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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8660059" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I think I understand the commonalities being claimed; I'll just again suggest that these commonalities range from trivial to irrelevant to people focused on "process sim", and often may not be much more so to people who really don't care about that but do care about genre emulation.Essentially, cats and dogs have a lot of common traits including being mammalian predators, but that doesn't mean their similarities are particularly relevant to people who have a preference in one direction or another.  So you have to ask what purpose your classification of them is actually serving.That's been my argument; the narrowness of Nar's classification means it served some actual purpose.  Its not clear to me that GNS sim's classification really does.I just don't really agree that they do.  Again, genre constraints are a fundamentally story based concern; they're designed to produce a particular look and feel and enable particular kinds of stories.  GDS sim actively rejects story as a reason to structure things in such a way.Its not the things a model successfully describes that is the sign of its value; its the number of ones it fails.  It somewhat describes D&D because the latter tries to be all things to all people.I'd tend to describe that in terms that are not particularly charitable, to tell the truth.  I don't think its really defensible once you get into its guts at all.  I think the confusion about what D&D is doing is largely a consequence of it having been used as the all-purpose fantasy tool for so long people don't even recognize the possibility they're hammering nails with the wrench sometimes because they're so used to doing it.See above.  I mean, honestly, to use a particularly well known example that originally set of GNS development, there were people who were certain Vampire was a narrative game, and banged away at those nails for all they were worth.  As best I can tell,  D&D for a long time (I won't speak particularly of 5e, though not much I've heard counters this) is a largely gamist structure overlayed on a genre focused target (with the note that its largely become its own subgenre), with some dollops of dramatist and simulationist fragments here and there.  But most of the latter is vestigial, and most of the former is being done on levels that the game only passingly helps you with.</blockquote>

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