Simplistic GNS examples...

[M. J. Young]

Ralph is exactly on target.

You speak of the importance of a solid underlying reality; but that's not simulationism. It is certainly useful (I won't even say necessary) for simulationism, but it is equally useful for gamism and narrativism.

For example, let's imagine a gamist player who knows the enemy is coming so he takes the high ground, sets up some defenses, and prepares his missile weapons, in full expectation that it will be easier for him to shoot down on his opponents than for them to shoot up at him. If the game supports that, he's happy; if it doesn't, he's not happy--but it has nothing to do with "simulationist tendencies". It has to do with an expectation that the system will model reality in a manner which supports the expected outcomes of his choices.

So, too, you're clearly thinking that having the reality seem real makes it simulationist. What makes it simulationist isn't that the reality seems real, or that the seeming reality of the world is something you want, but that you, as a player, are invested in exploring that reality. Is your interest really involved in what is cold, harsh space with sub-light travel limitations and rationally practical weapons (based on current science) really like? Is meeting the aliens just one of the factors here, just another part of being in space?

Code Select Expand

We diverted to pass through a hydrogen cloud, so we could scoop more fuel for the engines. It was a gamble, as it was going to cost a lot of energy to slow down from 87% light speed and set the directional vector appropriately, but it looks like it paid off, as we gathered enough to compensate for the expense several times over.

It appears that this system may be inhabited. The captain is trying to decide whether to reverse engines, slingshot around the star to absorb our momentum, and try to achieve orbit around the fourth planet, from which radio signals appear to be emanating. This isn't supposed to be an exploratory mission, but the possibility that there actually is someone else out here has got all of us excited. Decrypt haven't yet unraveled what is being sent, but they insist it is neither random nor repetitive, and appears to be an intelligently organized signal.

It would certainly delay our arrival at the colony; but then, three generations have already passed away while we've been in time distort, and another generation or two either way isn't going to be a big deal.
Simulationism is about those choices, deciding whether to explore the possibility of alien life or continue to the colony, paying attention to whether changing course an near light speed to pick up more fuel is worth the effort--the nature of the world, itself, the inhabitants, the physics, the knowledge, the flavor, the elements of exploration, is the focus of play. Sure, those kinds of things are present in other forms of play, but they're not the focus of what we're doing--they're the support structure.

Similarly, "feeling like I'm there" is common in one approach to simulationist play (although "watching it all from a godlike position outside it" is equally simulationist), but it's not definitive of simulationism nor exclusive to it. You can play gamist in pawn stance, moving your character around like he's a playing piece on a chessboard as you try to figure out how to beat the challenge, and even sacrifice him with no more thought than you would a knight to bring the king into checkmate. You can play gamist with the feeling that that adversary is going to kill you in a moment if you don't think of how to do this, and you can consider whether you're willing to sacrifice yourself to save the others, so that your side can win the game.

Example: there's a great board game making the convention rounds; if you can sit in on a game, do so. It's called Vanished Planet, and it's one of the best cooperative board games out there. Players play against the game, all together. More than once in games I've played, one of the players has sacrificed his world so that another player could finish a final quest which defeats the entity. You can do that with a casual detached attitude, or you can be very involved in being your people, watching your world consumed by the adversary, feeling like you have been destroyed--but you're still playing gamist here, regardless of the level of immersion, because you're trying to win the game.

Immersion is a red herring. It means nothing in GNS.

Ralph is also correct that narrativism is not proved by the presence after the fact of theme. The question is whether in play the players are addressing premise--is this game about exploring those moral issues? Their presence in play does not make it narrativist; it is the prioritizing of them as the important aspect that makes it so.

This is (as is often the case) longer than I intended; I hope it clarifies the matter some.

--M. J. Young

[RDU Neil]

Taking your very usefull example of an s-f game, I agree that I think I'm Sim because those are the very questions I find important in the game... but they are not so dispassionate.  There are moral/ethical elements of these choices.  How will the decision be made?  Is the ship a democracy, or does the captain just decide?  What happens if the captain goes against the desires of the crew?  Would it be moral to risk the crew on first contact?  Would it be immoral to ignore humanities chance at first contact?

Those are ethical/moral questions that are important to the game world, and to some extent the real world.  It is not only important WHAT you decide to do, but WHY.

If you could give me the SAME example written to describe NAR play... maybe that would help.

[M. J. Young]

I cross-posted with Neil; I hope I can address his new comments.

First, you're still confusing the desire for a consistent underlying reality with simulationism. Simulationism does not require such a consistent underlying reality. You can have a simulationist approach to a cartoon world, or a simulationist surrealism. These are uncommon, but they are not inconsistent with simulationism. Similarly, consistent underlying reality is not exclusive to simulationism. You can have it as foundational for gamist or narrativist play. Whether you want high detail and strong causality in the world is a red herring; it's a separate question from what your creative agenda is.

