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="Odhanan" data-source="post: 5842228" data-attributes="member: 12324">Welcome. I try to resist using this type of jargon because I think this is fundamentally divisive. I don't believe you (or me or anyone) are either a Simulationist OR a Narrativist OR a Gamist. I like to solve tactical situations in the game world as my character, I like to strategize and come up with a plan with the other PCs to overcome obstacles: does that make me a Simulationist, or a Gamist? The answer IMO is "both" AND "neither." The Forge had this point that games had to be "coherent", that is, they should appeal to one particular segment of GNS and that's it. If you are mixing bits and pieces of each of these descriptors into your design then your design is "incoherent", you're screwing with the game's "creative agenda", and that's "bad".I can't disagree more with this. I think this is absolutely, fundamentally stupid. I think that a game like D&D pulls some of its strength from the fact it can appeal to a wide variety of gamers in widely different ways, and that's an "incoherence", from the Forge's POV, that it should absolutely RETAIN if it wants to keep on succeeding in the future. How you create a core game that is basically satisfying to all these audiences AND then bring to the table specific modules which alter or modify the core to really help people who want a particular style at their game table is the real trick here.There's this idea out there that basically when you are a "Simulationist" you are just interested in the rules as a Physics Engine. That it's "Sim" as in "Simulation of RL". I think that's a wrong assumption. What is, however, important is that the rules make sense from the World's point of view, whether we are talking about a RL inspired setting, or a completely off the wall crazy setting, there has to be some coherence in what the rules actually simulate. And again, it can be anything, it does not presupposes that it would have to be "Reality". I always liked D&D's abstractions. I think it's a great way to bring people in, rather than reject them. The more the game engages in tetrapyloctomy and tries to erase these abstractions, the more specific it becomes, the less it is going to appeal to a wide variety of people, IMO. But abstraction doesn't mean that the rules are divorced from the game world. They are still simulating aspects of it, albeit in abstract ways you can make sense of if you think about them a little bit. I consequently have no problem with Hit Points, Experience, ACs and the like, personally. I think the notion that these "play styles" or "inclinations" we're describing are strict delimitations in the actual brains of real people is ludicrous. I further think that the notion these "play styles" or "inclinations" should be clearly delimited in your brain otherwise you are fundamentally "brain-damaged", "like a rape victim is," by the "incoherent" games you've played before is frankly outrageous, insulting, but more than that, a completely counter-intuitive idea when it comes to discussing what's actually going on for gamers playing an RPG in real time, and therefore how games should be designed to catter to their particular inclinations, however gloriously "incoherent" they truly are.I think that people are more complex than the Forge would like to think. They like to say, hang out together, eat Cheetos and roll dice, and ALSO happen to want to be able to immerse in their character when they want to, WHILE enjoying the strategic challenge of the campaign, etc. It's not either/or stuff. The real problem with the Forge's rhetoric is that it makes these "agenda" oppose each other, to the point where it posits that some of these "agenda" are either inferior, or simply do not exist! As was the case when Ron Edwards started postulating that Simulationism really doesn't exist, and that in fact people sharing its inclinations are simply "unaware" that they "do" have a creative agenda and that if they opened their eyes, it'd be clear they're either Narrativists or Gamists. That right there is total bullcrap that is uber-divisive in nature, and I won't stand for that. I'll avoid the rant, but basically, I think that the whole GNS theory is absolute garbage because it is poisoned by this sort of divisive thinking at the well. I think the Threefold model can be useful to talk broadly, THEORETICALLY, about gamer inclinations, but it is FAR from being an accurate model, or the only model that could or would matter to actually try to describe the complex reality of gaming and gamers.</blockquote>

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