GNS from Shadows in the Fog

[Valamir]

Valamir,

I know what you're saying; really I do.  If this turns into a debate, we should take it to the GNS forum, but here's what I mean:

And so we have

1. There's a heavy Nar thing going on in Shadows, where the players as players construct and bend the universe by player action.  Some of this is mechanical, but most of it is just a question of players essentially making up the universe's rules as they go along, to fit their conception of what sort of story they want to be in.  The focus here is story and character arc, and revising the setting to fit.

This is what I mean by GNS on a superficial level.  Narativism has nothing whatsoever to do with the degree to which players construct or bend the universe or make up rules.  That would be a question of stance (what we commonly refer to as Director stance) and stance is independent of GNS mode.  You can have Director stance in G N or S games.  Point being that its presence in your game (which I think is a good thing...hell Universalis is nothing but this sort of thing) is not an indication of narrativist content.

Also "focus on the story" is a quick and dirty paraphrase that IMO has confused the issue more than simplified.  Indeed, it is usually with the word "story" that most new visitors meet their first roadblock.  Ron has been valiantly trying to excise the word story from any description of GNS but it still creeps in (largely because most of us "old timers" who do know what we actually mean still find it convenient).  

"Story" as a word is pretty meaningless to base a definition on because it has so many different meanings.  An illusionist GM who has a fully amazing detailed plot that he's walking his players through is certainly focused on the story (which may in fact be a very good one) but is not in the least bit Narrativist.   Ron's outline on theme in your older thread on Premise and Narrativism is probably one of the best summaries to date.

2. The setting is a kind of mainstay for the game, and there is certainly significant emphasis on simulation in an historical mode.  That is, the game stresses having characters who are reasonably plausible Victorians, not stereotypes.  Exploration of Victorian London is a big deal here, but that world (since it's a real world) is so complex that it can be bent and twisted by the players without stopping being itself.

This is also one of the misconception traps those newly exposed to GNS fall into (including myself for a long time).  G N and S are not building blocks.  It is not a model where one takes 3 parts of Sim 2 part Gamist and tosses well with a dash of Nar.

Having an emphasis on setting and plausible Victorians is a fine thing (and as one who thinks that if one is going to draw on history in their game, they ought to take the time to get it right, one I applaud heartily).  But its mere presence in your game does not make the game "sim" or "partially sim" or a mix of "sim".  

Setting is one of the five components of Exploration (which together with color, character, and situation) is what I believe you mean when you refer to the game as Victorian.  Exploration exists on a level ABOVE GNS.  Placeing emphasis on any or all of these areas is part of ALL roleplaying regardless of G N or S.  What distinguishes S, is that in S play the sole and only point to the play is the Exploration.

It seems to me that you've described some other goals for the game that go beyond Exploration.

Frankly, my feeling about Ron's model is that it is excellent and a great mine for theoretical perspectives, but I don't agree with his basic conclusion.  As I read it, his thesis is that since these GNS priorities are somewhat mutually contradictory (I'd agree, on the moment-to-moment in-session level that the model deals with), therefore a game that tries to serve them all is incoherent.  But what I think he actually means here is that a game which says, "Hey, no matter what your perspective, you'll love this!" is going to be incoherent.  That I'd agree with, but I also think that most experienced players have a wide range of GNS abilities, and can enjoy different takes on things from moment to moment.  So this game says, "There are ways to use those different styles in this game, and they will all have value; if you pick one and ignore the rest, you will need to revise heavily."  I think that's a very different thing, and I think this is a logical flaw in Ron's model.

I think Ron is probably better equipped to describe what he means than I so I'll let him address this last.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Ralph's stated all of his points very well and completely, in my view. Chris and I have taken debate about that last point to private messages, only because I thought it was kind of general-interest boring as well as off-topic for the paren thread (that was before this thread started).

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

Argh --- I just sent a long private message to Ron about this; didn't realize this thread would actually split...

Okay, I'm going to clip it up and try to do all of this at once.  Sorry if it's kind of long.

Ron made the point that my rather offhand remarks on the previous thread (New Game: Shadows in the Fog, in Indie RPGs) suggest that I think GNS operates moment-by moment, where he means a rather broader categorization of instances, including for example whole sesions.

