From Outside the Big Model

[Wormwood]

Years ago, and subsequently as I was developing an understanding of core theory at the Forge, I discovered my most persistent hurdle was accepting the disenfranchisement of the model. The model worked nearly always, as long as I excluded my own play from the analysis. After that I could move to my main goal which has been developing an experiment based understanding of RPGs. In the mean time I occasionally attempted to push the language of the model into something that wouldn't be disenfranchising, but this was never very fruitful.

And now here we are. Extending the theory or refining the language is not available. I am quite suspicious that the Big Model lacks the capacity to adequately describe my actual play. It is my hope that my suspicions are wrong.

First and foremost, I consistently do not play with a creative agenda. I do not enjoy recognized competition, in nearly every situation where I have acted competitively my actions and results are innately private and not made available to other players. I do not (and likely cannot) enjoy addressing a moral or ethical conflict by making difficult decisions. I do not play is such a way as to hold any aspect of play as effectively sacred. Each of these may be present in some way during play, but I do not innately engage them.

So as I said, I don't play with a creative agenda. But I do play with an agenda, a very definite and overwhelming agenda. I facilitate the enjoyment of the game, whether I'm GM or player, that is the role I undertake. And what engages me in that role is the very emotional responses of the other players. Each player's actions and emotions are what I focus on during play. Then I make in game, meta-game, or even out-of-game decisions to help adjust the context of play to enhance that enjoyment.

Creative agenda serve as mere techniques to be adjusted and discarded from one moment to the next, in the search of player enjoyment. When hitting on all cylinders, I find this process immensely enjoyable, and pleasantly exhausting. And in those cases, when I have been able to solicit player feedback it has been quite positive. In fact, during games like this I have successfully hooked at least a dozen completely new players into at least part time roleplayers.

What's more I actively game design and develop theories during play, those processes are in innate part of how I play. From my understanding of how RPGs are played, I cannot imagine game design and theory as processes being subordinate to play itself, when it is clear to me that play itself only originates as a culmination of those processes being performed, however primitively by the players in situ. Certainly that is how I play.

I can relate specific situations in response to specific queries.

    - Mendel Schmiedekamp

[Judd]

And now here we are. Extending the theory or refining the language is not available. I am quite suspicious that the Big Model lacks the capacity to adequately describe my actual play. It is my hope that my suspicions are wrong.

Could you provide some examples from your gaming experience, please?

[talysman]

hi, Mendel. welcome back!

I think I'd like to see an example of play that you feel displays a lack of any Creative Agenda. it might help confirm your suspicions, and it gives us something concrete to talk about. if you could summarize a 1-3 session game cycle where you played a character through to a reward point (a point where you felt you had accomplished something with your character and could either retire that character or choose your character's next major step,) that would help describe what you mean.

I would like to say that this would not break the Big Model, because as it stands, there is no requirement that players *must* have a Creative Agenda, or that they can only have one Creative Agenda during a game. what the Big Model says is that there are three known Creative Agendas and they tend to exclude each other in particular ways. there has also been discussion of other Agenda that aren't Creative Agenda at all; Ben Lehman, I believe, came up with the concept of Social Agenda to help explain the position of Zilchplay in the Big Model. Zilchplay occurs when the players have no Creative Agenda preference and default to a sort of low-intensity Sim, but if one of the players suddenly shifts to real Sim or to Gamism/Narrativism, the Zilchplayer switches modes easily, going with whatever the rest of the group is doing. the term is one of those unfortunate names that some people are bound to interpret pejoratively, and there seem to be some people here who interpret Zilchplay as dysfunctional. I don't think it is, since dysfunction is by definition a social conflict over which Creative Agenda should dominate the game. a Zilchplayer, by definition, does not care which Creative Agenda dominates, but just wants to have fun roleplaying -- so there is no conflict.

without a specific play example, it sounds like you prefer Zilchplay as I have described it just now, or perhaps you tend towards Sim, but you have a  Social Agenda that takes priority; a third possibility is low-intensity Vanilla Narrativism; the provisional glossary has a note that Vanilla Narrativism is often mistaken for something else because it doesn't include the trappings of hardcore Narrativist games and doesn't have an abstract verbalized premise. you may not have considered low-intensity Sim or low intensity Vanilla Narrativism with a stronger Social Agenda because the examples for all three types of Creative Agenda are frequently described in terms of extremes; if you're pretty low-key and don't like being over the top on tough moral decisions or obsessing over fictional details, it's easy to think you might not have a Creative Agenda at all.

you might even like Sim and Nar equal (but with an aversion to Gamism,) but your Social Agenda is so strong, it swamps the Creative Agenda out and you switch back and forth as needed to fulfill your actual agenda.

but again, without a description of play, it's difficult to see which might be the case.

