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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8629109" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think your analysis is pretty solid, especially on 4e. I suspect that the REAL underlying issue that people have with GNS-style analysis is that there's an unacknowledged cognitive framework at work. When a lot of people talk about, for instance, 'Simulation' there's a taint of the 'common meaning' in there, that somehow we're talking about mechanics that take the place of 'the laws of physics' essentially. I mean, that MIGHT in theory be a kind of Simulationism (but I think it is in practice virtually non-existent in actual games). Likewise 'Gamist' was often commonly used to mean "any mechanical device which cannot be reconciled with realism." GNS, and I think GDS, etc. NEVER used these terms in that way (though probably if you were to dig far enough back into the early alt.rec.games posts you'd find that their earliest uses were probably along those lines). The above needs to be kept in mind when parsing earlier criticisms of 4e during the 'wars' period. 4e did a very specific type of Gamist play fairly well, that is simply an endless series of almost-disconnected tactical combats. You could tie them together, maybe add a quest goal here and there, and toss in a few fairly action-oriented SCs if you wanted, all of which mostly amounted to basically "test your chargen skills and tactical play against the GM", and in that light even leveling up was simply a mechanism to generate greater tactical variety, at each level the monsters and typical abilities change a bit, creating a varying set of challenges. The 'treadmill complaint' is easily understood in this context as simply being a reaction to the lack of illusionism about what progress means in D&D. Its right up front, it means very little. Gygax probably would have at least really groked that part in the sense that in a gamist sense leveling in 4e is just pure 'score' (which also evokes video games, another complaint).It is only when you start pushing into the more narrative methods of play that you, IMHO, really start to get some use out of a lot of elements of the system. Its possible to do that a little bit, or a lot.</blockquote>

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