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2024-05-24, 06:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
@Satinavian: missed your answer while editing. Two points:
1) my point is about limits of expectations your comment rests on.
2 Since it appears you agree on those limits, then your answer to my question should've been something to the tune of "in that case, it doesn't make sense to use them in contrast to another, they're more serviceable as isolated descriptors".
EDIT:
Originally Posted by Satinavian
Last edited by Vahnavoi; 2024-05-24 at 06:47 AM.
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2024-05-24, 06:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
Generally yes. Though there are situation where those ideas can come into conflict. You have to put in some extra work to have them play nice with each other or you just make a priority decision.
But that is not different from every other kind of perpendicular goals you could have. Satisfying several at once is harder, even if they are not technically at odds.
If you try to use it as analogy, then you have to remember that you and King Of Nowhere are arguing for usefulness of GNS terminology outside the context of GNS
And yes, the meaning is slightly different from how GNS understood them. Because no one cares for or references GNS. But they are clear enough, way clearer than other lingo terms like "Powergamer".Last edited by Satinavian; 2024-05-24 at 06:58 AM.
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2024-05-24, 09:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
Thanks this was helpful to me, as was the link about the RPG styles history you posted earlier. I am starting to understand what GNS is so controversial.
I think I was also falling into the same trap as Quertus, in liking the basic and simple GDS and confusing it for GNS.*This Space Available*
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2024-05-24, 09:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
GNS was improper to start with, which I think was the point laid out in the OP. Someone was trying to apply rigor to a thing and basically failed (due to internal agendas). But I will offer RE credit for making the attempt. Run it up the flag pole, see who salutes it.
Why is that? Because people find some use in the concepts of "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism", but have long given up on GNS, Edwards and Forge.
"the use has shifted as no one is working in the GNS framework anymore".
And why is GNS itself irrelevant ? Well, maybe it is because the idea to pursue purity in one of those agendas and how mixes are inconsistent never caught on. And of course the fact that the Forge only ever cared about NAR and never produced anything helpful for the other branches or, really, understood at all what was important there, hurt as well. And the latter is of course also a reason for the shift in use. Edwards was not the right person to properly define or write about gamism or simulationism given the poor understanding he had.
Heh, nice job time traveling back to about 2000-2002.
we can use words like gamist or narrativist because they are useful descriptors, without that having anything to do with the GNS theory.
Say what you mean, mean what you say, and use the correct term for what you are talking about.
(Same is true for a variety of other things I dealt with in the military, such as making sure you call for the correct munition in a call for fire, else you may violate the RoE, may end up destroying things or killing people you didn't intend to, etc...but that's a few orders of magnitude removed from a gaming hobby).
I bet most people using those words don't even know there's a theory in the first place. they use the words because they work and they are useful, that's all.)
less well agreed upon.
90% of people who use those terms never heard of those theories in the first place, and just use the words for convenience
And I really don't get your crusade.
I came into this thread with no idea what the forge or gns was, and i googled it to be able to figure out why vahnavoi was so mad about it. i read about half a page, before concluding it wasn't really important.
Doesn't that mean Munchkin, or is that not a case of clean equivalence?Last edited by KorvinStarmast; 2024-05-24 at 03:11 PM.
Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Worksa. Malifice (paraphrased):
Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
b. greenstone (paraphrased):
Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
Second known member of the Greyview Appreciation Society
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2024-05-24, 10:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
Yes. It cannot be objectively described as "better".
You can say, objectively, that "A missed the target and B hit it," but you can't say "B's performance was objectively better than A's."
Were they really both trying to hit the center of the target? What if A had made a bet that B was going to win the competition and threw the match on purpose, walking away rich?
What if A had never picked up a bow before and had a deadly fear of performing before an audience, and just picking up the bow to fire an arrow at an archery tournament represented a moral triumph for him, whether or not he hit the target, whereas for B hitting the target was "Tuesday"?
You can't measure fun or pleasure on objective bases, certainly, but there is such things as standards of quality that are objective.
If they were published today, the first D&D booklets would more than likely get the game company directly sent into a lawsuit-shaped hellscape, since there are artworks there straight up taken from Marvel comic books.
And you don't mess with Marvel's lawyers in 2024.
I'd say that "would destroy the company's finances if not immediately removed from sale" is a pretty good metric to say something objectively sucks.
Some people really like those crude old "copied from Marvel comics with light alterations" drawings because they remember their excitement when they first bought and read those booklets and then played that game with their friends.
