Pending a really good history of role-playing games [This exists now, btw: Jon Peterson's Playing At The World -z], this brief and GNS-based summary will have to do. Arising as it did from wargaming in the middle 1970s, the earliest RPG design reflected its Gamist + Simulationist roots.
This is wrong from the start.
The simulation goal vs challenge goal split in wargames took mainly one form:
Challenge: "We play Gettysburg and see who wins"
Simulation: "We play Gettysbrg and the North has to win because that's what happened, it's a re-creation"
The first one was way more popular and was the only one to substantially influence D&D and, via D&D, the rest of the hobby.
What about all those simulating rules, like in that one game where Italian troops carried more water because they needed to boil it for pasta?
Well: like nearly every single other rule that separates wargames from their predecessor (chess) these were invented to make the challenge more complex and lifelike. Variants on these games were literally used to practice for real wars: the "realistic" rules weren't there to make the generals feel like generals, they were there so that if the general thought up a real-world strategy or tactic they could test it for real. This is challenge-play. Straight up.
If it ever came down to a choice between "I will make this decision because it is what Matthew Ridgway would do" and "I will make this decisions because I'll win" wargame culture overwhelmingly plumped for the latter.
There is a subtlety to all wargames and RPGs that follow them: the designers, in effect, makes a series of simulating decisions for the player before play starts (Matthew Ridgway's leadership is 5, Italians will carry more water, hobbits are short) and then the player takes on purely challenge-oriented decisions with that simulated army to see if they can "beat" that scenario.
The rules of all RPGs are simulatory (I'm pretty sure RE would agree with this). That is, they simulate something outside the game.
Consider a piece in checkers. It doesn't simulate anything. It's a game piece you use in a game. Its behavior in the game of checkers is based on the abstract rules of the abstract game of checkers.
Consider a chess knight. It is starting to simulate something--one might say that the way a knight moves (by skipping squares) in chess is inspired by the way mounted cavalry can move past terrain in a way infantry can't. Maybe. At any rate, while the shape of the piece simulates a horse, the rules by which you manipulate the chess knight are not--in any particularly obvious way--supposed to simulate the way actual historical knights actually did things.
Consider a knight in a fantasy tabletop wargame. Now we are definitely simulating. There are rigid rules for what the knight can do, but most of these rigid rules are meant to simulate the capabilities of what a knight could or couldn't do (tactically anyway) on either a genuine battle or in fictional stories the players are presumably familiar with knights.
The rules also might be serving other masters--some of the rules (say, a limit on the number of knights that can ride together) might be there to make sure the knights aren't way more powerful than other troops (a kind of game balance) or just to keep things interesting or running smoothly (like a rule saying combats involving knights versus other mounted knights are resolved after all other combat because they're more complicated) (perhaps Edwards would call this a "gamist" rule--I'm not sure), but one of the distinguishing features of a wargame is that it has simulatory rules. They mimic some other situation. If it didn't, it wouldn't be a wargame. It'd be go or checkers or othello or backgammon.
Some games have simulatory rules, some games have abstract rules. Many have both. Battleship, for instance, has both. Some of the rules are there to simulate shooting missiles at a ship, some are just there because that's how the game works. Tetris has no simulatory rules.
Minesweeper kind of does.
It's notable that, even though Minesweeper and Battleship simulate different situations, the rules are almost the same--which means that you could write a battleship-shooting game with the mechanics of Minesweeper or vice-versa and still call the rules somewhat simulatory. You could also take the same mechanics, call it "OCD Cubicle Fun Time" and have the same rules and then it wouldn't be simulating anything--kind of like how you can make a perfect sphere and call it an abstract sculpture or paint it yellow and call it a sculpture of the sun or paint it black and call it a sculpture of a bowling ball. The important point for gaming purposes is communicating what the game's supposed to be simulating.
ANYWAY...
Now consider a knight in an RPG. The rules governing this knight are simulatory, no doubt, just like in the wargame. The biggest innovation in D&D is that the creators of that game discovered that you could write a game that not only simulated some aspect of reality, but write a game that--at least potentially--could simulate all aspects of reality. The wargame knight probably couldn't get a stomach ache or write a letter to his mom and have that produce any effect on the rest of the game--the RPG knight could, and it might. While a wargame might have special rules covering given situations, the RPG said, in effect: the player can create any situation they'd be able to create if they were actually doing the thing the game simulates, and these rules (and the DM) will have to stretch to cover them.
Whether D&D actually ran all the way through the door that it kicked open is not the point, the point is, once the creators realized that you could make a game that was as open in terms of what could matter as a novel or a movie--and that that would still be fun--then everyone else did.
At each stage, the rules simulate more and more things, and while you could say the game itself as a whole therefore took on more aspects of simulation, at no point do we (in GNS terms) need to have--or indeed have--a mass of players making decisions based on a desire primarily to simulate or that prioritizes simulating over winning. In terms of decisions, you could play chess, then a wargame, then run through Ghost Tower of Inverness and the only thing you'd be changing is how complex the landscape of threat and weapons to survive it are and how much they look like the ones in the real-world or imaginative fiction.
So in terms of Edwards own concern--the players' goals and decisions--there's little prioritizing Simulationism here--though (as in all RPGs) a lot of simulation.