[Wormwood]

Judd,

Most, though by no means all, of my play is done in the role of GM (or what have you). In which case a few examples of games where I have GMed would likely be useful. One such example can be found here. Note, that the discussion on that thread was significantly hindered because my play contributions to the game were misapprehended.

I'll do my best to summarize a few more examples, but first a little bit of context on my introduction to our hobby. At a fairly young age I started designing RPGs. Then I discovered D&D. I tried figuring through that, and tinkering with it. My first experience actually participating in any game was running a session of D&D. Eventually I ran more and more games, as time and players allowed (which was rather rare). At least five years later, I actually got to play, in this case also D&D. I've been experimenting with different RPGs ever since. But since I don't mind taking on the GM role, I often was made to do so. And eventually, I became good at it, or at least that's what my player's seem to tell me (and I've learned to detect those cases where the player isn't being entirely honest about it).

One of the first games I ever ran was an over-the-phone single player campaign. Now the player in question had little experience with D&D and while I knew the mechanics quite well, I often would expedite play dramatically. And for simplicity reasons I rolled the dice. Almost from the first, I would avoid rolling damage and simply extract the damage dealt by the hit roll alone. I continued this manner of mechanical contraction over the course of the year or so I ran this game. What started as a band of two brothers (the player had two initial PCs), who were searching for dungeons to investigate soon turned into a political game, where the PCs were involved, first in gaining favor, and eventually in undermining the corrupt nobility of their nation. This ended up involving two dozen nobles and some illithid working on a psionic conspiracy beneath the nation. For several months all of this played out with the major preparation being a large chart of the interrelations and temperaments of the royal family (who, if recollection serves were somewhat excessively inbred).

Eventually my player managed to get his preferred PC as king. It was during that portion of the campaign that I threw in an object lesson character, a paladin who died fighting his own army, in order to protect the children of the orcish tribe being attacked.

Then the nation level interplay occurred. Enemy nations and races to develop and fund powerful magical technologies, and to gain the loyalties of the mages to who had them. This became role-playing intensive, you might say, but I kept the intrinsic randomness, even if it was just to roll a d20 to determine uncertain outcomes. Then there followed a variety of conflicts all escalating, involving everything from gladiatorial combats with the PCs valiant henchmen, to orbital bombardments using spelljammer ships (to eliminate armies of fiends released over large stretches of the world). Eventually this development reached its apparent apex with the ascension of the main character into the Unseen Pantheon (i.e. the pantheon that does all the work so that the others can do all their wars, feuds, and romances.) as the god of Death (he was a necromancer). And only then did he encounter a force that was too potent to stop (back then I had a policy of balance by antagonism, the more powerful you are the more likely something out there wants to cut you down). Essentially the multiverse was invaded by strange beings who killed and stole the souls of those who died. Eventually a daring gambit to invade the other multiverse culminated with the sacrifice of the main character, in essence to stop his own multiverse from being destroyed. The game ended with a short few sessions spent in the Alabaster City (see my game Deja Vu, which can be found under RPGs here).

After the campaign ended, my player actually wanted me to run something much like it for a friend, specifically because he felt that he had learned a wealth of tactical knowledge from playing. On the other hand, he was somewhat shocked to discover that my method of running the game primarily involved concentrated visualization with my eyes closed and rolling a d20 now and again to make more decisions. The objective of my decisions was to produce interesting decisions for my player, and give him enough options to signal for what sorts of decisions he wanted, and I used the d20 to keep me honest.

Given the complexity of that example, I will attempt to post additional ones in the near term, but at the moment I ought to clear my head, so I can avoid confounding details of games. Please ask if any portions of the above examples require more clarification.

