I do still wonder if we're being a bit too "in the box" in terms of thinking about 'C&E'. That is, "War is Dehumanizing" would be a kind of premise, which I think would qualify as a conceit in this terminology. I don't necessarily have to emulate a war to examine it. That is, presumably I have to look at the human effects of war, but it seems like a bit of an odd kind of emulation. Maybe you would classify this kind of scenario differently.
That still sounds like Emulation to me. "The human effects of war" is still about
war. Sure, you aren't showing
the war itself.
Nineteen-Eighty-Four isn't "a war book" in the sense that no scene in it involves war or the conduct thereof, but it's
absolutely "a war book" in the sense that war is an inherent part of its dystopian message. Portraying the horrors of war via the refugees, the slowly-dawning dread that the life you once lived can never truly be brought back, the bleakness at discovering that even if you went back to your hometown
it's been blown off the map, etc. I don't really see how that isn't an Emulation of war tropes and concepts. It's just not one that specifically emulates
battles.
If every war-genre story had to be specifically about people fighting in battles, there wouldn't be nearly as many stories
about wars.
Neither does Edwards, actually. I know some people have said that, but all he ever claimed was that it produced 'incoherence' and that 'might' lead to issues. I think he's also talked about hybrid agendas and whatnot later. Remember, GNS was some essays from 20 years ago, 3e had barely been published, a LOT has been learned and a lot more said since then. I honestly have not followed a lot of that, since people here seem more interested in Forge discussions that happened way back when.
I wouldn't know either, I guarantee you that you know it better than I do. I can only go off the quotations and bits I've read, where he presents these things as pretty divergent and does not seem to be particularly positive toward "incoherent" games, hybrid or otherwise. But perhaps I have been mistaken. I still think that a thought of the form "if it's not incoherent, then it must be identical" is what compelled him to force together these two categories that I see as being...pretty obviously separate.
I'm not so sure this is an 'error' myself. Your 'Groundedness' just seems to me to be a special type of conceit. I mean, for sheer playability basically ALL RPGs (with a very few specialized exceptions) posit a 'real world like' place, with gravity, where people eat and drink, etc. While the degree of this may vary, I don't think that fact says much. If there's a specific FOCUS on "this world is really really normal" (like, say, Traveller really assumes that the action is happening in a 'real world' with just some specific technological extrapolations being made) then I would consider that to be a type of premise, and I would think it would be a conceit in your theory. Thus I'm not convinced that GNS really errs here in any meaningful way. It would assign any sort of serious attempt to deal with reality in terms of 'Simulation' generally speaking, though exactly which kind would likely depend on the approach and intent. It might also play to a kind of Gamist agenda. One might say that process simulation and gamist focus on the same element could look pretty similar. I think this actually explains how people can argue about, or use in different ways, a lot of the stuff in 3e that feels like an attempt to be 'realistic'.
You can do this. But if you do it, doesn't "Step-On-Up" become a "conceit" too? At which point you've collapsed three categories into one just because one can, with sufficient abstraction, lump most if not all the categories together and end up with a do-nothing framework. I have a dim view of such things; parsimony is certainly a cool thing to pursue in general, but not at the cost of utility.
And, again, I root much of this difference not in some airy conceptual thing, but in the way people
actually do talk and behave regarding this stuff. Simulation very specifically is about reasoning out the stuff that definitely must be true, based on other things we already know,
even if that has strange or unappealing consequences. "Hit points
must be meat, because we restore them with spells called
cure wounds" makes ZERO sense in any kind of "let's enjoy a genre or a theme," but it is effectively
axiomatic if one is saying, "Alright, we start from what the game
is, and figure out what must be true as a result." It's "realism" in the
practical sense, taking situations as they already exist and extrapolating from them.
To
portray is to depict (as in
portraiture) or to represent dramatically. Groundedness explicitly doesn't care two figs about
dramatic representation or the like. It is "stylized" only in the sense that literally everything humans make is "stylized" and thus "actively avoiding stylistic flourishes" is trivially "a style." Simulation has zero relationship to
portrayal. Emulation is literally
all about portrayal. It is the difference between providing an accurate model of what a group exploring jungle territory would experience, and portraying the tropes and drama associated with stories about jungle exploration (e.g.
Tarzan, She, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, etc.) The former is extremely unlikely to resemble the latter in any meaningful way, and vice-versa.
