Yond Cassius posted:

It's not about Tom Kirby specifically, but someone on /r/hobbydrama wrote up a pretty good summary of the Sigmar debacle.

theironjef posted:

See, this is why I used the qualifier "I think." I pretty much discounted GNS immediately on looking at it as an obscuring mechanism designed to give assholes the tools to call whatever game they liked the good one and any other games the bad one. I honestly don't even remember which one the good one was.

Bruceski posted:

It was N. The language for the others was intentionally dismissive.

It was an interesting idea from a perspective of "you cannot and should not design a game for everyone, so figure out what you want to emphasize and prioritize that in design decisions" but the actual use was, as you said, a way to label games as bad and shove everything into one corner of the triangle. Add in an intentional evangelical component where folks would go to other forums and scream loudly about GNS picking fights, and the idea's just cursed now. If I recall that evangelical wave was pre-4e, but then the 4e haters tried to start it up again as an excuse to dump on 4e.

Bruceski posted:

It was N. The language for the others was intentionally dismissive.

It was an interesting idea from a perspective of "you cannot and should not design a game for everyone, so figure out what you want to emphasize and prioritize that in design decisions" but the actual use was, as you said, a way to label games as bad and shove everything into one corner of the triangle. Add in an intentional evangelical component where folks would go to other forums and scream loudly about GNS picking fights, and the idea's just cursed now. If I recall that evangelical wave was pre-4e, but then the 4e haters tried to start it up again as an excuse to dump on 4e.

Gobbeldygook posted:

Ron Edwards is Osama Bin Laden and the Forge is his mountain terrorist training ground. Every so often his acolytes run out to other forums with 20,000 word essays about the meaning of Buttsex strapped to their chest.

FMguru posted:

Yeah, there was an excellent core idea at the heart of GNS theory (that there is no one way to play RPGs and different players will look for different things from their games) but they lost me when they kept insisting that there were EXACTLY THREE approaches to designing an RPG (no more, no less) and that their preferred way (always 'N') was superior/more advanced/more adult than the other two.

Robin Laws's book of GM advice developed the idea in a much better way.

hyphz posted:

Robin's Laws took its initial list of player archetypes from Glen Blacow's Aspects of Adventure Gaming, which far predates GNS and GDS, and had only four aspects: Power Gamer, Role-Player, Wargamer, and Storyteller.

hyphz posted:

Robin's Laws took its initial list of player archetypes from Glen Blacow's Aspects of Adventure Gaming, which far predates GNS and GDS, and had only four aspects: Power Gamer, Role-Player, Wargamer, and Storyteller. GNS essentially just consolidates Power Gamer and Wargamer into a single category in terms of what's provided by system design, but the terms it uses are generally horrible. "Simulationist" is misconstrued time and time again. Edwards changed Dramatist to Narrativist because the original term was used to mean "a satisfying storyline", but neither has managed to escape the assumption that "story" means something written before the session and thus the term means railroading. (And don't get me started on how Edwards mangled "story now".)

I'm not sure that Narrativism was pushed that heavily by Edwards himself - I think only one of his games, a lesser known one (Trollbabe) ever claimed to be 100% Narrativist. Rather, he had a bee in his bonnet about it because of Vampire.

Leperflesh posted:

That is a pretty good writeup. As you said, it doesn't really cover the absurd, sometimes corrupt, and weirdly hostile tenure of Tom Kirby. Highlights of the first death thread included Kirby's very inappropriate, bloviating prefaces to the company's financial reports. GW's treatment of its retail employees was also completely insane.

KingKalamari posted:

I think GNS is an overly simplified concept

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html posted:

System - "it does matter" all over again

Remember the System "bow" which shoots the Creative Agenda arrow? It must be an active tool. The Explorative Situation must change with verve - anything that introduces ebbs, flows, and unpredictable elements into the real-person decision-making process. That's what System does, whether it's composed entirely of dialogue or relies on pages and pages of probability charts. How does it do it? Through the combinations of Techniques being employed.

I'll focus on one bit of System: resolution. I'll break it up into Techniques regarding what exactly is being resolved. For Narrativist play, the key is to focus on conflicts rather than tasks. A conflict statement is, "I'm trying to kill him," or, "I'm trying to humiliate him," whereas a task statement is, "I swing my sword at him." (It doesn't matter, by the way, how much in-game time and space are involved; conflict resolution can be "very small" and task resolution can be "very big." We can discuss this more on-line.) 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.