Having lots of people agree on something doesn't make it objective. In fact, being objective means precisely that it doesn't matter at all how many people agree or disagree with it.
More generally, it is in fact an objective requirement for the society I live in that a lot of people do agree on values and that that we can make conditionals bases on those values that are amenable to objective examination.
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2024-05-24, 10:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
I have no idea what the Forge is or was, or the controversy around it. So, for fun I sat with my table and asked a few questions to see what people thought of when I said some of the key "trigger" words in this thread. This is not data or scientific in anyway.
First, not one of them had any concept of these terms prior to me using them:
- Gamist = Things done to make the game play smooth, mechanics
- Narrative = Things done for the good of the plot or story
- Simulationsit = This one caused some confusion. Folks decided it was stuff you did to make a game react in a "normal or expected way" based on prior experience in the game.
- OSR = No idea. Once I told them Old School Revival, they assumed it meant playing older versions of D&D, not porting those ideas into new systems or anything about challenge level match the abilities of the characters.
- Nordic Larp = Live action role-playing. Probably from Northern Europe. No real thoughts beyond that.
- Trad/Neo-Trad = No idea, but it sounded the same as OSR to them. They assumed it was some conservative form or throwback form of gameplay.
- OC (Original Character) = No idea, but eventually got around to games set in a Franchise game like Star Trek, Star Wars, or something like that.
None of the people in the group are academics in game theory or design. Two have played RPGs since the 80's, One has played since AD&D 2nd, two started at the end of 4e, two are relatively new to RPGs. They have all played at least 4+ different systems beyond D&D 5e. The ones I know of are L5R, Avatar, Lasers and Feelings, and Those Dark Places.
My conclusion: This stuff is less relevant to the community gamers than it is to us on the forum.
Only a handful of grognard nerds even know anything about all this stuff much les care.Last edited by Easy e; 2024-05-24 at 10:26 AM.
*This Space Available*
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2024-05-24, 11:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
Another thing to keep in mind is that it's pretty easy to accidentally coin these terms since they're just a common suffix stapled onto some common words. By extension some of their popularity is probably because the average English speaker can intuit a meaning from context without hearing about GNS. I would not be surprised if the majority of people using these terms have never heard about it.
Like, while I have heard about GNS it has always been in the context of "oh yeah remember THAT guy?"mew
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2024-05-24, 12:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
I have a LOT of Homebrew!
Spoiler: Former AvatarsSpoiler: Avatar (Not In Use) By Linkele
Spoiler: Individual Avatar Pics
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2024-05-25, 04:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
Thing is, "Gamist" and "Narrativist" are terms that aren't in common usage at all. There just isn't a common usage of those terms that doesn't go back to GNS. (Simulationist has a number of other meanings, there's an art movement and the people who believe we're all in a computer simulation).
Which means that pretty much every time they are used they're probably novel terms that mean whatever the person using them intends them to mean (because they're probably not actually referring to the formal GNS stuff because nobody actually does any more really).
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2024-05-25, 05:25 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
I would submit that the reason GNS theory and the terms associated with it continues to see discussion in the TTRPG space is simply that while it may be broadly acknowledged that the theory broadly failed to produce the results hoped for, nothing substantial has replaced it.
There was a major movement, in the 2000s to improve TTRPG design, and to do so in a systematic way with at least some attempt to discover/define first principles rather than simply producing games ad hoc. This was spurred in part by D&D 3e, which whatever its flaws represented a massive step forward in standardization and the use of theory in game design, partly by the end of the oWoD and the attempt by White-Wolf to create a unified rules system for the nWoD (at the time the second most popular portion of the market by a huge margin), and by both the OGL and just general advances in technology that made it possible for the first time for just about anyone with an idea to throw together a game system and try to sell it to people.
The thing is, this movement largely failed. The nWoD collapsed almost immediately (for reasons largely unrelated to the games themselves), and White-Wolf went down with it. The most theorycrafted version of D&D ever created: 4e, was also a massive failure, though this probably had more to do with marketing and the inability to continue campaigns across edition boundaries (ex. blowing the up FR) rather than the game itself. Smaller games that did utilize the sort of design theory that emerged during this time did get made, and many have acquired a solid niche, but the hobby as a whole contracted significantly up until the release of 5e, which succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of literally everyone including the people who created it (again for reasons largely unrelated to the game itself, like Stranger Things). 5e operates outside of basically any theory of TTRPG design, GNS or otherwise, but it's utter dominance of the market has broadly buried the discussion of how games should be created, leaving those people who do talk about such things to utilize old terminology from a period when such ideas had significantly wider play.