   - Mendel Schmiedekamp

[Wormwood]

Alright Judd, here's the second part of my play examples.

Currently I am running three games weekly or on alternating weeks. The weekly games are Stargate SG-1 (now using Spycraft 2.0) with four players and an Eberron 3.5 D&D game with approximately five players. The alternating game is Aberrant with four players.

I have one player common between each of the games (in particular one of my Aberrant players plays Stargate, and the other plays Eberron), otherwise the groups are distinct. Each session I do a basic minimal preparation, with Eberron receiving the most preparation, with Stargate usually getting a randomly generated planet combined with a core idea for a conflict or a mission on that world.

The Stargate game has been running for a year and a half, with one team-member leaving due to graduation at the end of last year. Because of the particulars of scheduling for some of the players, I don't run the game during the summer months (one player is a high school student brought to game by her father, but over the summer she tends to live with her mother more, so the logistics are less workable). This has naturally lent to a seasonal break in those months, so technically the game is in season two, although the setting is as caught up to the current source material. Indeed, before I was talked into running the game, I had only seen a dozen episodes of the show. Since then, if only as a means of self-defense I worked to develop a more thorough understanding of the show's tropes.

However this does not mean that this game follows those tropes. One of the running themes of the game, which has developed ever since the first session is the general incompetence of SG-15. For example, during the very first session, the PCs were sent to a snow-covered world with various strange geysers. They eventually tracked down a structure in the snow, which appeared to be a massive greenhouse complex, with occasional releases of steam running through it. But when the players attempted to climb up the wall and enter the complex, it turned out that they were ill-suited to the task, several of them fell, and in one case one of the character's was slightly injured. Eventually they got inside, and as they tried to climb down into the complex another character fell and alerted the owners of the complex. From this point on, the idea of the teams incompetence was ingrained on the players.

At first I stayed neutral on the mater, giving the players opportunities for success and generally social challenges. And the players learned from their mistakes, as several of them purchased the climb skill, and then the diplomacy skill after one character disastrously ruined a first contact by offering a veggie burger MRE to some primitive aliens (it turned out the BBQ sauce is noxious to the aliens). Later demolition skills were sought after the Jaffa, with only two ranks in it attempted to create a distraction so the team could sneak in and interrogate, but ended up blowing up a munitions tent and destroying nearly anything useful. The players often discuss their team's incompetence, and the displeasure of their commanders. But they enjoy it, it has essentially become a comedy of errors. I fill in the details and otherwise provide the responses expected from their commanders, but on the whole, I let them do the rest.

I only describe the basic area around the stargate and then let them decided how they want to try to succeed in spite of themselves. In some cases I have taken a firmer hand, such as a protracted stint spent off world due to an invasion force occupying the stargate. In the end, that mission proved too serious, and I hurried it to a logical conclusion. We have found a general rhythm, where I provide the basic outline of a mission, and the players choose what to bring. And their concerns about the mission are the source I use to develop the conflicts which may occur. In general, I have no strong tie to any piece of a mission, and if the PCs avoid it I just ensure that their decisions, good or bad, lead to another interesting situation.

For example, in a recent mission the PCs were attempting to locate a giant sized Go'uld symbiote (which most resembled a Chinese dragon in size and mobility). Reports had placed it on a planet ruled a by a Roman analogue, with a second class citizenry, who were the original Mayan inhabitants of the planet. Their technology had advanced to mid-Industrial, by this time. Note, I randomly rolled the particulars of the planet, only the Go'uld symbiote was a novel addition. The PCs arrived and were sent to one of the Mayan cities, which had become centers of production, and likewise nexii of pollution and disease. I decided that more than likely the Mayans were becoming rebellious and that the dragon was on the face helping them. Also the Romans suspected as such, and intended to deal with the dragon directly. In this sort of situation, who better the send then the expendable team SG-15, who remained ignorant of much of this.

