GNS - which are you?

[PapersAndPaychecks]

I spent years discussing the GDS on rec.games.frp.advocacy and was an active participant there when it was created.

In that case, you are a hugely more patient man than I. I read it for two days and gave up for fear of the loss of any more brain cells.

 

[John Morrow]

Edwards' terms "Simulationist", "Narrativist" and "Gamist" bear only a very passing relationship to what most people would understand by the words he uses.

Well, that's because he borrowed his original terms and categories from the GDS without, I think, fully understanding it. He changed D to N and purged all of th story oriented role-playing that he didn't like (railroading) and dumped it into S. Why? Because as The Forge thread I linked to above illustrates, he didn't really understand S, so it became the toxic waste dump for The Forge. As someone who is pretty solidly "S" in GDS terms, that makes the GNS pretty useless for me, because it tells me that a railroading storytelling GM shares the same play style that I do. Uh, no. Sorry. Thanks for playing. Try again.

What he should have done was left the GDS alone and then created a second three axis model dealing with the locus of control in a game -- whether the game is governed by the GM, objective rules, or the players (all of the participants). If you place that next to the GDS, you'd have a quite effective way of distinguishing railroading storytelling from group storytelling or even games like Theatrix, that provide rules to govern the whole process. Of course the term "Simulationist" is still problematic, even in the GDS (I say this as someone who used to think it was a great term) because it doesn't define what it is trying to simulate. In fact, the GDS was more clear when it was "world-oriented" and "story-oriented" and because of distribution problems with the message (you can only find a repost in the Google archive), rec.games.frp.advocacy really missed the boat by ignoring the labels in the first triangle proposed, which were:

Interactive Storytelling
IC (In Character) Experience
Problem Solving

Of course the really frustrating thing is that because his original terms were used by the GDS and are designed to describe the GDS categories, most people who have not read numerous Forge essays on the nuances of the GNS read the terms and intuitively define them by their GDS meaning, which is why most non-Forge people who talk GNS are really talking about GDS with GNS terminology. You'd think they'd get sick of people misinterpreting the model (followed by requests to read pages of essays) and pick terms that better fit their definitions. But, alas, no.

Likewise Edwards has proved a lot about Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism - but only if you accept his definitions.

More accurately, I think he may have provided some useful insights about Narrativism and Gamism but because of the ghetto nature of their Simulationist category, I don't think it offers much useful insight there.

 

[John Morrow]

GNS lumps Dramatist in with Simulationist as Simulationist which I think is a crime against clarity.

As someone who is pretty strongly Simulationist in GDS terms, I think it's also a crime against Simulationist players. And what makes it really nuts is that the GDS originated as a model designed to explain the distinction between Simulationist and Dramatist games -- specifically, why players who either look at the game setting through their character's eyes or otherwise value verisimilitude highly might reject overt attempts by the GM to make their games more story-like by sacrificing some realism.

But as a person who originally liked the term "Simulation", I think that's a bitof a crime against clarity, too. The problem is that every game "simulates" something. A Star Trek game where the red shirts die to prove how dangerous a monster is "simulates" the stories of the Star Trek TV show but they aren't "Simulationist" in the sense that "red shirts" are a story element, not a part of the setting. It's not "world-based" but "story-based", even though it "simulates" the episodes of a TV show. The distinction Simulationism was designed to make was one of making decisions based only on the reality of the game setting as opposed to Dramatism, which makes decisions based on story needs. Unless the characters in Star Trek are aware of the cliche that red shirts are destined to die, it's a story need decision, not a setting oriented one.

The biggest value I've gotten out of The Forge model, as an ousider, is a good understanding of why people reacted so badly to the rec.games.frp.advocacy model, for which I was an insider. I think I get it know. If you need to read a FAQ or pages of essays to understand how normal words are being used, something is wrong with the words that are being used. If a model rigidly limits the number of categories, insists that all role-players be fit into those categories, and uses a single category as a dumping ground for "bad role-playing", something is also wrong with the categories. In the rec.games.frp.advocacy case, Gamism was the dumping ground. In the GNS case, Simulationism is the dumping ground. Is it really that difficult to create a seperate category for "bad role-playing" or to admit that "bad role-playing" can be found in any style?

 

[John Morrow]

I've hear some folks on RPGnet that share the analysis that Simulationism is sort of a ghetto for the Forge.

I may have been one of them.

I think that the threefold model in any form's greatest point of enlightenment is recognition that there is no one "right way" and different people get different charges out of gaming. But I think that there are many not neatly defininable overlaps between the three and ways to combine the three that are not less satisfying than a "pure game", but more.

But I don't think that any model is useful if it doesn't accurately help people figure out why their games aren't working, how to fix them, how to identify people with similar tastes and people with incompatible tastes, and how to play games made up of groups with people who prefer different styles. Given that this is a small hobby and a social hobby, I think the idea of pure games that cater to a single style at the expense of others is the wrong solution to keep the hobby healthy and Laws and D&D, which seek to cater to several styles in the same game, are what I think this hobby really needs more of.

 

[John Morrow]

In that case, you are a hugely more patient man than I. I read it for two days and gave up for fear of the loss of any more brain cells.

Well, a lot of the early part of it consisted of people actually trying to understand what the problem was and understand what different people got out of role-playing. It's a much different experience being part of the confusion that reading someone else's confusion and (often) clumbsy attempts to get over it. I can see how that would be a "shoot me now" experience. But the one thing that I think did grow out of that was that I think that by the end the rec.games.frp.advocacy regulars all had a much better grasp of the positives of each of the styles than Ron did when he created the GNS using borrowed categories.

