Recently there's been a lot of talk of Universalis (or the Pool) as a sim facilitating game. With my understanding of GNS I really dont understand how that's possible so in an effort to clear my own thoughts I'm posting this. I will put forward why I believe it to be Narrativist and I'm really interested in hearing why either I am wrong or in how it is simulationist.

Narrativism is about addressing premise. Addressing premise is a technique put forward by Lajos Egri to help people in writing plays. So narrativism is all about everyone at the table creating a dramatic story.
Universalis is a game about creating stories. Everyone at the table has the same ability to create the story, how then can it not be narrativist?


Vernon M. Ryan

You can 'tell a story' by having the Universalis game be more of a travelogue following the characters around (Sim play)instead of play that strongly addresses a Premise (Nar play).

The current Universalis Arena II wiki-based game is doing a bit of both, but leans more Nar.

In this game, the strange city of Hope travels to new dimensions (shards) every month.To an extent we are following around the various characters from the city of Hope, and inhabitants (including Gods) from the Shard it has travelled to (Before Vesuvius- a greco roman dimension). However, there is a thematic element in this Shard that opposes Hope...in this case its a fatal Hate Plague that is transmitted by voice.

Each Shard will have some aspect of a personified antagonistic element to Hope...it may not be the main point of Play in the Shard (Dimension), but it will exist (and I bet it will often be a major plot point)

We could play without addressing the premise-based flavor of Hope versus Hate, but we've made it important, and thus a strong Nar premise.

We have considered doin some Shards as mostly Sim...by using the play time to mostly just create the world... Sim-Setting I suppose as a priority.

Which reminds me, new players are always welcome.

The city of Hope transistions to a new Shard on June 1st, taking some of its existing characters along, and adding or subracting things from the current Shard as it goes.

Right now it looks like it is going to Commancharia...an endless plain with native indian inspired concepts.

http://www.anvilwerks.com/index.php/TUA2/HomePage

Enjoy!

Try as I might, I can't fit Universalis into a category that faciliates a particular Creative Agenda.

Is it Narrativist? Sure. 'Complications' have been integral to every single game I've played. For me the Complication is the embodiment of Story Now, even more than Kickers or Bangs.

Is it Simulationist encouraging? It certainly encourages adding more details, more Traits to Components ...

... However, a more developed Component has more 'Weight', more ability to affect the story without being removed. They become like Buffy or Jack Bauer - a lead character so filled with traits and backstory that they've become integral to the ongoing story (in game terms, they have too many Traits to make it cost-effective to buy them out of the game). Maybe that's a weird artifact that doesn't fit into any particular Creative Agenda, or maybe that's Simulationist of long-running TV shows.

OTOH, I'm not sure what any particular game of Uni is supposed to be simulating. Maybe it's adherence to the initial Tenets (or maybe it's time for me to re-read the Simulationist essay).

In my experience, a lot of Uni play has facilitated Gamism. First, there's been a repeatedly observed desire to amass coins ... and more coins equals more story power than the other players. Second, depending on what behaviours the group at the table rewards, there's an implied Step on Up in having your version of the story be the one that's adopted. Third, with such simple rules, there's a real buzz to be gotten out of figuring out fixes, patches and gimmicks to give yourself an edge in Complications.

Side-note: The Universalis Arena has shown more co-operative usage of Complications to develop the overall story than I've ever seen at the gaming table.

So, linking back to the initial post, Uni seems to be a game that can shift between Narrativism and Gamism if players don't clearly communicate what they're finding rewarding.

What's the evidence that it's Simulationist? I'd appreciate some thread links on that.

Cheers,
Steve

I think Ron's review in the Reviews section contains a pretty good breakdown of the game's Sim- and Nar-facilitating elements, and why he comes down calling it 'Narrativist'. You could certainly play it hardcore Sim if you wanted, but it facilitates Nar pretty well with 'dropping into characters' and all that. A comparison with the setup procedure for Legends of Alyria, clearly a Nar-facilitating design, is probably useful for seeing this.

Making the comparison between Uni and Alyria: the key difference seems to be that every piece of Alyria's initial story-map is added after asking the question, "How does this relate to the central conflict?"

In Universalis there's no need to establish a central conflict before play starts - or at any point during it.

