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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6032099" data-attributes="member: 42582">That's an interesting comment, and it's a question that recurs in discussions of 4e.For me, the key observation from Edwards is this one, under the heading "Sh*t! I'm playing Narrativist":In Simulationist play, morality cannot be imposed by the player or, except as the representative of the imagined world, by the GM. Theme is already part of the cosmos; it's not produced by metagame decisions. Morality, when it's involved, is "how it is" in the game-world, and even its shifts occur along defined, engine-driven parameters. The GM and players buy into this framework in order to play at all. The point is that one can care about and enjoy complex issues, changing protagonists, and themes in both sorts of play, Narrativism and Simulationism. The difference lies in the point and contributions of literal instances of play; its operation and social feedback. This is why I think of my game as narrativist: because theme and morality are being imposed by the player and GM. In episodes like the <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-discussion/309950-actual-play-my-first-social-only-session.html" target="_blank">dinner with the Baron and Paldemar</a>, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-discussion/312367-actual-play-another-combat-free-session-intra-party-dyanmics.html" target="_blank">the interrogation of the priestess of Torog</a>, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/tabletop-gaming/313724-actual-play-pcs-successfully-negotiated-kas.html" target="_blank">the negotiation with Kas</a>, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-discussion/324018-wizard-pc-dies-returns-invoker.html" target="_blank">the resurrection of Malstaph as an invoker</a> and even <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/tabletop-gaming/301282-actual-play-examples-balance-between-fiction-mechanics.html" target="_blank">the taming rather than killing of the bear</a>, it was the players who were imposing morality - deciding "what it means to be a paladin", or a warpriest of Moradin, or a demonskin adept, or an invoker in service to Erathis.I think there are inconsistencies in the way Edwards explains narrativism - sometimes he emphasises self-conscious focus on theme (a more narrow definition that my game may not fit into), sometimes he emphasises that the value component is injected by the players rather than inhering in the situation and gameworld being explored (in the passage I just quoted, and in his discussion of The Dying Earth RPG), and that's what I have in mind in characterising my game as narrativist rather than high-concept sim.In the end I don't think labels matter per se. I don't care about labels - I care about a game which is player-driven in relation to value and thematic emphasis. In classic D&D, the single greatest obstacle to this is mechanical alignment, which is why I'm resolutely hostile to it on all ocassions! 4e not only drops mechanical alignment and its trappings (like the "great wheel"), but it replaces them with a conflict-rich but unresolved cosmological situation and makes it easy for the players to locate their PCs smack in the centre of those conflicts.This is what I have in mind (in conjunction with the purely mechanical features I mentiond uthread) when I talk about how 4e supports vanilla narrativism.</blockquote>

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