(Sideline: In a way, Narrativist design is a throwback down this simulatory scale back to chess and its hierarchies of dramatic importance. The Queen can move a lot because she is a big deal, the Pawn can't because she's not. Any other wargame or RPG would tell you they usually both move roughly the same speed.)
However, within a year, design philosophies split very fast across a brief Renaissance of largely-forgotten games that spanned nearly all of the GNS spectrum, and then two trends "settled out" to remain stable until the early 1990s.
The first of these trends was an ongoing series of imitations of post-tourney D&D, with its halting and incoherent mix of Gamism and Simulationism.
Incoherent, remember, means you can't consistently use it to address any premise. So: what were these thousands of gamers doing and why did they like it so much? And, for that matter, what am I doing when I head out to Nightwick Abbey playing an OD&D variant with Evan Elkins?
(I suspect part of the issue here is OD&D from literally page one assumes way more customization-culture in effect than Edwards.)
The second was a development of Simulationist principles in several trajectories, based on different models, including the following.
- The RuneQuest system from the Chaosium (extremely coherent, emphasizing System and Setting), developing both in the series of games from that company as well as in its imitators.
This is Edwards, again, mistaking the complexities of simulatory-rules-facilitating-complex-challenge for simulation-as-goal again.
The "series of games from that company" includes Call of Cthulhu which shouldn't work at all by GNS principles, as it is Runequest, (which is D&D + % skills)+ insanity rules + suddenly the goal isn't to "win" anymore but to maybe win and maybe simulate going insane or dying. Aaaand which has changed very little since it was invented and which continues to baffle GNS theorists to this day who don't get how one guy can want to solve the mystery and another can want to go nuts and they can change their mind in the middle and the rules work well for both of them and they don't get why you don't just play Cthulhu Dark--where you make your character really fast and don't get attached, or Trail of Cthulhu--where you don't have those tests of player skill (ie challenge/gamism) or Dread--where the player skill is pulling Jenga blocks and you know in advance you'll all die and there's none of this terrible GNS uncertainty.
The series also includes Pendragon which is Runequest (D&D + % skills) + personality mechanics and forced plot development which, again, should not work. It also is pretty much the only game everyone from the most die-hard Forgie to the grumpiest old schooler at least respects.
- The interesting mutual relationship between four editions of Champions and effectively two of GURPS (moving from incoherent to coherent, emphasizing System), which provides the model for the vast majority of new games.
That is: Champions and GURPS had a lot of rules, and lots of customization, and Edwards still doesn't get how those things facilitate Challenge. "moving from incoherent to coherent" just means in this case: the math loopholes got closed.
- The AD&D 2nd edition (mainly incoherent, emphasizing Setting and Situation), developing in the huge setting-based proliferation of TSR products into the early 1990s, as well as in a host of small-press imitators.
Hear that? If you were one of the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who played and enjoyed D&D 2e even though it "failed to permit any Premise (or any element of Exploration) to be consistently enjoyed." How did you do that? You are mutants defying all demiurges and propriety.
Another temperamental difference: mainstream fans, starting in the 80s started to see rules as gifts--you were now allowed to play a Thri Kreen, officially, here's how. More rules were more options and options were good. Monte Cook told me at one point 2nd edition AD&D had like 3 (or was it 5?) different rules for catapults. And that was ok with him: you might want different rules for different kinds of games. After 2000, people started to see rules as impediments. Rules-lite is good. Simplicity and accessibility are good.
In essence, both 80s D&D and GNS want you to have options about how you roll: it's just GNS wants to lay them out clearly in a multiple choice palette of different TV dinners (this is the low-carb high-fructose one, this is the gluten-free one...) while TSR just gave you the keys to the farm and figured you'd decide how to pick an apple or butcher a hog yourself.
The first is clearer, but more limiting, the second offers less guidance, but many more options.
(The culture of DIY RPGs generally--a rules-light or most-rules-ignored system plus endless homemade content grabbed from the internet is functionally a crowdsourced version of AD&D 2e's approach to letting 1000 catapults bloom.)
Around 1990, first Narrativist-facilitating methods became widely established, and then full-bodied Narrativist games appeared in 1994.
Ok bro.
About five years later, simultaneous with the appearance of innovative competitive games (not RPGs, but rather Cheapass Games), overtly Gamist RPGs appeared.
No, these were just the first ones ones so simple that your non-Tarrasque-killing ass recognized them as facilitating gamist/challenge play.
(A fascinating story of economics and industry hassles underlies this history, but I regretfully have to stay on-topic. Another time.)
Or to put it another way, RPG design through most of the hobby's history has been largely devoted to Simulationist priorities.
Btw I once asked Edwards point blank about this confusion of complex-gamism vs Sim and he was like "Huh--maybe".
This is not to say that the full range of this mode has been represented or all of its potential developed.
The sub-set of Simulationism most fully developed during the 1980s was "realist" (a form of Situtation) and "genre-faithfulness" (System with strong and various other co-emphases). Some conventions of these approaches include identifying Fortune methods with the imaginary physics of the setting
....which.....wait for it.......facilitates complex challenge. If fire works like fire actually works then...hey using fire gets a lot more interesting than "I light my arrow on fire" every single round because why wouldn't you it does extra damage?
...and a commitment to extensive search and handling times.