This leads on to a section from Ron’s review that I've always had trouble interpreting :

I think the game stands firmly in the category of facilitating Narrativist play. This is because:

(1) you must play the metagame to start, which for Simulationist play can be tricky (it's historically not common, certainly), and

(2) no competitive or strategic element can be easily realized (i.e. resolved), and therefore - as Situation emerges from all the other elements of Exploration - Narrativist play is pretty much going to occur. It's a lot like The Pool in this regard; the Narrativist Premise has to be generated during play, but all the tools for doing so are present, and no other approach really works.

It does facilitate Nar better than Sim, to me.

There are no mechanical underpinnings that really promote Sim. That has to be a group goal of play.

That does tend to promote Nar, or maybe even slightly Gamism. Acquiring Coins isn't the point of the game...so Gamists could be shooting themselves in the foot a bit by doing so.

Spending Coins is the point. Story power.

Perhaps even Story Now power. Thats what makes it lean more to Nar.

But group Tenets could specify a Sim bent to the individual game in terms of what can be bought, when and how they be brought into the game.

Much of the Social Contract lies in the Tenet/Gimmick phase, so its hard to talk about the game as a single thing.

The Kroolian Jungle indie-netgaming game has been a fairly Sim-ish Pulp Swords and Sorcerery game complete with halfman-halfcrocodile zombie minions.

Universalis is a very flexible game so its not easy to classify.

Spending coins is indeed the point.

But I think you make a tactical decision about when you spend them. Sometimes I'll have a story direction that I want to push through unchallenged, so I'll amass coins for an upcoming blitzkrieg ... and risk that someone else will come in and totally spin the story off in a different direction.

That's a 'tending towards' Gamism feature for me. But you're right: a really flexible game; almost a Rorschach test of gamer preferences.

Cheers,
Steve.

Course my 'spending the Coins' philosophy is why I hover down at or (mostly) below the low teens in most games... :)

I haven't played it, so I may be misunderstanding it; but it's been my impression that Universalis is fully driftable. The players get to write the rules, as it were, and so create the framework within which a creative agendum is defined. The system requires them to negotiate, and so eventually they either will agree on the goals of play or will completely fall apart as a gaming group.

As I recall, you can spend coins to create "gimmicks", which can be used to make the game more or less of just about anything. Spent one way, the gimmicks will make the game simulationist by excluding a lot of metagame concerns that support narrativism and gamism and simultaneously pushing for a reliable verisimilitude which is so friendly to simulationism. Spent another way, they create a premise-rich environment. Spent yet another way they provide the opportunity for personal glory.

Games that are fully driftable are rare, and are usually categorized as simulationist largely because that becomes the default (if you don't do something to introduce premise or challenge you wind up focusing on the exploration to a greater degree for lack of anything else to do). I see it with Multiverser, where many players go gamist or narrativist through their own initiatives, but the game gets labeled simulationist and played that way quite a bit.

--M. J. Young

Lots of interesting comments and so many directions to take this discussion this however I think the most interesting follows from this quote.

"Ron Edward from his review of universalis" wrote: (2) no competitive or strategic element can be easily realized (i.e. resolved), and therefore - as Situation emerges from all the other elements of Exploration - Narrativist play is pretty much going to occur. It's a lot like The Pool in this regard; the Narrativist Premise has to be generated during play, but all the tools for doing so are present, and no other approach really works.

hix wrote:
I don’t follow (2). As Bob indicated above, there’s no compulsion to generate a Premise in Universalis. In fact, gameplay can be satisfying without it. And recently I think I’ve been reading that Premise (whether articulated or not) isn’t a necessary component of Narrativist play.

So why does Uni skew Narrativist? Why does "no other approach really work"?

"M.J.Young" wrote: As I recall, you can spend coins to create "gimmicks", which can be used to make the game more or less of just about anything. Spent one way, the gimmicks will make the game simulationist by excluding a lot of metagame concerns that support narrativism and gamism and simultaneously pushing for a reliable verisimilitude which is so friendly to simulationism. Spent another way, they create a premise-rich environment. Spent yet another way they provide the opportunity for personal glory.

The problem with the "The players develop any conflict/Situation and it automatically becomes a Premise" is that not all conflicts are Premises.

The assumption is that if the players actively create a Situation then they must have an interest in Premise, but that is clearly not always the case. What if the players created the Situation to see which player could defeat the other? The player created Situation then would be Gamist in orientation and execution.

Premise, at least in the essay, "requires that at least one engaging issue or problematic feature of human existence" be addressed. What if the situation created is neither? What if the situation created is used for nothing more than a contest of wills amongst the players? There is nothing in Gamism that inherently forbids the players from creating situations to Step on Up in.

