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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8630562" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Some people are very diverse.  You may just be one of them.  But a lot of people do lean in to some agendas more heavily.  I mean, have you seen the number of people who badmouth game elements getting in the way of roleplaying?Back when GDS was put together, its history is instructive.  David Berkman (the author of the early diceless game Theatrix) came in to r.g.f.a. (who's original function was just as the A would suggest, about "advocacy"; promoting a game you value, if necessary by comparing it to other games. Berkman came in and, essentially, presented the position that everyone who wasn't playing his game was making an error; that they were all looking for Story, and everything else just got in the way of that.By historical accident, there were a handful of extremely pure-quill Simulationist types there at the time.  It was abundantly clear to them that what they wanted was not what Theatrix was offering, but they had to develop some language to explain why.  The proto-Dramatist in there at the time were actually kind of interested in understanding where the proto-Simulationists were coming from, and so some back and forth started (pretty soon they started largely ignoring Berkman because, honestly, he was either incapable or unwilling to accept that his premise might be faulty).  At a certain point it became obvious that the initial Simulation/Drama separation wasn't covering all the cases (I suspect it was early enough that someone brought up early D&D token play, but it actually happened before I stumbled into r.g.f.a.) and Gamism was added in, but since the extent participants at the time were largely uninterested in RPGs as games, their initial work was, shall we say a little less than adequate, and when a few of us came in later who did care, it never entirely got addressed.Besides working on refining the Threefold, a lot of discussion went out on topics like Stances (though they seem slightly different than what I usually see these days).  But the initial view that the Simulationist had that it was kind of an all-or-nothing thing broke down pretty early when people came in who tended to prefer mixes of the various agendas, or favored one at one time and a different one at another time.So the sort of all-one-thing phrasing you see has a pretty long history.</blockquote>

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