Gamism: Step On Up - Epiphany

[Lamorak33]

Hi all

I have just realised that I am the bitterest player in the world!!  I am sim with a wound down gamist heart!  But the prognosis is not as bad as it may seem.  I have stumbled upon narratavist play and have found it the most satisfying of all RPG experiences, but I will report back when I have actively (as opposed to accidentally) introduced narrativim to my ongoing Heroquest campaign, and the opportunity I hope to have to play in a narratavist campaign (happily) in my favourite game world, Glorantha.

Its weird, I spent 20 years being fed up with other players not wanting the same things as me from games!  2 days on the forge and 'Dr' Ron has correctly diagnosed me!

Has anyone had similar experiences and are their any threads??

Regards
Rob

[Justin Marx]

'Dr' Ron is indeed deep, but after reading the GNS articles over and over, I have diagnosed myself with 'Dr' Ron's Self-Help Roleplaying Advice with more or less every character flaw possible in a gamer..... Not a dig at the material at all, I'm just still in the process of working out what is relevant for my own play experience. If I could pick up a game and play it now I would be running a thousand empirical tests on myself and my fellow players.

The epiphany I just had after re-reading is that not all of play can or should be diagnosed stricly according to GNS. I am clearer of my CA now for sure, but the way in which I struggle to attain it confuses it somewhat - as the techniques which we commonly apprehend through gameplay are not easily categorised into the more abstract CAs. This makes it a great deal harder to work out what are my imperatives for the game I am designing. Writing it all down helps a lot I have to say.

But the fact that players were constantly excluded from our games for being too Gamist says a hellava lot.... but perhaps we are gamists after the 'Challenge' variable instead of the 'Step on Up' variable..... so much juicy stuff to mull over..... let me know how your Narrativist HeroQuest turns out. Run those tests like a mad roleplaying scientist and report your results for peer review!

[Landon Darkwood]

But the fact that players were constantly excluded from our games for being too Gamist says a hellava lot.... but perhaps we are gamists after the 'Challenge' variable instead of the 'Step on Up' variable..... so much juicy stuff to mull over..... let me know how your Narrativist HeroQuest turns out. Run those tests like a mad roleplaying scientist and report your results for peer review!

Just because two people are playing with the same Creative Agenda, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to get along, as far as I understand it. Everyone who plays Gamist "Steps on Up"... if there's friction, it's either purely social, involves a disagreement on what Techniques are being used to support the Gamism, or involves a disagreement on what elements of Exploration are being emphasized to provide the opportunity to show your competence.

For example, I once knew a Shadowrun player whom I decided was absolutely playing Gamist even though she never took an interest in mastering the rules to any great degree. However, she was constantly looking to prove her competence in other areas of play... her character had to be recognized as the sexiest, or the one with the best plan, or the one with the best stats (even though she didn't really know how to use them), the coolest stuff, the coolest connections, or the most style, and so on. Whenever another player tried to exhibit any traits in his character that would bring them into one of this player's "arenas of cool", there was definitely unspoken competition in the scenes.

She tried accomplishing all of this mostly through Character, Setting, and Color emphasis, and definitely took it as failure when other players wouldn't respond to these endeavors with the appopriate "that's cool, you're so <fill in the blank>" response. She wasn't pushing for dysfunction, in that she was willing to socially support other people's attempts to show off their "cool" and recognize their efforts. The problem was that she was the only person who really cared about that criteria as a measure of how "good" a player you were, so she never got very much of the feedback she wanted.

So, it was Stepping on Up all right, in the sense that she was risking her ego and putting herself out there to get esteem from the other players, just not through the medium of System and not according to some of the more common criteria used to evaluate Gamist play. At least, that's how I interpreted it.

