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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8629856" data-attributes="member: 16814">One is High Concept the other is Purist-for-system.  The essays make this distinction under simulationism.  So... sure, only if your taxonomy intentionally stops at too high a tier.  Like saying Animal, Elephant and Animal, Platypus are the same thing if you stop at Animal.We've been around on this before, and you seem hellbent at stopping at a high level and ignoring the sub-groupings below.  GNS does this.However, this is one of my issues with GNS, in that it's structure allows for this kind of argument to be easily reached.  While I agree that internal cause is the key thread between high concept and purist-for-system (or process sim), the grouping of things that value very different kinds of internal cause makes it very easy for people that don't grok this to dismiss the entire theory by misunderstanding this.  It's obfuscated enough that it's an easy target.If the point is genre evocation -- and by this I mean the point of playing the game is to experience the genre -- then it's sim. The point of AW isn't to experience the genre.  It's not to recreate Mad Max or any other genre story.  All of that is background to what the game is getting to.  So AW doesn't emulate genre and genre is not the point of playing AW.  If, as [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] notes, you jump into an AW game to revel in some glorious post-apoc tropes, you're going to be first confused and then disappointed when the game doesn't deliver this.Your arguments treat story now as a version of dramatism, despite being told multiple times it is not.  You also state that it should be easy to move from story now to simulationism with no changes to a game that was built from the ground up to enable narrativist play and avod simulationism.  You deny it in your airy claims that you can mix and match GNS agendas freely, despite the point of the essays to be to identify competing agendas.  You deny it in that people that do play the way you do not are telling you that you have a misunderstanding about what's central to their play (at least some of it, I engage many agendas across many games).  The root of your argument is that these aren't separate things, but rather just loose descriptions, but my experience, and the experience of many other posters you've engaged, is that these are separate things.  You aren't allowing for a difference of opinion, but instead a hard statement that says "your play isn't what you say it is."Meanwhile, on the other side, no one is denying your play at all.  Looking through the lens of GNS doesn't require denying play -- it's pretty open to any kind of play and makes no normative statements about play (why would it, the author enjoys multiple agendas himself!).  It's not saying that your play doesn't exist, nor are the other posters.Your quotes don't even engage the point you tried to make about shared narration.Shared narrative power is something that exists independent of the agendas.  You can even have shared narrative power in a simulationist game, although that's going to have the least utility.  But it exists in some gamist games, and some narrativist games, but not all, and isn't a requirement.  Blades in the Dark has some shared narrative power, in that players can Resist complications and, by this declaration, cause the GM to have to narrate a lesser or no complication.  The player has to tell how they Resist in the fiction.  This is clearly some shared narrative power (I've elided the exact mechanics of how this works).  So, in Blades, there's at least some narrative power sharing.  But, in AW, there's pretty much zero outside of "ask questions, use answers."  This is triggered by the GM, though, so it's not something the player can assert, but if the GM does use it, then they are bound by the answers and they open up the backstory to player input.So, no, shared narrative authority is not a requirement of story now.Then show that 1) you can accurately apply the model (which you seem to have trouble with) and 2) how you can do 1) and harmonize. Let me provide some examples of how your assumption on harmonization doesn't really work.  You, [USER=7025508]@Crimson Longinus[/USER], are on record that hitpoints have to have at least some "meat" component because the healing spells say "wounds" in them.  So, to you, it does not make sense that you'd have a spell "cure light wounds" if it isn't curing actual wounds.  This is simulationist -- not because it's emulating anything, but because it's valuing some internal cause.  But, let's say a player named Bob sat down at your table and insisted that there is no "meat" to hitpoints, that they're just a game element that only tells us things when they're gone and otherwise don't have any fictional attachment, Bob is clearly engaged in some gamism.  These two things cannot be harmonized.  What you value -- that internal cause -- is not at all what Bob values here, and these are going to conflict.  Maybe, if Bob is cool, and you're the GM, this gets glossed over.  Bob doesn't care you're narrating wounds because he's happy that the game still works out and he can just ignore your narration (although this opens up the question of if your narration really matters at all -- is it even engaging internal cause or is it largely meaningless?). But if the roles are reversed, and Bob is the GM, he never bothers to narrate anything for hitpoint damage because it's not a thing to him.  You, however, are not getting served any internal cause, and are, in fact, getting the opposite -- no internal cause.  You are now unhappy in play.  This is an unharmonizable agenda conflict under GNS.  You are receiving incoherent play because you expect one thing but are receiving something else.Another example of this is the game The Between.  This is a PbtA/Brindlewood Bay hybrid game billed as Story Now.  However, it has quite a number of High-concept simulationist elements in how it presents and resolves the villains (the game is about Victorian monster hunting and solving mysteries related thereto).  This causes tension in the game when these elements interact, and the game handles this via some occasionally jarring toggles.  Mysteries are run in a nominally Story Now style approach, but some moves only generate "clues" which are statements about the situation that are not conclusive (the GM is given an example list for each villain).  Players collect these clues, and, when they wish, can invoke the move "answer a question."  The questions are provided and unique to the villains.  The players then can use some or all of the clues they've provided to create a narrative that answers that question.  They then roll to see if their narrative is true, true but with unforeseen twist/danger, or not true and they've made a dangerous error. The conflict here is that each villain or mystery is, in many ways, pre-scripted.  What is important about the villain is pre-scripted -- their unique questions.  This causes tension in play because now players have to incorporate these issues into their play and move towards answering them rather than playing to find out what happens.  The locus of examination and exploration is moved off of the characters and onto a narrative structure.  We're no longer playing to find out what happens, but playing to find the answer to this mystery that has nothing to do with who the PCs are.  This is high-concept sim space.  On the other hand, there's some really nifty mechanics that center on discovering who the investigator PCs are, and that are strongly story now in flavor and execution.  The problem really is that you're doing one of these things or the other -- it toggles, it doesn't harmonize.  I'd say The Between is a really good go at creating a game that tries to do both, but that it fails in this regard because the tension between undercuts each agenda.  It feels incoherent in play quite often.  One of the biggest pieces of the game that seems to cause the most confusion/consternation in how it works is the mechanic called the Unscene[sic].  This is pure conch passing story telling that interleaves into regular play during the Night phase and exists only to allow players (not the GM) to tell a shared story in pure storytelling mode about something happening in the city that has nothing to do with the play of the game (and never again features in play).  It's mood setting and/or pure flavor only and is the single most questioned piece of the game (ie, has very many questions about how it even works or what it's supposed to do or if it's being done correctly).  It's another toggle, and only that is obvious in play -- and that was in a game where the players were very comfortable spinning stories so it was easy to do but still felt like "okay, stop playing this game while we play this other game for a bit and then we'll go back to the first game."  The Between doesn't harmonize agendas, even as it tries to serve two (high concept simulationism and story now), but rather it toggles and the seams are often quite visible.</blockquote>

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