The PC's decided to take up a look out on a small mountain nearby the city. From there, since seeing a dragon would be difficult at best, I decided to put in a meeting of the Mayans in town. Since this intrigued the players, I added more details, and had them walking outside of town, presumeably having something to do with the dragon. Eventually, I gave the players some ambiguous information, hinging it on their spot rolls. The next day they decided to come down to the city, deciding that the locals probably know something about the dragon, or are at least up to something. After a nervous breakfast in a small inn, the players found themselves being followed by interested townsfolk. After some diplomacy (the player's learn their lessons, they rarely fail the same way twice, instead finding new and interesting ways to do so) they were able to earn the trust of their stalkers, and learned about the respiratory disease that has been running rampant in the city, and implying that the dragon was able to heal some of the sickest of the Mayan elders.

After this, the PCs investigated the Romans, and discovered that they had started building up a military presence in their fortress on the opposite side of the city from where the Mayans had gathered. In particular I pointed out that the Romans had recently brought in some heavy equipment. After an unhelpful meeting with the Roman commander (mostly due to player decisions on how to deal with him), the PCs returned, and awaited meeting with the Mayans and their dragon. As evening fell, they did so, confirming that, the dragon did indeed look like a gargantuan Go'uld symbiote. The dragon attempted to communicate, but I was feeling tired that night, and not up to playing something as alien as a symbiote dragon searching for his queen (whom the PCs had kidnapped earlier) and generally plugging enlightenment. So, I had the Romans open up with artillery cannons. The PCs made their reflex saves, recognizing artillery attacks, but the majority of the Mayans were not so lucky. The dragon, enraged charged towards the Romans, pulling the artillery shells into itself which engulfed it in flames, as the Romans were firing incendiaries. Unfortunately, almost half the city ended up being on fire.

In the sense of actions speaking louder than words, this quick scene got the idea of who this dragon was across far better than half an hour of enigmatic conversation. The PCs jumped into their vehicle and took off, trying to see what they could do to save the city or the dragon. In the end they decided to fire off their stinger missiles into Roman fortress, which ignited their ammunition, and made short work of them. Unfortunately, they didn't decide to do this until after the dragon crashed into the mountain side.

Par for the course, their mission was somewhat successful, and somewhat disastrous.

That ought to be sufficient for the moment, I can relate a similar example of Aberrant or Eberron. Also, John my next examples will be ones from a player perspective, as you requested.

        - Mendel Schmiedekamp

[Josh Roby]

Sounds to me like your play is quite happily and functionally incoherent, Mendel.  Did you have a specific question?

[jburneko]

Hey There,

I'm looking at your game writeups and I'm seeing a lot of "what happened" but I'm not really seeing "how it happened" in terms of the interactions between you and the players.  In your very first post you mentioned, "playing into your player's emotions."  I'm very curious about that.

1) Can you tie any point in your play transcript to a moment where you were playing into a player's emotion?  What emotion did you feel you playing into?  Why do you think what you did played to that emotion so well?

2) Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like playing into one player's emotion would actually be upsetting to another player?  If so, what did you do?

Jesse

[Wormwood]

John,

Thanks.

I'll put in a play example when I'm not running the game in a moment, however I first would like to discuss some of the other matters you brought up.

I'm not claiming the Big Model is broken, I'm claiming that it lacks the means to adequately describe how I play, and as such offers often untopical and down right unhelpful advice. In general, I'm not looking at a classification, I'm looking at an understanding. As it is, Zilchplay, Low-intensity Sim, Low-Intensity Vanilla Narrativism are all ways of describing something via absence. I.e. they are terms that only apply because the typical descriptions and contexts for understanding play do not apply. In a sense these are all "others" categories, which don't distinguish between the many different play approaches which lie at under those terms. Any therapeutic effect is largely useless because these terms just point to a frontier, not a definite and studied form of play.

The innovation of Zilchplay was to admit that people could have fun while not adopting a creative agenda, by "just roleplaying". Low intensity or no intensity doesn't make sense, as I suppose a die-hard Narrativist would object to being called a low-intensity sim player. The way I play can reach the level of intensity found in the best play examples I've seen posted here. But it doesn't do so in the same way.

Also, as a reply to Joshua, that is my problem with the title functionally incoherent. It's essentially a category of stuff that the model doesn't support. What I'm suggesting, that this isn't something that sits at the base of the model, but sits outside, just beyond the frontier, waiting to be explored and hopefully enfranchised, rather than treated as an irrelevant exception. If the Big Model can improve already functional play in a creative agenda, then why can't a model do the same for a facilitative agenda?