(GNS term for looking stuff up in the book.)
The sub-set developed later used the previous one as a foundation, but lightened the details and concentrated on Character, Setting, and Situation in its most external form of published metaplot, as a determinant of large-scale events during play.
That is: they were publishing novels about the setting.
Quite a lot more has occurred in Simulationist design, of course. Not surprisingly, the variety among coherent Simulationist design is extensive, indeed, vast, because the key to design is which elements are being Explored.
- Character: Unknown Armies
- Setting: RuneQuest, Pendragon, Usagi Yojimbo, Jorune
- Situation: Call of Cthulhu
- System: GURPS, Champions 4th edition (or rather, the Hero System), Fudge, Multiverser
- Situation and Setting: Feng Shui, Cyberpunk 2020
- Character and Setting: Legend of the Five Rings, Nephilim, Albedo, Ars Magica, Nobilis
This is not to say that any RPG will illustrate one of the above categories so clearly; the listed titles are among the shining lights of coherent Simulationist design.
The inability to recognize Call of Cthulhu as the ultimate simultaneous improv (simulationist) plus challenge design (solving mysteries by literally finding clues in a literal picture in the module, f'rinstance) is a pretty good example of that Sherlock Holmes thing about how you wanna have facts before theories because otherwise you shape facts to match theories not the other way around.
Anyway, this is getting repetitive: Edwards doesn't get complex challenge or rules designed to handle it and his history lesson illustrates mostly that.
His take on Narrativism is, of course, more informed, interesting:
Overt Narrativist RPG design is a latecomer, with the exception of the few glimmers appearing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of which Marvel Super Heroes is the sole survivor. The first thoroughgoing Narrativist game since then was Prince Valiant, in 1989. Although both games were based on source texts, their designs did not recommend Exploring the canonical settings so much as using the texts' authors' philosophy of story creation as a model for creating new stories entirely.
Again: just as Edwards doesn't recognize that Call of Cthulhu is drama AND/OR challenge, he doesn't get that and he doesn't get that it's pretty easy for drama-kid Colossus and challenge-monster Wolverine to play together in Marvel Super Heroes.
In fact, without Karma (the spendable experience points which many players forget to use or save for boss fights) it's pretty hard to see anything particularly Narrativist about Marvel Super Heroes. It's a 100% functional hybrid and I've literally had Monsterhearts-playing crunchphobic angstgamers next to Let's Waste Zeus Next hardcore old schoolers happily bouncing off each other in that game.
And the fact all it takes to facilitate that is one new mechanic--spendable xp that can be awarded for doing superheroey stuff--kinda asks some major questions of GNS.
In most Narrativist designs, Premise is based on one of the following models.
- A pre-play developed setting, in which case the characters develop into protagonists in the setting's conflicts over time. Examples include Castle Falkenstein and Hero Wars.
- Pre-play developed characters (protagonists), in which case the setting develops into a suitable framework for them over time. Examples include Sorcerer, Everway, Zero (in an interesting way), Cyberpunk 1st edition, Orkworld, and The Whispering Vault.
I have observed that when people bring a Narrativist approach to Vampire, Legend of the Five Rings, or other game systems which include both detailed pre-play character creation and a detailed, conflict-rich setting, they must discard one or the other in order to play enjoyably.
This is interesting: what he's saying is if you want to play Narrativist games you need some room for players to invent a conflict: either the characters need to be formed during play or the setting does.
However, he couches this not as an absolute axiom but an observation of how thing usually go.
My guess is some spunky Indie kid will challenge that if they haven't already, but it speaks to how tied to what the setting is or who the character is conflict (or "Premise") is. But that might just be a typical trapping of genre fiction: the werewolf doesn't have to be The Chosen werewolf, but it sure helps get a Theme across if they are.
Given the widespread use of Author and Director stance in Narrativist role-playing, the functional result is to spread tasks and creative roles left for the GM in most other play among all participants.
I think everybody gets that by this point. Even in Marvel when you as a player invent power stunts for 100 karma you are kinda being the GM a little bit.
The next few paragraphs go into more technical develoments Edwards is observing emerging and topics he'd like to see explored ("Random vs. nonrandom elements of character creation contrasted with those of event resolution"). Not real immediately relevant.
He does then tries to address "balance" in a clear, helpful way...
"Balance" may rank as the most problematic term in all of role-playing. What in the world does it mean? Equality of some kind? Fairness of some kind? Whenever the term is brought up, the discussion cannot proceed without specifying further regarding the following issues.
- Balance of what? Components of the characters? Specific sets of components?
- Or perhaps it's balance of actions, in which case, is it of opportunity, or of consequence?
- Balance among whom? Players or characters? Both in some way?
- To what end? (Citing "fairness" is tautological.)
- Shifting the issue, perhaps it's a matter of balance within a character, rather than among characters.
- And extending the issue, should balance be concerned with initial starting points of characters or with the processes of change for the characters, or both?
Currently little insight arises from discussions of balance, as it inevitably wanders about these issues without focusing. The issues themselves, on the other hand, are very interesting. Therefore the term is much like "genre," in that discussion might as well focus on the real issues in the first place and never use the term at all.
...but kinda can't manage to use simple phrases like "effectiveness" or "spotlight time" so it's not great.