I grant this, but I still think there's a logical flaw here. A long-running campaign may well have instances of all three modes, and I think experienced players can enjoy them as such. If one session is very Us-vs.-the-GM, using every trick in the book as players and characters to "win," that's going to be rather Gamist. But the next session might quite smoothly turn into a nice Narrativist thing, where everyone is cooperating to create a great story arc. I don't see this as violating the model; in fact, I think Ron indicates this when he talks about not "labeling" people as G, N, or S.

But if that's the case, then a particular RPG can be structured such that the three modes are encouraged, so long as it doesn't try to encourage all of them to happen at the same time. That would lead to incoherence and confusion at any and every given moment, which is I think what you're concerned about. But if the game has resources and design constraints such that the group can mutually, preferably without a lot of explicit debate about it, run a session in whatever mode currently seems appropriate, I think that's a good thing.

My problem with straight Narrativism, you see, is that my experience is that such campaigns are short-lived. Nar requires a kind of sustained intensity that everyone just has to be "up" for. If it's not happening, forcing it isn't going to work; I think this is part of what's being discussed in the "Damn the Continuing Story" thread.

Okay, so here's a more careful look at what I'm talking about; if I misunderstand, tell me:

Suppose I'm running a Shadows in the Fog campaign.  Thus far things have been pretty Nar-oriented.  What I mean here is this: the sessions have been focused on mutual, cooperative construction of good stories [wait for it, Valamir :) ] based around moral conflict (the PCs are sliding deeper and deeper into becoming exactly the sort of people they dislike most, i.e. creepy occult freaks).

Here we have what I understand Nar to be.  You've got some stance stuff, as Valamir points out, but importantly the play focus is on a moral premise and problem: how can we understand and overcome these dangerous occultist freaks without becoming them? and if we do start becoming like them, where is our justification for conflict?  As players, we have a number of mechanical devices which assist us in ensuring that this will be the focus, but the point is the focus of play.

Okay, moving on:

This evening, everyone's pretty drained by a rough week. Okay, let's do a monster stomp! I've got a plot, yes I'm going to railroad a bit, but important point I'm going to tell everyone that this is what I'm doing. So people kind of set aside the moral conflict and story arc thing for a moment, and just let 'er rip on straight-up "let's whack the GM's monster!"

Here we have something I would think of as Gamist.  The players want to beat the GM.  This isn't bad-tempered, it's just a question of winning at a game.  For the moment, the moral issues are put on hold, because we're really sort of tired and don't want to delve into our souls right now.  We accept that the GM is going to railroad us into the situation; the game is to beat him within this narrowly delimited framework.

Moving on again:

I, the GM, have a grandiose plot I'd like to overlay on everything else.  It involves a lot of intricate details about my setting, and in order for people to be able to deal with that plot, they're going to have to understand the setting pretty well.  Okay, tonight I'm going to tell my players that the session will be a little expository, by which I mean in GNS terms that Exploration is going to be the issue, in this case of setting.  I now let them focus on being in-character (exploring their characters without much concern about premise as such), and gently guide them through a detailed series of exposures to complexities of Victorian London.  We do have some sort of story going on (otherwise it'll be boring), but of course story is not part of the model as such.  The focus tonight is on the characters exploring themselves (keep it clean, boys!) and the world around them.  They learn about some new stuff, they orient themselves toward that new stuff, and they begin to interact with the new stuff.  

In future sessions, they will (I hope) shift back to their usual Nar-mode, reverting the focus to the moral premise.  But now they have some new memories and information to work with.  Maybe now they'll start worrying about that monster stomp, and its moral implications.  And so forth.

------------
My only problem with the GNS model is that it seems to imply that a game which encourages all these things to happen in the same campaign is necessarily incoherent and unworkable. I don't buy it. I've run games like this, TV shows work well like this, and I don't see why a game can't be designed like this. The only really essential thing, and I think we agree here, is that the game can't say, "Okay, here's how to do all three things at once, and that's the future of RPGs, hooray." That's not going to work, and the group is going to have to begin revising as soon as they crack the cover, because they're going to need to shift the emphasis into something possible.

[Jason Lee]

My only problem with the GNS model is that it seems to imply that a game which encourages all these things to happen in the same campaign is necessarily incoherent and unworkable. I don't buy it. I've run games like this, TV shows work well like this, and I don't see why a game can't be designed like this. The only really essential thing, and I think we agree here, is that the game can't say, "Okay, here's how to do all three things at once, and that's the future of RPGs, hooray." That's not going to work, and the group is going to have to begin revising as soon as they crack the cover, because they're going to need to shift the emphasis into something possible.

