I wondered if that would be controversial!
I was thinking of classic Gygaxian D&D as the most gamist: the whole "skilled play" thing, and the notion that in a porperly run game PC level is a rough proxy for player skill.
Oh I wouldn't argue that. 1e is, I would think, not only the most gamist, but also IIRC the only
explicitly gamist incarnation of the game.
I agree that 3E is the most process-sim, but @
LostSoul and others have persuaded me that 4e is perhaps the best adapted to high-concept sim. (Let's find out what it's like to be heroes with an epic destiny awaiting us.
hmm...interesting idea. I'm not sure that I agree, but its an interesting idea. Although, in a bigger sense, I'm starting to doubt the whole concept of simulationism in rpgs.
And 4e doesn't have the same opportunites as 3E for gamist play in build, because of its greater mechanical rigour and transparency on both player and GM side; nor the same opportunity for gamist play in either XP or treasure acquisition (the DMG description of these as "rewards" is a clear misnomer, given tha acquisition of treasure is simply a function of levels ie XP, and XP are earned automatically for playing the game).
I'd need a fair bit of convincing that rigor and transparency act as detriments to gamist play. Wargames, for example, are often long on both and quite gamist (obviously). There exist folks who use the 4e mechanics with a few tweaks to play a very competitive "Old-School" game. I can't see how more regulated rewards makes them any less rewards. Sure, it takes an element of chance out of the game (that is, a recent OSR game I played in kinda disintegrated after two
very fortunate sets of rolls on the random treasure tables.) However, I tend to see it as primarily a shift in frequency and potency. If anything, it makes 4e a
better gamist game, because your character + stuff even more directly reflects your accomplishments with that character, rather than random rolls on a chart.
The inadequacy of 4e as a D&D gamist vehicle is visible, for instance, in the frequent criticism that D&Dnext is meant to "fix", that gaining levels and finding +1 swords and in general getting bigger numbers doesn't actualluy make your PC any better because everything scales up. (In the fiction, of course, your PC is getting better, so this is not a criticism from the high-concept sim side. It is a criticism from the gamist side.)
I'm not sure how you figure that (and I dread to bring this up). Look at any of the Mario Bros games, now turn one into a tabletop game. They certainly aren't Nar or Sim, they are almost purely gamist. Similar to your note about 1e, what level can you get to is a measure of player skill, not character skill. Yet Mario doesn't get substantially more effective as the game goes on (temporary power ups notwithstanding). The only thing that changes as you progress in Mario levels is the complexity of the levels. 4e can, to some extent, be played in a very similar vein. From my point of view, its
regulated to play that way (at least "rules-as-suggested"). You
will receive these benefits as you level up for precisely the reason of maintaining a specific
challenge level while we tour a bunch of "levels/tiers" with different trappings/flavor...a very gamist concept indeed, that treadmill. At least AFAICT.
Consider also intra-class balance. From what I can tell, this is a purely gamist concept, because its measured directly against that challenge level from above. Its also not (from what I can tell) incompatible with the 1e take on gamism, which include tacit admissions that playing a Fighter is "easy mode" and playing thief or wizard is "hard mode" or "normal mode" (which is which seems to vary a bit between the editions and presentations). The wizard player receives his rewards of power for surviving all those low levels at a much higher difficulty setting than the fighter player. The difference is not one of gamism, but of design choice in how to affect it best.
You might think that challenge or difficulty level is not Gamist, but I can't see how it isn't. For the (pure) Sim player, the world just is, and I'm exploring it. It may be terrible and gritty, or it may be rainbows and unicorns, but its just there. If I am correctly experiencing the world as my character would (living the dream), then there is no "fair" except as he would experience it. For the pure Narrative player...heck, there are Narrativist games where victory is a foregone conclusion and the players are merely dickering over
how the victory happens. Difficulty or challenge is merely flavor for such a player. (Of course, no real player is such a purist in TTRPGs, at least IME.)
By "failure" I meant "less successful than necessary to be sustained", so on that I think we're agreed.
On fragmentation - I think the audience was always fairly diverse. The present fragmentation is a new commercial state of affairs (because of the emergence of PF, and the commercial effects of the OGL/SRD more generally) but I don't know that it's a new state of affairs as far as the preferences and styles of the player base are concerned.
I tend to agree. I think D&D, as the "big one" seems to gravitate toward the middle of the "triangle". Whenever it jaunts off away from any of the poles (whether with a new edition or not) it seems much less well-received. To my view, the game started off very Gamist with a dash of Sim, and stumbled backwards into Narrativism. Fans of the newly discovered Narrativism dragged through kicking and screaming into 2e...where its shortcomings stood out. 3e doubled down on Sim(ish) things and kicked Narrativism and Gamism to the curb. 4e (in so many ways) tried to be the anti-3e, and so tossed 3e's Simishness to the side. 5e seems....well I dunno. To me, it looks like its abandoned all three agendas with the intent of providing a good simple vehicle for a group of geeky buddies to hang around a table and goof off while occasionally generating good stories as they pretend to be elves, etc. Which, honestly is maybe the best thing.