I would suggest that the DIY D&D scene has done a lot to clarify what "balance" is and is not good for since this essay was written.
Then...oh shit?
Hybrids and drift Can multiple GNS goals be satisfied by a single game design? It may be possible, but it is not easy. As mentioned before, merely aligning topics of Exploration with those of Premise is probably not effective. I conceive of two types of hybrid: (1) two modes are simultaneously satisfied in the same player at the same time, of which I am highly skeptical;
I mean Colossus above? But this introduces some philosophical issues like if you're eating a grape while getting a blowjob are you experiencing them both "simulataneously" or alternating? Idk
and (2) two modes can exist side by side in the design, such that differently-oriented players may play together, which might be possible. Some possible candidates for the latter include these.
- N + G: Champions 1st-3rd editions; I'm interested as well in seeing the upcoming Elfworld and a proposed game from Hogshead Publishing regarding fantasy weaponry.
- N + S: Little Fears and UnderWorld (these games' degree of "abashedness" exists squarely on the border of the two modes).
He seems to completely miss the examples I noticed. Again: Idk.
It's hard to imagine any trad game that couldn't have at least one player Simming while another Gamed.
Drift is a related issue: the movement from one GNS focus to another during the course of play. I do not think that "drift" reflects hybridized design (in which both modes are indeed present), but rather correctable incoherence (moving toward coherence in one mode)
I can't imagine why. Like if you spend one session trying to kill the bishop and the next talking to the Queen about soup because you like the funny voice you just did it.
I mean: is Red & Pleasant Land cutting some kind of Gordian Knot just because it has puzzles and weird NPCs that are fun to talk to?
And, 100% seriously: everyone is a dramatist when the NPC is hot and the player is drunk. So all you have to do to "drift" from Gamism to that form of Sim is bring some Bulleit rye. And further, there's no reason that can't actually be written into a ruleset.
Historically, drifting toward Gamism is very common; it isn't hard to understand that a frustrating and incoherent context can be turned into an arena for competition. Internet play has illustrated some distinctive drifting: Amber moves from abashed Narrativism either to Simulation with Exploration of Character or to Gamism with the emphasis on interpersonal control; Everway moves from abashed Narrativism to Simulationism with the emphasis on Exploration of Situation.
The 1990s transitional game offers a good example of driftable design: Simulationist resolution with strong metagame mechanics, highly customizable character, setting, and situation, with or without exhortations to "story." Fudge and The Window are perfect examples, on either side of Simulationism or Narrativism, respectively, as the stated emphasis.
I find this whole section obscurely baffling--Edwards takes designs which have tons in common: Runequest, Rifts, Shadowrun, Marvel FASERIP, D&D, AD&D--and declares them fit for specific kinds of play more than others with little rhyme or reason other than some of them summon for him the dread crunching chaos of Simulationism. Which is barely a thing.
Like some tiny group of people like to track resources for fun but none of the game design trends needed that focus to make sense.
Incoherent design
Unfortunately, functional or nearly-functional hybrids are far less common than simply incoherent RPG designs.
The "lesser," although still common, dysfunctional trend is found among the imitators of the late-1970s release of AD&D, composed of vague and scattered Simulationism mixed with vague and scattered Gamism. Warhammer is the most successful of these.
See? Runequest is apparently superfunctional but Warhammer is incoherent? Like what? These games have so much in common. This sounds like someone who has literally never played them.
He's a little more clear here:
The "dominant" dysfunctional system is immediately recognizable, to the extent of being considered by many to be what role-playing is: a vaguely Gamist combat and reward system, Simulationist resolution in general (usually derived from GURPS, Cyberpunk, or Champions 4th edition), a Simulationist context for play (Situation in the form of published metaplot), deceptive Narrativist Color, and incoherent Simulationist/Narrativist Character creation rules.
Oh, right, so this is just Edwards' blindness to Complex Challenge again. The "deceptive Narrativist color" is presumably game advice saying you write your own story and "incoherent Simulationist/Narrativist Character creation rules" is just: there's probabilities but you get to pick some stuff outside your PC.
This combination has been represented by some of the major players in role-playing marketing, and has its representative for every period of role-playing since the early 1980s.
- AD&D2 pioneered the approach in the middle 1980s, particularly the addition of metaplot with the Dragonlance series.
- Champions, through its 3rd edition, exemplified a mix of Gamist and Narrativist "driftable" design, but with its 4th edition in the very late 1980s, the system lost all Metagame content and became the indigestible mix outlined above.
- Vampire, in the early 1990s, offered a mix of Simulationism and Gamism in combat resolution, but a mix of Narrativism and Simulationism out of combat, as well as bringing in Character Exploration.
The design is hugely imitated, ranging from Earthdawn, Kult, and In Nomine, to the mid-1990s "shotgun attack" of Deadlands, Legend of the Five Rings, and Seventh Sea.
The idea that the metaplot of the Dragonlance series of novels and modules suddenly forced incoherence on functional gaming really says a lot about how fragile GNS thinks player groups are.
Metaplot means, at worst, your PC can't change the metaplot.
First: That isn't a huge restriction considering how many stories are set in real life during, say, the Carter administration without anyone killing the president or ending the Cold War early (real life's "metaplot").
Second: It's pretty easy for adults to recognize that sometimes they don't want to play a module where they can't kill the president. Did you really need a special theory just to say that? Seems like a regular taste problem.