Here's my take on your problem; which is a little contradictory to the actual theory.  It's just my deviant opinion.

GNS is like instantaneous velocity, and much like calculus confuses people for years ;).  GNS only exists at 'points of GNS conflict'.  You can be playing for years with moral questions, in a consistent reality, and still want to be challenged and win (to paraphrase the modes).  The only time GNS will ever exist for your game is when you are required to choose between one of them at a point during play.  I also happen to think that these conflict points are all at the Stance level, and the GNS modes are just handy 'most common player motivation packages' to narrow down why the Stance conflict occured.

[M. J. Young]

Clehrich, I agree with you in principle, but I'm not certain that your examples tell what you think they tell. What you're describing to me sounds more like this is an essentially narrativist game which sometimes doesn't hit the issues as directly as at other times. That is, sure, this week we take a break from worrying about our moral issues and stomp a few monsters, that week we are going to explore more of the world in which this is all happening, but overall we're telling a story about characters who are struggling with a moral issue who, like real people, don't struggle with it constantly.

You sort of betrayed this understanding

In future sessions, they will (I hope) shift back to their usual Nar-mode, reverting the focus to the moral premise.

That is, the game is still about these moral issues; it's only momentarily sidetracked. In the same sense that D&D monster romp doesn't cease being gamist and become simulationist because you're walking through the halls listening at doors and haven't found any monsters, your game doesn't stop being narrativist just because today the character's ordinary concerns are disrupted by the appearance of a horrible monster requiring immediate attention. The very fact that

Maybe now they'll start worrying about that monster stomp, and its moral implications

suggests that you expect this narrativist concept to incorporate the other kinds of play as being part of the overall narrativist objective: what are the moral implications of this part, in the light of the moral problems we have overall?

That said, I've elsewhere (on threads currently in storage at Gaming Outpost's off-line vault) argued that games can move between GNS aspects. However, after much debate and discussion, clarification and adjustment of both Ron's and my positions (which are still not the same, but I think much closer than they were a few years ago), I think that it requires a more solid break than you're suggesting.

Ron says that from his reading Multiverser is a simulationist game (and as such he speaks highly of it). I certainly won't argue that; it provides all the tools to simulate anything I've found so far, and indeed the core concept, that you have been knocked out of this world into the myriad of imaginable others, is an exploration of system and setting and character, with the emphasis wherever the player wants to put it. On the other hand, because the nature of the game involves moving the same characters into drastically different kinds of worlds, in play it seems to me to become gamist or narrativist in particular worlds. I've written a number of worlds in which play shifts very much to responding to issues, such as the slavery question of http://www.multiverser.com/world.html">Orc Rising or the racial issue in Race Wars in our (somewhat less than smooth) http://www.multiverser.com/eval.html">evaluation version. Most people dropped into these worlds quickly shift to dealing with narrativist premise, as they respond to such issues, creating stories built on these conflicts. Similarly, there are other worlds used in play in which the game shifts to beating the world, whether merely through survival against the odds or in overcoming some defined enemy, and issues drop in importance.

I've also noticed that sometimes I can drop different players (independently) in the same world, and if the world doesn't provide them with a clear notion of what sort of GNS priorities they should have, they'll provide their own. The game will adapt to this.

Part of it is in designing a game that doesn't interfere with any particular approach to play, and doesn't attempt to reward any style of play. D&D's experience point system is strongly gamist; Multiverser doesn't have any reward for play except play itself, that is, beating the odds, or discovering the world, or exploring the issues is the reward, not the thing rewarded.

I can see where Ron could argue that all of this is still simulationism, that Multiverser provides a wonderful framework for exploration of character, setting, and system, and that the exploration of moral issues and the assault on gamist objectives are expressions of that essential exploration of character ("this is what you would do in this situation"). Perhaps I don't see the model clearly enough to be able to split those hairs. I do see that isolated incidents, even several game sessions long, do not in general mean that GNS priorities have shifted, but only that within the grander overview of what the campaign is about there is room for variation in playing styles and story elements.

After all, in a particularly weak analogy, Dune didn't cease to be about Dune when it described the distant Harkonnen court. It just presented a different part of the exploration which ultimately fed back into the main story.


--M. J. Young

[Johannes]

I can see where Ron could argue that all of this is still simulationism, that Multiverser provides a wonderful framework for exploration of character, setting, and system, and that the exploration of moral issues and the assault on gamist objectives are expressions of that essential exploration of character ("this is what you would do in this situation").

