one likes camping", just because those two qualifiers are there, does it?
 

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If "popcorn" is your reason (and I said this upthread) then it doesn't matter what you're playing. Monopoly is as good as 5e.
So it is. Gamism, Narrativism, Simulationism, and now, Popcornism.

Edit: You can also do the inverse. I could get Gamism from playing Magic: The Gathering. Simulationism from playing SimCity. Or Narrativism by writing a story.

Maybe role-playing games aren't that special, just another pastime invented by people?
 
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As others have noted, one doesn't need a single reason. Popcorn might be why one goes to the movies, but once at the theatre they might want the movie to be within certain very broad bounds (say G to PG13 with at least 30% positive on RT?). Hanging out with friends might be the reason one goes to the FLGS, but they still might want a game that falls in broad bounds (vaguely cooperative and encouraging of talking while playing?). Not wanting to be eaten by bears or freeze to death doesn't mean that getting out in nature can't be "the reason one likes camping", just because those two qualifiers are there, does it?
Seriously? "What people like about movies" is now not worth discussing because some hypothetical person finds themselves at a theater only because of popcorn and then thinks about what movie they want to watch while eating it?

This is bizarre. Popcorn has as much to do with selecting an airline as selecting an RPG. It's irrelevant. It's chaff, smokescreen, red herring, whatever you want to call it. Because the question of interest is what you want to get out of an RPG. If you aren't asking that question, of course an answer to that question is of no use. But you can't say "I'm not asking that question, so it's of no use, but now that it's of no use, I'm going to ask that question!" It's a tad ridiculous, really.
 
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So it is. Gamism, Narrativism, Simulationism, and now, Popcornism.
No. Popcornism has as much to do with the question "what do you want out of your RPG" as it does "what airline do you want to fly on." It's irrelevant to the question asked. You cannot discard an attempted answer to that question with an irrelevancy and then go back to the question and pretend you've still discarded that answer. This is a classic red herring.
Edit: You can also do the inverse. I could get Gamism from playing Magic: The Gathering. Simulationism from playing SimCity. Or Narrativism by writing a story.
Taking for the sake of argument that there's a direct transfer between RPGs and other activities (there really isn't), then yes, yes, and absolutely, totally, and in all ways, no. It's a very common misunderstanding that the "narrativism" in GNS is a stand in for storytelling. In fact, a pure story railroad under GNS falls under simulationism. The cause-effect is the primary driver, with that cause-effect being entirely based on the story the GM wants to tell.

Narrativism in GNS is about making the PCs the clear protagonists of the game-- and by this I don't mean the ones you root for, although that's a part of it. Rather, that the play will focus on these characters, will be about them and their dramatic needs (what/who they care about, who they actually are, etc.), and that the intent of play is to resolve those needs. It has nothing at all to do with telling a story except that, when done, you may be able to do so. This play is generally hamstrung by a game structure where the GM has prep -- ie, elements of story ready to deploy. Because it's not about telling a story, so having story ready is a problem.
Maybe role-playing games aren't that special, just another pastime invented by people?
Sure. And chess is the same. Or football. You can try to tell other people that things important to them aren't important, but it's a losing argument. But, sure, I expect that you'll just pick a random RPG next time you sit down for your popcorn? There's no reason to select any specific one, if there's popcorn, right?
 

Seriously? "What people like about movies" is now not worth discussing because some hypothetical person finds themselves at a theater only because of popcorn and then thinks about what movie they want to watch while eating it?

This is bizarre. Popcorn has as much to do with selecting an airline as selecting an RPG. It's irrelevant. It's chafe, smokescreen, red herring, whatever you want to call it. Because the question of interest is what you want to get out of an RPG. If you aren't asking that question, of course an answer to that question is of no use. But you can't say "I'm not asking that question, so it's of no use, but now that it's of no use, I'm going to ask that question!" It's a tad ridiculous, really.

Agreed.

We could reduce every discipline ever to this.

Don’t analyze, teach, and learn carpentry because I just want to cobble together stuff!

Don’t analyze, teach, and learn Brazilian JiuJitsu because I just want to violently entangle with another person!

No houses get built.

Nobody can reliably control an aggressor.

It’s regressive and I don’t know how/why we get here as often as we do. It’s like we have this latent Tyranny of the IDGaF in our operating systems.
 

My personal stance is that the jargon of the dominant play culture is widely used and supported because it reinforces the values of the dominant play culture. The purpose is to reinforce norms. This whole "ivory tower" nonsense seems to be a way to suggest that the play we are trying to describe does not actually exist. That it's all just theory when some of us have more than a decade of actual practice under our belts.
I use "jargon" all the time in my profession. It is because we have specialized terminology to describe accurately and concisely things we deal with that are not part of the common usage. It doesn't have anything to do with keeping specific philosophies in place, and in truth gets extended regularly over time - cycled may be even more accurate as some terms fall out of usage.

I'm not debating that it could also be used as you describe, but I am wondering what makes you believe that it is used to control thinking as opposed to just being a shorthand way of describing concepts among those who are familiar with it?
 