All of these games are based on The Great Impossible Thing to Believe Before Breakfast: that the GM may be defined as the author of the ongoing story, and, simultaneously, the players may determine the actions of the characters as the story's protagonists. This is impossible. It's even absurd. However, game after game, introduction after introduction, and discussion after discussion, it is repeated.
This seems like a consequence of three things:
.80s-90s game authors not being real precise (because they didn't have the internet screaming at them that they needed to be precise) about how they wrote the part of the game text about "you are now allowed to tell stories" that nobody read.
.Confusion between the words "plot outline" and "story" by these authors, Edwards, or both. Anyone with even a vague idea of what the word "improv" means knows there are ways one person can say "End the scene with John taking a bath" and still have 5 other people make up a lot of details that make the story meaningful or interesting or fun or funny before that happens.
.GNS people taking the GM advice and intros too seriously in an attempt to diagnose real problems at their game tables. Half the time a GM of one game learned from the GM advice of another--or just by watching someone else. You can only blame so much on GM advice.
Now Edwards talks about Vampire--which is the game that ruled the roost in RPG land when this essay was written.
It is impossible to read GNS people complaining about Vampire (as it is impossible to read 4venger trolls complaining about any edition of D&D except "theirs") without sensing some deep personal trauma they don't want to talk about roiling beneath the surface. Like maybe a Ventrue killed their dad. And then they went to Mark Rein-Hagen to ask it why that happened. And, god dammit, he couldn't tell them. And then the trauma was finally exorcized when Monsterhearts let them play a sexy goth soap opera and Apoc World let them play with a katana. And there were mechanics for sex. Finally.
Check it:
Consider the players who were excited about the vampire concept for role-playing. What happens when they try to play Vampire: the Masquerade? Well, they try to Believe the Impossible Thing, and in application, the results are inevitable.
- The play drifts toward some application of Narrativism, which requires substantial effort and agreement among all the people involved, as well as editing out substantial portions of the game's texts and system.
To be fair, the game explicitly says only use the rules when you want. Which is clunky but not dishonest.
- The play drifts toward an application of Simulationism in which the GM dominates the characters' significant actions, and the players contribute only to characterization. This is called illusionism, in which the players are unaware of or complicit with the extent to which they are manipulated.
So many problems with this
First: There's nothing in the rules demanding that. I know: I had to read them for work.
Second: There's absolutely no school of writing or drama which claims characterization isn't a massive playing field for creativity. Or that it is necessarily walled-off from taking "Significant" actions.
Third: "Significant actions" aren't defined. Are we talking symbolically? Plotwise? Metaplotwise? Morally?
Fourth: It's only illusionism if the players don't know which actions have been denied them or which choices have been nullified secretly. This may be happening (and sucks) but neither the text nor the description you give demands that.
- Illusionism is not necessarily dysfunctional, and if Character or Situation Exploration is the priority, then it can be a lot of fun. Unknown Armies, Feng Shui, and Call of Cthulhu all facilitate extremely functional illusionism. However, it is not and can never be "story creation" on the part of all participants, and if the game is incoherent, illusionism requires considerable effort to edit the system and texts into shape.
Again, confusing "story" with "plot outline". Possibly influenced by Egri's rhetoric about what a "story" is but without defining story.
Also: "considerable effort" isn't defined enough for us to see why it's a bad thing. See "substantial effort and redesign" above.
- Most likely, however, the players and GM carry out an ongoing power-struggle over the actions of the characters, with the integrity of "my guy" held as a club on the behalf of the former and the integrity of "the story" held as a club on behalf of the latter.
That sounds annoying, but like if they're under 16 this is just life for kids doing anything (including playing totally "functional" boardgames) and if they're over 16 then I am skeptical this is a problem of game design rather than a problem of having an adult conversation about how much control the players want to have. It is a real problem, but not one I'd lay primarily at the feet of game design.
The players of the vampire example are especially screwed if they have Narrativist leanings and try to use Vampire: the Masquerade.
Thus the 20 years of trauma they have transferred to all of us.
The so-called "Storyteller" design in White Wolf games is emphatically not Narrativist, but it is billed as such, up to and including encouraging subcultural snobbery against other Simulationist play without being much removed from it. The often-repeated distinction between "roll-playing" and "role-playing" is nothing more nor less than Exploration of System and Exploration of Character - either of which, when prioritized, is Simulationism.
No. "Roll-playing" is a derogatory term for rolling dice in any context but not giving your PC a personality which can mean anything from challenge to just being along for the ride and "role-playing" in this context means acting. That you lumped them together doesn't mean anyone else has to or, more importantly, that the jerk 15-year olds who enthusiastically embraced this pun-based snobbery weren't just as incompatible with their victims as anyone in the G or the N or the S is with their other letters.
Like why is it so hard to have Jimmy Gamist and Sara Sim happy at the same table that there needs to be a whole theory about it but apparently Davey Drama and Donna Dice have merely superficial differences?
This is just replacing the snobbery that irritates you with a snobbery that irritates the next generation of designers.
Thus our players, instead of taking the "drift" option (which would work), may well apply themselves more and more diligently to the metaplot and other non-Narrativist elements in the mistaken belief that they are emphasizing "story." The prognosis for the enjoyment of such play is not favorable.
