Probably one of the more popular and well-supported innovations in RPGs is the Hero Point/Life Point/Luck Point/Force Point. A Hero point could be construed to represent:
- A character's determination and capacity to exceed their normal capabilities
- A form of currency used by a player to overcome challenges
- A tool to shape the story to create climactic events and prevent anti-climax
In practice, it is any, and all three. A basic weakness of Forge theory is that it posits competing agendas, when in fact, in many cases, the agendas have the potential to converge.
As I imagine you know, Edwards' GNS essays discuss hero/fate points in some detail, and the different ways in which they can be used. This is one example which underpins the more general claim made on the Forge that there is no very obvious or evident correlation between particular techniques or rules variants and "creative agendas".
I know this from my own experience with Rolemaster. The design of Rolemaster, like RQ, is inspired heavily by purist-for-system sim concerns. And like RQ, Rolemaster therefore makes parrying important in melee. But unlike RQ, Rolemaster does not make parrying a separate skill from attacking. Rather, round-by-round a melee combatant must assign points from a common pool to parry, and to attack.
Although intended to support simulationism, and promoted in that fashion, this mechanic also opens the door to gamism (there is a tactical choice to be made from round to round, which can generate approval or disapproval from fellow players) and to narrativism (because there are often multiple viable choices possible in a given round, the player can make a choice that is thematically expressive of something s/he cares about with respect to his/her PC, or the situation in which that PC is engaged).
At least in my experience, this feature of RM can make it attractive to players who aren't particularly moved by purist-for-system priorities (and who therefore would have much less interest in playing RQ).
Edwards doesn't discuss this feature of RM, but he does talk about the points-build rules for Champions/HERO, which again - because they require significant player choices - open the door to the injection of non-simulationist concerns.
But the fact that a given mechanic can support multiple sorts of approaches to play doesn't mean that agendas can happily converge. Another actual example from RM play: RM combines levels with points-buy for PC building, with each level permitting a new set of points to be spent. Some players approach levelling from the perspective of "improving" their PC relative to the challenges they envisage facing (a typical, although not necessarily exclusively, gamist concern), others from the point of view of taking their PC's story in a new direction (I had a player who developed Seduction for his PC because he wanted his PC to be able to get romantically involved with an NPC whom the party had encountered), and others from the point of view of having their PC's development reflect their experiences over the past level (I had a player who, every level, would develop one rank of "region lore" for every area his PC had visited).
The RM rules themselves are mostly silent on how development should be handled, although there are hints that the purist-for-system simulationist approach is to be preferred, and there are optional rules that would reinforce this. I also think it is the dominant approach to the issue on the ICE forums. In an RM group who were strongly committed to this sort of approach to PC building, the metagamer who develops skills not because they flow naturally from what the PC did last level, but because they support what the player wants his/her PC to do in the
following level, could be a disruptive influence - a munchkin, even!
In general, then, I don't think that versatility of a given rule or technique establishes compatability of creative agendas.
for a story to be good, it has to be believable - which brings in a degree of simulationism. While telling my story, the players make informed decisions, and if the world does not make sense, they cannot do so. Also, for the game to be enjoyable, it has to play well - a Gamist concern. Resolving the use of a skill has to be fast and easy.
An RPG, by definition, involves the participants sharing a conception of a fictional world in which the PCs do their stuff. And often genre, or verisimilitude, will be used to help provide a common anchor for that shared fiction. But on its own this doesn't make play simulationist - simulationist play, at least per The Forge, is about
prioritising this aspect of the fiction. Whereas narrativism, for example, is about producing a story in the fiction via actual play - which (as is the case with stories in other media) may require at certain key points a departure from verisimilitude and/or a flouting of genre. I give an example of the first (generally more-lighthearted) approach to narrativism below.
And by "gamist" concerns you seem to mean something like "how smoothly the game plays". Whereas gamism - at least at The Forge - is generally used to describe play in which the players have to "step on up". Gygax, in the last few pages of his PHB, gives a good example of what he sees as the gamist goal of AD&D play - namely, demonstrating that you are a "skilled player" by eg preparing for your dungeon expedition in advance, and brining and using plenty of iron spikes and 10' poles.
I consider myself a Storyteller first. But I also enjoy Simulationist and Gamist elements, and I see no real conflict between them.
Earlier in this post I've given some examples of how creative agendas can clash, even when all the players are committed to using the same mechanics.
Another example came up today on
this thread. I describe two different ways of resolving an attempt by a group of PCs to bluff there way past a guard into the king's castle:
One way is to design the situation (castle, king, guards, diplomat etc) in detail but to build in some holes that the players (via their PCs) can exploit. I would call this approach one that focuses on exploration as a priority. It rewards players who engage with the nitty-gritty descriptive detail of the gameworld. It also works best when players and GM are on the same page as to what is feasible, and what not, when it comes to running a bluff.