- I've been wondering about this one also lately. I think that here are two different things:
1. Character facing a moral dilemma in his fictional life. (Sim. exp. char/sit/setting - not sure which one)
2. Player as audience "looking at" a RPG and contemplating a "hypothetical" moral dilemma represented by the game. (Nar?)

2 is often (even usually) achieved by 1 (think of Dostojevski's Raskolnikov) but this is not necessary. The character does not have to percieve any moral dilemma (1). He can be for example a fanatic who is unable to consider any other points of view than his own. The player however can look at him and his actions from the outside and percieve and consider the moral issues represented by the story (2).

I've played a campaing which was just like this: My last Harn PC Cinall Cinaira was a violent fanatic "freedom fighter"  in Orbaal. He did terrible things (from my player perspective) and never stopped to hesitate even when he planned the most vile deeds. In a way he couldn't think things in terms of moral and ethics. I on the other hand had at moments very strong feelings of disgust, grief and compassion as I played his tragic journey and moral corruption. I could percieve the moral dilemmas and I had to face them as a memeber of the game's audience jut like when reading a book.

I'm not sure if it's possible to have 1 without 2. It could be argued that in order to play the char the player has to understand the moral dilemma of the PC and so face it him/herself. On the other hand it could also be argued that the player's ethics differ from those of the PC and the player doesn't consider the PCs dilemma a moral dilemma at all in absolute sense of the word. The player would the take an ironical position in regard to the PC and percieve the char as intellectually inferior to himself. I don't have an actual example of this but I can give an pseudo-example:

The player believes in the survival of the fittest because it's the way nature works and man is part of the nature. Killing animals for food is not an moral issue to him. (I guess nothing is.) The PCess does not think like this. She believes that all life is holy and good in itself and that causing suffering to other living beings is evil. Thats why you shouldn't kill animals even for food. Killing animals is an moral issue to the PCess but the player is just exploring a character that has silly beliefs which add color and perhaps complicated situations to the game. He takes delight in the absurd situations the PCess gets herself for these (in player PoV irrelevant) moral beliefs. Maybe this is 1 without 2 - I'm not sure.

[joshua neff]

Clehrich--

I'll leave it to more qualified people to reply to all of your points in depth, but there were a few points I would like to address.

1) You say that "experienced gamers" can enjoy Narrativism, Gamism, & Simulationism through the run of one game (which is usually called a "campaign", although I intensely dislike that militaristic term--& I have yet to find a different term that I like better). First of all, I'm not sure what experience has to do with anything. Personally, I don't think experience counts for nearly as much in RPGs as enthusiasm & everyone being on the same page. Roleplaying isn't something you need to learn how to do--you may have to learn the mechanics of a game, or even get a handle on the mechanics of RPGs in general. But it isn't rocket science. Secondly, experienced or no, not everyone enjoys all types of play. I, myself, can get into Gamist play to a certain extent, but I'm bored to tears by Simulationist gaming, usually. I find that I'm not all that interested in simply Exploring--I want to have some sort of thematic push to the events, even if the narrative Premise is unstanded or subconscious. As long as I get to have my character make choices based on some sort of dramatic theme, I'm happy.

So, I would say no, not all gamers can enjoy all types of gaming in one "campaign."

2) You also say that you think Narrativist gaming would inherently lead to short-term "campaigns." Which is wrong. Ron, for example, has written quite a bit about the long-term Hero Wars game he ran (over a year of play, wasn't it?), which was intensely Narrativist. On the other hand, even if it does--so what? What's wrong with a game that only runs 16 sessions? Or 10 sessions? Or 3? Or 1? Longer is not better, nor is it even necessarily desired. I'll take a good 3 sessions of Narrativist gaming over a year of Exploration of Setting. That's just my personal preference, but I doubt I'm the only one. (Similarly, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a 5-year run of Exploration of Character. But it ain't my cup of soup.) There is still this conception that the longer the "campaign", the better, & that idea needs to be taken out behind the shed & whacked. And why would a Narrativist game be inherently any shorter in run than a Gamist game?

As for your example of being tired one week & wanting to make the session a simple monster stomp, what I would do in that situation is simply run a different game. "I'm not in the mood for Narrativism tonight, so instead, I'm running Rune. Is that cool?"

