This is gonna take a little while for me to go over, so bear with me.

A couple a' months back now, me and a few semi-regular players were playing a zombie-horror-survival game where the basic premise was that we played ourselves as our hometown was overrun by the undead, without a strong focus on 'realistic' outcomes and no deliberate effort to impose a predecided storyline.  The game itself wasn't perfect by any stretch- the underlying system was some BRP-derived relic with plenty of support for combat, but not much else, and in the event we wound up doing chases, conversations, investigations and agriculture more often than direct combat, but the GMs' adjudications on the subject were reasonable, and it all seemed to mesh.  Despite occasional lapses into illusionism, and a frank admission that he was improvising various bits and pieces as he went, the story took interesting twists over time and it definitely felt like our choices had genuine consequences.  (One interesting scene involved me butchering, not once, but twice, what seemed to all appearances to be a totally non-hostile zombie-child, but that's a long story.)  The campaign only lasted a couple of sessions, but it seemed to be a promising start.

Which all brings me back to an excerpt from Narrativism: Story Now-

Jesse: I'm just still a little confused between Narrativism and Simulationism where the Situation has a lot of ethical/moral problems embedded in it and the GM uses no Force techniques to produce a specific outcome. I don't understand how Premise-expressing elements can be included and players not be considered addressing a Premise when they can't resolve the Situation without doing so.

Me: There is no such Simulationism. You're confused between Narrativism and Narrativism, looking for a difference when there isn't any.

This feels all a bit vague without some actual Actual Play to sink my teeth into, but I've come to realize that a request like "Please barf forth all the Actual Play you can physically recall" can be less than helpful.  So I'll structure it like this:

Can you please provide a recap of a scene or scenes and point out:
  - What the Premise is, and
  - How the players are addressing the Premise within the scene.

I think that might be a fruitful place to start.  It'd be just as fair to start from the other end and ask for the Simulationy bits first, and I think we'll get there eventually, but I suspect that's the sort of thing that we're better at recognizing at face value already (look, an encumbrance check mechanic.)

Cheers,
Roger

Roger wrote:
This feels all a bit vague without some actual Actual Play to sink my teeth into, but I've come to realize that a request like "Please barf forth all the Actual Play you can physically recall" can be less than helpful.  So I'll structure it like this:

Can you please provide a recap of a scene or scenes and point out:
  - What the Premise is, and
  - How the players are addressing the Premise within the scene.

Thanks, Alfryd.  That helps, although it's not quite enough to help us determine what's going on here.

That basic Situation -- someone is going to die if we don't let them in, what do we do? -- can be explored through any of the creative agendas.

From the Right to Dream essay:  The point is that one can care about and enjoy complex issues, changing protagonists, and themes in both sorts of play, Narrativism and Simulationism. The difference lies in the point and contributions of literal instances of play; its operation and social feedback.

And here's a bit from the Story Now essay which I think might be helpful:

[...]
But Narrativist role-playing is defined by the people involved placing their direct creative attention toward Premise and toward birthing its child, theme. It sounds simple, and in many ways it is. The real variable is the emotional connection that everyone at the table makes when a player-character does something. If that emotional connection is identifiable as a Premise, and if that connection is nurtured and developed through the real-people interactions, then Narrativist play is under way.
[...]

Now, I'm personally not entirely sold on this whole "yeah, but what are you feeling, man?" vibe I sometimes get from this approach to Story Now, but that's probably a discussion for a different thread.  As it stands as defined, Story Now deals a lot with the emotional connections of the players at the table.

So:  what was your (you, the player) emotional connection to the woman outside the door?  What was the other player's emotional connection to her, the one who wanted to let her in?  How did you feel about condemning her to die?  How did the other players around the table feel about you condemning her to die, and about their own decision to let you condemn her to die?

Cheers,
Roger

Roger wrote: Now, I'm personally not entirely sold on this whole "yeah, but what are you feeling, man?" vibe I sometimes get from this approach to Story Now, but that's probably a discussion for a different thread.  As it stands as defined, Story Now deals a lot with the emotional connections of the players at the table.

So:  what was your (you, the player) emotional connection to the woman outside the door?  What was the other player's emotional connection to her, the one who wanted to let her in?  How did you feel about condemning her to die?  How did the other players around the table feel about you condemning her to die, and about their own decision to let you condemn her to die?