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2024-05-25, 10:23 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
Hit the nail on the head.
This is why GNS is such a problem. People (including very much me) want to use words that aren't actually defined, let alone words that are defined and they're just using wrong.
When someone says "narratavism" in regards to gaming I can think of several disparate things that are not automatically related to each other :
1) An underlying "plot" thread that ties together events. Specifically, Railroading.
2) Players have input on the world, not just the character's attempted actions.
3) Meta-rules / meta-currency
Interestingly in many Forge GNS derived games (e.g. AW & BitD), #3 is explicitly to enable #2. And as I understand it, the entire point of GNS was railing AGAINST #1, especially White Wolf. The anti-Trad game (D&D especially) stance was because late-TSR had also gone that direction, with linear railroading adventures and campaign metaplots. Starting with Dragonlance.
I have similar issues with the terms Storytelling, Collaborative Storytelling, and Storytelling Game as used in context of RPGs. And the term Metagaming. They're either not used in any way that lines up with what the words actually mean, and for the undefined terms often mean something wildly different from person to person.
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Dungeons and Dragons 5e has huge amounts of OSR input. Along with "back to roots" of course.
What's interesting is Mearls didn't make an OSR game at all. He took 4e and started rolling it back to something that 'felt' more like D&D (as early as 4e Essentials) and listened to input from the OSR community, without explicitly making something directly based on first principles of their theories. Which I don't believe were fully fleshed out in explicit terms at the time anyway.
Edit: To be clear, I don't disagree with you that it operates outside of theoretical design. Intentionally so. But Mearls had quite a few specific guidelines he used in his design process AND the input of groups directly oppose to The Forge / GNS theories.Last edited by Tanarii; 2024-05-25 at 10:33 AM.
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2024-05-25, 03:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
@KorvinStarmast: I already beat you and PhoenixPhyre in the race to mock people who abuse "quantum"; see one of the comics I linked.
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@Jason: it is not required for value statements to be objective, for us to agree on a set of values and then make conditional statements based on those values that can be examined objectively.
Elaborated using the tangent you had with Unoriginal, arbitrary and relative are not synonyms with subjective. It is, in fact, possible to give objective criteria for a good backpack as surely as it is possible to give objective criteria for a heavy backpack or a cool backpack. The benchmark is arbitrary because words used are relative and there is no absolute frame of reference, but the measures used are objective. The same applies to values. That is, how much you value (say) challenge over fellowship may be arbitrary subjective decision by you, but your decision is an objectively examinable fact to me and then, based on objectively measurable qualities of games, I can objectively rank them relative to your decision. Those relations are objective even if the points of comparison are subjective and arbitrary.
Hence, "better is subjective!" isn't an actual obstacle to discussing what makes games better, as long as people are willing and able to express what they value. Which is why, again, I ask you: Which of the eight aesthetics you personally would not be willing to nominate as a value for games?
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@catagent101: the words "narrativism", "simulationism" and "gamism" follow a standard construction, yes. I agree they are easy to stumble upon. That doesn't mean they have standard use nor that their meaning is easy to intuit. A comparison can be made to "realism", which follows the same standard construction. That word has both lay and formal definitions that are clearly applicable to discussion about games. Yet, Satinavian argues it's an even worse term for discussion.
How could that be the case?
It can be the case when people act like King Of Nowhere and use "realism" to mean whatever the Hell sounds right to them, without taking more than five minutes in Google to find out what the past usage has been or which definition would be applicable, leading to fallacies of equivocation and false dichotomies.
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@Mechalich: you may be right part of the problem is lack of popularized game design theories in hobby spaces. However, I'm willing to argue lack of such popularized theories can partly be blamed on the Forge, GNS, and their fallout: their failures caused at least some vocal people to develop a distaste for theories in general. Add to this clique-ish ideas about how special or different tabletop roleplaying games are in comparison to video games and other tabletop games, and it creates a situation where, even when game design in the rest of the world becomes more professional and academic, tabletop hobbyists end up ignoring it. For example, it wouldn't surprise me MDA goes underappreciated by hobbyists simply because it isn't specifically about tabletop roleplaying games.