3) I think you're misunderstanding the use of the word "incoherent." It doesn't mean "unplayable." Obviously, people play all kinds of RPGs that Ron or others here have labelled "incoherent": D&D, Vampire, & so on. "Incoherent" is another way of saying "unfocused." Vampire is definitely playable, but it's also incredibly unfocused--"What do I do with it?" "You do whatever you want with it." Some people see this as a strength; the game is flexible & supports all kinds of play. I don't think it supports different types of play so much as undercuts every type of play, one way or another. Now, you can adjust the game to suit your style of play--but then the game ceases to be what you bought (or otherwise acquired) & becomes a different game. For some people this is fine. For some of us, we don't want to do that kind of work, we'd rather spend our energy on other things.

Does that answer some of your questions?

[clehrich]

Josh,

I think some of my remarks were made a bit offhandedly, and so were perhaps not put clearly.  I think we actually don't agree, but in a narrower sense than might seem to be the case.

1) You say that "experienced gamers" can enjoy Narrativism, Gamism, & Simulationism through the run of one game....First of all, I'm not sure what experience has to do with anything. Personally, I don't think experience counts for nearly as much in RPGs as enthusiasm & everyone being on the same page. Roleplaying isn't something you need to learn how to do [CUT]

As to the first, I mean that a player with some experience of all these types of things should be able occasionally to set aside her own preferences for a session or two.  For example, you are strongly on the Nar side, and don't like Sim.  If you were playing in a Shadows in the Fog campaign, and two sessions shifted over into strong sim-mode for whatever reason, would you be pissed off and bored, and just kind of sit like a lump for the two sessions, or perhaps be bitchy and abrasive?  I suspect (hope) that what you'd do, having considerable experience of various campaigns, is say, "Well, this isn't my thing, but I think it's going to go back to my thing later on, and I'm going to help make this part is just as much fun as anything else (since I know some players have different GNS preferences than I do) even though it's not my cup of tea."  That's what I mean about experience.  It's a kind of maturity, of course, but I think no matter how personally mature a very inexperienced player might be, without having seen a lot of different possibilities it's going to be hard for that player to be creatively and dynamically supportive of a kind of play he just doesn't enjoy very much.

On the second half of this, I totally disagree with you, I'm afraid.  If you think about the many, many threads around here (especially in Actual Play) where people have said, "I had some complete newbies, so I wanted to X," you'll notice that there has been a general sense that you probably shouldn't drop a newcomer to the hobby in at the very deepest, weirdest end.  I do not mean, however, that "weird" is Nar and "non-weird" is D&D.  But a game which demands multiple Stances, shifting character depth, and periodic game-mastering on the fly, without warning, is going to be very difficult (not impossible, perhaps) for a newcomer.  Why not give a newcomer a chance to get comfortable with things like "playing my character" or "contributing as a player to a story-arc" or whatever?

I'll get to points 2 and 3 later; gotta run shortly, and it'll take a while.

[clehrich]

Okay, I've got a minute:

2) You also say that you think Narrativist gaming would inherently lead to short-term "campaigns." Which is wrong. Ron, for example, has written quite a bit about the long-term Hero Wars game he ran (over a year of play, wasn't it?), which was intensely Narrativist.

I certainly believe it can be done; my experience (supported by the remainder of your post) is that Nar gaming tends toward short campaigns.  So long as you mean "inherently lead" as a general push rather than an absolute rule, I agree with you.

On the other hand, even if it does--so what? What's wrong with a game that only runs 16 sessions? Or 10 sessions? Or 3? Or 1? Longer is not better, nor is it even necessarily desired. I'll take a good 3 sessions of Narrativist gaming over a year of Exploration of Setting. That's just my personal preference, but I doubt I'm the only one. ... There is still this conception that the longer the "campaign", the better, & that idea needs to be taken out behind the shed & whacked.

The thread "Damn the continuing story" has been discussing this question for some little while now, and I'm not going to recap the whole thing.  What I notice there, as here, is that a lot of Nar-preference people feel strongly that "short is OK too."  This tells me two things: (1) short is OK, which I knew, and (2) Nar games tend to be short, which I sort of knew.

Nobody here is saying, as did Gary Gygax and his ilk, that longer is necessarily better.  However, the Premise which largely guides Shadows in the Fog is relatively long-term: a slow slide into becoming what you despise, and seriously wondering whether you should actually despise that something.  I think that a two or three session campaign of SitF (as someone called it --- looks like Sitzfleisch to me) will not be able to deal with that Premise much, except in a CoC semi-cartoonish way.  Therefore a structure for the game which tends to discourage relatively long campaigns is at odds with the game's Premise.