Alfryd wrote:
I feel, for example, that so many fantasy yarns gravitate toward feudal settings because it helps to satisfy these conditions:  the nobility's decision-making has a disproportionate impact on events regardless of individual competency, while political stability is cemented by kinship ties that frequently conflict with large-scale social priorities.  This combines to ensure that a privileged handful of characters- and only those handful- make really big choices with really big consequences.  (It makes for, at one and the same time, a wonderful dramatic premise and a truly shitty system of government.)

contracycle wrote: Well, just as a quibble, I don't think that RPG's do gravitate to Feudal settings at all.  None of them, or at least none that I have ever seen, have ever done anything remotely like it.  Sure there is a sort of nominal genuflection to it, but the texture of the world is actually very modern, such as for example having highly flexible, overproductive economies, countries with strong nationalist sentiments and identities, and yet an ethnic melting pot.  Makes me shake my fists at the sky and yell "this is all wrong!".

Alfryd, I totally get this. When I was in the thick of trying to figure out GNS, looking at some of my favourite game sessions, one day I thought they were Sim and the next day I thought they were Nar. One day I read some comments about Nar that seemed just alien to me, considerations on a seamingly abstract level of “statements” and “meaning” and, worst of all, “premise” that I never could relate to, and I thought, these guys are playing a totally different game than me. Another day, I read some account of a supposedly Nar game and I thought, hey, that sounds fun, that’s the kind of thing I like to play, too.

I wrote a lot about my game sessions of old, Star Wars d6 and Vampire, which were pretty clearly Sim by Big Model terms. I know some things have changed for me since then, in particular my approach to GM vs. player tasks and the players’ part in deciding what happens. And sure I emphasize different elements when I play different games. System does matter and all. But when did I cross the Nar line, if ever?

I’ve been a Forge regular since 2004, and for a while I’ve been contributing pretty actively. I even wrote up a summary of the Big Model once which Ron confirmed to be correct. I tell you something. With some games I played in, to this date, I can’t tell you whether they were High Concept Sim with a strong emphasis on drama and player-driven play, or Vanilla Nar with a strong emphasis on Exploration. Or maybe even a Hybrid, though to my understanding of the “state of the Model”, the idea of a “Hybrid” is kind of a relic.

At some point I decided I just don’t need to know.

- Frank

Not that it really matters so much the label you stick on your gaming, but isnt it about the agenda of the players rather than what happens?  Two groups playing a survival horror game with different agendas might produce the same scenarios occasionally, by different means.  The first group is trying to be as true to in-game cause and effect as possible, whilst the second group is actively pursuing opportunities to confront the characters with interesting decisions -- they both end up barricaded in a stronghold with a hungry person outside.

Nope, no traps here.  "Fun" isn't anything worth talking about in this context, but that again is a whole other thread.

So, yeah, we all agree that play under all Creative Agendas can have lots of moral quandaries, big solid Premises, etc, embedded in it.  Here's what I think the big difference is:

In Story Now, the player characters (and, by proxy, the players) are deciding how to resolve the Premise.

In Right to Dream, the player characters (and, by proxy, the players) are discovering how the Premise is resolved by the System.

That might be sort of a subtle point, so let me illustrate with an example:

We've got our Premise -- "Is a ruthless selfishness necessary to survive in a crisis?"

In a Story Now game, we're typically going to have player characters across the spectrum of ruthless selfishness, and the game will consist of pushing the characters into crisis and seeing how it works out for them.  Some of the characters may survive, some may not; some may change their opinions about the Premise along the way.  An individual's answer to the Premise is fundamentally a subjective opinion.

In a Right to Dream game, answering the Premise is essentially an exercise in the scientific method.  You've got characters who require a certain amount of food each day and who can grow a certain amount of food in a month.  What are the minimum and maximum size of a viable group?  It's simply a matter of crunching the numbers, rolling the dice, and finding out what the System tells you.  The answer to the Premise is already in there, within the parameters and models of the System, waiting to be discovered.  It becomes a matter of objective fact.

In my own experience, I think I've seen this come to light most obviously with Vampire: the Masquerade.  When I was a bright-eyed naïve new player, I thought, wow, this'll be great -- let's address what it means to be a monster, what it means to be driven by an insatiable hunger.  Then I discovered it means that you get three extra dots in Stamina and you need to test versus Willpower to not bite some dude.  The theme that I was hoping to personally address was already sitting there, fixed and naked, in the Simulation.