I don't know what any of this is based on. Observation? A guess? What Ron did?
One may ask, if this design is so horribly dysfunctional, why is it so popular? The answer requires an economic perspective on RPGs, in addition to the conceptual and functional one outlined in this essay, and is best left for discussion.
No it requires looking at Tim Bradstreet drawings and all the goth girls looking at Tim Bradstreet drawings. But then, for some reason nobody has successfully explained, the entire GNS subculture seems to be basically blind to the meaning and communicative power and role of visual culture strongly communicating Premise.
Like streamers these days, and like Tom Sawyer painting that fence, illustrators go "Look: this will be fun. Put in the substantial effort to get here." Which, for many people, works quite well. Vampire and D&D did both actually spawn legions of LARPers who don't use the rules at all--or tabletop gamers who happily wrote their own. They needed to be pointed at the premise, then given some booster rockets, then: they're free. Many of them run the world now.
Edwards then excoriates the idea of a game that serves all GNS preferences for a few paragraphs, separates that from GURPS-style universality, then moves on to:
A number of code-phrases to describe RPG system and goals have arisen as role-players struggled to match their interests with the spectrum of available games, but most of them lack substance.
- Rules-heavy vs. Rules-light: this dichotomy is vaguely oriented toward high vs. low search and handling time, but it is confounded a great deal with so-called realism and so-called story. (This confusion is a product of the transition design period of 1990-1991, exemplified by Fudge and The Window.) The concept of rules-focus, in terms of goals and modes, has not entered the popular understanding of the hobby.
Edwards himself is totally vulnerable to this in his continued confusion of rules-heavy for "simulationist". He also doesn't sort out a complex or crunchy game from a
Fat Game leaving me to do that, but hey, nobody said gameblogging was easy.
- Completeness: as far as I can tell, this term relies on as thorough a presentation as possible of all the listed elements, apparently such that Simulationist play of any emphasis can pick and choose which aspects to emphasize, by elimination rather than by creation.
How anyone could be remotely aware of Challenge as a goal and not see why you might want a boatload of new spells all the time is beyond me. Magic: The Gathering had been out for years by then.
Anyway the way he describes completeness, that's kind of close to a "fat game"--which is actually a useful concept.
I wouldn't say a skinny game is less complete than a fat game. Though it depends on the game: I'd say a complex-challenge James Bond game with boat stats is undeniably more complete than an identical one with only car stats and so would every sane human being on the planet. The only possible confusion Edwards could have about what this means is how to change this very down-to-earth complaint into GNS terms which seems like putting the theory cart before they helping-people-solve-their-real-game-problems horse.
Chapter Six: Actually Playing
It all comes back to the social situation, eventually, because role-playing is a human activity and not a set of rules or text. Coherence is expressed as a social outcome; it must apply all the way into and through actual play. I suggest that preparing for and carrying out the role-playing experience in social terms, well above and beyond considerations of system mechanics, is most coherent from a GNS and Premise perspective.
I'm really not sure what this does and doesn't mean to Ron. Especially in light of how thoroughly his analysis til now has emphasized not social stuff but text.
I'm not sure I agree or disagree with it but he switched topics pretty fast to a pet peeve...
But it's just a game! This phrase is an alarm bell...The ugly truth is that this phrase is not reconciliatory at all. Rather, it is code for, "Stop bothering me with your interests and accord with my goals, decisions, and priorities of play." I strongly urge that individual role-players not tolerate any implication that their preferred, enjoyed range of role-playing modes is a less worthy form of play.
If GNS had any virtue it's that at least it did get people on the internet articulating in real detail what they did and didn't like. Though that happened around 2000 in every field from YA fiction to fetish porn without anybody needing a rickety theory to justify it so...yeah.
Then to GMs--a few questions but no assertions about possible social dynamics ("what kind of authority or status does a GM have over or with the players anyway? Is he or she the physical host, using physical living or work space for the game?") and then:
How might a GNS perspective help keep that GM/player understanding clear? Historically, the terms cover very different ranges within each of the modes.
- The range in Gamism: GM as referee over players who compete with one another, GM as referee over the players competing with a scenario, GM as opponent of the players as a unified group, or even no GM at all among a group of competing players.
- The range in Simulationism: GM as channeler of external source material, GM as the fellow Actor responsible for the landscape and NPCs, GM as referee of the physics and internal consistency of the imaginary universe, GM as covert author.
- The range in Narrativism: depending on the degree of coauthorship of the players, the traditional tasks of the GM may vary all the way from one centralized GM to a situation in which all the players are mini-GMs. Interestingly, this is the one mode in which, throughout its range, no role for an "impartial referee" GM is possible.
Note again that none of the GM roles (except "covert author") ascribed to Sim are incompatible with Gamism, and the first two Sim GM roles are perfectly compatible with Narrativism (the GM can channel external source material into a Narrativist game that the players then fuck with as in Marvel Super Heroes).
One last note about Gamism: the shift from tourney play, in which many groups of players competed for time and kill-count as they were "run through" identical adventures, to single-group play led to many design holdovers that often lead to frustrating experiences.
I mean: if you're chickenshit?