As for your example of being tired one week & wanting to make the session a simple monster stomp, what I would do in that situation is simply run a different game. "I'm not in the mood for Narrativism tonight, so instead, I'm running Rune. Is that cool?"

You certainly could do this.  But why do I have to?

Look, the point here (I'm cutting to the chase about coherence as well) is that the GNS model and its relationship to coherence is valuable but perhaps a bit simplistic.  I think that a sort of straight interpretation would say:

Games with a clear GNS goal encourage that sort of play.  If the players want to play that way, they will like the game.  If the players want to play some other way, they will play something else.  Then everyone is happy.

Games with an unclear GNS goal encourage no particular sort of play, or they encourage all sorts of play which amounts to the same thing.  Eventually players will become unsatisfied, no matter their preferences, and shift to a game whoes GNS goal matches their preferences.

Now a fundamentalist take on this (not Ron's I think), would say that the essential term here, "clear GNS goal," means "One particular style, structure, and focus of one particular type: G, N, or S, and never never never mix.

I say that a clear GNS goal can be a mixture of the three, so long as the emphasis and purpose of such mixing is clear and narrow.  Here in SitF I'm emphasizing Nar, primarily, but in certain circumstances other GNS goals may happily dominate sessions.  This does not, as I understand it, violate the GNS model, unless your interpretation of "clear GNS goal" is quite narrow.  I believe that Ron's version of that phrase is rather more narrow than mine --- some time I'll try to formulate my thoughts on exactly how broadly I think that can be taken --- but he sure as hell is not saying that a single game has to be absolutely G, N, or S.

The result, for SitF, is this: if I want to run a monster-stomp with it, and that session is therefore going to be rather Gamist, I don't see that this makes the game incoherent in any way.  To say, "No no, if you want to shift from Nar to Gam you have to change games entirely" is to take a quite extreme position on the GNS model.  In my opinion, that extreme, if folded into the GNS model itself, would make the model completely useless, because everything would be excluded as a boundary-case.

[Ron Edwards]

Chris,

You're arguing against a straw man. Nothing in my essay, or inherent to what people have said, states that people cannot shift their preferences socially as they play, at the level at which you describe.

It's very easy to read this straw man into our discussions, and to get into a semi-defensive mode of trying to refute it. I've seen this so many times, diminishing in frequency as the essays and discussions evolve, that it's hard to get interested in it for me any more.

I was under the impression that my last private message to you made this clear. May I have your permission to post it here?

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

Actually Cle, there is substantial anecdotal evidence for just the opposite of what you describe.  That in fact,  

a game which demands multiple Stances, shifting character depth, and periodic game-mastering on the fly, without warning

is actually much EASIER for a newbie to get than for an experienced gamer.

What's "normal" and thus comfortable and easy vs what is "wierd" and thus a stretch that takes effort is completely dependent on how one learned to play.  I submitt for example that someone who learns to game playing old school D&D for 10 years and then is suddenly thrown into a LARP, has a very different perspective on which is more comfortable than a gamer who learned gaming by LARPing for 10years then being introduced to D&D.

For a complete gaming newbie they haveing learned one thing or another yet.  They haven't been brainwashed for decades on silly "what is roleplaying" sections in gaming books instructing players on the "proper" way to play.

I suspect that if one were to do a test of people who've never gamed before that games like OctaNe or Inspectres, or the Pool, or Paladin, or Donjon, or Dust Devils, etc would be deemed easier to figure out and learn to play and enjoy than D&D, GURPS, HERO, Deadlands, etc.

Stances and having GM powers as a player only seems wierd to people who've been trained over years of gaming that Actor stance is the only acceptable stance and that the GM is the sole holder of power.  There is no "The GM is God" rule in Monopoly after all.  I submitt that for people new to adventure gaming, whose only experience with gaming has been Parker Brothers and Monopoly that having 4 or 5 people around the table who all have identical power, authority, and responsibility is FAR more "normal" seeming, than being asked to submitt to the whims of a GM.

[M. J. Young]

Games with an unclear GNS goal encourage no particular sort of play, or they encourage all sorts of play which amounts to the same thing.  Eventually players will become unsatisfied, no matter their preferences, and shift to a game [whose] GNS goal matches their preferences.