Now, let's assume (as it seems may be) that what you're looking for is a narrativist game that has strong support for causality and immersive "being there" play. The "narrativist" part of that is what is most important in the creative agenda level of the theory. The rest of it is still part of the theory and important to play, but is not definitive of creative agendum. The narrativism aspect means that you want to be able to address moral, ethical, and personal questions through play.

That means you probably don't want to play Hackmaster. Hackmaster is designed to support gamist play, strong player-vs.-referee challenge. If you're trying to pursue questions like "what does human mean?" this game is going to get in your way. It relentlessly pushes you to answer the question, "can I beat the monster, and will it have enough treasure to push me up to the next level?" You might also have trouble with GURPS, where the emphasis on realism in some areas is so strong that unless you particularly want to address premise through character death you're going to find your efforts thwarted.

You want a game that uses techniques which support your play objectives.

The particular value of the creative agenda level of the theory is that a tremendous amount of player conflict arises here, because it is here that most people have objectives for play which they cannot easily articulate. It's relatively easy to say "I like the feeling of being my character, immersed in the world so I can taste it." It's a lot harder to say "I like being able to address moral and ethical questions through the events of play, and think that beating the villain should be incidental to that" versus "I want to beat the villain; if that raises moral and ethical questions, fine, we'll deal with those along the way, but ultimately we'll find a way to get around these so we can beat the villain". (This is much the same as the Prime Directive in the original Star Trek: it existed to create a greater challenge for the characters, something they had to work around to win the day. It didn't exist as a moral question to explore. Sure, the characters gave lip service to whether it was right to do what they wanted to do, given the Prime Directive, but ultimately they found a way to do it, because the point was to save the day, not discuss the morality of interfering in other cultures. They discussed it, but the answer was a foregone conclusion--they were going to find a way to win the day, and this was just another problem in the path, not the point of the story.)

So now we know that you want something with strong internal causality that supports immersion and does not interfere with a narrativist agenda.

I'm given to understand that The Riddle of Steel fits that description; I haven't read it, so I don't know. I would say that Multiverser can go that way, if the players are comfortable with it and premise is loaded through setting. I suspect that Universalis has the capability to be played thus (probably would have picked up a copy from Luke at Ubercon III if he'd had one, but he was out).

I'd also say that there isn't a lot of game development in this direction. there's a strong emphasis on light rules systems running concurrent with the rise in narrativist design. The two are not necessarily correlated, but occur together frequently because of emphasis on both concepts at the same moment in game development history.

I've been interrupted several times here, and have to run off again, so I hope this is coherent, and more that it is helpful.

--M. J. Young

[Gordon C. Landis]

... what you are saying is that it doesn't matter what I DO... or what SYSTEM I play... or what the RESULT/OUTCOME is of the game...

... GNS only is concerned with what I WANTED to be the focus of the game.  It's only about the focus of my desire in the game.

Hi,

In case another angle on this bit proves helpful - to my eye, there's some communication failure going on here, as Ralph would NEVER make the claim you seem to see him making.

ALL that GNS looks at is what you DO when you play.  It actually couldn't care less about what you "want" to be the focus (in an analytic sense - as a tool for getting the play you enjoy, what you "want" enters in, but that you want it means nothing in terms of looking at what actually happens).  What did you demonstrate to be the focus - what did the PARTICIPANTS (players and GM), the real people, show to be the thing they cared about most?

As folks have pointed out, you will always care about the Explored elements  - otherwise, you aren't RPing.  But do you care about that MORE than you care about examining the moral issues?  Where "care" means "demonstrated to be the priority in play", "moral issues" is Premise, and "examing the moral issues" means Address of Premise (looking at the issues as issues, not resolved situations and/or established barriers) while you play?  If so, cool: that's Sim, you're prioritizing The Dream, and while moral stuff (or challenge stuff) might be there - and it might be important to you that it be there - it's not the demonstrated priority of play.  Or maybe you do demonstrate that as the priority - fine, that's Nar, and the Explored stuff is also there, and also important - but not the priority.

Hopefully my or someone else's explanation gets across the idea that Exploration will ALWAYS be important in RPing, but even with that established, some people still want to say "but I don't just *have* the Exploration, I *Prioritize* it  - AND the theme (or challenge), too!"  The GNS claim (which my experience sees as basically true, if a bit more flexible than it sometimes comes across as) is that you just CAN'T have more than one Priority.  They become mutually antagonistic - optimizing one inevitably harms the other.  Harms the other as a Priority, not as an element.