If player created Situation is not always Narrativist and thus could be Gamist then it is also possible for it to be Simulationist as well. It could just be conflict without any interest in Theme. It could be Situation created not because we are interested in the answer, but just to play through the Situation with no further goal than to Simulate the process of working through such conflicts.

Aure Entaluva,

Silmenume

Silmenume wrote: The problem with the "The players develop any conflict/Situation and it automatically becomes a Premise" is that not all conflicts are Premises.

Well, it's not quite threefold sim, as there are no "simulating" mechanics: the mechanical logic is the logic of stories.

However, to my mind, it's definitely supportive of GNS sim, if only because the reinforcing mechanism is such that it rewards the creation of detail, and the application of already created detail.

So that's deepening & widening the dream, and re-inforcing the dream. Sounds like GNS sim to me.

I'd take issue with Ron's characterization of it as Nar, as the fact that he and his groups "naturally" get Nar play out of Universalis is no more inevitable than a gamist group grooving on using it to move characters into no-win, or at least very tough situations, and creatively using established facts as leverage to deal with those situations. It points more to the inherent driftability of Universalis, as well as Ron's preferences, than it does for determining whether Universalis inherently supports any agenda.

An interesting discussion.

My take on it revolves around the difference between what a game allows and what it supports.

Does Uni allow sim? Absolutely. One of the design goals for me was to allow groups to crank the exploration dial up as high as they desire in terms of both how crunchy they want to get and how strongly or loosely they want to enforce things like causality or genre expectations. So if a group wanted to use Uni in pursuit of a sim agenda (exploration, exploration, and only exploration) they could do so.

But does Uni support sim? Not particularly. The integrity of the simulation is supported in Uni only by the cooperation and collaboration of the players. The sole enforcement the game provides is that Coins spent in support of an established "Fact" are doubled for purposes of Challenges. But even that is a pretty malleable enforcement. If there are enough people who want to violate the fact, or those trying to defend it are relatively cash poor, the game not only permits the "fact" to be violated, but actually says "yes that's the way its supposed to work...that's a feature, not a bug". So while the game certainly permits players to pursue a sim agenda, there really isn't any rules structure that points the game towards sim.



I think Uni's support of Gamism is more visible but actually less effective than its support of Sim. There are elements of Uni that on the surface seem like they'd be ideal for Gamist play: managing the resource of Coins, skillful use Complication to generate Coins, the timing of Interruptions and Control Taking, skillful use of Traits and Master Components, etc. All of these things are definitely elements that reward players who are adept at using them with greater influence in the story. But most games have elements like this. Simply allowing players to scratch the gamist itch is not the same thing as supporting a gamist agenda.

Players in pursuit of a Gamist agenda are likely to be disappointed in Uni. The elements I described above are all present, but frankly, I'd find them to be rather boring if they were the point of play. Generating Coins via Complications is pretty easy. There really isn't a whole lot of deep tactical challenge to it. While there is a degree of learning curve to Coin management, pretty much any player with sufficient familiarity can obtain the Coins they need to participate fully in the game as they desire. There is an issue of the timing of when a player finds themselves relatively poor vs. flush, and this pendulum is indeed a key element of the mechanics...the changing dynamic of who-has-Coins-when between all of the players. But it is primarily an issue of pacing, not winning or losing. Accumulating Coins isn't all that difficult to do, and the sorts of tactics one could use to vastly outstrip your fellows really isn't that fun...even for the person doing it. So not a particularly Gamist supporting game either, IMO.



Narrativism is about addressing premise. I think there is a built in meta level premise to Uni. Simply put "what do you the player feel is important enough to spend Coins on? Knowing that every Coin you spend today is a Coin you can't spend later, and that spending alot of Coins to make choices now means cedeing some ability to influence the future, what is important enough to you at this moment of play to be worth potentially giving up something that may be important to you later?"

In order to play the game, every player has to answer that question. I would argue that every Coin spent is a partial answer to that question whether the player is concious of it or not. The process of answering that question (i.e. "what elements of this story are important enough to you to spend coins on") creates the premise of the story itself. Every time a player takes themself from cash rich to cash poor on a spending spree they are by definition addressing what is important to them as players about the game.

Could that important element be limited to "setting, situation, character, and color", in other words, exploration only? Sure. BUT it isn't going to stay that way. Because every other player at the table is then going to stick their hands in your pie and start playing with the toys you wound up. Could you, as a player, simply sit back and enjoy observing what happens to all of these disparate elements as the various players (yourself included) have them interact with each other? Again sure...as I said the game allows sim play.