These are almost all based on the shift from the GM as referee, with the opponents being other groups, to the GM as opponent - and the players, rather sensibly, turning from competing with an invincible opponent (the holdover from the referee status) to competing with one another.
When is the GM ever an "invincible opponent"?
A final issue about GM and player(s) concerns who is expected to be entertaining whom, in some kind of dichotomous way. Evidently this is a matter of some emotional commitment, prompting the same defensiveness and hurt feelings as the mention of "immersion." Therefore I am personally willing to let it lie.
Hippie.
With a few exceptions, most role-playing texts completely ignore the actual human logistics of play, although these are hugely important in application. How can one possibly participate in a social, leisure activity without considering all of the following?
- The number of participants and the extant relationships among them.
- The time to be spent playing, in terms of hours per session and the number of sessions per unit of real time (week or month, e.g.), the anticipated number of sessions, and so on.
- The event-scope of play; that is, when and how often units of satisfaction for the participants occcur (here the GNS perspective is tremendously useful, because it identifies the instances of satisfaction).
Uh...except you never identify what counts as an "instance of play" so we have no idea how to measure this or talk about it in GNS terms and you go out of your way to leave it undefined.
- The necessary time and effort to be spent in preparation, and by whom.
When AD&D was released in its late 1970s form, its content encouraged a "more is better" approach. The more players, the better. The more time spent, the better. The longer the sessions, the better. The longer the sessions continued, the better.
This is pretty much still how we roll and prefer to, tbh.
Nearly all role-playing games used AD&D as the starting point for presentation purposes, even those with vastly different systems and philosophies of play, and so this dysfunctional approach remains with us to this day. The term "campaign" is especially misleading, as in wargaming it denotes a specific set of events from point A in time to point B in time, whereas in role-playing it denotes playing indefinitely.
Philosophical question: indie narrativist games are generally considered less-popular for long term play.
Is this because:
-Being sure you're gonna address a heavy Premise requires certain assurances of reasonably quick resolution?
-The games are embedded in a culture of Indie Game Design where trying and sharing and talking about and making a variety of new games a lot is encouraged so games have high turnover?
-The creators are obsessed with film and its attendant structures rather than books?
-The narrative control generally granted means players get what they are conscious of wanting relatively quickly and burn out most questions on the table?
-They don't do Fat Game-style library content and so there's not all this promise of "all the parts of the game we haven't tried yet" locked inside?
-They're consciously or subconsciously adapted to the "minimum social footprint" model which assumes adults are busy and don't have time to game?
-The games kinda suck even for many of their own fans and don't repay sustained examination? (Hey, the option has to be on the table, even if your answer is "no")
-Some mixture?
The term "campaign" is especially misleading, as in wargaming it denotes a specific set of events from point A in time to point B in time, whereas in role-playing it denotes playing indefinitely.
For those forms of role-playing that emphasize "story" in the general sense (see Chapter Two), this approach is completely unsuitable.
What is a "story" to be, in terms of individual sessions and all-sessions? In role-playing culture, one is often assumed either to be playing a "campaign," which means it should go on forever, or a "one-shot" session which aside from the connotation of being superficial is simply too short for many sorts of stories. The functional intermediate of playing the number of sessions sufficient for the purpose of resolving a story is nowhere to be found in the texts of role-playing.
I just ran an Ngram and the phrase "minicampaign" spikes in 1987 right at the height of the 80s RPG boom and then again when Edwards is writing so fwiw. Anyway: now Indie gamers have minicampaigns.
This next bit is interesting:
On the smaller scale, successfully preparing for individual sessions is especially integrated with GNS and Premise. Consider the historical tendencies among the modes, in terms of how a series of events emerges through the course of play. (These do not represent either a complete or definitional list, but simply historical examples.)
- Linear adventures, in which the GM has provided a series of prepared, in-order encounters.
- Linear, branched adventures, in which the GM has done the same as above but provides for the players proceeding in more than one direction or sequence.
- Roads to Rome, in which the GM has prepared a climactic scene and maneuvers or otherwise determines that character activity leads to this scene. (In practice, "winging it" usually becomes this method.)
- Bang-driven, in which the GM has prepared a series of instigating events but has not anticipated a specific outcome or confrontation. (This is precisely the opposite of Roads to Rome.)
- Relationship map, in which the GM has prepared a complex back-story whose members, when encountered by the characters, respond according to the characters' actions, but no sequence or outcomes of these encounters have been pre-determined.
- Intuitive continuity, in which the GM uses the players' interests and actions during initial play to construct the crises and actual content of later play. (This is a form of "winging it" that may or may not become Roads to Rome.)
It's weird Edwards doesn't quite explicitly mention the most common units of DIY RPG play: the standard dungeon or the sandbox. They're kinda like the second one but they are in no way "linear" as the order of encounters chosen affects the whole and there's no guarantee of hitting all the encounters and they're kinda more like a Relationship Map than anything else listed.
It took people like James Mal at Grognardia to make these part of everyday online RPG talk.
Roads to Rome and Linear/Branched play are extremely common in published scenarios with a strong Simulationist approach. Linear play relies on extreme commitment to the Situation, and thus works best for Situation-intensive Simulationist play, as in many Call of Cthulhu scenarios.
