G or N or S - caution, do not mix!

[Gordon C. Landis]

(Appologies if this turns out to be something we should just wait for the FAQ on . . .)

Over in game design, Ron corrected a possible incorrect understanding of his opinion re: "universal" game systems.  I'm wondering if I've got a misunderstanding of my own regarding his (and other like-minded posters here) opinions when it comes to the "exclusivity" of each point of GNS.  Here's my interpretation: it is the opinion of Ron (shared in varying degrees with others) that you really need to pick one and only one of G, N or S to focus your game design and play upon.  Anything less than total focus has significant, negative impact on the ability to use the game to achieve any goal.

Is this a generally held belief?  Anyone care to defend/attack it?  Or should I/we just "wait for the FAQ"?

[jburneko]

I disagree mainly because I view myself as narativist-gamist although I have not yet learned how to effectively use all the narativist tools.  But a good example would be a scenario I designed for a Chill game.  It was the first in a campaign titled "Things Man Was Not Meant To Own."  The title of the story itself was, "The Art Gecko."

Basic premise: A woman who is a sculptor is failing misserably at her art.  She meets a mysterious man who who sells her a Basalisk and she uses it to reap fame and forture for her 'life like depictions of human fear and terror.'  Some of her 'statues' were once prominent art critics who have gone missing.  To further complicate the situation one of the art critics was murdered by another aritist and his ghost is plaguing that artists.  Furthormore there are two or three 'red herring' artists all with their own secrets and motivations.  All of these artists are living in the same town New England town.  The players working for the SAVE organization are sent in to investigate the myseterious art critic disappearances.

The purpose of the scenario is two fold.

The Narativist Goal: To tell an intreguing story about this group of excentric and often moral ambiguous artists.

The Gamist Goal: Figure out what the hell is going on from the clues provided.

I often find that I mix narativist and gamist goals.  The narativist goals are always to explore a certain character concept or just an exciting adventure story.  The gamist goals are things like: prevent the end of the world, stop Dr. X from building his doomsday machine, figure out who killed Dr. Y and so on.

Jesse

[Dav]

I don't see that take as inherent within Ron's (or most of the peoples') opinion.  Rather, I think that it is often the case that one of the three models is the main focus, but there are often liberal doses of any of the other models thrown in.

Anyway, that is my take.

Dav

[Mike Holmes]

Dav,

I believe Gordon is right about Ron's opinion. Not that Ron is saying that people don't try to include more than one design goal. No, he says that in doing so you risk not being able to achieve any goal particularly well. Will the game be playable? Sure. Lots of games made before GNS have design elements that are good for achieving differing goals. And since. But they don't tend to support any of the goals that those elements would otherwise be good for supporting because the priorities clash in play.

For example, if you have a game that includes lots of rules for building a character to be good at fights and adventure well and overcome challenges, that might be a good gamist element. If you then put in mechanics for closely making the world match a certain kind of fiction, say, that might promote a Simulationist goal. Throw them in the same game, however, and you might a game where players make characters to win, and the GM will be upset when they act in unreasonable manners vis a vis the genre in order to win.

The players can't be blamed. The system informed them during character creation that they were trying to make the best character so that they can win and overcome challenges. If the designer had wanted a simulationist game, he should have made the chargen work better to achieve that goal.

And, Jesse, you may have been alternating play goals as you played. Ron admits that this happens all the time, I believe the term that is bandied about is sliding or something. It doesn't say anything about how the system that you played supported either style, though. Did the game go better when your players made decisions to win? Or decisions that made the story better? Which did the system support more? Or did it waffle and leave both styles flat? If it did, you'd probably get a better result out of a system that was more focused on one goal.

Do I have that right, Ron?

I'd personally be willing to entertain arguments that a system could be created that was intentionally designed to support sliding (MJ Young claims that Multiverser does this, but I have strong doubts) of a particular sort. It just seems unlikely, and also might, if it did exist, have a very small audience.

Mike Holmes

[Logan]

Short answer: Dav is correct. One preference is the main focus. The other two preferences are present in varying degrees.

Best,

Logan



[ This Message was edited by: Logan on 2001-06-07 17:59 ]

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Dav has stated, essentially, MY take on the situation, but Mike does so too. It's the whole theory vs. practice thing.

See, in theory, my opinion is that a designer *does best* to focus on one G/N/S goal for an RPG. That way, it is really, really satisfying for people who like that goal to play. And I'm all about - in fact, solely about - people actually enjoying their role-playing. That's the point.

