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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8631761" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Good stuff.This is a pithier way of expressing <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/supposing-d-d-is-gamist-what-does-that-mean.687974/post-8630631" target="_blank">my post 1076 upthread</a>.I've found over the last 10 years that we (oddly) often get called out for not breaking down this stuff.  Yet this post is at least the 2nd time this has been broken down in this thread.  My guess is the count is higher than 2.  So here is a 3rd below.What keeps getting missed (which you addressed above and I tried to clarify in my linked post) is in a High Concept Sim system, genre emulation is the method of causality (a means) AND because the experiential quality of exploring a system (world not game) governed by that causality (the end) is THE POINT OF PLAY, it (functional, color-heavy genre emulation) is an essential rider to a particular point of design and play; “let’s BE there.”Genre tropes do different work in Gamism because the point of design and play is different.  They constrain and inform the imagined space so players can leverage it to "distill skillfull play from less than (or Keep Score)." The point of play isn't “let’s BE there.”In Narrativist games, genre tropes constrain and inform and align the table’s understanding of framing and move-space and consequences so they can get on with “aggressive protagonism vs aggressive opposition to it; what happens when those collide (to the protagonists…to the opposition…to the nature and order of the things we care about)?”So a statement like “but Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark each have genre tropes too” is a misunderstanding (or lack of insight into) what work genre does in Blades in the Dark vs what work genre does in 90s White Wolf games (the poster child of High Concept Sim).  Genre/drama/trope logic and the color-intensivity (both its presence and the time spent marinating in that color) of a White Wolf game does seriously different work than a game of Blades in the Dark because in the WW game it is there to support and inculcate play with "let's BE there" and "power fantasy within those tropes."  Blades in the Dark has supernatural monsters, vampires, dark alleys in a deluge, trench coats, corrupt underworld etc etc...but the point of all of that stuff is neither about "let's BE there" nor is it about "power fantasy within those tropes."  Precisely because Blades in the Dark (featuring principled, skillful GMing with players playing aggressively and to Best Practices) is aggressively Story Now with an intricate system that features a seriously high Gamism signal (because of its delivery of its successful design intent to distill skillful play from unskillful play), the genre tropes do very, very, very different work than the 90s White Wolf games; they do the 2nd and 3rd of my bolded sentence above.  Any "let's BE there" is incidental/subordinate, color is backgrounded rather than foregrounded, and "power fantasy within those tropes" is 100 % anathema.</blockquote>

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