I just finished reading all three GNS support essays and wanted to air some of my reactions.

In Simulationism: the Right to Dream, Ron Edwards wrote: That's why it's often referred to as "the engine," and unlike other modes of play, the engine, upon being activated and further employed by players and GM, is expected to be the authoritative motive force for the game to "go."

In Narrativism: Story Now, Ron Edwards wrote: A lot of people have mistakenly interpreted the word "Narrativist" for "making it up as we go." Neither this nor anything like it is definitional for Narrativist play . . .

In Simulationism: the Right to Dream, Ron Edwards wrote: The only required priority is to enjoy the System in action.

In Simulationism: the Right to Dream, Ron Edwards wrote: Narrativist character creation in some games requires a fair amount of back-story, just as some Simulationist play does, but in the former, it's about establishing a chassis for conflict, metagame, and reward, and in the latter, it's about Coloring the character and providing opportunities for GM-created hooks.

In Simulationism: the Right to Dream, Ron Edwards wrote: Simulationist play may be spoken of as lacking metagame interpersonal agenda . . . Its metagame, although fully social, is self-referential, to stay in-game.

In Simulationism: the Right to Dream, Ron Edwards wrote: I suggest that in Sorcerer (Narrativist), the expectation is that the character will encounter functional limits of his or her behavioral profile, and eventually, will necessarily break one or more of the formal tenets as an expression of who he or she "is," or suffer for failing to do so. No one knows how, or which one, or in relation to which other characters; that's what play is for. I suggest that in GURPS (Simulationist), the expectation is that the behavioral profile sets the parameters within which the character reliably acts, especially in the crunch - in other words, it formalizes the role the character will play in the upcoming events. Breaking that role in a Sorcerer-esque fashion would, in this case, constitute something very like a breach of contract.

In Simulationism: the Right to Dream, Ron Edwards wrote: Therefore, when you-as-player get proactive about an emotional thematic issue, poof, you're out of Sim.

In Simulationism: the Right to Dream, Ron Edwards wrote: Many people mistake low time-scale techniques like Director stance, shared narration, etc, for Narrativism, although they are not defining elements for any GNS mode. Misunderstanding this key issue has led to many people falsely identifying themselves as playing Simulationist with a strong Character emphasis, when they were instead playing quite straightforward Narrativist without funky techniques.

In Gamism: Step On Up, Ron Edwards wrote: Gamist play, more than any other mode, demands that Situation be not only central, but also the primary focus of attention. You want to play Gamist? Then don't piss about with Character and/or Setting without Situation happening, or about to.

In Gamism: Step On Up, Ron Edwards wrote: For the characters, it's a risky situation in the game-world; in addition to that all-important risk, it can be as fabulous, elaborate, and thematic as any other sort of role-playing. Challenge is merely plain old Situation - it only gets a new name because of the necessary attention it must receive in Gamist play. Strategizing in and among the Challenge is the material, or arena, for whatever brand of Step On Up is operating.

In Gamism: Step On Up, Ron Edwards wrote: I love the T&T and Kobolds texts . . . In these games, the idea is to keep the Challenge whimsical enough that its occasionally-extreme consequences don't reflect proportionally on the player's emotional stakes of the moment.

In Gamism: Step On Up, Ron Edwards wrote: I suggest with great fervor that combat is only one form of conflict, and character survival is only one in-game metric for success.

In Gamism: Step On Up, Ron Edwards wrote: Trying to prevent this one-two combination of behavior has led many game designers mistakenly to provide endless patch rules, full of exceptions to cover the exceptions, none of which accomplishes anything except to open up even more points of vulnerability.

In Gamism: Step On Up, Ron Edwards wrote: Defend against Breaking through elegance, not through patch rules. Eliminate, from the ground up, all recursiveness, nonfunctional layers, and mathematical ratios.

In Gamism: Step On Up, Ron Edwards wrote: Beware of end-runs which permit a Challenge to be solved without the requisite Step On Up ability or competence. Playtest the game multiple times with people who are determined to beat it.