Cheers,
Roger

Roger wrote: Nope, no traps here.  "Fun" isn't anything worth talking about in this context, but that again is a whole other thread.

In a Right to Dream game, answering the Premise is essentially an exercise in the scientific method.  You've got characters who require a certain amount of food each day and who can grow a certain amount of food in a month.  What are the minimum and maximum size of a viable group?  It's simply a matter of crunching the numbers, rolling the dice, and finding out what the System tells you.  The answer to the Premise is already in there, within the parameters and models of the System, waiting to be discovered.  It becomes a matter of objective fact.

In my own experience, I think I've seen this come to light most obviously with Vampire: the Masquerade.  When I was a bright-eyed naïve new player, I thought, wow, this'll be great -- let's address what it means to be a monster, what it means to be driven by an insatiable hunger.  Then I discovered it means that you get three extra dots in Stamina and you need to test versus Willpower to not bite some dude.  The theme that I was hoping to personally address was already sitting there, fixed and naked, in the Simulation.

stefoid wrote:
Not that it really matters so much the label you stick on your gaming, but isnt it about the agenda of the players rather than what happens?  Two groups playing a survival horror game with different agendas might produce the same scenarios occasionally, by different means.  The first group is trying to be as true to in-game cause and effect as possible, whilst the second group is actively pursuing opportunities to confront the characters with interesting decisions -- they both end up barricaded in a stronghold with a hungry person outside.

Frank wrote:
Alfryd, I totally get this. When I was in the thick of trying to figure out GNS, looking at some of my favourite game sessions, one day I thought they were Sim and the next day I thought they were Nar. One day I read some comments about Nar that seemed just alien to me, considerations on a seamingly abstract level of “statements” and “meaning” and, worst of all, “premise” that I never could relate to, and I thought, these guys are playing a totally different game than me. Another day, I read some account of a supposedly Nar game and I thought, hey, that sounds fun, that’s the kind of thing I like to play, too.

...At some point I decided I just don’t need to know.

Whats improv got to do with GNS?

stefoid wrote:
Whats improv got to do with GNS?

I think the general understanding of improv is that the GM reacts to the players during play, and the 'plot' arises from that interaction on the fly, as opposed to preconceiving a plot before play and walking the players through it.  (to some degree or other).

Your definition of improv seems to me to be :  introducing a situation into the fiction for reasons other than in-game causality.  Is that a fair understanding?

If so, I would use another term for it.  It seems to me that using 'improv' as I define it is going to help simulation play because you are reacting (with 100% causality) to what the players are doing, rather than trying to direct them back to the pre-conceived plot which may result in you ignoring/lessening causality of player actions  because it would take the game away from the preconceived idea of where it should go.

Your version of 'improv' is better described as 'agenda' , as everybody has been saying.  If your agenda is causality then you are playing a simulist game, regardless of the situations that arise during play sometimes being the same as what might arise with a narativist agenda.

However, to have a narrative agenda you cant railroad, because that wouldnt allow the players to explore the situations as they see fit.  So narativist agenda and improv go hand in hand.  Which is probably why you are saying that imrpov is about narativist play and should be avoided for simulist agendas, but that isnt the case.  Two seperate issues.

Alfryd wrote:
Of course, this ideal raises all kinds of practical difficulties, and gets even uglier when you toss in the insistence that players must know, and have control over, nothing the characters wouldn't.  Because then the GM has to keep the machinery of an entire universe in their head, and the players have to essentially take it on trust that he or she is some kind of Mentat paragon always capable of maintaining a perfect separation between (A) what would genuinely seem most likely to happen on the basis of pre-established knowledge of the world, and (B) what he or she would personally like to happen as a real human being.  (I would personally contend there is such a distinction, but the temptation to mix the two is perfectly real.  And of course, depending on your overarching goal, may not be a bad thing.  But it ain't Sim.)

I cant say I've ever experienced this kind of play but maybe that's because I just tend to see all the dials and knobs being turned and dont worry about it.

Take your post apocalyptic game for an example, there are literally hundreds of choices you have to make in determining what is 'realistic' in the game world and in a whole lot of these choices what may be most realistic would likely end up with a pretty uninteresting world.  How the characters will interact with the game world is a huge question.  Do you want the characters fighting zombies or should they be to dangerous to fight and the characters should run and hide?  Will their be constant masses of zombies moving around hunting for the characters or can the characters settle down and try and grow food and create a new society.  Can animals become zombies?  Do zombies move fast or slow?  How badly injured do you have to be to become infected?  What's the chance of characters becoming infected? 

