In a previous thread I brought up GNS Theory (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_Theory ) and was told by someone that it was a bad theory because what the terms actually meant were "the kind of RPG I want to play," "the kind of game I don't want to play," and "other stuff" from the point of view of the person who made up a theory. Because I've had ideas about the theory bouncing around my head, here's a stab of reformulating the theory to make it more useful and balanced:


Gamist: Game play is based around covering various challenges that are callibrated to be of an appropriate difficulty for the party. Sid Meier defines a game as "a series of interesting choices" and a good gamist game would provide these by giving players meaningful choices between various tactics that they could use to overcome the challenges. Dealing with things like food wouldn't be done here since it doesn't really involve any interesting choices.
How results of actions should be determined: balance between different tactical choices would be paramount here since without balance then it is not interesting to choose between the various choices (for example if you have guns in your campaign you probably wouldn't want to make them clearly more powerful than all other weapons).
Why they GM would fudge results: In order to calibrate the difficulty of various challenges that turned out to be easier to weaker than expected.
What fights should be like: Something as abstract as Chess would be fine as long as it gives the players interesting tactical choices.

Narrativist: The focus here is more on interesting stories than tactical challenges. Dealing with things like food would probably be ignored since it doesn't really further the main story.
How results of actions should be determined: according to what would up the drama of a situation. Things like Action/Fate points work well here.
Why the GM should fudge results: to make the plot move in an interesting direction.
What fights should be like: Action movies, what fits the story should trump what is realistic or what results in the most interesting/balanced tactical choices. Fate's system in which players can get extra fate points for doing things that are in-character, whether those actions are tactically sound or not, would be a good example of this.

Simulationist: The focus here is on making the results fit with what is "real." For games based on fictional sources the focus is on fiting the source, for example not having any spells that don't appear in the books in a Middle Earth game.
How results should be determined: according to what is most real or what fits the sort of results that take place in the source material.
When the DM should fudge results: when the result that the dice give is patently unrealistic.
What combat should be like: As close to real combat as possible or as close to the sort of things that exist in the source material.

Acquisitionist (tenative forth category): Game play is based on the acquisition of progressively more wealth and power. Interesting/complex tactics are rare, the story is not the focus and realism goes right out the window. Basically MMORPGs at their worst.

I think that's a bit of a different formulation than the original GNS theory and a bit more balanced since I like playing three of the four types of games described above.

In summary:

Gamist: Guns shouldn't one-hit kill the main characters since that doesn't lead to tactically interesting combat.
Narrativist: Guns hsouldn't one-hit kill the main characters since that would truncate too many plotlines.
Simulationists: Guns should often one-hit kill the main characters because guns kill people.
Aquisitionist: My gun is made out of antimatter.

Feedback?