How does this relate to game mechanics? I'll take the most-common example of Fortune systems. The big distinction I want to make is between Fortune-in-the-Middle and the more commonly-understood Fortune-at-the-End. For the record, I think both go back to the very beginning of role-playing; I didn't invent anything by naming them.

Fortune-at-the-End: all variables, descriptions, and in-game actions are known, accounted for, and fixed before the Fortune system is brought into action. It acts as a "closer" of whatever deal was struck that called for resolution. A "miss" in such a system indicates, literally, a miss. The announced blow was attempted, which is to say, it was also perceived to have had a chance to hit by the character, was aimed, and was put into motion. It just didn't connect at the last micro-second.

Fortune-in-the-Middle: the Fortune system is brought in partway through figuring out "what happens," to the extent that specific actions may be left completely unknown until after we see how they worked out. Let's say a character with a sword attacks some guy with a spear. The point is to announce the character's basic approach and intent, and then to roll. A missed roll in this situation tells us the goal failed. Now the group is open to discussing just how it happened from the beginning of the action being initiated. Usually, instead of the typical description that you "swing and miss," because the "swing" was assumed to be in action before the dice could be rolled at all, the narration now can be anything from "the guy holds you off from striking range with the spearpoint" to "your swing is dead-on but you slip a bit." Or it could be a plain vanilla miss because the guy's better than you. The point is that the narration of what happens "reaches back" to the initation of the action, not just the action's final micro-second.

There's a whole spectrum of extreme connect/disconnect between conflict and task. At one end, the task does fail, but the goal fails too, perhaps with a nuance or two. The other end is much wider in interpretative scope: we know the character's goal (killing some guy) doesn't happen, but with those in place, narration takes over to provide all the events involved. Applying different judgments along this spectrum, for different parts of play, is a big deal in games like Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Sorcerer, and HeroQuest. In Sorcerer, failing a dice roll means failing the goal, almost always due to failing at the task; in Dust Devils, certain card outcomes dictate that you fail at the goal, but whether the task failed or succeeded within that context is entirely up for grabs and determined by that scene's designated narrator. HeroQuest and Trollbabe permit the group to customize between these extremes as they see fit for that scene.

Fortune-in-the-Middle as the basis for resolving conflict facilitates Narrativist play in a number of ways.

It preserves the desired image of player-characters specific to the moment. Given a failed roll, they don't have to look like incompetent goofs; conversely, if you want your guy to suffer the effects of cruel fate, or just not be good enough, you can do that too.

It permits tension to be managed from conflict to conflict and from scene to scene. So a "roll to hit" in Scene A is the same as in Scene B in terms of whether the target takes damage, but it's not the same in terms of the acting character's motions, intentions, and experience of the action.

It retains the key role of constraint on in-game events. The dice (or whatever) are collaborators, acting as a springboard for what happens in tandem with the real-people statements.

Not all versions of this principle are alike. Some of them involve scene-scale resolution (Story Engine), some involve narration-trading (Dust Devils), some are heavily integrated with tactics (The Riddle of Steel), and some of them require role-playing "bits" to justify incorporating system features (The Dying Earth).

Some Fortune-in-the-Middle applications give opportunities for tweaking after the roll: usually, spending points of some kind after the dice have hit the table to alter the effects. Some games have this feature and some don't; Forge jargon calls such things "FitM with teeth" because such a system forces the group to acknowledge that the dice do not "finish" the job of resolution.

Does Fortune-in-the-Middle define Narrativism? No, nor does it even facilitate it in isolation. It's merely a strong component of many Narrativist-facilitating combinations of Techniques; I've left its potential integration with reward and behavioral mechanics out of this discussion.

Is there such a thing as Fortune-at-the-beginning? Playtesting so far indicates that it's not very satisfying for Narrativist play; see discussions at the Forge of Human Wreckage and The World the Flesh and the Devil.

Is Fortune the only resolution method for conflict resolution? The answer is emphatically no. The two main alternatives are apparently Karma + Resource management, which I consider to be underdeveloped at this point, and highly-structured Drama, which may be investigated through Puppetland, Soap, and to a lesser extent Universalis.

Gobbeldygook posted:

senrath posted:

Was Kirby the one who thought that the Warhammer video games were a direct competitor to Games Workshop?

KingKalamari posted:

Sorry, I should clarify: GNS Theory as it was understood by angry people on the internet is an overly simplified concept.

theironjef posted:

Is GNS just dumbass Valhalla?