I think this is mistaken in a fundamental way. There is a great deal of difference between a game that does not promote any sort of GNS play and one that supports multiple sorts; or at least, the way most games promote multiple sorts of play is not at all the same as not promoting any one. I need look no further than D&D for an example.

The experience-based advancement system is a fully integrated gamist promotion tool. Consider how it works. You overcome the obstacles, in the form of monsters and barricades, and for this you receive experience points. As these points increase, you become better at overcoming those same kinds of obstacles, the monsters and the barricades, because skills related to that kind of play improve.

However, in trying to broaden the appeal of the game, experience point awards for role playing were added. Now you could get points for playing your character well, for resolving game situations without resorting to combat, for helping others. The result of this is what? You become better at overcoming obstacles in the forms of monsters and barricades. The advancement system inherently rewards this kind of activity; it does not reward any other kind of activity. You will nearly always get more experience points for a violent solution to a problem than for a peaceful one. Kill them all and take their treasure is the kind of play that is rewarded. Let's create a good story is not only not encouraged, it is inherently discouraged, in that while you're trying to create a good story, you're foregoing opportunities to kill them all and take their treasure, and so not being rewarded for play.

The alignment system was installed to attempt to counter this. Here we have something that is supposed to slow your advancement if you act out of character, and to some degree speed it if you act in character. It has potential (granted that it would need work) as a narrativist driver. However, it attempts to integrate into that same gamist advancement mechanic: if you act in character, you'll be better able to kill monsters and overcome obstacles. Thus the alignment system is dropped by many players, because it gets in the way of the gamist rewards without providing narrativist rewards in their place.

V:tM has been cited in this regard as well. The game concept makes much of the internal conflict of loss of humanity, but the rewards are again about becoming a more powerful character through defeating adversaries--in a broader sense, generally, but still a very gamist concept. Although on paper the game sounds like an exploration of the premise of whether you have the right to live at the cost of the lives of others, in practice it turns into supervillains who have to stay out of the sunlight.

If you promote multiple GNS objectives with the mechanics of a game, you get conflicted play, and generally the jettisoning of some aspect that makes it unworkable.

If you provide mechanics which are adaptable to different modes, I think that what will generally happen is the players will adapt them to the mode they prefer (or will drift between modes if there is conflict in the preferences within the group). The point is that a game that does not promote any one GNS perspective is different from one that promotes multiple ones, precisely in that the former will be coherent and the latter conflicted.

Also, I don't think that players will become tired of a game which suits their play if it doesn't conflict with their preferences. That is, it's one thing to play in a game that promotes gamism when you want narrativism; it's quite another to play in a game that easily allows either gamism or narrativism and a group that runs with the narrativist focus. You might find other games that suit you as well or better, but that's not the same thing as becoming disillusioned with a game that gives you what you want.

--M. J. Young

[clehrich]

I think it will be best to break this up as a few separate posts.  Let me start with:

Ron wrote:

You're arguing against a straw man. Nothing in my essay, or inherent to what people have said, states that people cannot shift their preferences socially as they play, at the level at which you describe.

I don't think I am arguing against a straw man; I'm arguing against my read of Josh's post.  What I am not arguing against, I think, is the GNS model.  You have indeed said that preferences can shift, and I agree.  As I noted, it is only a somewhat extreme interpretation of the model --- an interpretation I do not believe you agree with --- that says "one GNS goal, one type of gaming, per RPG."

I may be over-interpreting, of course, but what I'm responding to is this, from Josh's post:

As for your example of being tired one week & wanting to make the session a simple monster stomp, what I would do in that situation is simply run a different game. "I'm not in the mood for Narrativism tonight, so instead, I'm running Rune. Is that cool?"

As I understand it, Josh's point is that SitF, since it has a primarily Narrativist focus, ought to stick to that.  If we are "not in the mood for Narrativism" one evening, we should play a different game.  I do not agree: I think it is entirely reasonable and coherent to design a game that can be played in multiple modes.  I think you would agree, and my understanding is that according to you, there really ought to be a predominant GNS perspective.  What is being said here by Josh, however, is that a game's GNS perspective should be limited, and that the group should switch games when they want to switch perspectives, even temporarily.  I disagree.

[clehrich]

Next up,

M.J. wrote:

Games with an unclear GNS goal encourage no particular sort of play, or they encourage all sorts of play which amounts to the same thing. Eventually players will become unsatisfied, no matter their preferences, and shift to a game [whose] GNS goal matches their preferences.