In Gamism: Step On Up, Ron Edwards wrote: The short version is that friendships cannot be placed at stake based on in-play events - if they are, then Step On Up places way too much pressure on the agreement to play together at all.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: Premise must pose a question to the real people, creator and audience alike. The fictional character's belief in something like "Freedom is worth any price" is already an implicit question: "Is it really? Even when [insert Situation]?" Otherwise it will fail to engage anyone.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: The theme is the idea that you wish to explore in the story. It brings unity to the story and is explored throughout the story by the actions of the players and the main characters. Even the obstacle or conflict that forms the plot usually resonates with the theme. It is the thread that ties everything together and usually teaches the players something.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: Narrativist play doesn't force a "separation" from the imaginative commitment to the role-playing. As the whole medium of Creative Agenda is Exploration, you don't have to diminish Exploration at all during Narrativist play. It is instead focused and heightened as the mechanism for addressing Premise.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: Depth and profundity of the Premise and/or theme are false variables. The key issue is whether participants care enough to produce a point, not whether the point is deep.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: a "player" in a Narrativist role-playing context necessarily makes the thematic choices for a given player-character. Even if this role switches around from person to person (as in Universalis), it's always sacrosanct in the moment of decision. "GMing," then, for this sort of play, is all about facilitating another person's ability to do this.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: I submit that trying to resolve conflicts by hoping that the accumulated successful tasks will turn out to be about what you want, is an unreliable and unsatisfying way to role-play when developing Narrativist protagonism.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: When the Situation must slowly develop into Premise, play is necessarily extended into multiple sessions. Playing Sorcerer . . . often proceeds in this fashion, to the extent that the first couple of sessions resemble the first sections of a classical novel rather than a movie or play, and they tend not to show off all of their most satisfying features during single-session demonstration play.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: Producing a story via Force Techniques means that play must shift fully to Simulationist play. "Story" becomes Explored Situation, the character "works" insofar as he or she fits in, and the player's enjoyment arises from contributing to that fitting-in. However, for the Narrativist player, the issue is not the Curtain at all, but the Force. Force-based Techniques are pure poison for Narrativist play and vice versa. The GM (or a person currently in that role) can provide substantial input, notably adversity and Weaving, but not specific protagonist decisions and actions; that is the very essence of deprotagonizing Narrativist play.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: . . . if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play ... and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play ... then why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: An open, out of character dialog about the direction of the story should be maintained so that the Storyteller knows what's working and what's not.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: People apparently prefer a fair amount of context and constraint in order to provide input instead.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: A related tendency is to rely on restraint, stating or implying that "good players wouldn't do that!" I suggest two alternative approaches: (1) that System provide "rebound" or consequences to make the variety of choices interesting, and (2) stating explict Creative Agenda expectations up front.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: If the typical role-playing preferences among humans are Gamist and Narrativist, then play based on these modes should be easy to pick up, easy to spread, and easy to sell, and I think it is all three. However, since the typical role-playing text and typical training is Simulationist, the net effect is to bump the majority of interested people away from the hobby after first contact, and to consolidate the Simulationist primacy in all evident features of the hobby, as opposed to the potential ones. This is one of several reasons why the hobby remains decidedly fringe.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: . . . no one might be interested in you. In which case, you'll have to decide whether it's because your worthy vision is unappreciated and should seek new collaborators, or because your vision is simply lacking. It's not an easy thing to deal with.

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote: But let's say that's all resolved too, and you are holding the brass ring . . . what will you sacrifice to sustain it?

What an amazingly interesting post, Bill. I'm just going to take up one little part of it here - I hope others will do the same, because there's so much here to talk about.

Ron wrote: "I suggest with great fervor that combat is only one form of conflict, and character survival is only one in-game metric for success." And you replied: "Well, ok, I buy the argument as it pertains to character survival. But as it relates to combat, I am less convinced and await enlightenment."

Here are two games which to me really indicate different Gamist competition possibilities: Robin Laws' 'Pantheon', which has these weird little story games where you score points for doing funny things with the stories, and Ron Edwards' 'Elfs', where player conflict and character conflict run side by side in all kinds of ways that involve Gamist competition but need not necessarily involve fighting. In fact, the game seems to support a funny kind of competition in slapstick in a really cool way, to judge by the rpg.net reviews (no play experience yet myself). But anyway both of these seem to facilitate Gamism, and the competition does not center around combat in either one, although in Elfs combat situations are certainly one of many ways to get the game's Step On Up going.

Or, more topically, have a look at the Great Ork Gods playtest... The attribute Oog is used purely as a "score," it has no in game currency value whatsoever, it brings no benefits beyond "I got it.... and you don't."

And for the other points... Bill, i think this isn't just one of the great posts on Ron's essays. I think it's about a dozen. Magic 8-ball says "Responses will follow in spearate baby threads." But, given time, you could feed discussion for about a month with thsi baby alone...

What Pete said. Split this, and split frequently.

Assuming that this will become the "alternate gamism" thread, my position is that combat is merely traditional ane filial. That is, tradition is the form we see gamism in because of D&D. Had the first RPG instead been Buildings & Businesses, I'd be trying to tell people now that they ought to try combat instead of business competiton as a model for RPG gamism (and if you don't think that's a compelling enough arena for competition, I refer you to the current TV show, "The Apprentice").

This doesn't mean that there's any imperative to go this way. Just that people have ignored a wide open ground for far too long for no particularly good reason at all.

