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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 1594073" data-attributes="member: 16574">This is a longstanding topic of discussion, and the folks at <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/" target="_blank">The Forge</a> have codified this into a Theory of the three primary ways of approaching the rpg experience: Gamism (your friend), Narrativism (you), and Simulationism (the dominant mode during the 80s -- "realism" and creating a world are most important). There are a lot more nuances (and, alas, a lot of academic-speak jargon) that they've added on top, but this is the most basic version, and in my experience it holds pretty much true. Personally, I've never been much for Narrativist play -- when I want stories I read books or watch movies (or write stories, as the case may be). For many years I was a dedicated Simulationist, was heavily devoted to the worlds of Glorantha and Traveller's Third Imperium, and exploring these worlds was considered something of an end in itself. Recently, however, I've redirected myself to an almost entirely Gamist approach, the much-derided "player vs. DM" model where I consider my primary goal (as DM) as providing a challenge to the players, and their primary goal as overcoming these challenges. Yes, there's some Simulation (to provide the ground-rules against which the challenges take place) and some Narrative (to provide a pretext for the challenges), but the primary focus is always on the challenges themselves. An important thing to note is that a Gamist approach is not necessarily synonymous with a focus on numbers, powergaming, or mini-maxing. Yes this is an element of Gamist play -- in order to give yourself the best possible chance of overcoming challenges you want your character to have every possible advantage under the rules -- but is only means towards an end. Real Gamist play is a matter of matching wits, player (not character) vs. DM -- what you do with the numbers on the sheet, not the numbers themselves. This is actually one of the reasons why I prefer the less-detailed and numbers-heavy versions of the game (OD&D and 1E) -- in those versions the numbers and possible combinations are simple and limited enough that there's only so much weaseling and mini-maxing that can be done with them and the real measure of success will always be the skill and wits of the actual player, not his character, whereas in 3E there are so many possible combinations, so much number-crunching and mini-maxing that can be done, that unless you're very careful (or draw some arbitrary limits) the focus can easily shift away from player skill towards the numbers on the sheet (i.e. munchkinism).</blockquote>

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