Kilor Di wrote: I'm kind of new to these forum boards (having only signed on some time last month). That being said, what is a GNS?

It stands for Gamism, Narrativism, Simulationism, and is sort of a shorthand that developed over time for those, now called Creative Agendae. It's the core of a theory of roleplaying which essentially says that when we get together to play role playing games, individually we are expecting to get some particular reward from the activity, and that these rewards tend to fall into one of these three categories.

System Does Matter would be the original article discussing it; GNS and Other Matters expands it nicely. These are both a bit dated. You'll find the articles Step On Up and The Right To Dream very good on gamism and simulationism, respectively, but their narrativism counterpart is not yet in print. There is also an excellent summary of the most recent form of the model in Ron's post at the beginning of the thread The whole model - this is it, and some practical applications of the core concepts in the article Applied Theory.

The articles mentioned are all found in the Articles section of this site, linked at the top of the page; they are all by Ron Edwards with the exception of the last one mentioned.

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young