I think
@niklinna referred to
this upthread:
Talk to someone who participates in role-playing, and focus on the precise and actual acts of role-playing themselves. Ask them, "Why do you role-play?" The most common answer is, "To have fun."
Again, stick to the role-playing itself. (The wholly social issues are real, such as "Wanting to hang out with my friends," but they are not the topic at hand.) Now ask, "What makes fun?" This may not be a verbal question, and it is best answered mainly through role-playing with people rather than listening to them. Time and inference are usually required.
In my experience, the answer turns out to be a version of one of the following terms. These terms, or modes, describe three distinct types of people's decisions and goals during play. . . .
Collectively, the three modes are called GNS. Stating "GNS," "GNS perspectives," or anything similar, is to refer to the diversity of approaches to play. One might refer to "GNS goals," in which case the meaning is, "whichever one might apply for this act of role-playing." . . .
Used properly, the terms apply only to decisions, not to whole persons nor to whole games. To be absolutely clear, to say that a person is (for example) Gamist, is only shorthand for saying, "This person tends to make role-playing decisions in line with Gamist goals." Similarly, to say that an RPG is (for example) Gamist, is only shorthand for saying, "This RPG's content facilitates Gamist concerns and decision-making." For better or for worse, both of these forms of shorthand are common.
Upthread, I posted the following:
Gamist means (of a RPGer) advocating the gameplay, ie win-lose, aspect of RPGing or (of a RPG) pursuing or emphasising the gameplay, ie win-lose, aspect of RPGing.
Likewise for simulationist: it means (of a RPGer) advocating the simulation-like, ie exploration or experiential, aspect of RPGing or (of a RPG) pursuing or emphasising the simulation-like, ie exploration or experiential, aspect of RPGing.
<snip>
On the same pattern as the preceding, it means (of a RPGer) advocating the narrative-like aspect of RPGing or (of a RPG) pursuing or emphasising the narrative-like aspect of RPGing. The problem is that many RPGers think of the narrative-like aspect of RPGing as being told a story; whereas Edwards intends to pick up on the narrative-like aspect of RPGing that is telling a story.
If one is being told a story, the measure of the thing is was it entertaining, enthralling, etc. But if one is telling a story, the measure of the thing is was there a point to it?, or did I really have something worthwhile to say? That is what Edwards intends by narrativist RPGing.
So, to ask whether or not D&D is (eg)
gamist is to ask
what sort of RPGing do D&D players, on the whole advocate or else to ask
what sort of RPGing does D&D, as a RPG, emphasise?
I've already given my views on this upthread to quite an extent, but will consolidate here:
Classic D&D, by which I mean OD&D as I understand it, B/X, and AD&D as presented by Gygax in his rulebooks and the modules he wrote, is gamist. By that I mean that it is presented as a game to support beating the dungeon. Other activity - wilderness and town adventures - is also flagged, but that seems ancillary either to dungeoneering, or to building up an army and wargaming.
It is clear that, from pretty early on, there were significant numbers of D&D players who were interested in something other than gamism. There were simulationist intuitions, clearly, pushing towards both a greater amount of fidelity to the internal logic of the fiction, even at the expense of game play. You can see this emerging in Gygax's DMG - where he talks about living, breathing dungeons without addressing how these completely undermine the advice in his PHB on successful adventuring. There is a lot of it in Dragon in the mid-80s.
Later AD&D books seem to advocate simulationist play - the Survival Guides, for instance, and OA. The latter has clear high concept sim aspirations. For me, playing OA was a springboard into story now RPGing, but I don't think what I and my friends were doing was very mainstream. It involved leaning into the backstory-and-theme aspects of the PCs, and as a GM following their leads and not exercising the degree of strong control over setting and how situation should evolve that is more typical of D&D, and high concept sim, GMing.
As
@Ovinomancer and
@AbdulAlhazred have said (or at least implied),
AD&D 2nd ed is a strange game. Its PC build and combat rules are basically the same as Gygax's, and these are broadly gamist - there is the luck of the dice in PC gen, and the wargame-y aspect of D&D combat. But the advice to player and GMs is about subordinating all that, and going with "the story" even when that means ignoring dice rolls. (There is also the same system for spell memorisation as in classic D&D, but the dungeon-expedition-followed-by-a-rest cycle that gives it teeth for skilful players is downplayed or missing, so it just becomes "how magic works in D&D".) So the advocated play is high concept simulationism although the core mechanics point in a different direction. That is the sort of play I mostly saw in the 90s among 2nd ed AD&D players. In my experience it was fairly easy for a player with gamist priorities, and a bit of skill, to "break" or at least significantly disrupt the play at a typical AD&D 2nd ed table.
3E isn't a system I played much of, so my knowledge of it is mostly by reading others' reports of play. The PC build system seems to support gamist play ("optimisation"), although at higher levels it suffers from there being a few optimal choices amid the myriad that are presented. The combat system is recognisably similar to the classic one: there is a reduction in the metagame character of saving throws, to make them "make more sense" (and hose fighters in the process) but I think anyone who is really into process simulation of the RQ/RM style must find 3E pretty disappointing: it still has hit points, to hit determined by level, and classes as the framework for PC building.