But more often then not in my experience and those that have been reported to me, there comes a point, where something just clicks, and it becomes clear what needs to happen. Not just "what could happen", or "what would be plausible to happen"; but what needs to happen in order to make the entire session worth playing. That thing, is almost certainly addressing a narrativist premise of some type.

Well, I'd argue that the value judgement of what folks care about enough to spend coins on is as much Sim as Nar under GNS: if pushed, I'd say it's creating or cementing theme, but that's not the same to me as addressing premise.

Also, I'm not talking about gamism in terms of getting the most coins, which is a pretty dull way to play universalis, IMHO, but in terms of using Universalis to create challenging situations and a framework to step on up.

I don't see Universalis as being especially even abashed Nar, except in so much as it presents few , if any barriers to low points of contact Nar expression, but it does the same for all agenda.

But we're in the land of you say, I say here, and I'm in the position of being contrary to both Ron's review and Ralph's assessment of his own game. Which, if we're pushed to argument from authority, puts me on pretty shaky ground...

Its not shaky ground at all Pete. In fact, this thread, really highlights why GNS isn't really about categorizing games, but rather actual play.

I'm not sure what you mean about creating or cementing theme. What is your distinction between "Creating Theme" vs. "Addressing Premise"?

I'm certainly interested in where you perceive the step on up elements in the game. I'd often worried that the game would engender an attitude of "winning = getting my story in and your story out" in a sort of Once Upon a Time fashion. But I haven't actually seen that materialize in any play I've heard of.

Hiya,

I think Ralph nailed it. I also suggest that people who are interested in this issue pay special attention to the conflict mechanics, as opposed to the comparatively trivial challenge mechanics.

Best,
Ron

I was thinking more, for step on up, in terms of the old favourite of, we're at the end of the third act of four, time to put the protagonist down a big frickin' hole.

In fact, a recent RPG net thread discussing an idea for playing both sides in a Transformers game made me think immediately of Universalis: the proposed structure for a session was: players play the Decepticons coming up with a fiendish plan, and work to eliminate any possible loopholes. Then switch sides, and play as the Autobots, and pit yourself against your own plan.

I can totally see Universalis supporting this method, and it's almost entirely grooving on step on up, the whole group challenging itself.

I'm not saying that there's an element of step on up in the games emchanics as written, but only that it's as enabling to generating challenge as it is to adressing premise.

As for the line between creating theme and addressing premise: I'm seeing your description of play as exploration of possible theme, with each expenditure of coins cementing a more concrete expression of the theme. However, exploration of theme can of course happen without address of premise (but probably not vice versa). You can explore themes of loss, or revenge, or greed, without addressing a premise per se.

However, exploration of theme can of course happen without address of premise (but probably not vice versa). You can explore themes of loss, or revenge, or greed, without addressing a premise per se.

Hi Pete,

I think you might be confounding Challenge and Adversity. Almost all role-playing requires adversity, and certainly all Gamist and Narrativist play-experiences require it in spades. Adversity is often a key feature of "Situation" as a formal component of Exploration.

I also suggest that "engaged with passion" is not the same thing as Step On Up, which I define very carefully in the Gamism essay: putting social esteem at stake with special reference to personal strategy and guts.

So when you see people inject adversity into play, with passion, they are not necessarily introducing Challenge nor Stepping On Up. This behavior may be seen in any mode of play.

Best,
Ron

Ron:

No, but I see where you're coming from: and, absolutley, without adversity, without striving, there's little to be ultimately interested in. So I'm totally down with adversity being integral to all CA.

What I'm talking about is engineering of situation to present tactical challenge within the SiS, with the adjudication of tactics and risk being down to the players moderated through the conflict mechanism.

Hey Pete,

pete_darby wrote: What I'm talking about is engineering of situation to present tactical challenge within the SiS, with the adjudication of tactics and risk being down to the players moderated through the conflict mechanism.

Chris nailed it too. As soon as you try to engineer ...

engineering of situation to present tactical challenge within the SiS, with the adjudication of tactics and risk being down to the players

Okay, cool. I mean, not having seen gamist play of Universalis "in the wild", I was concerned that it was being dismissed without it being attempted or assessed.

If, as it seems, when it's done it turns into a sucking abyss of not fun with a gamist whimpering "make it stop...", I'll concede that perhaps it's not ideal for gamist play.