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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8626209" data-attributes="member: 82106">Going back to the original premise here... Of course D&D is Gamist. I mean, look, I played the game, actual D&D, quite a bit during its initial lifespan (IE from 1974 to about 1979 when IME most people had adopted one or another 2nd generation D&D in whole or part). It was an utterly gamist thing. It never pretended to simulate anything at all, as it was devoid of any definite setting, and its genre is entirely unique. While you could probably emphasize Narrative and little in D&D itself gets much in the way of that, it is also not particularly supported and D&D's absolute Referee/DM adjudication system means it is prone to Illusionism/Participationism/Trailblazing types of play, which are not particularly Narrative. So, at least in a GNS sense, we're left with Gamist. It is, AFAIK considered nowadays to be the classic Step On Up kind of Gamist challenge RPG. The goal is loot and XP, pure and simple. Now, if we looked at a GEN sort of view of D&D... I don't really get their 'Explorative' intent, these intents don't seem at all exclusive or prescriptive of anything much. Gamist is the easiest to look at, and again D&D is pretty gamist, it includes many constructs that exist purely to facilitate game play. However, why is D&D not 'explorative', it certainly is completely consisting of EXPLORATION, which is genuine from the player/character perspective in that what they find out was not known to at least the PC. I can see why D&D is analyzed in premise to be a 'character' game, but that's a pretty shallow definition of CHARACTER, as D&D is an overwhelmingly pawn-stance game in which the PC's traits have almost no bearing on personality, goals, etc. This reduces character to basically nothing but numbers. Yet it cannot be about setting, as there is none. Situation is also not something that is much addressed by the game itself, though we might say that D&D has a decent amount of rules about "being in an underground/wilderness setting of a specific sort." I think you're starting to see why GEN is not a very useful framework for evaluating game systems! As for the 3rd 'top tier' element, 'Realism', well in retrospect of knowing many other game designs since then, yes many of them are more likely to produce realistic results, but I guess this axis at least seems logical to me in some degree.Some of the GEN 'bottom tier' stuff can be discussed, but some of it I don't find super useful, and if you can't relate it to goals of game design it isn't that useful. I mean, reward and resolution mechanics are here, but IMHO those are really secondary to what you want to accomplish! Weight? I mean, OK, its a thing, but again, just listing these traits of a game system, what does it do? I would say D&D is a reasonably light system, though I am not sure I would call it 'freeform'. More 'ad-hoc', which isn't an option! I think we can posit that it is a Fortune system that is regulating effects, but I'm not sure what 'for cause' is supposed to really mean. I would divide this up more on the lines of Action vs Intent being resolved, which I think is a more modern and better option. Other than that it is pretty obviously a completely pre-plotted game where all authorship and direction are centralized in a DM. Early D&D was generally thought of as a type of sandbox, but often with strong DM inputs into suggest direction, so maybe ideally it is a Trailblazing kind of system at heart, which IMHO is a more useful analysis.I couldn't even attempt to give you a description of how D&D is in a GDS sense, as I can't really understand the criteria of 3-fold theory to any great degree. Obviously successive editions/variations of the game have gone SLIGHTLY in other directions, but IMHO TSR D&D is fairly consistent, aside from 2e fooled with 'narrative' but not in a serious way. 5e could definitely be seen as a simulation of 2e though!</blockquote>

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