NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8628479" data-attributes="member: 71235">I did! Thank you for sharing these thoughts, they're quite interesting.You clarify what you're getting at below, but at first this tripped me up, and sounded to me more like an issue of authority/control over the PCs, rather than GNS Narrativism/Gamism as such. Little-n narrative action is easily construed to mean all the stuff that goes on, and I think the GM has as much charge over NPC/world actions & events as PCs do over theirs (more, according to some <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😉" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" title="Winking face    :wink:" data-shortname=":wink:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />). But I think what you meant are the specific value-laden choices the players must make in GNS Narrative play. Those are the point of GNS Narrativist play, and the jobs of the GM and players in that regard are distinct. (Edit: You did in fact say that in the earlier post, but I figured it's worth continuing to emphasize.)The term "back seat" doesn't really work for me, although it feels close to the mark. But, the GM can very much be in full charge of the narrative events confronting the players...it's just that their job is different. But then you get right to that.Yes, it's for the players to present their values, the GM to challenge them, and the players to agonize over whether and how to fit action to their character's values (and again to be clear, in GNS Narrativism, that's the primary interest in play). I can't think of a game where the players routinely present moral dilemmas for NPCs to work out...maybe that's a type of play I haven't encountered yet!Similarly for Gamist play, the GM most definitely is in charge of the NPC's actions in a conflict. But the spotlight and attention is on how the PCs address the challenge. So, in that sense I can underrstand "back seat".I think it's worth pointing out again that both can occur in a single scene/encounter, where a combat might feature embedded decisions over who to kill or capture or let escape, or which innocents to rescue or allow to perish (to use an extreme but common example). Whether to engage in the combat in the first place can also be a value-laden decision point. But, usually, those decisions are more tactical or expedient, and more importantly, the individual moments are clearly one or the other, and the emphasis and priority held by individual participants can vary. Also, the specific example I gave, is common and generic—that is, it is likely not based on player-presented values but on trope.Going further along that line here, however, would be a huge tangent, albeit critical to some of the disagreements I see about the GNS model....Yep, makes sense to me.I agree that this is a combination of agendas that's much more likely to actively clash, rather than compete for time & attention.Yes. I think GNS Narrative play can co-exist with either, too, but not that it necessarily does.Yes, this makes a whole lot of sense. I also think it's one of the main sources of confusion and angst over the GNS model. Its lumping/splitting may not match what some people would like, but it does make the important distinctions.This fits too, and I find it interesting that you talk about mapping player reasoning to character reasoning in this context, which is widely regarded as a story/drama/narrative thing. But again, both you and the GNS model put that under Simulation, not Narrative. I shared <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/supposing-d-d-is-gamist-what-does-that-mean.687974/post-8628366" target="_blank">my key insight</a> on that too.Yes, tools and explicit support for player-driven values-and-issues narrativism (all deliberately lowercased) would help a lot. We've both hinted at that several times in this specific exchange and in many upstream posts.To get back to measures of evaluation and growth, you just helped me with another insight. I've always bristled at classes, xp, and levels, but I really enjoy games with playbooks, which superficially look a lot like classes. Classes, though, tend to be much heavier, and in defining what a character can do, usually in a more Gamist frame and in contrast with many other specific features, implicitly define to me what a character cannot do. They prompt in me a more literal reading that way. Playbooks, perhaps because their sparseness, don't prompt the same reaction and I find myself being much more imaginative and free in my role-playing. Not perhaps on topic, but the discussion yielded that, so thanks!Edits: Minor clarfications.</blockquote>

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