So, onto games I played rather than ran:

Note that your request for a reward point is somewhat of problem. I don't play for a reward point, and so I don't recognize them when they occur (or presumeably what someone else may view as a reward point doesn't qualify as one because I'm not looking for one.) However I will attempt to provide an example of a potential reward point.


The one game I currently play is a star wars game using a bastardized Trinity system. My character is a female rebel captain (now major) named Thadja, who is from a back water planet from which she is essentially a muskateer. Her technology is somewhat more advanced with a modern style rifle, and space tech armor. She insists on wearing the surcoat of her king, which as received notice, but never been discussed by her team. I've never detailed what happened to her king or why she hates the Empire enough to have become a known rebel, although those are likely connected. I figure those can be fleshed out on the fly. The other characters are a wookie bruiser, an upper class pilot, an engineer and droid aficionado, and a murderous vet. The beginning of the game involved Thadja leading a raid to rescue some rebel prisoners and picked the PCs up along the way.

The most recent mission we performed was a diplomatic envoy to a planet of fairly peaceful aliens being exploited by the Imperial aligned Mining Corporation. This is one of the last missions that will be performed under Thadja's command, as they PCs will be given a lucrative profiteering contract soon, after which Thadja will be the observer, rather than the commander. As such we spent much of a session discussing and planning how to infiltrate the Imperial held planet. During much of this time, I attempted to test and prod other players into adopting a leadership role, in preparation for the change in command structure. This was both in and out of character. In fact, during the entire mission, I was consciously aware of giving the PCs more autonomy. We eventually decided on a ruse using the pilot and the wookie as a wealthy couple, and the rest of us being the hired help. When we landed we quickly wandered into the city, in search of our contact, leaving the engineer behind to arrange a quick get-away if need be, again I wanted to separate the party somewhat to encourage PC autonomy.

Once we found our contact we were moved around through several safe locations, until we were brought to a meeting with the chief of the moderate clan. I attempted to convince him to ally with the rebels, but as sometimes occurs with this GM, there seemed to be a specific set of statements which would convince him. At first I monopolized the conversation, assuming that since the other PCs had focused even less on social situations than I had, that it wouldn't be a problem. Soon, however, several other PCs became frustrated with the lack of progress, and I backed off into a more cooperative approach. Eventually we were successful, mostly via dialogue, with some dice rolling for hints and the like. The intrinsic problem was that the PCs were operating on a very slim understanding of the alien's culture.

We were then shunted back to a safe house, where we discovered that the engineer had been accosted by stormtroopers, and had taken off, trying to hide on planet. We also discovered that an additional rebel agent had been smuggled in to help (a new player, who had never roleplayed before). Partially under the suggestion of the GM, I took her (the new player) under my wing for the rest of the session. This also made sense in character, as she had served under Thadja in the infantry.

Shortly afterwards, the aliens announced that the clans were willing to help, but that the principle leader was too afraid of Imperial reprisal to act. As such we were being called upon to kill the leader and make it look like an Imperial action. Quickly we gathered our new member, and the aliens brought us our engineer. Then we attempted to storm the office of the chief of chiefs, via the sewers. I used my tactics skill to get a clear idea of what order the GM wanted us to have, and then modified my plans accordingly. We encountered difficulty at the sewer entrance, and a failed security check set off an alarm at a vault door which had been placed there. Then with a combination of black power explosives and wookie strength, we managed to remove the door, and charge towards our objective. I brought the new player along to get to the final objective, so that she could get a chance to actually affect the game. As we went up the building I modified my character's effectiveness, usually by choices of when to split actions and when to spend willpower in order to ensure that the new player could take reasonable actions, but also avoid any significant danger. On the other hand, I also let the wookie do his own thing when he decided to jump four stormtroopers who we had snuck by. It nearly killed him, but they had a fun combat, especially when the knife wielding vet saved his life.

By the end, the wookie was patched up, and our new player had fired the killing shot against the chief of chiefs. Then we hurried back to the ship, where other plot was about to begin.