You talk a lot about once play starts but really the things that are decided before play starts have a huge impact on how the game will turn out.  Embedding those moral/ethical problems in the setting is one, chosing situations that come up in play that emphasize or ignore them and make a choice necessary or treating it as meaningless is another, that includes things like the ramifications of these ethical decisions happening offscreen or outside the scope of play.  Conversely all these decisions made before play begins shape how play will turn out to such a huge fashion that I dont see the difference between the preplay manipulation and the in play manipulation like railroading.  Some people may not accept it, others do, I cant accept that it is anathema to sim play.

Alfryd wrote: ...the thing is that- while I agree there needs to be an 'emotional connection' in the sense that the players do care about how the characters feel, that doesn't mean player feelings equate with character feelings.

So, in that sense, focusing on player responses as opposed to character reponses could be misleading.

Again, I would say this is predicated on the assumption that (A) the player-characters are all perfectly rational and (B) that large-scale outcomes are deterministic (which is to say, you can forecast in advance what the 'optimal' outcome would be without, as it were, 'experimenting' with different courses of action.)  I don't think either of those assumptions actually accords with observations of reality.  Which means it is, at best, a rather selective application of Sim principles.

stefoid wrote:
I think the general understanding of improv is that the GM reacts to the players during play, and the 'plot' arises from that interaction on the fly, as opposed to preconceiving a plot before play and walking the players through it.  (to some degree or other).

Your definition of improv seems to me to be :  introducing a situation into the fiction for reasons other than in-game causality.  Is that a fair understanding?

If so, I would use another term for it.  It seems to me that using 'improv' as I define it is going to help simulation play because you are reacting (with 100% causality) to what the players are doing, rather than trying to direct them back to the pre-conceived plot which may result in you ignoring/lessening causality of player actions  because it would take the game away from the preconceived idea of where it should go.

Your version of 'improv' is better described as 'agenda' , as everybody has been saying.   If your agenda is causality then you are playing a simulist game, regardless of the situations that arise during play sometimes being the same as what might arise with a narativist agenda.

contracycle wrote: Uff.  I dispute that.  First of all, I think the logic of "what would happen" is weak.  All too often that means "what would be the most probable outcome", but reality is more complex than probable outcomes.  What if the odds between two outcomes are 51% and 49%?  To assume that Sim MUST take the former when the two are so close is very limiting.

Second, I don't think that individual preferences are ruled out.  If "what would happen" was all that was inviolved, most FRPG sim play would be reduced to peasants harvesting their fields.  After all, that's where you'd most likely be born, thats the limited world you would most likely encounter, and maybe if you're lucky one day you'll get to go to the town fair 10 miles away.

Caldis wrote: You talk a lot about once play starts but really the things that are decided before play starts have a huge impact on how the game will turn out.  Embedding those moral/ethical problems in the setting is one, chosing situations that come up in play that emphasize or ignore them and make a choice necessary or treating it as meaningless is another, that includes things like the ramifications of these ethical decisions happening offscreen or outside the scope of play.   Conversely all these decisions made before play begins shape how play will turn out to such a huge fashion that I dont see the difference between the preplay manipulation and the in play manipulation like railroading....

Alfryd wrote:
I understand your point, but one of the points I'm making is that, by ensuring the PCs genuinely have a level of mechanical power/influence/information that's commensurate to the scale of the setting/situation, it's possible for their choices to have a dramatic impact on final outcomes without having to distort the strict modelling of in-world causality.  An example I gave was influential nobility within a feudal setting- the idea that their decisions could have major historical ramifications doesn't hinge on some fluke perturbation of the odds, but is entirely expectable.  (With that said, the result would quite possibly be a form of Blood Opera.)

Alfryd wrote:

If you want to phrase 'improvisation' in that way, sure, yeah I can agree with that.  And, yes, being 100% faithful to in-world causality does not have to entail that PC choices are insignificant, because PC choices are an in-world event that should have some repercussions.  The trouble with Sim is that everything else that happens in the world would also, logically, have repercussions, so in order for player choices to be significant, they would have to be expressed through control of characters who are powerful/influential enough to give the environment a run for it's money.  Otherwise, you have to resort to metagame.