This is pretty much true for all CA's, again, as I understand it. I know people who firmly believe that completely ignoring the rules is the only valid Technique to achieve a Narrativist agenda, because they got blindsided by problems with task resolution and GM-Force early on in their gaming. To those people, the notion of telling a story by using game mechanics to help you is completely bonkers. It really takes all kinds. :)


-Landon Darkwood

[Frank T]

To contrast, I have not had any sort of epiphany or quickening when first coming to the Forge. What's more, I have been thoroughly confused. I had played different, mostly functional styles up to then. None of those adhered to the single G, N or S. I am still not sure what of it to term hybrid and what incoherent, or both, but there was a lot of S and quite some G in there. N arose only very occasionally. Yet I used to consider myself "Storyteller". So no, I didn't recognize myself in GNS. I turned my back on the Forge twice before I finally came back to stay.

Nowadays I have started to get into Pervy Narrativist games and enjoy them a lot. But I still like to go back for a real tight game of Simulationist horror, with which I have had some of the best moments of my roleplaying life. And don't forget about straight old Challenge and Stepping On Up. I enjoy those so much at times that my own project has loads of them built in, along with the funky Narrativist undertone.

At the same time, the greater part of common Gamist and Simulationist play, to me, is boring to annoying. You know, just because I really dig creating that guy and "being" him when he's scared out of his guts and confronted with extreme situations that turn his life upside down, doesn't mean I have to enjoy spending two hours of gaming exploring a bazar in a fantasy setting, chatting with random NPCs. Both is Simulationist, but it's a very different thing. Or look at BARBAREN! (my project) and RUNE. Both games are about mighty Barbarians hacking and slaying their way through life. Both combat systems drip Gamism with every line. Yet they couldn't be more different. RUNE has complex lists of modifiers, a lot of stuff to check out and mull over. BARBAREN! has only some sleek point pools to manage.

So nope, no GNS epiphany for me. But still, the Forge has given me an incredible boost both as a gamer and a designer, through the discussions in the Indie Game Design and Actual Play forums, and through the excellent games that stem from here. I mean, just reading Dogs in the Vineyard has taken me to a higher level of designing and writing RPGs.

- Frank

[LandonSuffered]

For me, one of the coolest things about the Forge and its articles has been the vocabulary, the shared language it has provided with which to describe these aspects of the hobby like "creative agenda."  It was certainly an eye-opener for me to examine my 20 years of dys- to semi-functional game play in the light of this RPG theory.

That being said, what's even cooler is the notion espoused by Ron (and others at the Forge) that game design can be made to facilitate specific creative agendas such that you can achieve maximum bang for your buck from your game...in other words, applying the theory and language to a practical application beyond simple self-identification!  Like Frank T said, being introduced to the different game designs of the Forge really takes you to a whole new level...and from the postings I've read, it appears pretty difficult to go back to the same-old same-old after tasting some of the delights that are on display.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Rob - I wanna see some actual play in this thread, OK? You, a few other people, who they were, what game you were playing, system stuff you did, what happened among you, what happened in the fictional events.

Pick any session or series of sessions you want. Relate it to the points in your first post in this thread as you see fit. Don't feel the need to break it down into all kinds of jargon-ridden analysis. Just let us know more.

Best,
Ron

[Lamorak33]

Hi Ron

In answer to your request for some real examples of 'my journey' here you go, related back to my original post,

Hi all

I have just realised that I am the bitterest player in the world!!  I am sim with a wound down gamist heart! 

I started playing Runequest with my buddies at school.  Our GM was visionary for a 13 year old!  Man those games were great!  We were gamists and loved it.  Our characters hacked their way through plot after plot in the goal to become bigger, badder, tougher, richer....Until one game when we came across a statue that was behind this impenetrable cage.  We evaluated it to be 50 thousand silver pieces, which was all the money in the world in RQ terms.  The GM said it had an impossible lock.  We said nothing is impossible.  He said well, ok 1 roll but you will have to roll a 1.  Well Loni rolled a 1!!! So then we found we had more money than we knew what to do with, and at that early age I felt that we had 'broke' the game.  It all seemed to lose its point, and I wanted more. 

