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hyphz posted:He does still actually run seminars and design consultancy. https://adeptplay.com/ That’s cool but I’m not sure what it has to do with my point. I’m not saying Ron Edwards vanished from existence, I’m saying that GNS existed as an aspect of the conversations that occurred in a time when RPG design was rapidly evolving (much like it is, again, now). It’s not inscribed in the Canon; it’s an artifact of a moment long past.
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Dec 1, 2020 01:00
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Ferrinus posted:I've never really believed GNS is a helpful framework at all since every RPG partakes of all three letters and if you really dig down I don't even think that you can legibly argue that a particular game even uses one more than the other two. Like, is D&D simulating a fantasy world or providing a tactical challenge? Is the blood point economy in Vampire there to produce a particular type of story, illustrate how vampires "really" work (in this setting), or face players with an interesting optimization problem? Even in games whose mechanics partially or completely cover OOC story editing stuff rather than anything that's real to the characters themselves, you're still simulating something and - whether you want to or not - posing the people engaged in that simulation with a strategic game to play at the same time. I'd argue it is/was a very flawed lens to get people to start thinking about RPG design as actual design and while it's certainly not going to magically give you great tips to make a good game, reading it and keeping it in the back of your head could lead to some interesting ideas. Like clearly it's not great but it makes people examine things, and when they realize it doesn't work that well they can start thinking in different ways. Rather than 8,000 games that are just the Red Box but now battle-axes do 1d12 damage or whatever. So basically it's pretty crap but just people really doing effort in game design is so rare in this hobby that I don't want to poo poo on something that's making a teeny-tiny new-born horse's first step attempt at improvement.
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Dec 1, 2020 01:14
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Picking at history isn't a waste of time. It's not like Albert Bacon Fall lives rent free in my head because I talked about the Teapot Dome Scandal once. Digging around in this stuff can sharpen opinions on modern game design and RPG theory.
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Dec 1, 2020 02:01
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Yeah specifically cause it sucks everyone should at least skim it so they learn from past failures.
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Dec 1, 2020 02:50
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admanb posted:That’s cool but I’m not sure what it has to do with my point. It's kind of weird to be arguing this in the context of a thread where people are basically just revisiting an older concept and discussing it, unlike Swami Nisarg who actually holds an ongoing grudge against Ron Edwards like a Z-list supervillain. Ron Edwards isn't living "rent free" in anyone's head here any more than any other person of passing note in the elfgameosphere is.
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Dec 1, 2020 04:41
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At its core, GNS identifies and defines creative agendas beyond "having fun," which nearly 100% of gamers back then would have said was the goal of gaming without giving it any further thought. And for that it's vital and worthwhile, even if nobody today believes that the 3 categories he chose are exhaustive or well-defined, and even if nobody could ever agree on what the gently caress simulationism was supposed to mean.
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Dec 1, 2020 04:41
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Simulationism is "games I don't like that aren't Gamist"
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Dec 1, 2020 04:46
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Piell posted:Simulationism is "games I don't like that aren't Gamist" Wut? Like 3E is pretty widely (I thought) accepted to be a pretty Simulationist game. It's not 'Gamist' or 'Narrativist' because so many of the primary assumptions and rules are based not off of what would be good in a game or for the narrative flow, but what the (often very dumb, insulated nerd) authors thought would be a good mechanical representation of 'real world' physics interacting so-and-so way. Just because idiots misappropriate terminology doesn't mean we should abandon terminology as a concept
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Dec 1, 2020 05:19
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Darwinism posted:Wut? But that's not true? 3e doesn't try to be simulationist very much if at all, it's just trying to sort out what a complete D&D would look like after the actually trying to be simulationist 2e. 3e might appear simulationist because it looks like a very weird grab bag of stuff from end to end, but it's actually a collection of various pieces that were thought of as being important to D&D as a game (yes, even pricing for cows and commoner levels.)