On the other approach, the GM has only a general idea of the situation, and is ready for the players to try hijinks that the GM has not foreseen, and is prepared to roll with those hijinks based on a combination of (i) using mechanical means to determine whether or not PC actions succeed or fail in their goal, (ii) using the players' descriptions of what their PCs are doing to determine the actual consequences of successes and failures, and (iii) using understandings of genre/table verisimilitude tolerance that are shared between the players and the GM to work out what sorts of hijinks are entitled to a roll, and what sorts of hijinks are excluded on absurdity grounds.
The first approach could be simulationist, or exploration-heavy (perhaps Gygaxian-style) gamism. The second approach is most naturally suited to a certain sort of narrativism.
You can't tell which approach a given group is using simply by noting what system they are using, or what the character sheets look like - both can be implemented using 3E or 4e, for example, without the need for any house rules.
But a GM who want to use the first approach playing with a group of players who prefer the second - or, perhaps worse, a group of players with mixed preferences - is likely to have a hard time.
What defines the three "agendas" for the Forge definitions is the focus of social interaction besed on the events in play.
<snip>
This "Forge" usage is specifically where the comments about "exclusivity" come from. In these terms, it really makes no sense to describe a set of RPG rules, or an RPG player, as any specific one of the three "agendas". The agendas relate to instances of play, not to game systems or even groups.
That said, however, it does make sense to consider how well sets of game rules support play that is focussed on one or another of these agendas - and that is what is meant on the Forge by "Gamist supporting rules", or "Simulationist supporting rules" or "Narrativist supporting rules".
I fully agree with all this.
Making a ruleset that supports more than one agenda is not impossible, but it is very difficult to do well.
This I'm less sure about - historically many systems have supported a diversity of play, and often the drifting required isn't that severe. But for the reasons I already stated in this post, I think the idea that players with different preferences could play happily together with a given driftable system is sometimes a bit optimistic.
Of course a lot turns on what counts as "doing it well". I'll concede that modern, focused RPG designs might be regarded as better supporting the sorts of play that they aim at.
a game where the players were genuinely trying to gain and give kudos for all three at all times would be pretty unfocussed and confused, basically.
This, on the other hand, I continue to be less sure of. In my view The Forge fudges on this to an extent, by distinguishing "creative agendas" from "techniques", and then distinguishing a given player's preference for a particular technique from that player's creative agenda.
Edwards says things that, to my mind, push in both directions.
Here, he says that:
Simulationist play works as an underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented moments. It differs from the Explorative chassis for Narrativist play, even an extensive one, in that one really has to stop addressing Premise and focus on in-game causality per se. Such scenes or details can take on an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract (e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up pleasing neither enough to attract them further.
Historically, this approach has been poorly implemented in role-playing texts, which swing into Simulationist phrasing extremely easily . . . You cannot get emergent Narrativist play specifically through putting more and more effort into perfecting the Simulationism (which requires that the Narrativism cease), no matter how "genre-faithful" or "character-faithful" it may be. I consider most efforts in this direction to become reasonably successful High-Concept Simulationism with a strong slant toward Situation, mainly useful for enjoyable pastiche but not particularly for Narrativist play at all.
I would see a certain - in my experience fairly typical - approach to Call of Cthulhu play as an instance of this sort of high concept simulationism leading to pastiche. But I don't think, and nor does Edwards say, that the collapse from narrativism into pastiche is inevitable in this sort of situation. (And if the game has mechanics that require player input, and which can be metagamed in respect of that input - like the RM mechanics I mentioned earlier - than the door is almost guaranteed to be kept open.)
Here, though, is a passage from Edwards that pushes strongly in favour of exclusivity (he is discussing a hypothetical game in which the PCs play Vampires a la The Masquerade):
A possible Gamist development of the "vampire" initial Premise might be, Can my character gain more status and influence than the other player-characters in the ongoing intrigue among vampires?
Another might be, Can our vampire characters survive the efforts of ruthless and determined human vampire hunters?
. . .
A possible Narrativist development of the "vampire" initial Premise, with a strong character emphasis, might be, Is it right to sustain one's immortality by killing others? When might the justification break down?
Another, with a strong setting emphasis, might be, Vampires are divided between ruthlessly exploiting and lovingly nurturing living people, and which side are you on?
. . .
the variety of Simulationist play arises from the variety of what's being Explored. . .
A possible development of the "vampire" premise in terms of Character Exploration might be, What does it feel like to be a vampire? . . .
A possible development of the "vampire" premise in terms of Situation Exploration might be, What does the vampire lord require me to do? . . .
A possible development of the "vampire" premise in terms of Setting Exploration might be, How has vampire intrigue shaped human history and today's politics? . . .
A possible development of the "vampire" premise in terms of System Exploration might be, How do various weapons harm or fail to harm a vampire, in specific causal detail?
Any mutually-reinforcing combination of the above elements is of course well-suited to this form of play.
This certainly makes it look hard to combine sim and narrativism - if I'm exploring how a vampire feels, or what the vampire lord requires me to do, then where is the space going to open up to take a stand on the morality (personal, or political) of being a vampire?
Even here, though I don't see that the second gamist goal - "surving the ruthless vampire hutners" - couldn't figure in a subordinate way in exploring the morality of vampirism.
TLDR version of my Edwards's discussion - I'm in two minds about the exclusivity hypothesis.
