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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8632699" data-attributes="member: 6790260">That still sounds like Emulation to me. "The human effects of war" is still about war. Sure, you aren't showing the war itself. Nineteen-Eighty-Four isn't "a war book" in the sense that no scene in it involves war or the conduct thereof, but it's absolutely "a war book" in the sense that war is an inherent part of its dystopian message. Portraying the horrors of war via the refugees, the slowly-dawning dread that the life you once lived can never truly be brought back, the bleakness at discovering that even if you went back to your hometown it's been blown off the map, etc. I don't really see how that isn't an Emulation of war tropes and concepts. It's just not one that specifically emulates battles.If every war-genre story had to be specifically about people fighting in battles, there wouldn't be nearly as many stories about wars.I wouldn't know either, I guarantee you that you know it better than I do. I can only go off the quotations and bits I've read, where he presents these things as pretty divergent and does not seem to be particularly positive toward "incoherent" games, hybrid or otherwise. But perhaps I have been mistaken. I still think that a thought of the form "if it's not incoherent, then it must be identical" is what compelled him to force together these two categories that I see as being...pretty obviously separate.You can do this. But if you do it, doesn't "Step-On-Up" become a "conceit" too? At which point you've collapsed three categories into one just because one can, with sufficient abstraction, lump most if not all the categories together and end up with a do-nothing framework. I have a dim view of such things; parsimony is certainly a cool thing to pursue in general, but not at the cost of utility.And, again, I root much of this difference not in some airy conceptual thing, but in the way people actually do talk and behave regarding this stuff. Simulation very specifically is about reasoning out the stuff that definitely must be true, based on other things we already know, even if that has strange or unappealing consequences. "Hit points must be meat, because we restore them with spells called cure wounds" makes ZERO sense in any kind of "let's enjoy a genre or a theme," but it is effectively axiomatic if one is saying, "Alright, we start from what the game is, and figure out what must be true as a result." It's "realism" in the practical sense, taking situations as they already exist and extrapolating from them.To portray is to depict (as in portraiture) or to represent dramatically. Groundedness explicitly doesn't care two figs about dramatic representation or the like. It is "stylized" only in the sense that literally everything humans make is "stylized" and thus "actively avoiding stylistic flourishes" is trivially "a style." Simulation has zero relationship to portrayal. Emulation is literally all about portrayal. It is the difference between providing an accurate model of what a group exploring jungle territory would experience, and portraying the tropes and drama associated with stories about jungle exploration (e.g. Tarzan, She, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, etc.) The former is extremely unlikely to resemble the latter in any meaningful way, and vice-versa.Again: I see no problem with being able to say, "Hey, there's some interesting symmetry between 'Groundedness' as a goal and 'Conceit' as a goal; one could argue that they're both expressions of a desire to explore a concept." But "desire to explore a concept" is so abstract, it doesn't tell us anything about the things games are made to do. One might just as easily lump together G&S and S&A because they're both about strict adherence to rules, whereas V&I and C&E are about dramatic presentation. Or one might lump together S&A and V&I because they center almost completely on making difficult choices in moments of tension or crisis, while G&S and C&E are focused on setting and how it's presented. I see it as a serious error in reasoning (not just here, but in many, many other places) to go from "these to things have X important characteristic in common" to "these to things must actually be the same thing, simply manifesting in different modes." Being that reductive is not useful.I'm afraid I know even less about GDS than GNS. However, the specific point of "Values-and-Issues" was to capture something along the lines of "Story Now," so there's certainly some kind of conflict here (whether it's "my ideas are half-baked," "I have poorly explained myself," or "wires just got crossed" remains to be seen.)Values are declared by players; it is the players themselves saying, "yeah, that's what matters to me, right now." Issues are, therefore, the "Situations" (as Edwards would say it) where those Values are exposed to conflict. These conflicts must be resolved, either by making the necessary effort or sacrifices to do so, or by abandoning the Value(s) in question, or complicating the situation. Story Now is, at least, one specific manifestation of this process: players declare their Values, and consequently the DM is obliged to frame Issues where those values are under threat. I was very specifically thinking of Dungeon World Bonds when I named this category (in part because my group is currently in the process of reviewing and, almost certainly, replacing Bonds with some other system, as the way my players relate to them doesn't fit with their intended use.)Dramatism, from what I can see, is interested in telling a good story. Values-and-Issues play has no regard for that specifically. The only one of my game-purposes which is much related to that would be Conceit-and-Emulation. V&I doesn't commit to a plot, but rather to conflicts, like being committed to individual extemporaneous scenes without necessarily caring whether a play forms from the sequence generated. If one can stitch together a coherent narrative out of those scenes, that's great, and I wouldn't be surprised if that would be a subsidiary goal for V&I design. But it isn't vital to do so. By comparison, it would be poor C&E design if the Conceit being elevated-that-it-may-be-appreciated failed to produce a satisfying dramatic arc in the doing, and efforts taken to ensure that such a dramatic arc does occur, even if it requires some (metaphorical) stage magic to happen, are not only cromulent but laudable.Yeah I suspected from context that's what you wanted.I would argue that 4e when played as a "Story Now" game gets fairly close to a "full" hybrid of Gamist and "Story Now." The fundamental chassis is one of the best-made game games in TTRPGs, as seen both in how people praised it, and in how people criticized (or, in far too many cases, unjustly mocked) it. Yet on that chassis of a game where Stepping On Up was clearly a focus and Challenge was so well-articulated that it actually had encounter-building rules that reliably worked, it is quite possible to see Story Now play. The combat and skill rules, when invoked, work extremely well; and then you get back to your Quests and the like.This is what I would call "embedding" one game-purpose inside another. In this case, 4e has a natural Score-and-Achievement kernel, which for many of its fans is plenty. But for those who like Story Now, you can embed that kernel into a larger Values-and-Issues context. The S&A aspect then takes on something approximating the function of the actual roll portion of (for example) Dungeon World moves: the moments when conflict comes to an inevitable head and one invokes the rules in order to resolve the uncertainty of the outcome.That's...extremely confusing, because High Concept wasn't--as I understood it--something that players could choose. "High Concept" comes direct from cinema, where the director is an auteur. That's...really really really clearly Conceit. Like...if I have failed to articulate Conceit vs Values enough such that people are confusing Values with High Concept, then I have clearly screwed up MASSIVELY. Like, I have bungled almost the entire presentation and need to start from scratch.</blockquote>

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