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Dec 1, 2020 05:28
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Arivia posted:But that's not true? 3e doesn't try to be simulationist very much if at all, it's just trying to sort out what a complete D&D would look like after the actually trying to be simulationist 2e. 3e might appear simulationist because it looks like a very weird grab bag of stuff from end to end, but it's actually a collection of various pieces that were thought of as being important to D&D as a game (yes, even pricing for cows and commoner levels.) Oh yeah for sure 3E isn't simulationist because it's just trying to complete... the... less.. simulationist... edition that is 2E Well gently caress me I knew looking at this post was a bad idea but I went and did it anyway
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Dec 1, 2020 05:32
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This is very much 'the definitions that have accrued in my head secondhand' but I always thought a useful way to approach it was, when would a person see the game system as returning the wrong answers? Obviously everyone uses all these lenses at different times, but there are ways they can be in contention or made to work together. Not trying to claim these are what the GNS actually means, but just curious how much the definitions I sort of vaguely received drift away from the original questions. A Gamist approach says, the system is returning the wrong answers when the core math and structure of the game is off, when playing with the widgets themselves isn't enough fun to compel engagement. For example, the fictional question of 'what is HP' doesn't matter to the question of 'does this enemy have enough or too little HP to do what they need to do in the tactical game.' A Narrativist approach says, the system is returning the wrong answers when it would cause the stories you want to tell, or the stories it purports to tell, to fall apart. For example, if HP reaching 0 just means characters die instantly, that can be pretty unsatisfying in most kinds of narrative/genres, so you might want to rethink how HP works from that perspective. Doesn't need to intersect with the strategic layer at all. And a Simulationist approach says, the system is returning the wrong answers when it damages verisimilitude and the believability of the setting as a world. For example, if player character HP works differently from NPC HP, it can be jarring to think about how for no reason at all the characters work differently from the people near them. (Exalted 2e famously had named characters just have more health levels than unnamed characters, then tried to justify this metaphysically, a decision that kind of whiffed on every level in my opinion.) At least, that's how I generally received the idea, that these are different criteria for deciding if a system is doing what it's supposed to, and whether it needs to be changed. All three run off player expectations - what a well-tuned game looks like, what the narratives of this genre should look like, what supports verisimilitude. Verisimilitude in particular is really hard to nail down; there was an interesting article on 'invisible rulebooks' from the creator of RISUS that I read once on that point.
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Dec 1, 2020 05:33
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Joe Slowboat posted:This is very much 'the definitions that have accrued in my head secondhand' but I always thought a useful way to approach it was, when would a person see the game system as returning the wrong answers? Obviously everyone uses all these lenses at different times, but there are ways they can be in contention or made to work together. Not trying to claim these are what the GNS actually means, but just curious how much the definitions I sort of vaguely received drift away from the original questions. I don't find this to be an extremely useful take because even the most perfect examples of the criteria fall short, or return the wrong answers, pretty commonly - to me it's more about what your goals are instead of how perfect your execution is.
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Dec 1, 2020 05:37
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Darwinism posted:Oh yeah for sure 3E isn't simulationist because it's just trying to complete... the... less.. simulationist... edition that is 2E I don't know what you thought I was saying, but 2e was REALLY simulationist. Like it had a whole series of Historical Reenactment supplements for various eras and lots and lots of pages dedicated to creating realistic combat. 2e was a ton of optional rules and a lot of them were layers and layers of simulationism.
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Dec 1, 2020 05:47
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Honestly I think trying to argue which of the three archetypes in GNS Theory D&D fits into is a fool's errand from the start since the original game was never really designed with this sort of deliberate attention to design decisions in mind and is the work of multiple generations of developers who have all had very different ideas about what the game is supposed to be about. Even going back to the brown box editions you have mechanics that display aspects of all three ideas haphazardly thrown into the mix with little regard for what larger product they build towards.
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Dec 1, 2020 05:55
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I'd say an easy shorthand is that if the game has stats for housecats (but is not about housecats) it's got some simulation in there.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:13
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KingKalamari posted:Honestly I think trying to argue which of the three archetypes in GNS Theory D&D fits into is a fool's errand from the start since the original game was never really designed with this sort of deliberate attention to design decisions in mind and is the work of multiple generations of developers who have all had very different ideas about what the game is supposed to be about. Even going back to the brown box editions you have mechanics that display aspects of all three ideas haphazardly thrown into the mix with little regard for what larger product they build towards. And I actually think this derives from a different design goal entirely: being everything to everyone. Even before 3E and Dancey and Hasbro trying to be the owners of the concept of multiplayer analog gaming, just looking at a lot of the side supplements for 2E and earlier versions of the game shows that D&D was trying to be any kind of game that a given group wanted it to be - and I don't think this was entirely by accident. How well this worked is of course a matter of taste, and I don't think I'm reading the room wrong to say that it doesn't succeed at that goal as far as most of us are concerned; a lot of people here give the impression of preferring a game that focuses on doing a particular thing well, rather than doing a bunch of things less well. But I don't think it was entirely accidental that D&D has at least some support for doing any of those three styles of game (obviously, some better than others, but that's just how it works with any game; trying to play Apocalypse World as a tactical, Gamist-style game is just going to be an exercise in frustration, as one aspiring GM I played with found out.)
