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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5495118" data-attributes="member: 54877">I'm quoting this, but using it also as an indirect answer to Raven Crowking's post below that quote. And I don't entirely agree with Forge-speak, but I'll use it here for lack of something better to make the point. Let's just say for the sake of argument in this reply that Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulation have some kind of meaning, and that they can be distinguished from one another (in a rough and ready, flawed manner). The quote above is technically correct, but the implication is false. The implication is that if you do not have the fiction and action resolution affect one another via simulation, you will move away from roleplaying and towards something board-gamey. That is, you'll leach the simulation out and replace it with nothing but gamism. The implication is false because simulation is not the only way to produce roleplaying while interacting with mechanics. First, you can get a certain amount of roleplaying via the gamism itself. Not everyone does so, but when people are hamming up the combats, you can get that. But that has always existed in every version of D&D, and is an acquired taste anyway. So it is a tangent. Second, you can also get roleplaying from Narrativism. In fact, if you want to take an ultra hard-core, early Forge-speak slanted to its logical conclusion, you might say that you only get "real" roleplaying from Narrativism--(aka addressing premise). I don't buy that, which is a big reason why I frequently specify little "n" narrativism as a substitute.  Without writing a thesis and making this any longer than it already is, my claim is that there is this thing, "narrativism" where mechanics interact with the roleplaying without being directly tied in an obvious casual fashion from the emulated world to the mechanic and back again. Metagaming mechanics are a huge part of how this is usually done or thought of (but not all). For our purpose, they will do. For example, OOC decision making. Saturday, in our 4E session, we were running short on time, and people were getting tired. I ask the players if they wanted to play out the rest of the adventure up to the final confrontation, collapse the rest of it into a big skill challenge, or simply roleplay through (sans mechanics except DM fiat). I didn't care which one they picked, and explained it was merely a question of how much the adventure was holding their interest--we could keep on our slower pace or pick it up.  No matter which one they picked, the fiction still occurs to their characters. If we play it out, it is mostly a gamist/pseudo-simulation mix (that part being exploring a dungeon). If we go to a skill challenge, we have dropped the simulation for a more narrativist construct, but kept the imaged happenings very similar. Likewise, if we go with DM fiat in a storytelling mode, I can predict roughly how it would play out. Details will vary, of course, but some kind of fiction still happens 4E did not drop simulation leaving only gamism. Rather, it largely replaced simulation with narrative tools and advice, and also discarded some fluff that claimed simulation that did not, in fact, exist in the mechanics. If you engage those new mechanics, then you have fiction that interacts with the mechanics and vice versa. If you ignore those mechanics, then you do have something approaching a board game. This is the players' choice, the same way that when my high school friend and I would idle away an afternoon taking characters through the 1st ed. DMG random dungeon generator, we were largely ignoring the simulation and roleplaying aspects to play a board game.  And while I am on the subject, this is a big reason why that "dissociated" crap has put a few people on my permanent ignore list. 4E can only be dissociated if you ignore the roleplaying options that it provides, and probably not even then. Dissociated is a psychological term for when a person's parent, adult, and child states are not in harmony (or worse), and as such is veering dangerously close to the Ron Edwards "brain damage" crap about "disfunctional gaming groups." Edwards seemed to think there that people couldn't do two things at once without disfunction, but "dissociated" implies that anyone claiming "not a boardgame, I'm roleplaying darn it!" with 4E is in danger of the roleplaying equivalent of developing multiple personalities.  The truth is that people have been storytelling since there were people and language to do it with. There are lots of ways to skin that particular cat. Edit:  I've read the big model.  I thought it was fairly apparent from the above that I see it as a useful thought exercise, but ultimately a dead-end in game theory.  The "narrativism" that I value is not found in GNS or the Big Model.  Simply to clarify after some of the comments below.</blockquote>

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