Your version of 'improv' is better described as 'agenda' , as everybody has been saying.   If your agenda is causality then you are playing a simulist game, regardless of the situations that arise during play sometimes being the same as what might arise with a narativist agenda.

I still incline toward the view that if it looks like address of premise, walks like address of premise, and quacks like address of premise, it's address of premise.  I'll freely concede that premise-addressing moments-of-decision may arrive with somewhat lower frequency than dark-chocolate-with-cinnamon-sprinkles narrativism, but if stories are about (Moral Choices)X(Consequences), this simply strikes me as a question of tradeoffs between how strictly you model Consequences versus how reliably you hit with Moral Choices.  But how, exactly, do you walk out of this game without player actions producing a theme? 

Where is the ostensible boundary condition between Sim and Nar

Roger wrote: This look very interesting, but I'm finding too many ways to parse that to have a good sense of what you're saying.  So far I'm between:

1.  Focusing on a player's emotional response to the fiction, as opposed to a character's emotional response within the fiction, could be misleading.

2.  Focusing on a player's response to a situation, where the response is deciding to leave someone outside to die, could be misleading as opposed to focusing on the character's response to do so.

That being said, is there any requirement for the Right to Dream player to be rational?  Hmmm.  Deep question, this.  I would suggest that it is a fundamental feature of Right to Dream play.  The enjoyment comes from Exploring the rational cause-and-effect System.  As the Right to Dream essay proposes, "Internal Cause is King".  I can't think of any examples of irrational play that would persist beyond a short-lived superstition, but I'm happy to hear suggestions.

stefoid wrote:
In the agenda of the people at the table.  If your agenda is causality, you arent addressing a premise or producing a theme, you are addressing causality which might have a few themey moments.

Caldis wrote:
This is exactly the point though.  By setting the game up in such a manner and then following through on those expectations in play and also allowing the players to freely choose how to respond to those situations you are engaging in a narrativist creative agenda and not a simulationist one.

stefoid wrote:
Players choices are significant if you focus on, and play out the consequences of those decisions to their full extent.  the magnitude of those consequences doesn't really come into it.  they could be earth shattering or purely personal for the character involved, depending on the game.  If you rob the players of a chance to make a decision or modify the natural consequences of the decision, in order to drive the plot, then thats where player decisions become less significant.

If "internal cause is king" more or less accidentally goes ahead and creates theme, thats fine.  It just won't do it consistently.  So if you play according to "internal cause is king" consistently, MOST of your play won't produce theme.

See, this is what I was trying to get at by pointing to situational selection.  I don't think it'sd limited to initial setup at all.  Although the fundamental draw is exploration of causality in the imaginary world, you still need to contrive situaitons in which that is brought about, in which Interesting Stuff Happens.  And when Interesting Stuff Happens, you have reasonable odds of stumbling into the same sort of fictional situations that might potentially produce address of premise and thence theme.  But that is a side effect, and if the players at the table aren't actively trying to pursue that, it may well flop or just be incidental.  But more often, you're going to find they more or less contradict each other.  The thing that would be most thematically satisfying would require causality be rejected or vice versa.

And the only reason that this is worth mentioning, worth attaching a label to, is because you might have one player who lives for the thematic moments and another player who enjoys the exploration of causality, and one or the other is not going to be fully satisfied.  I think you have overextended the definitions; the description of RTD does not say "and it never ever produces any kind of thematic play whatsoever", just as the Narr definition does not claim "and it never ever includes any kind of causality exploration".  They are PRIORITIES, not absolute limits.

I guess I really just dont understand the point of what you are trying to resolve here?  When you sit down to play a game, you prioritise the elements of play that are important to you and your group and you play that way.  The resulting game might have gamist moments, it might have themey moments, it might have simmy moments.  It doesnt matter what you label the resulting mishmash - what matters is a) are you getting what you expect and b) is that satisfying for everyone playing?

Are you engaging in a theoretical play-labelling discussion here, trying to understand the convolutions of forge theory, or are you having problems with a) and/or b) at the table?

Look, it's possible that I'm reading too much into this, or that I'm just fussing excessively over arbitrary labels.  And I apologise if I've pored over some article from years ago and seized upon some isolated remarks out of context.

