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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8624855" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Returning to the OP, given some statements in a previous post:Addressing this, it's not that narrative mechanics "aren't engaging," but they're engaging in a very different and, generally, much more "cerebral"/"slow-burn" kind of way. It's hard to have impactful ethical choices without sufficient buildup. In games specifically built for "Narrative" play, this issue (if I'm understanding things correctly) is handled by, more or less, keeping everything focused "in the now," hence the "Story Now" label, and thus provides impact via keeping up the ongoing tension of the current moment. You're always under threat, or pushed to make a snap decision and have to live with the results, etc., which creates tension. Giving distributed narrative power, again if I'm understanding this correctly, is what makes sure the players aren't just feeling constantly tense with no ability to respond; they are subject to tension, but they have tools to respond to that tension.Gamism, on the other hand, might be seen as either requiring less build-up, or being more...basic, I guess, in certain senses. Chess or Go can still have extremely deep strategy and such, but you don't need to understand a whole bunch of subtle context and past history to know why a particular action is exciting or engaging. With a game, all you need to know are the rules (which are necessarily a-contextual, that's what they're designed to be) and the current state of play (which should be fairly visible to the audience). It's the difference between being dropped into the middle of a chess game or fútbol match, and sneaking into a theater in the middle of a play you know nothing about or jumping into an improv scene without any knowledge of the preceding events. It's not that there's zero engagement in one or the other, nor that gaming is in some objective sense "easier" or "harder" than making tough ethical decisions, but there's still some sense in which one is supposed to be able to quickly understand the state and stakes of a "gamist" situation, while it is difficult (sometimes impossible) to truly understand the state and stakes of a "narrativist" situation if you weren't there for those events.Building off the above (assuming I haven't gotten lost in another conceptual cul-de-sac), we call D&D "Gamist" because, in general, the way that it sets "things you care about as a player" (stakes) is via clever, strategic manipulation of rules-elements in order to overcome a fundamentally numerical or strategic challenge, having logistical concerns as a primary motive, and a fundamental emphasis on some sense of "winning."Now, before people tear into that as "YOU CAN'T WIN D&D THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT," I don't mean "winning" in the sense of terminating play with a permanent victor. I mean "winning"--what I called "success" earlier in this thread IIRC--in the sense of achieving a triumph, of rising to the challenge and proving yourself superior to it, of (as has been referenced several times in the thread) "Step[ping] On Up." Unlike with "Narrative" experiences, there really are "loss" conditions. This is why, for example, when I tell people that I don't have random, permanent, irrevocable death in my games, a LOT of them immediately leap to the (erroneous) conclusion, "oh, so your game is BORING because NOTHING MATTERS?" (please for the love of God don't interrogate me on this one, if you have questions PM me or go looking for posts by me using the words "irrevocable" and "death.") That kind of response simply, fundamentally, is not a criticism that could come up in a "narrative" game context in GNS terms, because "success" in that context, success at making moments of poignant drama or answering questions of moral/ethical/personal value, is kind of unrelated to whether or not characters can permanently die.Simulationism, on the other hand, seems to have a very...distinct relationship with the concept of "winning" or "losing." That is, in general, "process" Sim can superficially resemble Gamism because of its heavy emphasis on understandable states of existence. There's a distinct consonance between the value "process" Sim puts on a cognizable world that runs on understandable rules (which is probably what most people mean when they say things like "system as physics engine") and the emphasis Gamism puts on a cognizable state of play that runs on understandable rules. The distinction, as I understand it, is that "process" Sim wants those rules to be as naturalistic and grounded as possible, and (in general) achieving the maximum amount of detail they possibly can while still being usable, while Gamism is totally fine with rules that flout IRL intuitions without any explanation other than "because that makes a better game."On the other hand, "genre" Sim can superficially resemble "Narrative" in that, as frequently noted above, it literally comes out of stories and trying to generate the feel and experience of building such a story through improvisation. The main difference, if I've understood things correctly, is that "genre" Sim is really only interested in the "feel" or "milieu" and doesn't really give two figs about whether the process of play is forcing people to ask and answer tough questions or the like, so "success" in "genre" Sim terms means "did it evoke the right feelings/tropes while you played?" and "victory" is understood in a rather nebulous way as, more or less, "did the end result feel like a <genre> story?" E.g. if you're playing a supers game, did it feel like your adventures were like something that would occur in an actual comic book? If yes, success; if no, failure.So, as you can (hopefully) see from this, Gamism (and to a certain extent "process" Simulation) in some sense "offloads" some of the investment work onto things that don't require you to be playing. They both heavily use comparatively-detailed rules systems, where understanding those systems is key to achieving success/"winning." This is the sense in which they are "easier"--there's a provided, semi-fixed component to all contexts, which is then augmented by the specific context of "this particular fight/challenge. Those two pieces of information (the rules and the current, observable context) are the inputs, which are (when designed well) meant to be easy to pick up. Then the "engagement" comes in when trying to find how to respond to the current context, using those rules, in order to advance your position toward success and away from failure, and there's usually some kind of objective measure (e.g. HP in combat, distance in a race, number of failures vs successes in a skill challenge, etc.) for who is "closer" to failure or success.</blockquote>

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