I think this is mistaken in a fundamental way. There is a great deal of difference between a game that does not promote any sort of GNS play and one that supports multiple sorts; or at least, the way most games promote multiple sorts of play is not at all the same as not promoting any one.

I think you've taken my remark out of context.  The next line in my post was,

Now a fundamentalist take on this (not Ron's I think), would say that the essential term here, "clear GNS goal," means "One particular style, structure, and focus of one particular type: G, N, or S, and never never never mix.

My point is that everything here depends on what exactly is meant by "clear GNS goal."  If you take it in a fairly open and flexible manner, recognizing that play styles can and do shift and drift all the time for lots of reasons, then a game without a "clear GNS goal" is one that goes beyond open and flexible and moves into being incoherent.  I think that Ron's essay is not entirely clear about how incoherence works, but an example i'm pretty sure he has used is V:tM, which you have also mentioned.

As I understand him, Ron is saying --- and I agree, please note --- that V:tM is incoherent, because it tries to encourage multiple GNS styles simultaneously, i.e. it seems to want players to do Narrativism and Simulationism at the same time.  Ron's take on game design, I think, is that if V:tM were a more focused Narrativist game, and did not mechanically drift into Sim, then this would be coherent and helpful.  Of course, play might shift among styles, but the system would be clear on its focus, and play would not tend to be at odds with the system, requiring revisions and rewrites.

What concerns me here is that "clear GNS goal," if taken very narrowly (as I think Josh is doing), means that a game should not encourage multiple styles, ever.  Here I disagree, and I think Ron does too.  I'm pretty sure you do, as well.

[clehrich]

With respect to SitF specifically, my goal is a coherent, Nar-dominant game.  I think that it is possible to be a little more GNS-flexible than Ron's article seems to argue, although in our private email exchange (yes Ron, feel free to post it) I have learned that he thinks the model is more flexible than I read it to be.

The question is twofold:
1. What's coherence/incoherence, and what are its implications?
2. What is a "clear GNS goal" and what are its implications?
I think these are closely related.  Here's a breakdown of some of the possibilities; let's see whether we agree on this:

Flexible GNS (Ron's take, I think):
Coherent: X is called (by its authors) a Narrativist game.  The mechanics in X support Nar.  The premise and story and setting and whatnot are presented in a manner that encourages Nar.  When particular moments (single events, sessions, whatever) in actual play happen to be gamist-seeming, that's fine, but things will tend to drift back to Nar overall because everything in the game supports this style best.  And if you really hate Nar games, you're going to have to rewrite X a lot, but on the other hand when you start reading it in the first place you won't be fooled into thinking it's Sim or Gamist.

Incoherent: X is called (by its authors) a Narrativist game.  The mechanics in X support Simulation, but some little Director Stance thing has been thrown in. The premise and story and whatnot are presented in a manner that encourages Nar.  This game will tend to be at odds with itself.  Groups will tend to revise the game as they play, or before they start, or will just discard it.  Note: it's not unplayable, it's just incoherent.  If you really prefer Nar gaming, you may be annoyed by the game, because you may buy it as Nar (since the authors call it so), but then find out that in lots of ways it's a Sim game, which isn't what you wanted.

Inflexible GNS (NOT Ron's take, I think, nor mine):
Coherent: X is called Nar, the mechanics are Nar-encouraging, etc.  The game discourages other modes of play, at all times.  If the group wants to do something Gamist for a bit, they should drop it and go play a different game.

Incoherent: X is called Nar, the mechanics are Nar, etc.  The game says, "Okay, but feel free sometimes to do something Sim with it, if you like."  As you see, a Coherent game under a flexible GNS model would very often be labeled Incoherent under an inflexible GNS model.

Way-Flexible GNS (how I think SitF should work):
Coherent: X does not necessarily make claims towards a specific GNS style.  The mechanics are Nar-encouraging.  The setting and whatnot is insanely detailed, which could make it look rather Sim.  The gaming advice emphasizes Nar, but notes some parts of the game as tending potentially to emphasize other styles.  These points of potential internal tension in the system are not directly mechanical, but stylistic.  Such points of tension are also explicitly discussed and weighed in the text of the game.

Incoherent: Same as the Flexible GNS version of incoherence.  For me, the big markers are (1) A strong claim made about "this game is style X," at odds with something in the mechanics, and (2) A strong claim made that the mechanics are "correct" for style X, which usually means that they aren't.

Does this help at all?