I would add that I have an immense respect for the body of practical observations that folks on the forge have built up over time, and that I have found the various on-site articles and discussion threads to be enormously informative and full of useful insights- Ron's in particular.  I absolutely do not dispute that various techniques associated with the different modes can severely undermine and contradict eachother in non-obvious ways, and I entirely agree that analysis of player motivations is hugely important.  There is, in my mind, absolutely no question that discussion of The Threefold Model, GNS, and The Big Model has had a huge and overwhelmingly positive impact on system design and promoted healthier habits within the hobby as a whole.

However.

I don't understand how Premise-expressing elements can be included and players not be considered addressing a Premise when they can't resolve the Situation without doing so.

I don't understand how a heavy focus on in-world causality that incorporates observations of how people behave in the real world cannot be considered Simulationist.

Because apparently, you can have High-Concept Sim with a strong focus on drama and player autonomy, and that'll be just Simulationist, and you can have Vanilla Narrativism with a strong focus on Exploration, and that'll be just Narrativist (even when the group itself had no conscious notion they were playing that way or the other, and if you asked them, might give totally different answers.)  But hey- these are, evidently, both potentially totally functional creative agendas that the whole group can groove to.  And apparently, very very difficult to functionally distinguish from eachother, in terms of how much time and attention is paid to which bits and pieces during play.

If it's a question of 'no artificial additives, flavourings or preservatives means Sim', and 'inescapable moral questions with consequences equals Nar', to whatever degree, then I contend it is possible to accomodate both.  Or, if it's a question of procedural tradeoffs being involved between promoting one or the other, then it seems there are viable positions all along the spectrum between that can be totally functional creative agendas for particular groups.  I have absolutely have no problem with that idea.  But either way, that invalidates one of the key predictions of GNS theory, which is that groups that 'muddy' their agendas should experience at best mediocre and at worst dysfunctional play.

I'm just getting a distinct sense of 'oh, it's a particle', or 'oh, it's a wave' depending on how on how you interpret the results, with the implication that never the twain shall meet.

Im the wrong person to talk forge theory with --  I find the way it is defined by "story now" where players  collectively agree to address an ethical theme as a bit freaky in some contexts.  However I can see how playing nar games where the entire ruleset revolves around a specific premise means you cant possibly avoid it if you play that game.  So perhaps thats all the 'agreement' amounts to -- lets play this specific game that is about this premise.  Agenda.  But I havent played any of those games.

I just know what elements of role playing I prioritize - drama over 'realism', cinematic style conflict resolution, conflict res over task res, improv over predefined plot, etc...    What classification that falls under doesnt matter.

Things is that, back in the day, when the internet put large numbers of gamers into direct contact with each other for the first time, it rapidly became clear that there were massively conflicting ideas about people in games should be doing.  This collapsed into a whole bunch of you're-doing-it-wrong type arguments, and worse, you're-a-pervert-dteroying-the-hobby type stuff.  And to cool this down somewhat, a model was devekloped that recognised that not everyone was after exactly the same experience of play.

So the one thing we know is that there are a bunch of people out there who would have liked to address premise, but the rest of the group compromised that goal becuase they were more interested in The Dream, and vice versa, and that there are whole groups who would look at other groups play style and say it's sucky and boring. The GNS categorisation is an attempt to explain that phenmonon, not to assert or impose it.

I'd agree that if players really CAN'T resolve a situation except by addressing premise, and if this is a CONSISTENT feature of play, then that is Narr.  But I'd bet real money that in a sim game most of the time players COULD resolve the situation without addressing premise, and that even when it does occur it's NOTa consistent feature of play.

Now at the risk of making gross and unfair assumptions, I think the example you gave is one of an essentially accidental occurrence.  It looks to me rather like the following happened: the GM wanted to intoriduce a pet character, or a source of plot or setting information, into the group; and chose a female character in the hopes this would arouse greater sympathy, and gave her a lot of weapons so she would appear useful and competent.  When you rejected her, she was disposed of, because the GM is either going to abandon the attempt or try another device to introduce whatever function that character was supposed to fulfill.  It's probably caused some sort of prep rewrite.

That doesn't seem to me like the GM pushed a situation that was intended to invoke a premise addressing response, not least because ther decision was so sharp and binary, without buildup.  Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe you will find that the GM is indeed doing precisely that, and similar situations continue to arise, and are in fact the important part of play, both to the GM and to the players - rather than the exploration of the dream world that you're inhabiting.  From the rest of what you've said about the game, the strong interest seems to lie in the pseudo-reality of the game world; it doesn't seem to me that the players or GM are actively seeking out opportunities to address premise.  So I see no reason not to describe this as sim.

