Clarifying Sim vs. Vanilla Nar

[ewilen]

This is another post related to my thread over in the GNS forum about identifying GNS modes, here. Bankuei had expressed a distaste for "non-directed Sim". That raises the question for me (which I posed over in that thread): Is there such a thing as "directed Sim" that isn't Illusionist or Participationist? If so, what does it look like? In practice, how would one distinguish it from Narrativism, particularly Vanilla Narrativism? How might it clash with (Vanilla) Nar, in the sense of reducing the enjoyment of the participants when both modes are "trying" to be present?

When I think back to non-directed games, I can think of two general cases--both quite enjoyable for me. The examples for the first case are not IMO complete "instances of play" although one could possibly imagine them being extended that way. In the campaign with Hassan described in another thread, it was established in the course of play that another player's character, one of those quasi-Byzantines, had a vague distrust of Arabs. He was also dour, aristocratic, and proper, that is to say, in many ways the opposite of Hassan. This led to a fair amount of in-character hijinx not unlike one of those cop buddy movies. E.g., the two of them playing chess up in the crow's nest of a ship (somehow) and Hassan either cheating or outwitting the other fellow. It was generally in the midst of travel or campfire time in a given adventure; thus not completely unstructured but the GM gave us room to pursue those sorts of things. The same player was also co-GM in another brief campaign (Rolemaster) which developed into the characters taking refuge with some sort of (literally underground) rebel group; I recall a fair amount of time spent on getting the characters adjusted to their new circumstances, which included being assigned jobs in the underground. It was very Terry Gilliamish, with my character (a scrawny illusionist) getting into an argument with the officer in charge of the mess hall over the best way to clean out an enormous cauldron used to cook porridge. He said to let it dry and then chip it out in chunks; I insisted on scraping out the residue while still liquid. Eventually something important happened which might have led to more focused action, but unfortunately the two GM's stopped running the game shortly thereafter.

The other case was a stretch of a Runequest campaign where play centered on a large estate or manor, with the characters being family members and hired hands. It felt a bit like running a ranch, in that we basically stayed in place while the complications came to us--a minor epidemic in a nearby village, some sort of nasties sighted in the woods and thus requiring investigation and extermination. Low key, still enjoyable, though I think there were too many players.

By contrast, I preferred the RQ campaign to a higher-magic and more-focused D&D variant in which I was involved at the same time. It entailed an overt quest strung over the course of ten months' play. In the latter game, although the PC's had freedom to go anywhere on the map, and everyone in theory had input, it felt quite directed and, frankly, patchwork. This is bizarre, because I trust the GM's claim that it wasn't directed at all. Perhaps the problem was that the rules of the setting were not well conveyed to me, or perhaps it was that the GM's Intuitive Continuity was showing--no matter where we went, there was always a problematic situation waiting for us. Not necessarily a set-piece battle, but an issue-of-the-day which I never felt was foreseeable based on what I knew of the world.

Again, most of this post has concerned "non-directed" play which I would consider Sim. Not all of it was complete "instances of play", though. The last, high-magic game may have been some form of Sim (directed? non-directed? participationist?) or it may have been something else entirely.

[Ian Charvill]

Eliot

When you're talking about 'complications' in the RQ campaign or problematic situation.  Can you give some examples of these, and how as a group the players resolved them?

[ewilen]

Sure, though it's difficult since (as I mentioned elsewhere) it was over a decade ago. So I may be doing some reconstruction, and hopefully I won't end up twisting my recollection to bias the discussion.

I recall that for most of the RQ campaign, I had a character named Starbuck who was essentially a "person"--I conceptualized him as not a bad fighter, possibly an ex-soldier, but basically someone who was happy to have work and hoped to improve his lot through employment and experience. As such, he really didn't have much say in the workings of the manor; another more-established player had a PC who was a family member and thus led the group. So, I remember an occasion where some sort of nasties (broos? trolls? or maybe just maneating crocodiles) were reported to be in the neighborhood, and basically, the boss said "let's go get 'em", and we did. A detailed combat system was used (a cross between RQ and Harnmaster, with an even more elaborate homebrew system for regulating action sequencing), and a good amount of enjoyment came from planning out the scouting and ambush (some collaboration here), then executing the plan. For me, I also quite enjoyed a low-magic skirmish with emphasis on maneuver and "combined arms" (bowmen and footmen doing their respective parts), as opposed to the experience I'd often had with other games (primarily D&D), where there was little sense of space or terrain, and it mainly felt like an attritional struggle determined by "roll to hit" and deciding which spells to cast.

But as I said, too many players, thus relatively little opportunity for personal initiative, and the detailed combat system did take up a lot of time. Later on I recall that the "boss" decided to go on some sort of mission farther afield, which we all joined in, and at one point we ended up in a town, which provided individual opportunities to pick up rumors. But then...the GM moved away.