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@Tanarii:
Originally Posted by Tanarii
But even beyond that, I agree, these have usage problems. Largely because "story" is a loaded word all on its own, but partly also because roleplaying is a specific form of storytelling that does not necessarily overlap with other forms. So, when someone answers "what is roleplaying?" with (say) "it is collaborative storytelling", it's equivalent to answering "what is a ball game?" with "it is a team sport". Certainly, there are ball games that are also team sports, and roleplaying that is also collaborative storytelling, but the format of the answer commits a category error.
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2024-05-25, 05:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
As I understood it a large part of The Forge motivation was railing specifically against the 1990s King of "Story Games" ... White Wolf. Specifically and as I said, White Wolfs (and late-80s TSR) penchant for railroading adventures and metaplot campaign settings.
Of course, when I dug into the history one thing I found absolutely hilarious is a segment of folks (or at least a few specific individuals) claiming to speak for OSR went off the rails to try and position OSR as the ultimate opponent to The Forge / GNS in the internet flame wars. And it's true that the games produced by the (actual) members of the two groups result in wildly different games. But both movements, at their root, seemed to largely stem from rejecting those two concepts: Railroading and Metaplot. Instead the actual games produced rely heavily on some form of Player Agency. (Although I've never seen post-Forgites call it that.)
Edit: it's probably important for me to re-note ... I do not consider the actual games produced by post-forgites to actually match either GNS theory nor the philosophical mantra they often spout at various points in their work.Last edited by Tanarii; 2024-05-25 at 05:41 PM.
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2024-05-25, 05:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
@Tanarii: Yes, I know. I mean some people who despised White Wolf's Storyteller system joined the Forge and later went and founded a community called Story Games. The fact that self-described story games they made have opposed mechanics and opposed conception of how to tell stories with games, compared to earlier Storyteller system and other games that self-descriptively were about telling stories... that's what contributes to usage problems.
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2024-05-25, 05:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
BtW I just re-found this while looking for something else. Not sure how accurate a rundown it is, but I do recall reading it previously.
https://whitehall-paraindustries.com...ry_bad_rep.htm
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2024-05-25, 09:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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2024-05-26, 05:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
No, that is why i used "powergamer" as an example.
Some people use it the same way as munchkin but many others use it with different meaning and there are even several groups out there who proudly claim the moniker for themself. Most of them would be quite cross with you for calling them munchkins. Not that they are all on the same page as the meaning of powergamer goes. Also there are several other rpg-"theory" pieces, some even in book form, that define use the term - differently, of course.
The term is just worse when it comes to clear communication and i avoid it.
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2024-05-26, 08:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
GNS labels used with their original definitions are very much like "Charop" (mostly defined, good) vs "Munchkin" (mostly defined, bad). All carefully defined, you don't know what the word means if you're not an insider, and they're broken up as Narrative (Good) vs Gamism (mostly neutral) vs Simulationism (Bad).
Sometimes GNS labels as commonly used on the internet, are very much like "powergamer" (undefined, good or bad) or "storytelling game" (undefined, good or bad). People just make up their own definitions and it could be good or it could be bad.
And other times they're closer to "Metagaming". People assume the meaning based on the root word and what they think the common usage definition would be as a result. And it turns out they're completely wrong. Because that's not what the words mean in GNS. At all.
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2024-05-26, 10:45 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
"Powergamer" is basically a pejorative for winning in an unsportsmanlike way, and people who use it as a self-identifier are equivalent to those wearing a T-shirt reading "This is what winner looks like". The usage case is clear, but also useless for game design.
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2024-05-28, 10:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
I see that the statements could be in a way objectively examined as statements (this statement is more or less correct), but any value judgements could not evaluated as more or less correct because value is inherently subjective.
[quote]Elaborated using the tangent you had with Unoriginal, arbitrary and relative are not synonyms with subjective. It is, in fact, possible to give objective criteria for a good backpack as surely as it is possible to give objective criteria for a heavy backpack or a cool backpack. The benchmark is arbitrary because words used are relative and there is no absolute frame of reference, but the measures used are objective.[quote]If the benchmark is arbitrary then it is not objective. Objective to me means that it is true for all observers. If a benchmark is arbitrary then pretty much by definition it will not be accepted by all observers.
The same applies to values. That is, how much you value (say) challenge over fellowship may be arbitrary subjective decision by you, but your decision is an objectively examinable fact to me and then, based on objectively measurable qualities of games, I can objectively rank them relative to your decision.