It's super weird that people associate horror-investigation with railroads but a motif here is Edwards taking what comes out of the corporate nipple (modules: ie, things where railroads are way easier to write and which are sold to the GMs who don't want to think up their own stuff) way more seriously as design than what groups manage to produce at home.
Someone should fix that.
AGAIN, Edwards seems blind to the challenge/gamist-possibilities of exploration-oriented adventure structure:
Bang-driven (formalized in Sorcerer and Sword) and Relationship map (formalized in The Sorcerer's Soul) are best suited to Narrativist play. Intuitive Continuity may do well for a variety of modes that emphasize either Character actions being pivotal (Narrativism) or Character Exploration (Simulationism). Again, all of this is speaking historically and not at all in terms of potential.
Gamist play was not included above, mainly because it has been so badly marginalized during most of role-playing history. To date, most scenario construction oriented in this direction has fallen back on the late-1970s tournament model or the survivalist model found in many video games. The Hogshead family of Gamist RPGs ('Baron Munchausen, Pantheon) has broken this mold and I have no doubt that much more variety remains to be developed.
Like somehow the idea that trying to find a dragon somewhere in a dungeon and killing it is a challenge has escaped Edwards. Can you tell I'm getting impatient? It's 7 am. Sorry?
Dysfunction: When Role-Playing Doesn't Work Out
Great Googley-Moogley, let me count the ways.
The clearest case is straightforward. People do exist who will habitually disrupt a role-playing group for whatever reasons of their own, and the only solution for dealing with such people is to exclude them from play.
But let's consider people who do want to role-play together, and have even established an interest in the most basic, embryonic form of an initial Premise. What dysfunctions may arise?
Emotional tensions between people may override the role-playing. It can be romance, or money issues, or who's giving whom a ride home, or any number of similar things. My claim is that a lot of times, people get all upset at one another about game stuff (tactics, rules, etc) when the real problem is this people stuff. Such problems must be dealt with socially and above-board, because no in-game mechanisms can help; in-game issues are symptoms rather than causes.
I think the most common dysfunction, however, is GNS incompatibility.
This is one of the first broad, theoretically-testable assertions in a while. And bold: GNS incompatibility kills play more often than social stuff?
At least he has the decency to frame it as "I think".
At the highest-order level, if the people simply have entirely different goals, then actual play continually runs into conflicts about priorities and procedures based on those different goals. I think everyone who's familiar with the theory knows that this is a "no fault, no blame" criterion. I like potatos, you like pink lemonade, have a nice game with your own group.
First:
I have never had people I get along with socially who like games that I couldn't roll with, but ok.
I think a lot of GNS people do conventions instead of roll with friends: that might be a lot of this. This might have a lot more to do with the limitedness and weirdness of cons.
I don't know, I haven't done a survey. And, unlike GNS, I'm not going to act like I have.
Second:
Potatoes has an e.
More difficult incompatibilities also exist within each of G, N, or S. People may share the the large-scale GNS goal, but be accustomed to or desire different standards for Balance of Power, preferred stances, notions of character depth, the distinction between player success and character success, and many related things. In this case, dysfunction arises from (a) trying to resolve the differences during play itself, and (b) anyone being unwilling to compromise about the differences.
Uh--then why are the differences between G and N and S more important than the thousand of other kinds of differences? Oh wait, there's kind of an answer...
Drift is the usual method for dealing with this level of discord. It is a fine solution for resolving within-mode differences (emphasis mine -z), if everyone is willing to give a little. However, drift has a dark side, or degeneration, the disruption or subversion of the social contract such that what is happening is not more fun, at least not at the group level. Gamism is often pegged as the culprit when players shift from the stated or agreed-upon mode of play and turn upon one another as opponents, but it's better considered degeneration with Gamism merely being the direction. The usual effect of degeneration (any kind, not just this one little Gamist sort), if people continue to play, is to play without committing to anything at all.
God, what kind of blasted Ligottian hatescape do you come from, dude? Do they have oxygen? Is Immortan Joe there figuring out the Anti-Life Equation? What even?
The tragedy is how widespread GNS-based degeneration really is. I have met dozens, perhaps over a hundred, very experienced role-players with this profile...
We then close with an evocation of the GNS casualty guy I quoted up at the beginning of all this--with his turtle tactics and collection of glossy supplements.
I think that the most important phrase is "perhaps over a hundred". I haven't met perhaps over a hundred of anything. Stop going to cons, Ron. Stop running games of exploration of deep personal story-horror with whoever shows up to do that with total strangers and putting the spotlight on them to tell you all about their character and maybe you'll meet a few less "GNS" casualties.
2001 may also be a key number here: this is a year where isolated people who didn't hardly roll with friends hadn't yet gone from only being able to get a game at cons or at a game store to only being able to get a game online. So many of these things sound like communication issues--and so many of them seem alien to the context of just friends who all like the same game hanging out.
But I digress into the extra-textual. I have no hard evidence for these guesses.
The main thing is:
GNS assigns disproportionate levels of importance to certain kinds of differences for no particular reason, paints those differences as objectively more insurmountable than they are (see Fastball Special), fails to recognize complex challenge/gamism, invents a sloppy category called Simulationism into which it shoves disparate games, and, perhaps worst of all, doesn't do anything to model how players can be helped or moved by game design and game performance from one goal to another as functional parts of an enjoyable game. And made people believe all that.
Pray for me.
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