D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[Thomas Shey]

My understanding is that Edwards deliberately excluded genre.

And once again, emulation ≠ simulation.

That hasn't stopped people from lumping them together in this very thread.

 

[niklinna]

That hasn't stopped people from lumping them together in this very thread.

So I've noticed. Evocation, too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So I've noticed. Evocation, too.

As I noted, some genres essentially don't let you ignore them and get the kind of output you want. A model that disregards that would be worse than anything I've accused GNS of being.

 

[Campbell]

@Thomas Shey

You might find a lot more middle ground if you did not seem so adamant about throwing the baby out with the bath water. I would be completely fine with this list of creative agendas for instance:

Visceral Protagonism
Right to Dream (Dramatism / High Concept Sim)
Step On Up
Living Breathing World

Honestly that Story word seems like an albatross around Story Now's neck to me. It gives all sorts of people the wrong idea about what it's all about.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

He's not wrong with certain element of very early play style, but that sort of style did not survive contact with the playing public for very long at all, less so in some places than others. Particularly, while it might have stayed in practice, the support for characters being interchangeable started to go away about as soon as attribute values actually started to mean something. To conclude that all or even the majority of Old School play was/is that is something of a hot take.

I don't really disagree with this. I was only commenting on why backstory was seen in a negative light. Actually there is a 4) which is that players didn't like it because it gave the GM things to mess with (IE your PC's family or town, etc.). Anyway, hard pawn stance type play was only universal in the days immediately following the publication of D&D. Once people had a year of play behind them, they were doing all sorts of different stuff. Still, they didn't develop substantially new game tech for quite a while. I mean, most of the early focus was on "the magic system is stupid, lets have spell points" and such. That really didn't change anything. Actual change was generated by first of all discarding a lot of the Troupe Play aspects, and adding more mechanics to PCs. AD&D 1e was Gary acknowledging this. I mean, I actually remember when we got the PHB and we were all a bit irritated or questioning about just HOW DARN LONG it took to fill out a character sheet, like TEN WHOLE MINUTES, MAYBE 20! I mean, I'm dead here, I want to get back into play, hurry it up!

It wasn't until the early to mid '80s that people actually started, barely, to conceive of things like Low Prep play, systems where the GM didn't own all of the story, or where there was at least some sort of metagame that players had some part in (IE like FASERIP or Top Secret's fame points). So, really true old school play only lasted a short time (though some people DID stop there and never move on, but not that many). The real solidification of D&D came over the fairly long period from 1979 until 1989 when 2e came out. Essentially the conceptual organization of the game in 2022 is virtually identical to what it was in 1982 IMHO.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes here is the opening to the essay:

And the bit about fudging (emphasis added):

LOL, yes, words straight out of the early 80s! I mean, it might have landed in Usenet in 1995, but this was in fact already rather dated by that point.

 

[Thomas Shey]

@Thomas Shey

You might find a lot more middle ground if you did not seem so adamant about throwing the baby out with the bath water. I would be completely fine with this list of creative agendas for instance:

Visceral Protagonism
Right to Dream (Dramatism / High Concept Sim)
Step On Up
Living Breathing World

Honestly that Story word seems like an albatross around Story Now's neck to me. It gives all sorts of people the wrong idea about what it's all about.

I'm sorry Campbell; I realize this seriously irritates you and I'm not happy about that since I find most of what you say thoughtful and considered, but I'm still hard pressed to see why the Story Now position needs quite that prominant a position in the model. I'm not denying it exists, and that people get value out of it (as I said, it was clear some of the old Dramatists used it as part of their toolbox on occasion), but is seems a pretty small slice of a rather large pie. If that needs to be represented by itself, then you don't need a Threefold or a Fourfold; you need a FourhundredFold, because there are other just as specific categories in other areas that different people find just as important. Dramatism can be sliced up finer, Sim can be sliced up finer, and I can promise Gamism can be sliced up finer.

That's the gig here; the rework of GDS into GNS was done by someone that (to me) seemed to put a very high priority on one smaller subsegment of D, and (forgetting Sim) thought it required as much attention as all of Gamism. He found fruitful ears in some places which is why its continued on from there, but all that tells me is that appealed to other people with similar priorities.

I mean, ask yourself some time why the vast majority of people who defend it are people who value Nar. Look around for how often in any threads (and I don't mean just on ENWorld which could be argued to contain a disproportionate number of people who are unlikely to find any theoretical model useful) you get people who would primarily indicate they identify their agenda with GNS Gamism or Simulationism. Why do you think that is? Are they that rare? Or is it that the construction on both the other wings looks so defective to people interested in those area that they just dismiss the model and move on?

 

[Campbell]

@Thomas Shey

It's not about prominence. It's about distinctiveness. The creative agendas are just phenomenally different.

 

[pemerton]

Let's not act like I'm the only one in this thread that thinks shoving most of Dramatism into Sim makes no damn sense. And that disagreement in terminology is the matter now at hand. You can argue I'm biased here, but there have been at least two other people in here who find that pretty nonsensical, and they were not people around for GDS.

The question is: what is the actual error in looking at different modes of exploration?

In taxonomy, we could group bees with birds because they fly, but instead divide vertebrates and invertebrates, even though the latter have far more species and far more varied morphology than vertebrates. And not for arbitrary reasons.

Edwards has an account of "genre emulation", in high concept sim. It is explanatorily powerful: it explains clashes between that approach and purist-for-system/process sim despite the widespread idea that all you need to do is "add setting" (see eg GURPS); it explains why that approach generates conflict around issues like alignment, metaplot, etc; it is able to answer the questions being asked in this thread about why genre is doing completely different work in AW compared to (say) GUMSHOE.

And that account has been used, in repeated posts by me and others, to explain what is going on with D&D play from the mid-80s, and the way that D&D play (since then) and D&D rules (at least since 2nd ed AD&D, with 4e as an exception) straddle the line between low-competition, cooperative gamism and characters-face-problems high concept sim.

What is actually missing from the analysis, in your view?

EDIT, to QFT:

Genre emulation turns out is another of those fraught turns of phrase. The other part of sim from process is high-concept sim, and that can be genre emulation (I'd argue that FATE does this), but the point here isn't that genre is involved, but how it's involved. If genre is the point, it's sim. If genre is just present, not so much. So a game can be like AW which drips genre in some regards, but genre isn't the point of play.

Just to elaborate, and to link to what @Campbell has been saying:

If someone loved playing 2nd ed AD&D-style Dark Sun, with lots of worries about water supplies and encounters with dinosaur-riding halflings, and then thought that they could get some similar post-apocalyptic action with AW, they would be surprised - perhaps disappointed, maybe excited, but definitely doing something pretty different with their RPGing. The point of play, and the resulting nature of the experience, is completely different, despite the surface-level resemblance of genre tropes.

 

[pemerton]

It's not about prominence. It's about distinctiveness. The creative agendas are just phenomenally different.

Right.

Part of the goal of GNS is to avoid someone buying Burning Wheel expecting to get a 2nd ed AD&D or 5e D&D experience. To that extent, the analytical framework doesn't serve indie designers' commercial interests!, but that was never its purpose.