The existence of a skill system reduces its suitability for the sort of out-of-combat, mapping-and-traps-and-tricks gamism supported by classic D&D, but is easily reconciled with high concept sim because the GM gets to decide what happens next even on a success (ie it is task-based, not conflict-based). The modules that I have seem to sit on a thin line between high concept simulationism and gamism. I assume this is deliberate design, trying to appeal to both of the main D&D markets. A common focus of discussion in the 3E era was the tension between high-concept sim modules and PC build gamism (ie if you design the module so that every party has a chance, where's the reward for building a rogue trap-disarmer or cleric undead-turner? but if you design the module to reward those build choices, the story will break down for other sorts of party compositions). This is not a surprise given the AD&D 2nd legacy plus the design features of 3E itself.
I've never heard of "story now" 3E play. It's probably no worse for it than AD&D, but I'm not absolutely sure of that: the steeper scaling in 3E compared to AD&D might generate pressure towards either GM curation (ie high concept sim) to keep things on track, or else gamism (with a focus on PC build, and making or finding the right magic items) to keep the PCs up to spec.
4e is, notoriously, not well-suited to process/purist-for-system simulation. I don't think it's well suited to high-concept sim either, as it gives players too many resources to make it easy for the GM to curate the events and the "story" of play.
I don't think that 4e, as presented in its rulebooks, is well-suited to the sort of gamist play one found in classic D&D, because of its emphasis on cutting to the action ("skipping the guards") and its use of skill challenges for resolving non-combat challenges. It can support a type of situation/encounter-oriented gamism. The XP rules, and general assumption of party play and party parity, mean that the win condition and real-world payoff is basically
playing well and being high-fived by your friends for it.
The same features of 4e that support this sort of gamism - the encounter as a focus of play, the lack of rules that drag attention and play time away from the encounter, the intraparty balance, skill challenge non-combat resolution - all support story now play. In fact, I think skill challenges are better for story now play than gamist play, because from the gamist point of view they are rather weak - even half-hearted engagement with the fiction should enable the players most of the time to be making checks with reasonable prospects of success, and the penalties for losing are often rather light (eg surge loss, in a system that puts no especial weight on the adventuring day; or another XP-earning encounter). Whereas they are pretty good for story now play, as the concern for
what it means to perform this action rather than that action introduces a new parameter into the choice of action declaration, and into the scope of GM-narrated consequences.
Rob Heinsoo mentioned the influence of indie RPGs from the start, and clearly DMG2 (and not just in the pacing and coauthorship bit written by Robin Laws) shows some awareness of the narrativist character of skill challenges.
The
modules for 4e that I am familiar with - the HPE series - are not meaningfully different from 3E modules, and I think as presented are essentially incoherent relative to the game system. It's no surprise they're widely regarded as sucking.
5e seems to me to draw on the mathematical lessons of 4e to solve the PC build issues that plagued 3E. It is therefore, I suspect, less suited to "optimisation"-style gamism. (Are GWM and Sharpshooter exceptions? But no one is going to high five you for choosing those unless you're at a table isolated from the wider community conversation and you're picking up on them for the first time.) It is no better suited to classic D&D gamism than the preceding post-classic versions. Like 3E it can do combat-oriented gamism, but a lot of more "hardcore" players regard it as rather "easy mode"; and its out-of-combat resolution procedures make GM curation very straightforward.
So I think 5e is best suited for high concept sim, and as I posted upthread the "easy mode" aspect mostly solves the problem that untrammelled fortune mechanics can cause for high concept sim. It can also support gamism in the same way 2nd ed AD&D and 3E and even 4e did, but will probably need a bit more drifting/"amping up" given its default "easy mode".
************************
I've tried to talk about both
what the system facilitates and
what the player base, as best I can make sense of them as a mass, is doing; and in the end, I land close enough to
@Manbearcat.
Probably my one point of difference from Manbearcat, and
@Ovinomancer, is on 4e: the happy player base was probably more gamist than anything else, while the unhappy player base were those trying to make it play in a sim fashion; but as a system I think it facilitates a light/low-risk narrativism as well as it does gamism. I agree with
@Campbell that is probably doesn't facilitate that
as well as Sorcerer, BitD or AW facilitate their (higher risk, at least for the first and last; I don't know BitD well enough to judge its emotional exposure/risk potential) narrativist play. In particular, the sheer intricacy of the combat resolution system has the real potential to drag play away from the dramatic/thematic focus, and resisting that requires the GM to work hard in their encounter building and action declarations for monsters and NPCs, and also requires the players to build their PCs in ways that are coherent with their conceptions of their dramatic needs and trajectories.
But the support the system does provide for that sort of play is more than trivial, and I think is more than
just getting out of the way, though it does that too.
