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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 5084578" data-attributes="member: 3192">Convergent and divergent are terms from academia regarding role play, mainly the field of sociology.  They refer to roleplay simulation (RPS) more often than drama therapy, the work of Moreno, and psychodrama.  RPS had literally millions of participants by the 1970's, while psychodrama was practically dead.  So most people at the time of the RPG hobby's founding understood roleplaying as role training from a single trainer perspective (i.e. convergent).  The game design of D&D followed in kind.Convergent simply means the truth of what is being explored is held by only one person while the others interact with that person to discover it.  Divergent design is where every person determines the truth at different times.  If you know RP terminology, consider it a static versus alternating state of the Director position.Convergent <img src="http://www.logo-search.com/viewPreview.php?preview=2064" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Divergent<img src="http://www.symbolportal.com/pics/astro/chaosstar.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Divergently designed RPGs are currently held as the only functional game design mainly because of predominant theories in the industry. This means GM has no real special status in the game, but is only one of the many determiners of truth at the table. The determination of Director status is the actual game, normally a competitive game played peripherally to the story in order to gain storytelling rights.  The emotions generated by the exterior game can be very complementary to those in the story.  But the game rules themselves are not the story.Convergently designed games are really just one game IMO, but more indicative of all RPGs in the past.  There is exclusively only one person who is always the Director, the GM or DM or Referee.  The game is played as an interactive pattern finding game where all the other players are in the position to determine what comes next based upon everything that has occurred so far.  Here, the game is actually the fiction being expressed by the GM.  Most PFGs call the other participants a "cooperation group" (I'm using this term from another PFG website), though a game does not need to be set up as a cooperative game.  From my study of the rulebooks, early D&D appears to be designed as the latter form with hidden rules as suggestions or guidelines and with a balance of difficulty towards a cooperative game.  This really only means cooperative strategies by the players are rewarded more heavily than working individually or in competition with others.  Cooperation is not assumed in a cooperative game, but is a meaningful choice.  These types of games can be hard to accept for anyone who simply wants to work together as a rule (something not insured beyond table rules in D&D).</blockquote>

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