Seriously? "What people like about movies" is now not worth discussing because some hypothetical person finds themselves at a theater only because of popcorn and then thinks about what movie they want to watch while eating it?

This is bizarre. Popcorn has as much to do with selecting an airline as selecting an RPG. It's irrelevant. It's chafe, smokescreen, red herring, whatever you want to call it. Because the question of interest is what you want to get out of an RPG. If you aren't asking that question, of course an answer to that question is of no use. But you can't say "I'm not asking that question, so it's of no use, but now that it's of no use, I'm going to ask that question!" It's a tad ridiculous, really.

It felt like some of the posts about rpg theory sounded like people choose/like/prioritize things based on a single over-riding agenda. I don't think that's true for just about anything. It feels like, at the least, people have a bunch of bumpers/ranges/borders on many/most other axes that come in to play that can definitively exclude some choices.

And so the person whose overwhelming thing they like about movies is Popcorn (or cinematography or costuming or the acting) might avoid a slasher or soft-core movie regardless of how good it was on the popcorn/cinematography/costuming/acting. The person who likes the social aspects of gaming might near-equally enjoy tons of games (board or card or RPG) but not even consider Monopoly or Titan or War or Bridge or Tales of Equestria or Phoenix Command.

It certainly feels useful/interesting/fun to me to discuss what those more prominent axes might be. It seems actively counterproductive to me to claim too much about them.

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Where does genre come in?
 

So, in my previous major post, I said I would offer some practical examples of what I was referring to. Let's do that now. I will give examples for the four answers I have proposed to the question, "What are roleplaying games made for?" Before I do, I'd like to stress that I do not consider these the only answers. It is entirely possible that there are more I haven't thought of yet, or even answers that haven't been considered by anyone yet. Further, while I do think these answers have a tendency to push one another away (some more strongly than others), I think it's actually very uncommon, perhaps even quite rare, for players to have zero care whatsoever about the other answers, even though one answer will (almost always) be most important to them.

To recap, for those not wishing to reread the (lengthy) previous post, the four answers I've mentioned are:
  • Score and Achievement: Roleplay provides the meaning and import, while gaming provides a semi-objective challenge to overcome.
  • Groundedness and Simulation: Roleplay as the valued and desired byproduct of natural reasoning about a world and its contents.
  • Conceit and Emulation: Roleplay as the process through which a concept or idea is given life and produces satisfactory expression.
  • Values and Issues: Roleplay as the process of choosing what matters most, and having to resolve conflicts as a result of those choices.
These answers have both historical details (e.g., what I call "Score and Achievement" is by far the oldest answer to the question, "What are roleplaying games made for?") and practical details (e.g., different games implement or manifest them in various ways, but patterns tend to emerge). Where possible, I intend to discuss some of this, but my knowledge and analysis will be incomplete, because I am not a historian and have not played, nor read, nor even heard of every possible roleplaying game ever made. I ask, then, that discrepancies be understood not as an unfair pre-judgment failure to account for something real and meaningful, but rather as a coincidental blank space that simply went without comment due to ignorance or merely having nothing to say. If, on the other hand, you genuinely see a claim to exclude or dismiss something unfairly, I welcome reply, but you may only get, "That isn't meant to be a restrictive rule, just a description of an observed pattern" as your response.

With that lengthy preamble concluded, let's look at some examples.

Score and Achievement

As I said, this is the oldest answer, and is an answer for why most games get made (I'm ignoring "to make money" because that's not about design, nor very interesting to me.) Simply: lots of games make "numbers go up" (or "stay down," e.g. golf) desirable. Many games tie this to some physical action, object, or demonstration of skill, e.g. arcade games. Roleplaying games, however, exist at least as much in the mind as they do in physical objects (often moreso). This means players need reasons to care about the numbers; there is no built-in reason like with many other games. That's where story is important for games focused on skillful play, carefully using resources, and other forms of "adroitly avoid failure and pursue highest success" gameplay.

Dungeons & Dragons has essentially always filled this niche, but the specific way it does so has varied over time. "Combat"--violent conflict, usually against "monsters" (but sometimes humanoid enemies)--is pretty much by definition a matter of "can you succeed well enough, fast enough?" In Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, there are lots of mechanics which measure success or complicate the process of seeking success in order to enrich the play experience. Each player's imagined person, their "character," has various gameplay features which provide numerical advantages when engaged in combat; these include things like "race" (an amalgam of physiological and cultural traits), "class" (the "character's" training and past life experience, e.g. a "Wizard" has usually attended some form of university-style institution to formally study magic, while a "Paladin" usually belongs to a sacred, knightly order), and "background" (in brief, personal life history). These things provide resources and options which players can leverage in play; in general, the players' goal in combat is to deplete every opponent's "hit points" (or "HP," a mechanic representing endurance and ability to remain an active combatant) before the enemy can deplete their character's "hit points" and those of the other players' characters. Defeating the opposition (whether by actually "killing" them or by breaking their will to fight, if the facilitating player--the "Dungeon Master"--decides that's reasonable) results in gaining "experience points" ("XP"). Characters that gain enough experience points "level up," that is, their skills and abilities advance by a discrete and pre-defined amount. Experience points and levels are another metric of "score," one that bridges between the discrete bouts of indiivdual combats.