   - Mendel Schmiedekamp

[Josh Roby]

I'm not claiming the Big Model is broken, I'm claiming that it lacks the means to adequately describe how I play, and as such offers often untopical and down right unhelpful advice.

The way I see it, Big Model isn't offering you any advice.  Big Model starts and ends with Creative Agenda.  In a lot of ways, Big Model does not describe roleplaying, it describes creative agendas.  If you want to roleplay without a creative agenda, you're outside of the Big Model and shouldn't expect topical and helpful advice any more than you would expect topical and helpful advice about auto maintenance from a knitting magazine.

If the Big Model can improve already functional play in a creative agenda, then why can't a model do the same for a facilitative agenda?

Can another model help you create more and better functional play?  Of course.  I'm developing the Interaction Model at my blog listed in my signature.  There's Channels theory, Threefold, the four styles of refereeing, et cetera.  Are you asking for something that describes what you do?  I still don't see a question.

What is this thread about?  If it's offered up as proof that there's instances of roleplay that don't fall under the Big Model, I don't think that's something that really needs proving.

[Wormwood]

Jesse,

Well, for clarification, I'm not necessarily focusing on one player's emotional state at the time. In essence, when I make a decision I usually use an "interesting" heuristic (will this context produce interesting decisions, i.e. ones that do not have an obvious result given what I know about the players). To some extent this requires attention to the emotional response of all the players, as a whole and individually.

In answer to question one, take a look at the star wars example I just posted.

In answer to question two, consider the following analogy. I'm not solving each player in a vacuum, I'm taking the bulk system of all the players and attempting to solve it as a large dynamical system, or baring that simply testing to enhance later solutions. In that respect the answer to when player responses contradict is all time (in an avoidable way) and very rarely (in an unavoidable way).

I hope that helps,


   - Mendel Schmiedekamp

[Wormwood]

Joshua,

In my habit of correcting exaggeration in metaphor, it is more a matter of expecting a motorcycle repair handbook to help in truck repair. But what I'm really asking, is can we make a truck repair manual in the same manner as the motorcycle one? So, yes, I have been spending much of this thread motivating that actual play examples require extensions to common theory such as the Big Model. Isn't that how we are being asked to introduce theory questions, within the solid context of actual play? Please point out some extensions or wholesale theories which you think might help. I have some ideas, but I am definitely interested in other ones as well.

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

[Josh Roby]

Mendel, I submit to you it really is more different than motorcycles and trucks.  You are talking about fundamentally different activities that happen to use the same medium.  You're making sand castles; Big Model describes firing the sand into glass statues.  You don't need an 'extension' to describe your play; you need a different theory.  I look forward to you submitting something of substance to describe your preferred style of play.

As for "some extensions or wholesale theories" I mentioned a few in my last reply.  By your aggressive tone, however, I have an inkling that you're not here for constructive conversation.

[Wormwood]

Joshua,

I apologize if my tone seemed aggressive, it's always difficult to gauge that in the context of a text post. Perhaps we could both benefit from a more charitable reading. That being said, I am quite interested in theories that could apply to the situation I'm presenting. As I see it, there are two ways for a theory to apply:

1) Acting as a cognitive tool to better understand and predict players.

To do this the model will need to have some way to talk about players individually and dynamically, and also must be real-time predictive, in the sense that it can be used to build a hypothesis for future behavior and engagement based on past behavior during play.

2) Describing positive features of facilitative play (rather than listing features which are not present).

I suspect that this use also requires speaking of players individually and dynamically, as well the capacity for the theory to manage self-reference in terms of play intent.

In either case, I would very much appreciate if you could relate applications of any of the theories you presented explicitly. In particular if you could relate how your Interaction Model may be of use. From what I've read the Channel theory, Threefold, and four styles of refereeing don't properly manage the dynamical requirements of the situation. Although I could be misreading them. Any other theories which you would suggest as relevant are also welcome.

   - Mendel Schmiedekamp

[Mike Holmes]

Josh is right, Mendel (in fact, given the relative shortness of his time at The Forge, I'm often astonished about how right Josh is about these things). I didn't like his analogy, however, so I'll use a different one. You're looking for a medical theory that speaks about scurvy, which is a disorder caused by a diet deficiency. Creative Agenda is like Oncology, which is the theory behind treating cancer. You're asking Oncology to answer a queston about a diet disorder, and it can't. That doesn't mean that Oncology isn't important, just that it isn't what you need.

