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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2210203" data-attributes="member: 27012">Are you talking about core GNS or the whole Forge family of models?  This thread is asking about "G", "N", and "S".As for Laws model looking at different aspects of the experience and then creating categories, can you name some categories (at the same level of abstraction as Laws' other categories) that you can represent in the GNS but not Laws' model?Again, this thread asks about "G", "N", and "S", to the sub-categories.  And the "G", "N", and "S" part of the GNS is about as far as most people who are not Forge regulars get.  My concern is whether that top-level division is sensible or not.  I don't think it is.  I think it's designed to give a very specific form of play (called Narrativist) it's own privileged high-level category.I would argue that most people, if they are looking to improve the taste of their pizza, would find a discussion of supermarket ingredients more useful than a discussion of chemisty.  I claim that most people looking at role-playing style models are looking to improve the taste of their role-playing game, not to understand the nutritional breakdown.  As such, I think Laws model is more useful for most people.Further, I think that if we were to divide Pizza up into components, I think that Crust, Sauce, and Cheeze is more useful than compounds that contain Potassium and Compounds that don't contain Potassium.More accurately, I'm saying that enjoyment or problems occur because of style clashes.  A model that doesn't distinguish styles that clash from each other isn't terribly useful in diagnosing problems or improving game quality.Which still goes back to the point that just the "G", "N", and "S" don't tell you very much if you need to rely on sub-categories to make the important distinctions.  And if the GNS thinks that all power-gamers are Gamists, I think it may be making an even more fundamentalist mistake, though the tendency to never attribute a negative style of play to the Narrativist camp makes that unsurprising.And what does that tell you?  In other words, what would you do with that information if you had it that you can't do with the Laws model?That actualy describes me pretty well.  Realizing that Laws' categories are not exclusive or "pick only one", I'd call him a Method Actor and Butt Kicker.  In fact, I'd argue that the GDS, GNS, and other models don't work very well as exclusive categories, either.  The way the three-way models generally solve the same problem is by defining the categories as a triangular space that a point can be placed within, which is simply another way of saying 50/50 or 60/40.Which is exactly why so many people not only reject but resent the GDS and GNS.  The styles that they place in opposition are not always in opposition.Of course it defines concrete things.  Otherwise, I couldn't say that I am a Method Actor and a Butt Kicker with a Tactician streak but I'm not a Power Gamer, Storyteller, Specialist, or Casual Gamer.  And once a GM knows that, they'll have a pretty good idea of what I'm looking for in a game.   A model does not have to have exclusive categories to be valid.  That's like saying that pie-charts are the only way valid way to represent data, but that limits you to representing things only in terms of values that add up to 100%.  Why?It's that insistence of exclusivity that makes so many people, including well-respected authors of role-playing material, reject the GDS and GNS.  Those models leave no place for what Ryan Dancey called the "basic role-player" in the WotC model, the only one backed by actual survey data and research, by the way.  The person who likes a little of this and a little of that can't be defined in any exclusive model.</blockquote>

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