I delved into the background of Runequest and Glorantha.  I turned into a hardened sim gamer.  Reward was no longer the imperitive, immersion in the setting and having a cool character was the key.  I no longer had the opportunity to play RQ (my friends when I left school and went to college hated the system).  We played Marvel Super Hero's, and the Hero System and AD&D.  I preferred the Hero System with it flaws that somehow gave the character the kind of depth I wanted but in an empirical way.  People could look at my sheet and know how affected I was by my code of conduct or whatever.   AD&D finally broke when it became Hard Core and dysfunctional.

We played Vampire as well, which I hated because the GM was our AD&D GM and he seemed to think that it was to be played as if it was a Ravenloft scenario (ultra deadly if you are not familiar with AD&D Ravenloft) so was very gamist.  When the GM introduced what I now recognise as (perhaps poorly generated) narratavist elements, I reacted as if he was giving me a hard time!!  He'd pick something out about my character and use it to piss me off!!  So I retreated into the comfort of simulationist gaming. 

I drifted out of role playing all together when I got married and moved away from my gaming group.  When Hero Wars came out, I got it and hated it because I was hoping for Runequest which people might want to play!!  I was hoping for something like Pendragon. 

I happened to drop in a few years later to the Glorantha website in time for Heroquest.  I read about some of the supplements that had come out and thought it might be worth a look.  I bought the supplements first, for the fiction, if you like.  I then caught what the rules intended and thought I would love to run these Heroquest Glorantha games.  So I started a group in London.

But the prognosis is not as bad as it may seem.  I have stumbled upon narratavist play and have found it the most satisfying of all RPG experiences.

The group I run had an interesting mix of personalities.  I was hoping that for characters they would choose warrior types.  Wrong!  The first 2 players chose a scholar and an entertainer.  Keen to just have anyone play, I said fine.  But play was good and I kept up with the lists, and scoured books and the internet for 'adventures' to throw them into.  But of course as all sim GM's will know, players will often not follow your story line.  In fact, I could at times detect that they new where the plot was going and would go in the opposite direction. 

One guy was rejecting this whole notion of hating Lunar worshippers (the bad guys).  So I thought I'll show them the dark side of the occupation.  On returning home they found a clan mate (someone the rejecting guy had made friends with previously) crucified and near death.  The option was clear, rescue and bring down anhilation on the clan, leave her up there to die or kill her there and then.  I had no agenda here, it was an entirely free choice.  This brought out some of the best gaming that I have GM'd.  We got about 2 or 3 sessions out of that decission. 

I started with trying to persue this moral questioning.  This lead to so uncomfortable situations for me, and once I literally died on stage and called the game to an early halt.  I needed a recess and to take stock.  I felt shattered that I had go 6 people fired up for a game, only to watch them stare at me unbelieving with the rail roading trash I served them up.  Basically they had inadvertently killed a clansman who was possesed.   This would have had terrible repercussions for  the clan.  The answer was either the player who killed him became a death worshipper, magically severing his relationship to his clan and his kin, or he 'put things right' by going on a Heroquest to recover the lost soul.  As you can see, the group were all contributing to the decision, with the player centre stage having the final decision.

He chose the latter.  The heroquest was a disaster and forced me to take stock.  I sent them off to this city and get back to basics with some good old fashined gaming.  At the city they became embroiled in the politics of the city, and were becoming invested in the setting.  I was still groping for the secret, for my 'El Dorado'.  I knew I could create a good game, sometimes a great game, but was hit and miss.

I was directed here by word of mouth and started with the articles.  Hence my epiphany with the Gamist, Simulationist and Narratavist essays.  I was able to diagnose my style, and my players I think.  I have a strategy to go forward.  This includes setting an unambiguous agenda, and making the characters central to the story.  I will report back with the results, but I am looking forward to it with relish.

Regards
Rob