NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rogue Agent" data-source="post: 5786579" data-attributes="member: 6673496">First: GNS was originally based on the Threefold Model developed on rec.games.frp.advocacy back in the late '90s. The Threefold was very specifically aimed at describing what motivated GMs to make specific decisions: Does this simulate the game world (simulationist)? Does this make for a good story (dramatist)? Does this make for a good challenge (gamist)? The theory applied to people insofar as GMs and players would generally have preferences for the types of decisions they would like to be made.I once read a pretty good summary of what Edwards did in developing the GNS. I can't find it at the moment, so I'm going to re-summarize it: Basically, Edwards had a real passion for a narrow slice of Dramatism. He defined that narrow slice as Narrativism. This left him with a bunch of dramatist play-styles that no longer fit in Narrativism, so he basically shoved most of those into Simulationism (which he didn't appreciate or understand very well).This, of course, is a complete mess. It works fine if your Gamist or if you fall into the narrow slice of dramatist that Edwards defined as Narrativism. But the Simulationist wing of the model was a complete mess. You can see this very clearly in later discussions at the Forge where adherents of the GNS keep describing Simulationism as incoherent (or struggling to find coherent in it): It was incoherent because Edwards had made it that way.Second:While same gamists may want to "win the game", they're just a narrow (arguably dysfunctional*) wing of gamism. In similar fashion, there's a narrow wing of dramatists who want to "tell my story" (and will sit there lecturing their players through cut-scenes) and a narrow wing of simulationists who will spend 2 hours resolving 10 seconds of action using a dozen minutely detailed tables.(* Although there's really no reason why you couldn't design an RPG to  accommodate them. Arguably Descent is that game.)None of these narrow wings actually tell us much about the bulk of players pursuing that agenda. Most gamists are actually just interested in facing and overcoming challenges (often using creative tactics both in-game and metagame). And that's been pretty much a core property of RPGs since Day 1.I would, personally, argue that a central flaw in both the Threefold and GNS is that you can't satisfy multiple stances at once. (People may have blurred values, but the Threefold argues that any decision has to be purely one or the other; and the GNS holds that rules have to purely pursue one agenda or they lead to brain damage.) Whereas, in practice, this is usually quite trivial if you're not dealing with radicalized purists: You can have the goblin cave with a sufficiently plausible ecology and behavior pattern to satisfy the guy who wants the game world to feel real; which is also a solid challenge to satisfy the guy who wants to overcome such things; which is also rife with inter-tribal political agendas that satisfy the guy who wants a story-riich environment.And, even moreso, the desires of the agendas actually overlap quite a bit: Challenge is the stuff of powerful stories; stories are only effective if you can believe in them; and so forth.tl;dr One of the central principles of both the Threefold and GNS is that different gamers have different opinions about what's important. Congratulations, you have an opinion different from gamists. So what?</blockquote>

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