Hence, "better is subjective!" isn't an actual obstacle to discussing what makes games better, as long as people are willing and able to express what they value.
Which is why, again, I ask you: Which of the eight aesthetics you personally would not be willing to nominate as a value for games?
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2024-05-28, 10:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
I think we have different understandings.
To use the backpack example, we can look at a few people that might want a backpack - a hiker, a schoolkid, a business person, and someone in the army.
The hiker needs a certain amount of storage, and doesn't care about more - they budget what they carry pretty closely. They also want to minimize weight since they're hiking. Appearance isn't that important, but preference probably is in the more "sport" range.
The schoolkid needs a good amount of space for books, and needs something sturdy to not fall apart with the abuse they put it through every day. Weight is less important since the books will outclass any weight from the backpack. Having a design that they like (per their interests) is also extremely important. If they like Pokemon, for instance, a Pokemon design would be great. "Boring" is probably out.
A business person wants something fairly light and easy to work with, and preferably something with appropriate pouches/compartments for the electronics they use the most. Overall carrying capacity is probably less of a concern. Appearance will typically aim for "professional".
Someone in the army wants a lot of space, durability, and more durability. Appearance will need to match Army requirements (assuming it's not just handed out by the Army). Weight probably doesn't matter too much, since again they'll be carrying a lot of weight above and beyond the backpack.
So, given these for people and their individual needs, we can't just say "The Pokemon backpack is better than the lightweight, plain black, computer laptop". "Better" is subjective in that it's dependent on the individual needs of the person. However, it's not arbitrary. Each person has a set of needs, and while there might be some truly arbitrary bits in them (some design aspects, for instance), to a great extent we can determine if a given backpack is better or worse for some user with a specific set of needs."Gosh 2D8HP, you are so very correct (and also good looking)"
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2024-05-28, 11:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
I think part of the longevity is that, devoid of context, the GNS terms seem like useful discussion terms.
When I first encountered them, I thought "Oh, that's a neat way to talk about games, games tend to have elements of these three things, and different people enjoy different aspects to different degrees".
A Game is Narrativist to the degree that it's a tool for telling a story. It's Simulationist to the degree that it is a tool for providing a model for some fantastical scenario, and it is Gamist to the degree that it is mechanically fun to engage with. Scrabble is 0 simulationist, 0 narrativist, and 100% gamist, and that's just a tool for describing scrabble.
To me, this is the intuitive use of these terms.
Of course, that's not the origin of these terms, you've got years of discussion and, as you say, the original definitions exist not to describe aspects of a game, but to group games, and to implicitly serve as a value judgement on the "Correct" way for a game to be.
But so long as people keep getting exposed to the terms without the context, they'll keep showing up, because they seem like useful terms for discussion except that the very contexts that introduced them also poisoned them.
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2024-05-28, 11:40 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
@Jason: the definition of 1 meter as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second, is an arbitrary benchmark. It is, also, objective. The fact that not everyone uses SI units of measurements doesn't make it less objective.
Originally Posted by Jason
In the exact same way, what makes a better backpack for any given person is fundamentally rooted in physical shape of the backpack, which also have a relationship to such absolute values. The same is true of any game rules due to informational constraints of the human brain and mind. Again: don't confuse variability and relativity with lack of objectivity. People come in various sizes and with various cognitive skills, so of course a single product won't be the best for everyone - but this isn't more exotic than saying that a moving object won't have the same vector of motion relative to every possible observer.
Originally Posted by Jason
Originally Posted by Jason
The basic error you are making here is the same that has been repeatedly made by people throughout history: presuming that because something is hard to study beyond your experience, that there is no objective study or theory to be found. Your line of argumentation is equal to Aristotle arguing temperature cannot be studied objectively, because hot and cold are subjective. Posterity has pretty well shown that we can go a long way to ground temperature in absolute natural constants to measure it objectively and, consequently, make useful predictions of what people will subjectively find hot or cold.
Why do you think the same can't be true of aesthetics of gameplay? Keep in mind said aesthetics include sensory pleasure, and contemporary science has quite a lot of objective things to say about how human senses work. If I can predictably create optical and aural illusions - things that very much require being able to find objective correlates of subjective experience - why do you think these findings aren't useful to game design?