One of the things to remember about premise and addressing premise is that it's something that remains constant throughout the game.  You dont just do it in one instant of play its something that affects play throughout the game.  The idea comes from Lagos Egri's work on stage plays and it referred to the whole play being focused on addressing the premise of the play.  Now there are differences between a stage play and a roleplaying game so it's not a direct translation but the idea holds true.  Your one moment of ethical choice doesnt necessarily express premise, if it doesnt have any further impact on the game.  I'd suggest that setting up a post-apocalyptic game world where your characters will constantly be challenged to survive and they have to make ethical choices based on that challenge to survive is predisposing the game towards narrativism, it could go towards gamism if it's a test of the players ability to see if they can get the characters to survive or sim if it's not so much about what ethical choices the characters make but how there physical abilities and possesions change over time as they live through the apocalypse.

I think another problem is you've set out that you think certain elements are essential sim elements but you havent really been outlined what those are.  I notice in the one thread you linked to Eero started to talk about how your assumptions fell in line with nar thought, character integrity being essential to nar whereas you had claimed it for sim territory.  So it might be more fruitful to discuss what are the baseline assumptions for sim play and see if we can come to agreement on those rather than just continue what looks to be talking past each other here.  That might warrant another thread or maybe we can just discuss your bullet points I see problems with associating several of them with sim play and not play in general.

contracycle wrote: Now at the risk of making gross and unfair assumptions, I think the example you gave is one of an essentially accidental occurrence.  It looks to me rather like the following happened: the GM wanted to intoriduce a pet character, or a source of plot or setting information, into the group; and chose a female character in the hopes this would arouse greater sympathy, and gave her a lot of weapons so she would appear useful and competent.  When you rejected her, she was disposed of, because the GM is either going to abandon the attempt or try another device to introduce whatever function that character was supposed to fulfill.  It's probably caused some sort of prep rewrite.

Caldis wrote: I think another problem is you've set out that you think certain elements are essential sim elements but you havent really been outlined what those are.

Alfryd wrote: ...for Plot Reason X, without a basis in prior events...

Alfryd wrote:

Caldis wrote: I think another problem is you've set out that you think certain elements are essential sim elements but you havent really been outlined what those are.

I thought I outlined this in the OP, but my understanding is largely as follows:
*  You have certain starting 'seed' assumptions that, ideally, resemble those of particular source materials.
*  Beyond that, events ideally unfold based on in-world causality and ONLY in-world causality.  Internal Cause Is King.  (This is subject to the understanding that player input as expressed through character decisions, along with certain random outcomes, are valid forms of in-world causality.)
*  The events that unfold should, in turn, ideally exhibit properties that resemble the source materials.  (However, 'unpredictability' may well be one of those properties.)

But this basic idea that's present in so many Sim-oriented RPGs- namely the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast- has absolutely nothing to do with allowing in-world causality to reign supreme.  Nothing.  Not a damn thing.  Zip.  Nadda.  Nil.  Zilch.  It doesn't make inherent sense in terms of politics, it doesn't make inherent sense in terms of psychology, and it doesn't make inherent sense in terms of physics- particularly not when you take reality as your 'source material'. 

The bolded bit is interesting -- when I made my bronze age fantasy heartbreaker, I had some personality stats which consisted of 6 or so sliders which represented opposite ends of a behavioural spectrum.  At one end of each spectrum was complete freedom of player choice and at the other end was complete constraint.  i.e.  <brave/cowardly>,  <immoral, moral>,  etc...    If you were perfectly brave and perfectly immoral, the player was 'allowed'  huge amounts of freedom in deciding character actions, whereas a craven, goody-two-shoes character would be constrained by those personality traits in relevant situations.

How these were used was pure sim.  During character creation, you set your sliders, and you got some points for spending elsewhere if you moved your sliders to the constrained end of a scale.  and having done that, thats how you were supposed to play your character.  There was even a rule that said if the player chose to play out of character as defined by the sliders, then the GM could call them on it.  so yeah, there was a player decision during character creation -- how much freedom of decision do I want for my character in certain situations...  and then during play, you were expected to stick to that.

Now during my current game design, I also have some 'personality stats' called Motivations which the primary purpose of is to drive character goals and complicate things for them.  And the rule in regard to how they effect player decisions is :  You decide under what circumstances the characters motivations might kick in, or when the character might break with those motivations.