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Dec 1, 2020 06:22
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Darwinism posted:I don't find this to be an extremely useful take because even the most perfect examples of the criteria fall short, or return the wrong answers, pretty commonly - to me it's more about what your goals are instead of how perfect your execution is. I'm not arguing it's a useful take, I'm just saying this is more or less how the concept got communicated to me secondhand and how my particular group of nerds used it. And how I've mostly continued to use it informally, though honestly I haven't thought about it as a way of considering games in a long while.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:24
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In stock market investing, one of the most basic things you do when someone pops up with a brilliant new theory of How The Market Works, which will definitely make them and you filthy rich, is to take that theory and back-test it against historical data. If it fails (e.g., given data from x to y date, the theory predicts a future z that did not happen at z), that's an immediate and strong argument that the theory is incorrect. Maybe there was some kernal of interesting or innovative ideas in it you can harvest, but you don't have to take the theory itself seriously. I think the fact people struggle to agree on the most basic assessment of whether games we're all pretty familiar with fit into which categories of GNS, is a compelling condemnation of that categorization method. It's useful to understand what actually was said and (maybe, if it's actually discernable) intended by GNS. But I don't think it's useful to revisit the old arguments of exactly whether a given edition of D&D was more, or less, of any one or all three categories.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:28
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KingKalamari posted:Honestly I think trying to argue which of the three archetypes in GNS Theory D&D fits into is a fool's errand from the start since the original game was never really designed with this sort of deliberate attention to design decisions in mind and is the work of multiple generations of developers who have all had very different ideas about what the game is supposed to be about. Even going back to the brown box editions you have mechanics that display aspects of all three ideas haphazardly thrown into the mix with little regard for what larger product they build towards. For sure. The point I'm making is something different though: it's easy to look at 3e and THINK it's being simulationist, that it's got some grand idea of completely replicating a fantasy world and ends up being a mess because of that. But that's really not the case. 3e was a reaction to and an attempt to update and unify the pieces of AD&D that had been a huge mess until then, and the pieces that are frequently brought up as simulationist are actually gameplay elements in previous editions that retroactively look simulationist because of how drastically the play model changed during 3e. 3e has a lot of clunky game elements that are still game elements. Why are there rules for walls? Because walls as a gameplay element matter a lot in D&D and always have - how hard is it to climb, how tough is it to break, how much does it cost to build. Originally you didn't really have any solid rules for them, then 2e provides different rules in different places that don't really work together, and then 3e as one of its stated development goals puts all the rules in one place as a standard element. Yes, it looks simulationist from outside of the game's discourse to care about the wall's thickness and hp, but that was actually the designers working to clarify, simplify, and unify how these interactions work. I think the most simulationist element of the 3e core rules was the rules for determining populations in settlements, complete with classes and levels. But that's really actually a worldbuilding tool - it's creating power structures, characters, and capabilities for PCs to interact with, and it's a system for creating the kinds of "the local lord is a fifth level fighter" writeups that had existed in D&D for decades (since OD&D.) It feels weird to look at today and go "oh god why do I need to calculate the highest level NPC of each class here, this isn't going to get used" but those structures enabled and drove play for decades. Why are there NPC classes? It unifies a bunch of goofy-rear end rules about NPCs that were done piecemeal. 