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

Tom Kirby was a collosal moron and I have no idea how he lasted 30 years

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

Tom Kirby was a collosal moron and I have no idea how he lasted 30 years

Lemniscate Blue posted:

Which reminds me of the ancient Usenet classic about Real Men, Real Roleplayers, Loonies, and Munchkins.

ZeroCount posted:

Man, I remember this stuff. In hindsight it was loving insufferable.

Bruceski posted:

It was N. The language for the others was intentionally dismissive.

neonchameleon posted:

This is not how I remember it.

Or more accurately the message round G was "stop dumping on the people you call Rollplayers. What they do is actually pretty cool and should be thought of more". It came out of a 90s White Wolf mindset with screeds about "Roleplaying not Rollplaying" used as part of the game to justify lovely rules, and Ron Edwards was trying to rehabilitate G.

Gobbeldygook posted:

The biggest problem with discussing GNS is that everyone looks at the words "gamist/narrativist/simulationist", ignores the writings of the creator, and invents their own theory based on their definitions of the words. It would be like trying to discuss utilitarianism if half the people talking about it thought utilitarians believed only utility workers had rights. The second biggest is that Ron Edward's writing is worse than reading Lacan via Google Translate.

Joe Slowboat posted:

Why does science fiction studies need the term 'novum' instead of 'novelty?' Because 'novelty' might be construed different ways while 'novum' means you're talking about Suvin. Unless you're just using it secondhand and now it means two things, oh no, we need more terms! MORE TERMS!

Language was a mistake.

theironjef posted:

Who knew so much of that narrativist poo poo is just arguing over whether an attack roll is a sword swing or the combined value/culmination of several seconds of cinematic fighting? That's more or less perfectly structured to create neverending fights, since a lot of games, like straight up ol' D&D, are rife with confusion on that point and the battleground for a ton of dumb arguments about it! Is GNS just dumbass Valhalla?

Liquid Communism posted:

There's nothing wrong with being the guy who's just there to throw dice and win combats, as long as everyone else at the table is cool with that being a major part of the game.

The whole roleplayer/rollplayer split has always been a problem of people not having a ten minute conversation about mutual expectations before sitting down to roll characters.

KingKalamari posted:

I think GNS is an overly simplified concept, but I think there's at least a kernel of a legitimate observation it's built off of. Every game is going to use some combination of the three ideas in its ruleset, and I feel like the major divide comes more from the players rather than the designers. There's always been this contingent of people who think D&D should be a realistic physics simulator, which the game has absolutely never been.

KingKalamari posted:

Sorry, I should clarify: GNS Theory as it was understood by angry people on the internet is an overly simplified concept.

Terrible Opinions posted:

Funniest thing is how the people mad about "rollplayers" the loudest inevitably play incredibly rules heavy poorly balanced games like White Wolf, 3.5 D&D, or Pathfinder. Lordy the Paizo forums were a miasma.

neonchameleon posted:

Or more accurately the message round G was "stop dumping on the people you call Rollplayers. What they do is actually pretty cool and should be thought of more". It came out of a 90s White Wolf mindset with screeds about "Roleplaying not Rollplaying" used as part of the game to justify lovely rules, and Ron Edwards was trying to rehabilitate G.

Halloween Jack posted:

Uh, was he? I wasn't hip-deep in the Forge and the communities and discussions that came out of it, but my impression was that Edwards was all about identifying and championing Narrativism.

Halloween Jack posted:

Yeah, Simulation didn't mean "the rules are the physics of the setting" in either the Threefold Model or GNS. But half of the discussion of RPG theory has been people misappropriating it to fight edition wars, and Simulation probably got it the worst!

theironjef posted:

Does that mean things can retroactively become simulationist? Is Rifts simulationist now because Ready Player One started the "just smash all your nerd poo poo together badly" media genre?

theironjef posted:

Does that mean things can retroactively become simulationist? Is Rifts simulationist now because Ready Player One(or Pixels whichever hit the toilet water first) started the "just smash all your nerd poo poo together badly" media genre?

Halloween Jack posted:

I have to admit, I grew up playing Shadowrun and White Wolf games, and it wasn't until I played D&D that I really learned how to look at game design (and specifically game balance) in a logical, disciplined way.

admanb posted:

The weirdest thing about GNS is that people talk about it like Ron Edwards is out there pushing his "GNS Theory of RPG Game Design" course on Skillshare. He's living rent-free in ya'lls heads off of a few posts he wrote in 2001 on a forum that closed in 2012.