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2024-05-28, 11:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
I was referring to the benchmarks being arbitrary in Vahnavoi's example. If someone says "1.5 cubic feet is enough storage," then he's set an arbitrary benchmark, and it is of necessity a subjective benchmark.
You can say "this backpack has a capacity of 1.5 cubic feet" or something similar and be objective.
If a critic reviewing the backpack says "1.5 cubic feet is more than most other backpacks on the market," he can be making an objective statement.
A critic who says "1.5 cubic feet is enough storage for most people," he could even be objective, if he really has some evidence showing that most people report that this is enough storage in their backpacks.
If he says "this is a good backpack" then he's making a subjective judgement. Not necessarily an arbitrary judgement, but not an objective one.
Edit:
You can make such an argument, but whether something has moved or not is not a value judgement. My point was that value judgements are always subjective.
Posterity has pretty well shown that we can go a long way to ground temperature in absolute natural constants to measure it objectively and, consequently, make useful predictions of what people will subjectively find hot or cold.
Why do you think the same can't be true of aesthetics of gameplay? Keep in mind said aesthetics include sensory pleasure, and contemporary science has quite a lot of objective things to say about how human senses work. If I can predictably create optical and aural illusions - things that very much require being able to find objective correlates of subjective experience - why do you think these findings aren't useful to game design?
You can make an objective statement like "this game has more pages and words devoted to combat than that system". You can't say "combat in this game takes too long" and be making an objective statement.Last edited by Jason; 2024-05-28 at 12:13 PM.
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2024-05-28, 01:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
Right. You can say "combats in this game typically take <x> time" (or, more likely "x time per participant"). You can also talk about the preferences people have for how long combat takes. This gives you a good assessment about whether the game would likely be a good fit for a particular person, without making an overall objective statement of goodness or badness.
The analogy I like to use is cars. Is a Jeep, a Ferrari, or a minivan better? Depends on what you're doing - going fast and looking cool, driving over rough terrain, or carrying lots of people? Unless you go to "sell the Ferrari, and then buy...." level, you can't really say one is better than another overall. You can say one is better than another for a specific use case."Gosh 2D8HP, you are so very correct (and also good looking)"
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2024-05-28, 01:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Worksa. Malifice (paraphrased):
Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
b. greenstone (paraphrased):
Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
Second known member of the Greyview Appreciation Society
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2024-05-28, 02:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
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2024-05-30, 10:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
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2024-06-03, 12:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
Yet presumably the people making 5e had some sort of way of saying: "We'll make it like 3.5, but playing more like a game and less like a detailed simulation. Instead of skill points and a bunch of +2 to +5 bonuses of different types for the purpose of stacking or not, how about we go back to a single check if proficient or not (except in a few minor cases where we forgot we were doing this), we'll lower the bonuses so the Barbarian actually stands a chance at investigating stuff, remove some of the overly specialised skills and add in this bonus die mechanic from other games that we can call advantage and disadvantage."
I'll happily believe that GNS theory is wrong, I'll happily believe that I use terms like gamist wrong based on the definitions of the time, and I certainly don't have a detailed counter definition of my own. But at the end of the day, 5e is less of a simulation than 3.5 was, and therefor plays more "gamey". You can say exactly the same thing about 4e in comparison with 3.5 (presumably, most of what I know about 4e is just from "Will save world for gold"), so just "gameyness" is an inadequate filter for "if you like this game you might like that one too", as 5e was more designed for 3.5 players than for 4e players, despite both 5e and 4e being more gamey than 3.5. But it's still nice to have terms for that.
So I propose we all start talking about gamey, simulationy and narrativey games. Surely I have done everyone a favor and we will never need to have this discussion again.Last edited by Lvl 2 Expert; 2024-06-03 at 12:29 AM.
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2024-06-03, 08:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS
I'd rather talk about "play your character" vs "play the world" games. That'd be ones where the player solely makes decisions about character actions vs ones where they can define aspects of the world outside the character.
Or consequence-driven results vs plot-driven results.
Slow, fast, or intentionally variable paced. At least intended.
Dice Pools vs Modified Die
Rules Light vs "haha just kidding it's really not Rules Light despite people calling it that" vs Rules Heavy
Or the classic one, which is really about mindset for everything despite the name
Combat as War vs Combat as Sport
Or the newfangled ones (but not really):
Theatre of the Mind vs Battlemat / Grid / Minis (latter not officially named)
Combat vs Social vs Exploration vs Other