2e had an entire supplement about sages for crying out loud - just knowledgeable NPCs for your PCs to learn from, with piles and piles of tables and percentage chances for "Does Elminster know if Drizzt has a boil on his butt." In 3e, that's unified through the Knowledge skills, and NPCs have levels because everything has levels or Hit Dice (which are effectively special monster levels in 3e.) It's a lot simpler and easier to actually work with a first-level commoner than what used to be called zero-level humans, who were a whole pile of exceptions in and of themselves. The Murphy's Law of "you can't see the Moon" in 3.5 gets passed around a lot here. But it was never meant to be that - it's a game of telephone for what was originally the encounter distance rules, which are crucial for sandbox and dungeon crawl play using wandering monsters. In 3.5 that section gets cut and the penalty goes onto Spot in general, and it sucks and makes no sense because the underlying game system is totally lost. People in 3e aren't blind, they just had a set of rules for a purpose that fell out of favour during the edition. There's tons and tons and tons of that in 3e. If you're looking at something and it feels weird and nonsensical, especially if it's in 3.0 or the core rulebooks, it's likely a game mechanic from previous editions of D&D that's just lost context or purpose, not an attempt to be a simulation exercise.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:28
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KingKalamari posted:Honestly I think trying to argue which of the three archetypes in GNS Theory D&D fits into is a fool's errand from the start since the original game was never really designed with this sort of deliberate attention to design decisions in mind and is the work of multiple generations of developers who have all had very different ideas about what the game is supposed to be about. Even going back to the brown box editions you have mechanics that display aspects of all three ideas haphazardly thrown into the mix with little regard for what larger product they build towards. I mean my personal experience in D&D starts with 2E AD&D but... D&D has been fairly easy to sort into GNS categories? 2E is pretty obviously a transition between Gamist (pixel bitching dungeoneering) and Simulationist (loving lol 3/2 attacks because reasons), 3E is S as gently caress, 4E is the 3E system's Gamist reinterpretation, 5E goes sorta back to S but wants to eat its G cake by letting Rule Zero pull alllllllllllll the weight. edit: This is more to say that GNS is kinda linked to D&D than to lend it absolute credence as a sorting system Darwinism fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 07:33
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GNS was never supposed to be for classifying games! It was for classifying creative agendas like "play to win" or "play to find out what happens". And then, you can design games with those in mind and get something you might call a narrativist game - a game where the design is focused on enabling players playing to find out what happens. So no, D&D doesn't fit into any category. The whole point of the theory (which was based on discussions with people playing the games of the time) was that some groups played D&D to win (G), others played D&D to find out what happens (N), and other D&D groups told Ron that they didn't play for such base reasons as those and used terms like "verisimilitude" (S). And that's why S never made sense. Because it wasn't a coherent thing but just Ron taking people at their word that there was something there when those people were mainly just being pretentious pricks self-fellating about how they are the true roleplayers. He said in the essays that he had no experience with it himself. He fails to explain it to such a degree that people think it has something to do with whether NPCs and PCs use the same HP (how could this possibily have anything to do with fully inhabiting your character?) And while we all agree that surely there are far more than 3 possible creative agendas, even if we grant that the classification was broadly accurate at the time, he was clearly missing a fourth group that as far as I can tell may well be the largest today, and was certainly large when he was writing: Players who come to experience the GM's mostly-preplanned story and GMs who play to tell their stories. This is hugely popular today, with nearly all streaming falling into that category. Groups have been playing like this forever. I've personally had players put off when I have GMed without a story in mind. We've all seen it. And yet Ron didn't include it. It can't be (N) because it's almost the opposite of Story Now. It's certainly not (G) since winning is guaranteed. But ascribing it to (S) doesn't make sense with how casual and uninvested in things like verisimilitude many groups who play this way are. So why did he miss it? Because that style of play was considered railroading and illusionism and nobody on the boards he posted on would admit to playing that way! That was just bad GMing, they thought, not a separate creative agenda! Even though coming to experience and play in the fun story your buddy wrote is obviously a perfectly valid creative agenda, as is entertaining and surprising your friends with your cool story that incorporates their characters in fun ways.
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Dec 1, 2020 08:19
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When I was a teenager reading about GNS on Usenet, my thinking was that D&D, being a tactical miniature game, was Gamist. World of Darkness, being for dramatic goth nerds, was Narrativist. GURPS, having a rule, skill, and sourcebook for every concept imaginable, was Simulationist. None of this was ever relevant and I don't know why I bothered thinking about it.