This is far from the only option, however. In much earlier editions of Dungeons & Dragons, particularly the "original" version (sometimes called "OD&D"), combat was considered a bad thing. This was by design: in early editions, combat was brutally difficult, and extremely likely to result in character death (usually considered a bad thing), unless the players had worked rather hard to bias that combat heavily in their favor. Instead, early editions of Dungeons & Dragons used a system where the monetary value of treasures the player characters extracted from their expeditions would translate into experience earned, and thus measure player achievement. (These expeditions, regardless of edition, usually go into ruins, typically underground, colloquially referred to as "dungeons" regardless of their actual purpose, e.g. tombs, decaying fortresses, temples, natural caves, etc. are all called "dungeons.") This system was often called "GP = XP" (or vice-versa), because the "gold piece" (GP) value of the fictional treasures acquired by the player characters determines the amount of experience points they earn. Though this rule is not always strictly followed in a mathematical sense, that is, it was not always a perfect 1:1 relationship between "gold pieces" recovered and "experience points" gained, it is a useful shorthand. In games of this style, which include several "modern" games designed with a similar ethos, one demonstrable achievement would be having a character that survived to reach high level, because that meant the player was very good at managing resources and avoiding the many dangerous hazards of the fictional world. Some fans of this specific subtype of "Score and Achievement" play consider other, more modern-day-sensibility forms of "Score and Achievement" play to be inferior as a result, which reflects the specific focus on being challenging in an at least somewhat objective sense.

But I am tired and there's much more to say on other things, so I'll stop there for now.
 

Creative agenda and motivation to play are different things. Our creative agenda is what we are trying to accomplish when we sit down to play. I play poker with friends in part for the social experience, but the game has an objective - a contest of skill between players. Part of the expectation when we play is you bring your game. If you just want to socialize you can just hang out, but if you play you should play.

I'm more than happy to have a discussion about player motivations, but if we are going to address a theory, we should at least do so on its actual conceptual framework.
 

It's more difficult for me to address this because your point here relies on a lot of he-said-she-said, and I'm not sure if there is a good way to speak to or navigate through whatever you may be alluding to. Is there perhaps a way that you could rephrase this or focus on something in particular about GNS Theory that giving you difficulties or misgivings?
Simply the apparent claim that there are exactly three things people want out of RPGs, and that an RPG can only satisfy one of them at a time.
I say all of this because GDS and GNS occupy a similar place in the field of TTRPG theory, even if the latter was mired in a lot of anti-Forge controversy. Some of the basic ideas will seem revelatory. Some will not. Some of the core ideas will hold up. Some will not. Some people have moved on from it. Some still hold on to it. Some will revise it. Some will reject anything that so much as even remotely resembles it.
Sure. I think the idea that sometimes play goals conflict with one another is obvious, and I think any stronger claims from GNS, such as the specifics of the three agendas, or the idea that they can’t be served simultaneously, are obviously incorrect.
I would suggest investigating GNS on your own, using primary sources, to determine how accessible you find it so you can properly draw your own conclusions, though I suspect a large barrier for accessibility is that Edwards's writing is difficult, if not annoyingly so, to parse. (I'm reminded of how the basic ideas of 'deconstruction' are fairly easy concept to grok, but reading Deconstructionists talk about 'deconstructionism' can be an everliving nightmare.)

I also recommend this website discussing "What GNS Theory Claims."
I’ll give that link a look, because my previous attempts to investigate the primary sources did indeed run into the problem of Edwards’ writing being difficult to parse.
You don't feel like you need GNS to explain why someone may like these sort of games that are out in the market; however, GNS was developed at a time when there was an absence or dearth of these sort of games in the market. The Forge helped hammer-out (no pun intended) a lot of the concepts, frameworks, and terms that would help lay the groundwork for these games.
I mean, yeah, that’s great. I recognize that, whatever issues I may take with the theory, some good game design came out of it, and that’s cool. I look at it a bit like Freud - foundational to the field, but at this point largely outdated.
That said, would you mind expanding your point in the bold? What do you feel is appealing about more traditional RPG play that GNS theory misses the mark about?
I went into it in quite a bit of detail in a previous post. In brief, I think traditional (maybe “classic” would be a better term so as not to accidentally conflate it with the Cultures of Play typology’s “Trad” culture), appeals for its ability to use challenging gameplay and internal consistency to hilight player choice and reveal character. It is a gameplay style in which the three play goals GNS identifies and treats as mutually exclusive are closely intertwined. It works because they all compliment each other.
It doesn't matter. I find the more general practice of clarifying game terms more useful than getting caught up about where it came from.
Ok, well if a jargon term comes up that I don’t understand I’ll ask for clarification.
 

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