Creative Agenda very specifically in it's GNS classifications, at least, does not in any way speak to motive or product of play. There are possibly an infinite number of motives that one could assign to gamism for instance. Gamism doesn't say anything about that, just what the behavior looks like. So you have a motive to serve the players or something and you're wondering what creative agenda that fits into? That's like asking what kind of cancer scurvey fits into. They don't, because the theories in question don't deal with what you're looking for.

Still to this day, the most common misconception about the GNS modes is that all RPG behavior, motives and such can all be explained by GNS or Creative Agenda. The model can't do that, nor has it every attempted to do so. If you want a model that does that, you'll have to find it yourself. In fact your own P3 model might be far better for this.

Mike

[talysman]

Mendel,

thanks for the second example, although I notice that it's still lacking descriptions of the way you and the other players interacted, which points got you jazzed, and so on. what it looks like is a Transcript: the story produced as a by-product of play. you can't really tell any kind of agenda from a Transcript, because Transcripts focus on what happened in the Fiction instead of what happened around the table. still, there are a couple points where you let slip how you felt about a moment of play, how the other players reacted, so we can discuss those. what they reveal about Creative Agenda is perfectly describable under the Big Model and always has been, but there are gaps in the description -- but as you will see, the gaps have nothing to do with Creative Agenda.

before we do, however, there are a couple things we need to make clear. first, something I or someone else should have said in our resplies: Creative Agenda is about the group as a whole, not about individual people. people can switch agendas as they switch games or switch play groups, or can even switch after a couple sessions because one reward cycle has been completed and something else has caught the group's attention. I think this happens a lot with mostly Sim groups, for example; most of the sessions will be about detailing/celebrating the world they are creating together, but after the end of one quest/expedition, there will be a brief change of pace: an orc attack on a village that gets played out in a Gamist manner, or or a difficult choice between two flawed pretenders to the throne that turns into Narrativism. when that particular story is finished, the group goes back to Sim; basically, the group likes the other mode a little, but only in small amounts.

so, you are not Simulationist, Gamist, or Narrativist. no one is. people enjoy many styles of play, but may reject a particular style for a particular group, or may reject one style completely, or perhaps don't focus on the Creative Agenda part, instead focusing on another Agenda. this leads to the second point: the Big Model is not GNS. GNS (Creative Agenda) is one tiny part about play styles that cut through the layers of the Big Model (Social Contract, Exploration, Technique, Ephemera.) there are also other Agenda: Social Agendas describe what an individual prefers regardless of the contents of the fictional world created; Aesthetic Agenda describes which part of Exploration (Character, Setting, Situation, System, Color) a player prefers to emphasize; Technical Agenda describes which Techniques and Ephemera a player prefers (immersion, low-handling time vs. high-handling time, cards vs. dice, etc.) a specific Social Agenda, Creative Agenda, Aesthetic Agenda, and Technical Agenda together describe a particular style of play, called a Skewer. people have preferences for one or more Skewers, rather than to Creative Agendas in isolation. we know, for example, that the "hardcore Narrativist" Ron Edwards likes Gamism in the form of Tunnels and Trolls. there's something about that particular agenda combination that appeals to him where another kind of Gamist Skewer would not.

so here's the trick: when you say your playstyle is not described by the Big Model, you're talking about a Skewer, but you keep focusing on GNS and asking why one of those three Creative Agendas can't describe your playstyle. we *can* describe which Creative Agenda you enjoy, if we examine one reward cycle for a game you enjoyed to see what Creative Agenda the group (not you) was playing with. this is why I asked for a description of one of your reward cycles. it doesn't matter whether you played *towards* receiving a reward or not; at some point, you the player were rewarded for a couple sessions of play, and that formed one reward cycle.

now, without a description of a reward cycle and how your group interacted and made decisions, we still can't be sure of the Creative Agenda, but I think there are some clues. it does seem that you switch between Simulationist and Narrativist agendas during play. I don't know how strong your Simulationist side is, but the way you focused intensely in your description on all the little backgroiund details of the worlds you've played in suggests to me that you get a lot of joy out of the Fiction. I note also that you pick a lot well-known fictional universes to play in, rather than create one in play; Stargate SG-1 and Star Wars. although it's possible to play Nar or Gam in an existing fictional world, it sounds very much like a focus on celebration/exploration of those worlds, which marks it as Sim.