But back to practice. For most of the games I played in the 80s, looking back now, I see that Narrativists and Simulationists were often happy with the noncombat aspects of a game (say, early Champions) whereas the Simulationists and Gamists were often happy with the game's combat aspects. And I look back on certain aspects of very early D&D to find that Gamists and Narrativists could get along sometimes as well. So my take is that SOME combinations work, in some ways - although I have yet to see an RPG that unequivocally satisfies more than one of the three throughout its entire contents.

Well, it's time to see whether the above response makes people go "Oh," or whether it spawns a frenzy of "What I meant to say ..."

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

I just realized that my post above only concerned GAME DESIGN, whereas as the starting post was asking about both design and play.

These are two different things.

GAME DESIGN
The game book/etc is the game text, case closed. Looking at it from a G/N/S perspective often requires actual play, with a concerted effort not to inject one's own modifications without realizing it.

In practice, as I said, you often find mixes and matches of G/N/S goals across the presentation and mechanics. I'm not denying that some of these combinations are functional, but I think that the majority are not.

Another point about game design is that the rhetoric is often incredibly garbled. Many games claim to be "story-oriented" BECAUSE they are diceless or system-light, which is patent nonsense. (Also, I think the very term "story-oriented" and anything like it is so vague as to be useless.) Basically, I treat game text of this sort very much like interviews with actors - it takes up space and can be attractive, but the vast majority is arrant babble.

ROLE-PLAYERS
Well, now, here we're talking about real people doing real things. It all boils down to player behavior and decisions (clarification: I use "player" here very broadly, to mean ANY person involved in the role-playing, GM or small-p player). As I hope is clear to all, calling someone a (say) Gamist means, "person who tends to make Gamist decisons a lot during play." It's just shorter to say "Gamist," but that doesn't mean some robot who can ONLY make such decisions.

So therefore it's quite conceivable for a person to exhibit any or all such behaviors, across various instances of play. I do NOT think, however, that any SINGLE instance of role-playing (the unit here is iffy, perhaps a "scene") would be a "blend" of the three. MAYBE it could be consistent with any two of the three, I'm not sure.

In my experience, many people who claim to "be all three" are fooling themselves. Their alleged Simulationism turns out to be Narrativism with a strong dose of plausibility (or genre-faithfulness); or their alleged Narrativism turns out to be a taste for Actor stance; or their alleged Gamism turns out to be a healthy dose of competitiveness that never over-rides their other priorities.

But who am I to say? If you really do adjust your mode of play into different gaming/social circumstances, and those adjustments turn out to be 33.3% of the time for each one, then cool. I won't argue with you.

PUTTING THESE TOGETHER
Given that design is what players/GMs are interacting with, such that role-playing occurs ....

Well, my conclusion is that game design is "good" insofar as it facilitates people enjoying themselves at this activity. In my experience, that happens BEST and EASIEST when the design has its goals/shit together, and the people have their goals/shit together, and the two match up well.

G/N/S coherence appears to be the best set of vocabulary for helping that to happen.

Best,
Ron

[Gordon C. Landis]

Ron -

Thanks.  That's very clear, to me anyway.  And very consistent with my RP experiences.  Cool - one less thing to get "stuck" on . . .

GOrdon C. Landis

[Justin Bacon]

Anything less than total focus has significant, negative impact on the ability to use the game to achieve any goal.

Is this a generally held belief?  Anyone care to defend/attack it?  Or should I/we just "wait for the FAQ"?

Massive disagreement from me. Beliefs like this undermine the usefulness of the Threefold in a significant fashion.

The Threefold is useful because it analyzes stuff we already do, even if we aren't aware of the Threefold. Sure, there are occasions when you want to focus on one facet of the Threefold over another (gamism while running TOMB OF HORRORS; narrativism while playing FENG SHUI; etc.) -- but this is not a requirement by any stretch of the imagination.

Justin Bacon
triad3204@aol.com

[Mytholder]

On 2001-06-23 13:54, Justin Bacon wrote:

Anything less than total focus has significant, negative impact on the ability to use the game to achieve any goal.

Massive disagreement from me. Beliefs like this undermine the usefulness of the Threefold in a significant fashion.

Justin - you're right in that the Threefold doesn't support the suggestion that games which don't totally focus on one style of play are flawed. However, GNS (which is a slightly different model) does make that suggestion to some extent.

It's a different model and a different approach. Whether it's better or worse is to be debated (and can probably never be resolved...)