So there is significant change in my outlook between those two games.  Is the first one sim and the second one supportive of nar?  probably...  but thats tangential to the issue behind the change in outlook.  The point remains, youll be much better off worrying about concrete aspects of play which you enjoy or dont enjoy and what you can do about that.  The GNS stuff is handy in that it if you find an aspect of your current play that you dont like, it might point you in a direction of a solution.

I guess my personal opinion on the subject is that a character shouldn't violate a particular Motive gratuitously.  That is, if you've established particular goals, urges and ethics for your character, then the character shouldn't break them without a reason.

But there could be lots of reasons for breaking with a particular goal, urge, or ethic- some of which might be posed by the GM in a deliberate effort to foster drama, and some of which might emerge 'organically' on the basis of in-world cause-and-consequence (including the actions of other PCs, or the character's own personal epiphanies.)  "It's dangerous" could be one.  "My friend disagrees" is another.  Or- and this is perfectly possible- one of the character's basic motives could conflict with another.  In fact, I would contend that all moments of drama- i.e, the kind that drive good stories- involve a conflict between the character's motives which makes their behaviour difficult to predict.

It's just that not all the character's motives can be explicitly enumerated or formalised on paper.  Some of them could be ephemeral, some of them might develop or wither over time in response to accumulated experience, and some might barely need mentioning- the urge to preserve self, friends and kin, for example.  The only way to really grapple with the full nuances of the situation is to get a human brain in on the action, directly.  Factual mission-statements, dice-rolls and stats can help, but they cannot possibly capture the whole story.  You cannot exclude choice from the equation and expect to reproduce human behaviour.

So within that framework, I think there is still an expectation the player be able to put him or herself in the character's shoes, and think as they would for a bit.  I just don't think you should simplify the problem to the point of falsification.

Anyway- since I'm largely babbling to myself at this point- I'd just like to say that if I've offended anyone who may have been involved in the games I cited, or if I phrased things indelicately, then I'd just like to apologise for that and hope it doesn't sour them on the idea of trying relatively plot-less games in the future.  I appreciate that getting this right is not trivial, that some RPG systems are better adapted for it than others, and that even under ideal circumstances, it ain't neccesarily for everyone.

To close- since I've basically been crapping all over the idea, and I do enjoy playing Devil's Advocate from time to time- I'll just make a few idle speculations as to why Sim games might, historically, have been conflated with fixed plotlines, for reasons that are, in and of themselves, sympathetic and understandable.

The first is that there is a focus on predictions matching up with observations.  Insofar as Sim-inclined players/GMs get a kick out of following the logic of internal cause-and-consequence, there is a certain pleasure to be gained from a sense of underlying predictability to events.  Hence, the association between Sim rulesets, and (A) Fixed-personality-profiles that allow the characters to be bounced off pre-scripted crises like billiard balls until they go down the right pot, or (B) Pastiche imitation of existing source-materials.  The Impossible Thing, after all, is not obvious on first viewing, and because drama applies to large-scale outcome and deep motivations, a focus on reductionist explanations means it's entirely possible to miss the forest for the trees.

Secondly, the strict focus on in-world causality and maintaining an illusion of tactile 'reality' means that baring the system mechanics too nakedly can disrupt the sense of 'immersion' that Sim players value- it can be an uncomfortable reminder of the underlying, artificial, real-world, stats-and-dice-driven scaffolding to the experience.  Hence, some players prefer that the GM keep all the dirty, oily, cantankerous details of the nuts and gears of the engine hidden behind the sleek, chrome-plated exterior of narrated outcomes and a well-placed GM screen.  (This might also account for the use of code-phrases like "easy", "difficult", "challenging", etc. in place of explicit target-numbers in things like FUDGE and Cyberpunk, IIRC.)  Hence, this huge investment of absolute trust in the GM to keep things humming along quietly in the background that often hides substantial operational defects.

Thirdly, in the same sense that rules-bloat in Sim design is often a kind of encysting inflammatory response to Gamist Calvinball-tactics (i.e, rules-lawyers,) it's possible that the rigid insistence on fixed responses to stimuli is a similarly ineffective 'precaution' against Hard Core Gamist incursions, but in the realm of psychology rather than physics, and in the opposite direction- simplifying things past the point of all reason.  In other words, the only way to get some Gamists out of naked Pawn stance is to make adherence to character motives mandatory.

So, I guess I'd just leave it there for now.  Thanks to everyone for the feedback.