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Dec 1, 2020 08:50
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Jimbozig posted:GNS was never supposed to be for classifying games! It was for classifying creative agendas like "play to win" or "play to find out what happens". And then, you can design games with those in mind and get something you might call a narrativist game - a game where the design is focused on enabling players playing to find out what happens. This is a super bad example because D&D absolutely presents itself as a simulation of fantasy reality and the fact that most streaming is done in a very scripted manner in no way changes this presentation. The faux-simulationist ideology described by those ever-so-pretentious people that Ron Edwards dared to take at their words? They won. Their game is the one streaming. edit: Ask most people and they absolutely will never say they're just playing to 'experience a story' whatever your galaxy brain take on other people is. Taking people at their word in this isn't dumb. It's just... what you have to do? Instead of intuiting what their Purestrain Elfgame Preference would be? God it annoys me that "taking people at their word" is a strike against the dude somehow edit2: It's this, "Yet you participate in society, curious," level take honestly. People mostly play constructed adventure paths that help emulate the emergent stories that talented DMs (that our systems have no way of reliably producing) can create! They must just really love to go through rote stories, the rubes. Darwinism fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 09:03
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Even Critical Role doesn’t fall into that category so I do not see how it’s possible for “nearly all streaming” to.
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Dec 1, 2020 09:35
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We've all been at the session that's 95, 99, or 100% storytime over combat. In Age of Covid VTT settings it's more difficult to navigate because GMs lack the ability to quickly read the room's taste. I guess it's also worth noting that while D&D might be construed as simulationist it's never clear what it's trying to simulate besides, in grand circular logic, itself.
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Dec 1, 2020 09:54
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Sodomy Hussein posted:I guess it's also worth noting that while D&D might be construed as simulationist it's never clear what it's trying to simulate besides, in grand circular logic, itself. I mean yeah, this is actually not at all incorrect. D&D is "Simulationist" from both angles, it's simultaneously attempting to simulate Being D&D to a degree that's often detrimental to itself as a game (you'll never see a version of D&D that ditches ability scores no matter how vestigial they are because if you did that it would be insufficiently D&D, so regardless of how useful they are they have to stay) while also simulating a bunch of useless fuckin minutia to appeal to the verisimilitude crowd (the weight of equipment in pounds, how much silver you earn by using the Performance skill, you can't backstab this entire category of enemies because they don't have the necessary weak points somehow, etc).
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Dec 1, 2020 13:17
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GNS reminds me of how the way Magic The Gathering categorised players became a whole astrology system of adhering to nerd stereotypes.
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Dec 1, 2020 13:57
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Not So Fast posted:GNS reminds me of how the way Magic The Gathering categorised players became a whole astrology system of adhering to nerd stereotypes. Timmy, Johnny, and Spike
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Dec 1, 2020 14:02
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Darwinism posted:This is a super bad example because D&D absolutely presents itself as a simulation of fantasy reality and the fact that most streaming is done in a very scripted manner in no way changes this presentation. The faux-simulationist ideology described by those ever-so-pretentious people that Ron Edwards dared to take at their words? They won. Their game is the one streaming. How the hell do you get this from my post? This is wrong on every level. First paragraph: I never said D&D doesn't have rules that fit some folk definition of "simulationist" - that doesn't change anything. The point is that GNS was explicitly not for classifying games. If you disagree, I don't care - you are simply factually wrong. It was about a play group's creative agenda. And explicitly different play groups would have different goals even in the same game. Also "they won"... As though you read my whole post pointing out how lovely GNS was in multiple ways and thought I was defending it and Ron Edwards? And as if players who like to play in other modes are supposed to feel bad because they're not on TV? gently caress off. I like tactical combat where I can play to win, and I like improvised story rather than a mainly pre-scripted one. But those aren't popular streams! Oh no, whatever will I do?? Maybe I'll keep on liking what I like and not caring what's on TV. Second paragraph: it's not a knock on Ron that he took people at their word generally. It's a knock on the lovely assholes who we've all seen in grognards.txt whose main motivation for posting was proving that they are the real roleplayers unlike those rollplayers or storygaming swine. And the knock on Ron is that he didn't see their assholery for what it was. Literally the same rampant blindness that allowed Zak S to become a popular blogger and author despite him coming across as a piece of poo poo in every social interaction. And the third paragraph... what? I didn't even talk about pre-made adventure paths because that wasn't what I was talking about. At all. Although there are interesting things to say about them. But most importantly, I was criticizing Ron for ignoring the way scads of people like to play as simply bad GMing instead of recognizing their fun as a valid thing. And you somehow got the opposite out of my post - that I'm criticizing how people stream. It just goes to show exactly what I was saying - there is so much stigma against that kind of gaming where the GM has a story in mind and the players play within it that even when I make a post describing it plainly and defending it, people think I'm attacking it. That stigma is why Ron missed it and didn't include it in his essays.