Mike

Hi Bill,

I finally managed to get a few minutes to go through your post! I regret that I have to take it fairly piecemeal. For now, I'll keep all my responses in this thread, in a kind of "responses to your reactions" way, and if you or anyone else wants to take a sub-topic to a new thread, that would be fine.

Here's a general point. You use lots of non-role-playing analogies in your post, and usually you qualify them as being "heresy" or expecting some kind of disapproval. Dude, I use non-RPG analogies all the time, like the basketball thing in the Gamism essay. As long as we understand that we're using them only for points of analogy and reference, all is well.

Regarding Narrativist vs. Simulationist agendas:

Is Narrative play better facilitated by a game world filled with question marks? Or do some things need to be established to even have a game world? What’s the cutoff?

Is discovery of pre-determined elements anathema to Narrativism? Is employing this technique the equivalent of knocking off that module and returning to the chassis (i.e. necessarily Simulationism)?

Ok. Does the adversity that a Narrativist GM serves up necessarily challenge the limits of character behavior as an expression of their identity, or is that particular to Sorcerer? Or is it an element of Narrativist diversity?

Indulge me. What is an example of a character acting out of profile, derailing a Simulationist agenda? If someone could do 1st ed. AD&D (if that's Sim), that would help me understand better.

Just curious: if you have a system with characters summarized by a one-line issue, an explicit procedure to improvize situation (in a chain of causality) relevant to those issues, . . . is it necessarily Nar? Or instead, is it one of these Sims in Nar's clothing?

is less metagame necessarily less bolt-on agenda?

Here's a zinger: does challenge necessarily denote Gamism? If not, would challenge “in the context of competition” flip the switch?

What is reasonable to expect in terms of a mature Gamist attitude? Engaged by the in-game challenges (e.g. kill the dragon) but detached from the metagame consequences (e.g. my friends all witness my defeat)?

Beware of end-runs which permit a Challenge to be solved without the requisite Step On Up ability or competence. Playtest the game multiple times with people who are determined to beat it.

The second sentence I understand. Will someone plain-speak the first one?

Consider a character whose defining interest is to save enough money to put her son through college so he can have a better life than she did. The GM says, "At work, your associate relates, through tears, how her son, your son's friend, emptied out her checking account and ran off. You return home and find a note from your son. He's left on a road trip to Mexico with that ne'er do well!" Premise? Or just a bit of pulp fiction?

it sounds like Ron is saying a campaign should be stamped with something like "Is love worth dying for?" Or maybe each character gets their own stamp, like everyone gets a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant. I take the source issue to be Narrativist diversity, but does this value-study syntax strike anyone else as being a bit dry?

So we can still say, "Ok, you're in a bar. This guy with an eye patch sits down at your table and says in a gravelly voice, 'I've a need for sword hands,'" right? And can the players still do things like go to the market or visit the alchemist shop? Just to see what's there?

Does this mean that it's Premise if it matters to the players?

It's only Premise if it matters to the players. In this sense, Story Now and Step On Up are 100% identical, and a certain case is being made for the same relative to The Right to Dream in a neighboring thread or two. Oh, and the GM is a player too.

I think, also, an important GM duty for this type of play is to be continuously presenting something worth making a decision about. (Which sounds exhausting.)

Nah! It's way easy, actually. It's only exhausting if you make the little error you're making and concentrate this duty in the hands of one person.

I submit that trying to resolve conflicts by hoping that the accumulated successful tasks will turn out to be about what you want, is an unreliable and unsatisfying way to role-play when developing Narrativist protagonism.

I can see myself making this pitfall. Is Fortune in the Middle the best tonic? Or is there a more general, logical opposite?

Fortune-in-the-middle is only one option, although it is a good one. You're right to scent another, more general one, though - always turn to the Reward system, the single most important part of System in general, relative to Creative Agenda.

Can there be modules a la AD&D for Narrativist games? Or would that be antithetical to the style of play?

There's a whole thread goin' on about this now. You'll have to provide a far more focused reference point than "modules a la AD&D," though.

A related tendency is to rely on restraint, stating or implying that "good players wouldn't do that!" I suggest two alternative approaches: (1) that System provide "rebound" or consequences to make the variety of choices interesting, and (2) stating explict Creative Agenda expectations up front.

Regarding (1), I'm all for any technique or design approach that provides for a variety of interesting choices. What is meant by rebound?

A resolution system with "rebound" not only provides feedback for the imaginative expression of what's going on, but also shows you real consequences to your character's in-game actions. No matter what, however the dice fell, stuff happened and the situation is now changed. The Whiff Factor is, by definition, a low-to-absent rebound feature ("I miss. Next round"). So is unstructured Drama resolution ("They attack you." "I kill them").

I read that Ron's intent or ambition is to compete with other types of social activities (e.g. playing poker, going to clubs, watching Simpsons re-runs, etc.). There are a number of layers of apathy to pierce.
...
I remember having to beg one of my groups to give M:TG a try. They were just more comfortable playing Nintendo and making home videos at the time.

