GNS Theory Revisited

[Darrin]

Okay, you're completely missing the point of what Ron Edwards calls "Narrativism". Narrativism has nothing to do with following a plot, it has everything to do with exploring themes.

...but you can explore themes through Gamism and Simulationism. I guess I miss the older term "Dramatic", where the structure of the game is supposed to reflect a "narrative" in the sense of a story, drama, movie, etc.

Ron doesn't think TRoS is Narrativist (or rather "primarily Narrativist Facilitating") because you can use the SAs to "bribe" the players into following plot hooks. In fact, he views it as Narrativist because it makes the players unwilling to risk combat and allows them to get one shotted by a meaningless mook. This - according to Ron - underscores the "Narrativist" theme of the game, which is that violence always has consequences. You can't just say "that guy's a nameless mook" you have to say "that guy poses a threat, so I should not challenge him unless I really, really care about what I'm fighting for."

That's a bit absurd. So if a game contains violence without a lot of risk, then it's not narrativist?

My concept of a "narrative" game is one where one of the primary goals of the game is to create a "narrative", i.e., a story, and the structure of the game, along with the decisions and options available to the players facilitate that. The risks and consequences of certain actions... that could be shoved into the Gamist or Simulationist corner (as RotS does with it's combat engine).

I don't agree at all. In all the situations you cite, you've just arbitrarily picked two axes of the threefold and says "this game does these and not the other one.

Entirely subjective examples, yes. But historically, most of the criticism leveled at D&D is how poorly it supports narrative play with it's emphasis on combat, levels, and memorizing stat blocks. Likewise, WoD is marketted to "Storytelllers" and puts a great deal of emphasis on character development, mood, themes, and narrative structures.

Why is D&D not Narrativist? The entire system is designed to produce a Hero's Journey.

Actually, it does this exceedingly poorly, in fact so poorly that I wonder why people bring up this point at all.

The standard D&D theme has very little to do with the Unhealing Wound, The Call to Adventure, the Refusal, the Journey to the Underworld, and Father Atonement (nor does the game system provide much, if any, by the way of rules to deal with those issues). D&D characters and personality are defined one-dimensionally via their class and alignment. They are punished *by the game system* for having any flaw (heroic or otherwise), where optimized characters are mathematically proven to out-perform more "heroic" characters.

The only real scrap of D&D that could be considered part of the heroic journey is you're more of a bad-ass at 20th level than you were at 1st. But even I'd have a go at that... if you look at the examples we have of the heroic journey, very few of them start out with the hero at 1st level and take them up to 20th. Usually they start out fairly bad-ass, and don't get all that much better towards the end. Because of the oral storytelling tradition, most heroes don't "improve" from story to story, any iconic abilities they have in one story are just as likely to appear in the next. Hercules doesn't pick up "Great Cleave" as part of the journey, he started with it and keeps using it.

The World of Darkness is the textbook example of "not narrativist". Hell, the entire concept of "Narrativism" was pretty much invented so that Ron could have a go at Vampire.

This is the problem with GNS in a nutshell: no one can agree what the terms mean.

The WoD is, in fact, hugely simulationist. It's about exploring what it is like to be a (say) Vampire in the vampiric society described by the books.

But you just said that to Ron, exploring theme = narrativist.

Again, you're just making this up to fit your pattern. Feng Shui isn't Narrativist, because it doesn't have a core theme, nor does the possibility of doing 57 damage with a butterknife preclude it from being "gamist".

The core theme is emulating what happens in an action movie... and from there, you get another theme based on what kind of movie you're trying to emulate. Granted, the narrative structure is a bit weak... Robin Laws has been working on better tools for narrative games since then, but the intention in the rules is to encourage players to base their decisions on what would be more dramatic or cinematic... essentially, a narrativist goal.

The butterknife example is about game balance, which in my mind is the goal of gamist play. There are people who would get really bent out of shape if they designed a character to do a lot of damage with a huge anime-style greatsword, only to watch some scrappy kid do more damage with a butterknife. Feng Shui is designed to place a great deal of power in the hands of the players, and things start to break if you try to come at it from a game balance point of view.