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Dec 1, 2020 14:42
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admanb posted:Even Critical Role doesn’t fall into that category so I do not see how it’s possible for “nearly all streaming” to. It is my understanding that critical role is largely pre-planned. Feel free to let me know if I'm wrong on that. I don't know much about it, just what I've heard here from others.
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Dec 1, 2020 14:45
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Darwinism posted:Like 3E is pretty widely (I thought) accepted to be a pretty Simulationist game. It's not 'Gamist' or 'Narrativist' because so many of the primary assumptions and rules are based not off of what would be good in a game or for the narrative flow, but what the (often very dumb, insulated nerd) authors thought would be a good mechanical representation of 'real world' physics interacting so-and-so way. Joe Slowboat posted:And a Simulationist approach says, the system is returning the wrong answers when it damages verisimilitude and the believability of the setting as a world. For example, if player character HP works differently from NPC HP, it can be jarring to think about how for no reason at all the characters work differently from the people near them. (Exalted 2e famously had named characters just have more health levels than unnamed characters, then tried to justify this metaphysically, a decision that kind of whiffed on every level in my opinion.) Simulation does not mean that the rules are a physics engine. That's precisely the misappropriation of 3e vs. 4e edition warriors that became common parlance. If 3e was actually a simulationist game, D20 would actually be good at simulating anything, instead of producing a bunch of broken games that just turned their subject matter into a broken, bizarro version of D&D. (For perhaps the ultimate example of this, see D20 Testament. For exceptions that prove the rule, see Mutants & Masterminds, Spycraft, and a few other games that make D20 work--by changing it until it's basically incompatible with any other D20 game.) Statting up NPCs the same way as PCs is a great example of how 3e failed to be a flexible ruleset that simulated multiple genres. Feng Shui's mook rules are very simulationist for the genre it's trying to simulate. (Nor does "Verisimilitude" mean what Justin Alexander and a thousand shrieking morlocks on ENWorld and RPGnet think it means.)
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Dec 1, 2020 15:25
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Darwinism, I just realized I was being stupid. Instead of arguing and getting in a pissing match over what is obviously a misunderstanding, I'm just going to restate my points more clearly. Sorry for being aggressive before. Premise: I'm talking about Ron Edwards' definitions of GNS, not any other definitions. Point 1. GNS is explicitly for classifying groups' creative agendas, not for classifying games. 1a. D&D can be played with any of the creative agendas Ron identified (and more). 1b. There can and have been games designed with certain of Ron's creative agendas in mind, and it might make sense to call those games Narrativist or whatever, where the label wouldn't make sense for games that predate the model. Point 2. Ron's definition of simulationism was never clear, was never coherent. 2a. Ron admits in his essay on simulationism that he doesn't really get it either. 2b. Ron got it wrong because he was listening to a bunch of grognards whose main goals in posting were edition warring and feeling superior to both those powergaming rollplayers and those magical tea partying cupcakes. Point 3. Ron ignored a huge swath of gamers in his classification that obviously don't fit into any of his 3 categories as defined. 3a. These gamers were a large group then and are now perhaps the largest group. (Your words: "they won." As in, they are currently dominant. Right, you definitely agree with me on this.) 3b. He missed them because the lovely culture on the boards back then said that rather than having a different agenda, they were just playing wrong and had lovely GMs. 3c. They aren't playing wrong and their creative agenda is just as valid as any other. I'm happy to elaborate on any of these points with examples or evidence. Some I'm 100% sure of while others I'm only guessing. You brought up premade modules, which I also have lots of thoughts on, as they can easily help support any of the creative agendas we've been talking about when designed well (even story now!, despite the superficial contradictions), and thinking about creative agendas and how players will use your modules is key to designing them well.
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Dec 1, 2020 15:45
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If I recall there was a fourth entry for people who preferred prefab stories, which was "Illusionism". I think the idea was it's the creative agenda of already knowing what your character needs to do to fit with the story, with the creativity being coming up with a reason or excuse why your character does it. Instead, the term meant it got mixed up with an illusion of playing the game at all. "Story now" is something that Ron loved to redefine - if you go back to Sorcerer, "Story Now" meant that a PC should be capable enough at the start of a campaign to be a story protagonist rather than having to level up into it. It only later changed to mean that the story is written at game time rather than written in advance or retroactively applied to the game. (Also, although I'm enjoying playing in a more story-driven game I'm getting the feeling that there's only limited numbers of narrative structures which mean it's not as varied as might be expected from the outisde.) I always liked Ron's tagline for simulationism, "the right to dream", which connects it with mimesis and character decision-making which I think is where it belongs, although god knows if that's what Ron meant. hyphz fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 17:29
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Illusionism sounds like something a 19th century candidate for Governor of Arkansas would accuse his opponent of.
