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="Hussar" data-source="post: 5124561" data-attributes="member: 22779">I'm going to take a stab at how I understand GNS-Gamist - the mechanics are the focus of the game.  Every, at at least most, elements in the game are dealt with through various mini-games conained within the rule set.  As was mentioned, Magic The Gathering is pretty much 100% gamist, at least when played competitively.  You can move away from that in casual play, but, in competitive play, you build your deck to win, not to evoke or examine a particular emotional response or to explore a particular imaginary space.Narrative - The goal of the game is to evoke or explore an emotional response or theme.  The events in the game and the mechanics for resolving that event are less important than the players interaction with that response or theme.  Searching for the princess or killing the dragon take a back seat to an examination of the emotional impact of being kidnapped by a dragon.  Narrative game would as often cast you as the victim (the princess in this case) or the dragon (the villain) as the hero.  My Life with Master is a good example here.Simulationist - exploration of the imaginary space is the goal of the game.  Actions are taken in game within the context of this imaginary space and everything should be underpinned by that.  3e D&D relied heavily on Sim play with a rule for everything that attempted to create a logical whole.  GURPS is probably an even better example.That all being said, I think you could graph most games at some point within that triangle.  Very few games, even the ones I listed, would be at the pinacles of that triangle, but most would fall somewhere in the overlapping circles of the Venn diagram.  I do think that finding a game that falls dead center would be difficult.I think that even if the mechanics did fall dead center of the Venn diagram, equally spaced from all points of the GNS model, in play, groups would lean the individual campaign to one direction or another based on the group's preferences.  Those preferences would bias the game towards one or two of the GNS ideas, rather than remaining fixed between all three.</blockquote>

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