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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8623468" data-attributes="member: 42582">What you are describing here is a technique - a way of establishing the content of the shared fiction.I don't think you've fully specified your technique. For instance, building my PC with a high Pick Pocket skills is the use of a mechanical lever to try and influence the game toward a particular story result, namely, pockets being successfully picked by my PC - but I dobut you'd call that "narrativism". I think you are meaning mechanical levers that are "pulled" at the point of resolution, to generate departures from raw dice rolls and their modification by pre-determined bonuses or circumstance-generated modifiers.Here you describe one goal that might be achieved by using the technique.But here's another: in OGL Conan (published by Mongoose), a player can spend a Fate Point to create a minor advantage for their PC (eg if their PC is in prison, a servant working in the prison is a friend of a friend and so secretly brings the PC a dagger). That would most likely be used not with the aim of emulating a story genre, but with the aim of having the PC escape from prison. The fact that it somewhat resembles Conan stories is a plus - we are playing OGL Conan, after all! - but the player isn't aiming at genre emulation. That's just a byproduct.Or consider a supers-type game, where the player spends the points so that their Iron Man-level PC can beat the Thanos-level NPC in the final confrontation. That's consistent with the genre - sometimes weaker heroes beat stronger villains - but the player's goal is to beat the challenge, not to emulate the genre.Ron Edwards uses the labels simulationism, gamism and narrativism to describe overall creative/aesthetic goals, not particular techniques.For me, that is consistent with what I posted in my earlier reply to you (post 187, not far upthread).One thing Edwards is interested in is talking about the problems people have with the RPGing, as a precursor to trying to solve those problems.Edwards thinks that there are two sorts of problem you are likely to encounter: broken simulation, ie when the mechanics don't really do a good job of telling you what is happening in the fiction and so someone (probably the GM) has to step in and ad hoc patch things up; and "munchkin" players, who aren't interested in seeing the world unfold via the mechanics but just want to focus on beating the opposition. The worst problem, he thinks, is when those two problems come together: so a real munchkin or power-gamer who seizes on the broken simulations and uses them to break the game! That sort of player is likely to generate a lot of at-the-table conflict, as the GM has to step in and try and patch-as-they-go and/or put their foot down on the munchkin behaviour.Again, if the previous paragraph doesn't resonate at all, that will reinforce your scepticism. If it does make sense, it demonstrates exactly why Edwards and friends were developing the terminology and framework that they did.</blockquote>

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