Again: I see no problem with being able to say, "Hey, there's some interesting symmetry between 'Groundedness' as a goal and 'Conceit' as a goal; one could argue that they're both expressions of a desire to explore a concept." But "desire to explore a concept" is so abstract, it doesn't
tell us anything about the things games are made to do. One might just as easily lump together G&S and S&A because they're both about strict adherence to rules, whereas V&I and C&E are about dramatic presentation. Or one might lump together S&A and V&I because they center almost completely on making difficult choices in moments of tension or crisis, while G&S and C&E are focused on setting and how it's presented. I see it as a
serious error in reasoning (not just here, but in many, many other places) to go from "these to things have X important characteristic in common" to "these to things must
actually be the same thing, simply manifesting in different modes." Being that reductive is not useful.
No. Remember, I'm not viewing it through GNS lens. To me your description of V&I sounds to me much more like GDS Dramatism. As I've noted before, I don't see a lot of that requiring the specific approach of Story Now.
I'm afraid I know even less about GDS than GNS. However, the specific point of "Values-and-Issues"
was to capture something along the lines of "Story Now," so there's certainly some kind of conflict here (whether it's "my ideas are half-baked," "I have poorly explained myself," or "wires just got crossed" remains to be seen.)
Values are declared by players; it is the players themselves saying, "yeah, that's what matters to me, right now." Issues are, therefore, the "Situations" (as Edwards would say it) where those Values are exposed to conflict. These conflicts must be resolved, either by making the necessary effort or sacrifices to do so, or by abandoning the Value(s) in question, or complicating the situation. Story Now is, at least, one specific manifestation of this process: players declare their Values, and consequently the DM is obliged to frame Issues where those values are under threat. I was very specifically thinking of Dungeon World Bonds when I named this category (in part because my group is currently in the process of reviewing and, almost certainly, replacing Bonds with some other system, as the way my players relate to them doesn't fit with their intended use.)
Dramatism, from what I can see, is interested in
telling a good story. Values-and-Issues play has no regard for that specifically. The only one of my game-purposes which is much related to that would be Conceit-and-Emulation. V&I doesn't commit to a plot, but rather to conflicts, like being committed to individual extemporaneous
scenes without necessarily caring whether
a play forms from the sequence generated. If one can stitch together a coherent narrative out of those scenes, that's great, and I wouldn't be surprised if that would be a subsidiary goal for V&I design. But it isn't vital to do so. By comparison, it would be poor C&E design if the Conceit being elevated-that-it-may-be-appreciated failed to produce a satisfying dramatic arc in the doing, and efforts taken to ensure that such a dramatic arc
does occur, even if it requires some (metaphorical) stage magic to happen, are not only cromulent but laudable.
I'l take either, but my emphasis is on deliberate rather than ad-hoc. Even so, if you have an example of ad-hoc play that illuminates the matter, that'd be great too.
Yeah I suspected from context that's what you wanted.
I would argue that 4e when played as a "Story Now" game gets fairly close to a "full" hybrid of Gamist and "Story Now." The fundamental chassis is one of the best-made
game games in TTRPGs, as seen both in how people praised it, and in how people criticized (or, in far too many cases, unjustly mocked) it. Yet on that chassis of a game where Stepping On Up was clearly a focus and Challenge was so well-articulated that
it actually had encounter-building rules that reliably worked, it is quite possible to see Story Now play. The combat and skill rules, when invoked, work extremely well; and then you get back to your Quests and the like.
This is what I would call "embedding" one game-purpose inside another. In this case, 4e has a natural Score-and-Achievement kernel, which for many of its fans is plenty. But for those who like Story Now, you can embed that kernel into a larger Values-and-Issues context. The S&A aspect then takes on something approximating the function of the
actual roll portion of (for example) Dungeon World moves: the moments when conflict comes to an inevitable head and one invokes the rules in order to resolve the uncertainty of the outcome.
No, I think what it may be pointing out is that "Values & Issues" seems to occupy a somewhat different ground than Story Now, and might more accurately describe a High Concept Simulation more than it does pure Story Now Narrative. He sees "Values & Issues" more in terms (I think) of simply articulated character traits of PCs and the resulting motives, being used as drivers in play. That COULD describe at least some Story Now play, but it could also fall more onto the HCS side of the fence, possibly. I think some of us have pointed out that we feel 5e is mostly an HCS game. Now, one way to think of that was in terms of addressing D&Disms as a genre. Another might be to consider how Class, alignment, and I guess BIFTs/Background might produce character motives and then play to those (possibly thematically, like if you created a campaign where the PCs are all followers of Pelor or something like that). 4e could be drifted in this way too I would say.
That's...extremely confusing, because High Concept wasn't--as I understood it--something that
players could choose. "High Concept" comes direct from cinema, where the director is an
auteur. That's...really really
really clearly Conceit. Like...if I have failed to articulate Conceit vs Values enough such that people are confusing Values with
High Concept, then I have clearly screwed up MASSIVELY. Like, I have bungled almost the entire presentation and need to start from scratch.
I feel a bit relieved to not be in academia at this moment, lol. 
