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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8630842" data-attributes="member: 16814">Sure, heist as a genre focuses on a large scale robbery or a string of robberies.  Blades doesn't do this in any consistent way.  Play doesn't have to be about robberies at all.  My last game was with a crew of smugglers.  We did a few heists, but we also did smuggling, a lot of occult stuff at the end, politics, and flat out beatdowns.  So, if Blades was meant to emulate a heist genre, it seems to not do so with surprising regularity.  I can do heists, for sure, but it's not a heist emulator.It's also a staple of other genres.  It's not at all unique to heists.  This was my point -- heist as a genre is fairly specific, but flashbacks are not specific to heists.  You can have heist genre without flashbacks.  Flashbacks are neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve heist genres.  A great example of flashbacks in a non-heist is Westworld, which makes extensive use of flashback layering.So, this entire argument is a poor construing of what Blades offers in an attempt to lump it into an easy bin and claim that it's simulationist -- I mean, you've ignored the repeated statements that just having genre isn't sufficient for that agendas, but that genre has to be the point of playing, but that aside this fails.It's good that you're finally acknowledging that simulationism has more than one bucket, and that there are differences in techniques.And, again you show you haven't paid attention.  Of course games can do multiple things.  5e is a good example.  YOUR claim about AW is incorrect.  Some games do multiple things, others do different multiple things, some don't do things.  AW doesn't do any simulationism.  This isn't purity, it's actually applying what the model says to what the rules actually say and not your loose argument that any genre is genre emulation and that this is the same thing as simulationism.  I've pointed out where those steps are wrong individually and together.I've already said a few times how games manage different agendas -- they toggle.  You've made claims about harmonizing, I've disagreed.  The agendas are mostly exclusive of each other, so you cannot meet more than one at the same time, but you can toggle between them.  My example of The Between earlier showed how that works with Sim and Narrativism.  It also showed what kinds of structure actually have to be in place for Sim to function, and those are lacking in AW.It's not.  I don't know what to tell you.  You seem to have a very low bar for sufficiency.  I think it's tied to how much you want to show that the GNS model has no useful things to say -- like how you try to discredit it for not having the same number of things in each bin, how you try to say that the Narrativism bin is the same as Dramatism from the GDS model, how you claim any genre is emulation and therefore simulationism (when that's not remotely close to sufficient).  You've yet to try to apply the model in a constructive way but instead have only posted how it doesn't work, and you've made errors every time you've done so.There are legit criticisms of GNS.  The ones you're putting out, so far, aren't.  You've touched closely on a few, but chose to run in a different direction.  Yes, because that discards the model.   However, the utility of the model is that it's identifying agendas that conflict.  It's pie-in-the-sky to assume that no agendas actually conflict; that they all can work together if we just hold hands hard enough.  But that's not true.  I showed this with the hitpoint example.  I've linked examples from the first 20 posts on the main page of ENW that show conflicts in agendas.  Conflicts exist, and GNS actually is useful in identifying why they exist and what the conflict is actually over.  The model isn't there to tell you how to fix it, but how to identify and understand the source of conflict.  If you want to talk about how to work through conflict, I'm 100% game.  I love that stuff.  But that's not what you're doing.  You're saying that agendas do naturally work together and this model, the GNS model, is wrong because it suggests that they do not.  Your fixation on genre is weird, especially since the model doesn't really care much about genre -- it would only care in the sense of a high-concept sim whose goal is to specifically emulate a genre.  Other than that, genre isn't even a consideration for the model.  It is in some of Edwards other essays, where he talks about the role of setting in various agendas (it's a good read, but long and even denser than the GNS essays).  The fixation you have that genre is the important detail just doesn't follow.  Of course not every game can use every genre.  That's, well, obvious.  And totally beside the point.  We aren't talking GNS to evaluation what genres a game can support because it doesn't care about that.</blockquote>

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