My way of thinking about this is to include a "little g" game and a "little n" nar as sort of optional elements along side the Big 5 Explored elements (Setting, Situation, System, Character, Color).  There's problems with that, as little-g and little-n aren't really the same kind of thing as the Explored elements, but it makes clear (for me, anyway) that what we have is a set of equal-valued (in terms of "appropriateness" for attention from the RPG participants) things that we then look at and say "OK, which of these is Prioritized?"  The Five are absolutley required to EXIST, but need not be the priority  Little-g and little-n are (IMO) unavoidably present because of the way a human "mind" works, but they sure don't have to be the priority.

Hope that's useful,

Gordon

[M. J. Young]

Again I have cross-posted with Neil, and I seem to be getting into a conversation here--well, I hope I can answer a bit more.

Taking your very usefull example of an s-f game, I agree that I think I'm Sim because those are the very questions I find important in the game... but they are not so dispassionate. There are moral/ethical elements of these choices. How will the decision be made? Is the ship a democracy, or does the captain just decide? What happens if the captain goes against the desires of the crew? Would it be moral to risk the crew on first contact? Would it be immoral to ignore humanities chance at first contact?

Those are ethical/moral questions that are important to the game world, and to some extent the real world. It is not only important WHAT you decide to do, but WHY.

Sorry to quote so much of the post, but I think this just about screams narrativist, at least to me.

Why is a difficult word, because it has too many different meanings--or rather, it elicits too many different kinds of answers. All of these might be the answer to the question "Why did we divert in the direction of the star system to pick up hydrogen gas."

[*]Because we had used more energy than we expected at this point, and decided it was worth the gamble to try to pick up gas from the cloud we'd detected. Note that this answer seems to be entirely from the character perspective.[*]Because it was a plausible reason for us to head toward this star system where we would detect life. Note that in a game with strong director stance this could be a group decision (let's postulate that we detect a cloud of hydrogen gas which leads us to the inhabited star system), but in more traditional play this could be a referee hook (if I put the cloud of hydrogen gas there, it will draw them to the star system where the aliens are located).[*]Because from a strategic standpoint the probability that we would get more energy than we expended was worth the risk that we had miscalculated. This, too, has a character-related feel, but is detached to a degree, suggesting that someone is making decisions divorced from the reality. To see it, consider that if the assessment is mistaken, the choice has just cost the characters their lives. It might be that the desire to have this extra energy leads to a decision that most people would not make were they actually in that situation.[*]Because we've established a pattern of picking up hydrogen along the way whenever we see it. This suggests a "what the character would do" approach.[*]Because the referee must want us to go that way, and he's clearly using this patch of hydrogen gas to show us the right path. This represents trailblazing play, where the players are trying to find the referee's story by following his clues.[/list:u]There are probably other answer to the question "why".

However, your particular use of that word in that context screams issues. I expect that for you, the answer would either be

[*]It would be nice to have the extra energy, and if it turns out to cost more than we gain, well, we're all right, so it's not a problem;

or
[*]It is doubtful whether we will reach our destination if we don't find some energy somewhere, and this is the best chance we've got, so faced with the decision between hoping our reserves will hold until we get there and risking failure in the hope of increasing those reserves, we'll take the chance to increase them.[/list:u]That is, either the decision is made in a context in which it doesn't particularly matter (the first choice), or (the second choice) there's a significant issue here, and players through their characters are going to wrestle with it.

If the example I gave was narrativist, the same events could easily have happened, but the emphasis would now be on the issues behind them--the gamble they took, what the significance of reaching the colony is and whether the delay is warranted. Also, to some degree, given that our premise (drawn from your previous statement) is "What does it mean to be human?", this is mostly preliminary stuff. We've enjoyed playing with it, but it's not what's important. Yes, we'll pick up the hydrogen gas, slingshot around the star, come into orbit over the planet, and attempt to decrypt their transmissions--but those things are preliminaries to the real event, which has to do with meeting these aliens and starting to explore our own definitions of humanity.

One could watch Star Trek solely to figure out how everything works--the control layout of the consoles, the function of each station on the bridge, the operations in the engine room. There is a book given to writers on the series that explains all this in great detail, because the detail has to be right. However, a great Star Trek episode isn't one in which they reveal more about how the ship works. It's one in which they come to grips with a moral question and attempt to find an answer, or at least to make the audience look for an answer.

That doesn't mean there aren't fans of Star Trek who love the detail of how the ship works. There clearly are. Galaxy Quest makes fun of this phenomenon, as its version of trekkies know how the ship works better than the actors who played the roles on the series. I run a Blake's 7-like space-opera sort of world for Multiverser sometimes. Some of the people who land in it want to learn how everything works; some want to build up their characters with powerful skills and equipment and prove themselves against the enemies; some want to wrestle with the gray area of being essentially a member of a rebel pirate crew fighting against a legitimate if repressive government. What do you want out of the game?