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Dec 1, 2020 17:44
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I think the positive form of Illusionism is when you start with the PCs at the entrance to the dungeon, and then say "ok, players, each tell me: what has brought you here?" The players are therefore generating backstories leading to an already known end point.
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Dec 1, 2020 18:19
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Some weird speculation here: is WotC being prepared for sale by Hasbro? As far as I can read, the only 'evidence' is the recent lawsuits being an effort to clean up outstanding obligations? Which, I guess you could say that Hasbro was taking the initiative by violating contracts, but both lawsuits were brought by outside parties and I have to imagine there was an easier, cleaner way to cut ties. On the pro-side, selling off the rights to D&D right now might be good since it's at the zenith of its popularity, but I don't think Magic is anywhere near a high point in popularity and that's the bigger brand. Anyway, here's some totally pointless speculation.
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Dec 1, 2020 18:21
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EverettLO posted:Some weird speculation here: is WotC being prepared for sale by Hasbro? As far as I can read, the only 'evidence' is the recent lawsuits being an effort to clean up outstanding obligations? Which, I guess you could say that Hasbro was taking the initiative by violating contracts, but both lawsuits were brought by outside parties and I have to imagine there was an easier, cleaner way to cut ties. Magic is in a weird spot because digital is surging and Paper magic is on the edge of a cliff.
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Dec 1, 2020 18:46
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hyphz posted:If I recall there was a fourth entry for people who preferred prefab stories, which was "Illusionism". I think the idea was it's the creative agenda of already knowing what your character needs to do to fit with the story, with the creativity being coming up with a reason or excuse why your character does it. Instead, the term meant it got mixed up with an illusion of playing the game at all. I don't remember a 4th entry, but I'm going to go see if I can find it because I'd like to hear early 2000s Ron's take on it. Like I said, the culture on the boards at the time often thought of that style as just railroading and bad GMing rather than its own style, so I'm curious what mr GNS himself wrote about it. Edit: I didn't find it but found some old forge threads and ugh, it's so much tougher to read now. Already in 2002 they are talking about narrativist play as playing to address a premise and insisting that the players and GM are consciously addressing a specific premise, and I can't help but feel like... that's not the same as playing to find out what happens! That's already not the original definition. It's so obvious that they are smooshing multiple distinct creative agendas into one thing, but I guess it was a lot less obvious back then to those involved. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 18:46
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EverettLO posted:Some weird speculation here: is WotC being prepared for sale by Hasbro? As far as I can read, the only 'evidence' is the recent lawsuits being an effort to clean up outstanding obligations? Which, I guess you could say that Hasbro was taking the initiative by violating contracts, but both lawsuits were brought by outside parties and I have to imagine there was an easier, cleaner way to cut ties. It's rare for a corporation to sell off assets when the parent corp is financially healthy. I think the strongest point is the move in-house of the boardgame licenses, and that seems like pretty weak evidence. Hasbro is making substantial revenue from Magic, and does not seem to need to convert that future revenue into a big pile of cash (or cash-equivalence) right now. Of course, sale is only one divestment possibility; Hasbro could also spin off WotC as a separate public corp, retaining some amount (typically a majority) of shares, for example. But what would we imagine Hasbro is raising cash for? I suspect the small-scale maneuvering being referenced in the article is exactly that, and no more; just small scale changes being made by management in the normal course of doing business.
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Dec 1, 2020 18:55
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| # ? May 26, 2024 21:21 |
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Hey all. The game I kickstarted two years ago is finally done! It's a TTRPG set in the "Mythic West" - ie, the kind of romanticised, exciting west that exists in old cowboy movies and dimestore pulp novels. The game has a heavy emphasis on character and storytelling, and folks seem to really dig it so far. If folks are interested, it's available here: https://gumroad.com/deadinthewest And just for the yucks, you all can have a goony discount with the code "goonsgowest". However, I'd like to also state that... I'm a little lost as to what to do now. Where do I promote this? How do I get clicks? Is there anything I need to do? Does anyone have any general advice?
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Dec 1, 2020 19:07
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