... except that you *did* slip in Narrativism. I picked up on a few statements:

What started as a band of two brothers (the player had two initial PCs), who were searching for dungeons to investigate soon turned into a political game, where the PCs were involved, first in gaining favor, and eventually in undermining the corrupt nobility of their nation [...] Eventually my player managed to get his preferred PC as king. It was during that portion of the campaign that I threw in an object lesson character, a paladin who died fighting his own army, in order to protect the children of the orcish tribe being attacked.

Currently I am running three games weekly or on alternating weeks. The weekly games are Stargate SG-1 [...]  One of the running themes of the game, which has developed ever since the first session is the general incompetence of SG-15 [...] I only describe the basic area around the stargate and then let them decided how they want to try to succeed in spite of themselves [...] in a recent mission the PCs were attempting to locate a giant sized Go'uld symbiote (which most resembled a Chinese dragon in size and mobility). Reports had placed it on a planet ruled a by a Roman analogue, with a second class citizenry, who were the original Mayan inhabitants of the planet. Their technology had advanced to mid-Industrial, by this time. Note, I randomly rolled the particulars of the planet, only the Go'uld symbiote was a novel addition. [...] I decided that more than likely the Mayans were becoming rebellious and that the dragon was on the face helping them.

that's looking a lot like Vanilla Narrativism. you don't want to play moreal decisions hard, making a big deal about inner moral struggles, but moral themes seem to surface in the games you describe. it's never an abstract Premise, just a more prosaic, concrete one. "this paladin is sworn to uphold good and destroy evil, but these orc children, inherently `evil' are about to be killed. whose side will he be on?" or "the evil Go'uld is helping Mayan rebels, who are being oppressed by the Romans. whose side will we help?" I'd even call the theme of an incompetent SG-15 team a kind of premise. "will they do the best they can, even though they know they're screw-ups?"

it looks like you don't like the premise to lead to extremely strong or emotionally overwrought scenes. since a lot of the heavy Narrativist games seem to be designed for strong moral premises, you probably looked at those and said "nuh-uh", and then figured you can't possibly be a Narrativist. but really, it just seems you have a lower threshold for the kind of intensity you want from play. plus, you really like the Sim, too, and probably play most of your sessions focusing on all the little details, only occasionally raising a moral issue.

what's confusing you is the other details you are pointing to in your playstyle. you feel that your tendency to focus on what's better socially versus what's better creatively is somehow not described by the Big Model. but, you see, it *is*. that's not a Creative Agenda, it's a Social Agenda; the Skewers you prefer emphasize changing other play elements to keep everything running better socially, but that doesn't point to a hole in the Creative Agendas, because the Creative Agendas were never intended to describe that part of play. they are rudimentally described in the Big Model, and yes, the Big Model is incomplete in its description of Skewers, even though Ron has long said we need to move on from discussing GNS and start focusing more on Skewers. why are they undeveloped? because almost all the energy being put into theory has been rehashing GNS, over and over, when its not the most important part of the Big Model. so, we currently know that Social Agendas exist and have briefly described a couple; we've been exploring Aesthetic Agenda in a bit more detail, although we've never called it that; we've seen a bunch of Techniques and Ephemera discussed, but in almost every case, the discussion broke down when someone claimed Immersion or something else was a new Creative Agenda, instead of rightly recognizing the fact that it's a Technical Agenda; and, because of this lack of development of the four kinds of Agenda, we have only been able to describe a paltry number of Skewers (Illusionism, No Myth, Jay's Bricolage approach, maybe a few others.)

this is part of why Ron closed the theory forums. they stopped being useful to further research.

so: can the Big Model describe your preferred playstyle? yes. is it complete? no. is it because the Creative Agendas are described incorrectly, or we are missing a Creative Agenda? no.