Again, I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young

[Storn]

The struggle now will be to make this meaningful to my play group, who will likely never read, nor care to, any of this theory.

No.  I'm here.  Just lurking, because I haven't gotten a good handle on all the terminology, language and definitions to put forward useful dialogue.  Neil is much smarter than I and better pointman on this and I let him "forge" ahead.

I came in the back door from some articles on RPGnet about a week ago.  So I understand I'm going over similar ground that many who are smarter than I have tread before.  

IF GNS is

ALL that GNS looks at is what you DO when you play. It actually couldn't care less about what you "want" to be the focus (in an analytic sense - as a tool for getting the play you enjoy, what you "want" enters in, but that you want it means nothing in terms of looking at what actually happens). What did you demonstrate to be the focus - what did the PARTICIPANTS (players and GM), the real people, show to be the thing they cared about most?

... as stated by Gordon....

I guess my reaction to that is "why is GNS so tough to "get""... isn't that just advice to watch a person's tells... like at a poker table?".  Maybe that is overly simplistic.... but I got to start somewhere.

[Valamir]

It's like a reduction of analysis past the Exploration point is kind of ridiculous, since everything I care about you say exists above the CA level in this theory.

Actually Neil, I'd be inclined to say that everything you care about* exists below the level of CA in the realm of techniques.  See Exploration is important to every roleplayer, but I strongly suspect that you wouldn't view your playstyle as being compatable with every role player.  There are certain approaches to Exploration that you would find intolerable.  There are certain methods of doing things that you quite likely do automatically in actual game play because you've found those methods to lead to the type of Exploration you prefer.  Those methods are the Techniques and Ephemera of the model, they exist below the CA.


* I caveated this part because I wanted to return to it and point out that I believe this is what you think you care about, because you seem like someone whose spent some time self analysing his role playing preferences and the most common out come of such self analysis is to identify with techniques..."I like it when there is an actual defined reality behind the GM screen, better than when the GM is playing shell games with reality"...that sort of thing.

Saying you like this (or something else in the same vein) is something shared by alot of Simulationists, but its not, in itself, definitive of Simulationism.  As a %age I'd venture that more Simists would answer "yes" to the above than Gamists or Narists, but there'd be some number of the other CAs who'd also prefer this.  No Technique maps 1:1 exclusively to a CA, but several techniques used in combination can be potential pointers towards a likely CA.


So we've only begun to scratch the surface in exploring how different Techniques combine to support different CAs so I can't simply look at a chinese menu of your play style and say "yup, your sim".

What can be done is for you to step out of body a little and observe your own play around the table.  Certain elements that occur in a session are going to make you smile.  Certain elements might make you shout "yes, totally cool" (or whatever).  Certain elements might make you frown and perhaps label the guy or gal across from you as a "bad roleplayer".  Identifying those elements is currrently the best way to hone in on what your Creative Agenda is.

You can't have everything in your game all the time.  For any given instance of play there will come a time when the 3 Agendas...which may well have existed in perfect harmony up to that point...will become mutually exclusive.  How you choose to proceed at that time, and which of the 3 you pursue and which you are willing to step around (at least temporarily for that moment) is where you will see CA come to light.

And I would argue (as would most here I think) that even if those moments are few and far between where the agendas don't nestle comfortably with each other, they are responsible for the lion's share of group dysfunction and feelings of disatisfaction with a roleplaying session or campaign.

That's why CA is so important.



Oh,

Storn:

... isn't that just advice to watch a person's tells... like at a poker table?". Maybe that is overly simplistic.... but I got to start somewhere

Yup, that is indeed the best way to identify CA.

[Gordon C. Landis]

Storn,

Just to reinforce what Raplh said - yup, it really is that simple!  Of course, the implications get more complicated - GNS says things about what "categories" the tells fit into, and how those categories interact, but . . . fundamentally, as a tool to get peple to look for GNS in the "right" place, your poker/tells analogy is (it seems to me) GREAT - I'll be trying it out in my non-jargon GNS dicsussions.  

Typical poker advice is "play the person, not the cards."  But - the game is in the cards, right?  You can't be playing the game unless you're playing the cards!  Well, "tells" are ABOUT the person playing the game - that's why they're so valuable in playing the game.  That's just like GNS - GNS is ABOUT the person playing the game, not about the charcaters in the game.  Yet, it's (pardon the hyperbole) the absolute KEY to playing the RPG game, just like tells/playing the person are absolutely KEY to playing poker well.

(As you can tell, I like the analogy . . .)

Gordon

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Storn, you wrote:

I guess my reaction to that is "why is GNS so tough to "get""... isn't that just advice to watch a person's tells... like at a poker table?". Maybe that is overly simplistic.... but I got to start somewhere.

... and you nailed it in one.

Best,
Ron