I submit that most people who self-identify as "gamers" or "role-players" are extremely learning-aversive and extremely neophobic. When you turn to people outside of the subculture, you may be astounded at how willing they are to try.

I think I should also explain that I do not intend or have ambition toward role-playing competing with other social activities. My claim is that the hobby/activity already does so and hence, to be a reliable part of one's life, ought to provide at least as much enjoyment and opportunity for positive social feedback. I'm speaking on a personal level, not on a social-change expand-the-hobby level.

I think you'll like the Infamous Five links I recently summarized in Site Discussion.

Whew! There ya go - thanks for reading and writing.

Best,
Ron

It sounds like I’ve been trying to pigeon hole CA by associating various Techniques. And while some help/hinder more than others, there are few (none?) hard associations.

Ron Edwards wrote: - A player decides to have his assassin character (a) default on a job, (b) save the thieves' guildmaster's daughter from goblins, (c) return her to her real mother who'd thought she was dead, and (d) die in a hail of crossbow bolts between the city guard and his ex-compatriots, because it buys time for the mother and daughter to escape secretly from the city.

Ron Edwards wrote: Does that help at all?

Ron Edwards wrote: Zinger-schminger. The question's nonsensical. First you check whether Step On Up is occuring; if yes, then just stick the "Challenge" label onto the Situation. That's all there is to it. You can't go in reverse.

Can you propose a situation in which all manner of opportuntity for Gamist play is available? Sure, but that doesn't make the play Gamist; only Stepping On Up does that.

Ron Edwards wrote: More specifically, your proposed answer puzzles me greatly: if one is detached from the metagame consequences, no Step On Up is possible at all. The whole point of Gamist play is to be invested in such consequences.

Many people who aren't interested in Gamist play, or who have only done so in an adolescent context, only conceive of such investment as Wimpiness and the Hard Core. I argue that this viewpoint is a tad limited.

Ron Edwards wrote: H'm, seems pretty clear to me ... Can you win without demonstrating personal strategy or guts? Just because you picked the (here's one of those analogies) the Channel-Fireball feature? Then the game system's broken.

Ron Edwards wrote: Neither. This is merely Situation. We don't know whether a "defining interest" is involved until we see what the character does, and even that won't be a Premise unless the people at the table get invested in it.

Ron Edwards wrote: First, your perception that I'm talking about "stamping" a Premise-label onto play needs some revising. I'm not talking about what we say to one another while or before we play, I'm talking about what our play is doing whether we notice it or not.

Ron Edwards wrote: Second, sure it's dry. This is an analytical essay, not an inspirational tract. The essay is nothing but dry, boring, definitive descriptions. By contrast, my supplements for Sorcerer are biased, focused, with any luck inspirational, and totally dismissive toward anything but Narrativist play. That's because they're supplements for Sorcerer. Does that make sense at all?

Ron Edwards wrote: Uh-huh. I confess to being very puzzled at what you imagined people might be doing if they weren't doing that. Perhaps a touch of synecdoche is going on, in the sense that you're thinking that only Simulationist play is "really" role-playing in the sense of using shared imagination as the medium.

Ron Edwards wrote: You're right to scent another, more general one, though - always turn to the Reward system, the single most important part of System in general, relative to Creative Agenda.

Ron Edwards wrote: A resolution system with "rebound" not only provides feedback for the imaginative expression of what's going on, but also shows you real consequences to your character's in-game actions. No matter what, however the dice fell, stuff happened and the situation is now changed. The Whiff Factor is, by definition, a low-to-absent rebound feature ("I miss. Next round"). So is unstructured Drama resolution ("They attack you." "I kill them").

Ron Edwards wrote: I think I should also explain that I do not intend or have ambition toward role-playing competing with other social activities. My claim is that the hobby/activity already does so and hence, to be a reliable part of one's life, ought to provide at least as much enjoyment and opportunity for positive social feedback. I'm speaking on a personal level, not on a social-change expand-the-hobby level.

Hi Bill,

Excellent conversation!

Establishing CA is not a GM duty. (Though it may be revealed by his actions as a player.)

I find there is a quality of detachment or serenity or unconcern that facilitates finding the limit of your performance capacity. You remain deeply committed to the endeavor, but you also instantaneously release feelings of disappointment. Because the next move is coming up, and you need your mind clear to wield its full power.

Would TROS be an example of a system with high rebound as pertains to combat? And Story Engine be an example of a system with overall low rebound?

bcook1971 wrote: You know, I’ve never trucked with the value of character advancement in RPG’s. It’s always struck me as absurd. I mean, if a character’s cool because he does something, why rate it? Hell, it better work. Else, why am I playing him? I mention this as the consequence of Reward.