 

[S'mon]

But as a person who originally liked the term "Simulation", I think that's a bitof a crime against clarity, too. The problem is that every game "simulates" something. A Star Trek game where the red shirts die to prove how dangerous a monster is "simulates" the stories of the Star Trek TV show but they aren't "Simulationist" in the sense that "red shirts" are a story element, not a part of the setting. It's not "world-based" but "story-based", even though it "simulates" the episodes of a TV show. The distinction Simulationism was designed to make was one of making decisions based only on the reality of the game setting as opposed to Dramatism, which makes decisions based on story needs. Unless the characters in Star Trek are aware of the cliche that red shirts are destined to die, it's a story need decision, not a setting oriented one.

This is what really bugged me about GNS and caused me to ultimately reject it as a useful framework. To me, Simulationist Trek is "what would it be like to be a Starfleet Officer?", Dramatist Trek is "Let's create a story like a Star Trek episode" - and those are 2 very different goals, yet Edwards counts the second as Sim! *ugh*

 

[S'mon]

A couple of years ago I turned to GNS theory, partly because I felt on some level my D&D campaign was dysfunctional and I wanted to know why. I think now my D&D campaign was dysfunctional because at least two of my players had problem personalities that would be difficult to accommodate in any game (not that I’m perfect either), but also clearly most or all of the players wanted things from the game that I wasn’t providing and in some cases wasn’t interested in providing. GNS in the end provided susprisingly little help, though I think it did help collapse my campaign – one of my ex players had an epiphany and decided she was a Narrativist, so she abandoned D&D entirely.
Laws’ definitions are nice, but unlike GNS or GDS they seem entirely player-centric, which makes them less useful for seeing what I as GM want out of a game.
GDS is better than GNS – at least it makes sense – eg I know now as GM I want to provide G & S, and that I like D but I tend not to want to provide it in play, hoping it will emerge naturally. I think GNS was very harmful, actually, because it says “You can only have ONE play style at any one time”; and it strongly implies that if you feel a lack, it’s because you need Narrativism as a solution to your ills. It’s kinda cult-like, actually.
I’m really enjoying GMing my current Lost City of Barakus campaign; focusing as GM on simulating the environment and providing good challenges. Drama – story – is developing naturally in play, and it feels good.

 

[John Morrow]

This is what really bugged me about GNS and caused me to ultimately reject it as a useful framework. To me, Simulationist Trek is "what would it be like to be a Starfleet Officer?", Dramatist Trek is "Let's create a story like a Star Trek episode" - and those are 2 very different goals, yet Edwards counts the second as Sim! *ugh*

Exactly. In fact, defining those two different goals were what led to the creation of the whole GDS model. But to be fair, this illustrates why I think Simulation was also a bad term in the GDS model. The definition can certainly be stretched that way. By the way, I do think Edwards and company have some important insights to offer within their model but I think it gets lost under all of that GDS baggage.

 

[John Morrow]

GDS is better than GNS at least it makes sense eg I know now as GM I want to provide G & S, and that I like D but I tend not to want to provide it in play, hoping it will emerge naturally.

I think that the G&S pairing is fairly common (I'm S with some G) and I think those two styles do often play well with each other because there is substantial overlap.

I think GNS was very harmful, actually, because it says You can only have ONE play style at any one time; and it strongly implies that if you feel a lack, its because you need Narrativism as a solution to your ills. Its kinda cult-like, actually.

I think the ultimate preference issue may be between those who have a preference for how things turn out and those who like to be surprised. If a GM or player have a subjective preference for a particular outcome or resolution to something in a game, the rules are only going to frustrate them because the rules will inevitably fail to anticipate their subjective preference. So they wind up with, "I want X to happen but the rules are telling me that Y happens." There are two ways to make the "X" happen rather than "Y". You can either ignore the rules or create rules that let the GM or players decide that "X" happens.

For players who enter the hobby through rule-heavy systems but are stuck always wishing that the rules would let "X" happen, it's apparently a bit of an epiphany to realize that the GM can ignore the rules or that it might be possible to create rules based on a GM or player's dramatic sensibilities rather than realism or good game-play. Finding rules that enable them to simply get the results that they want rather than fighting the rules feels like liberation to them. So with all the zeal of the newly converted, they rush out into the world to tell people how to fix their problems.

The problem is that they fail to realize that not everyone has their problem, nor does everyone want it fixed. Not everyone has a preference for how a situation should turn out. Not everyone wants to just decide what happens next. They like rules and dice and mechanics that produce objective results. But those who feel liberated can't understand why people would reject their "better way". Since those who reject the "better way" support a way of doing things that seemed backward and torturous to the liberated, they attribute all sorts of irrational and malicious motives to those who stand in their way.

This doesn't only happen in role-playing, by the way. People who are converted to all sorts of causes because their new way of doing things just "clicks" with them and "feels so right" often exhibit zeal like this.

Im really enjoying GMing my current Lost City of Barakus campaign; focusing as GM on simulating the environment and providing good challenges. Drama story is developing naturally in play, and it feels good.

Well, the way to get it all is to craft the set-up to a game or campaign in such a way that anything the players do will be challenging and make for an interesting story while simply letting things logically happen as they would witin the setting. Most players, regardless of their style preferences, seem to accept quite a bit of staging during a set-up. It's how things play out between the presentation of a situation and the outcome where the differences occur.

 

[pogre]

Gamist - as is everyone else who plays D&D. Now, get in your box!