Good column

[smascrns]

I'm one of those that thinks that simulationism, dramatism and gamism are not opposed objectives, contrary to what Ron Edwards thinks. On the contrary, I think they have to go hand-in-hand, specially in the long run for an ongoing game.

If you were able to achieve your simulationist aims, then you must have a game system that works in terms that the gamist player, the one that focus on competition and achieving well defined objectives through a game system, will be able to get it... within the constrains of the setting as modeled by the game system. Just like in real life where we can as "gamist" as we want or feel inclined to be within the constrains of our environment.

Likewise, a good simulation is essencial for dramatic build up because drama is part of the environment being simulated.

Just think about any fictional or real setting. Take, for instance, the build up for the Iraq intervention in 2003 and all the drama associated with it (and the political gamble it involved). A game set in such a setting, a game that wants to simulate it correctly, also has to support the drama of the times because that drama was part of it. It also has to simulate the huge political gamble being played at the times, for the same reason. Things go hand-in-hand.

[M. J. Young]

As Thanuir said on another thread:GNS is not GDS. They do entirely different things.

I'm not so familiar with the Threefold RGFA model as perhaps I ought to be. However, the words "Gamism" and "Simulationism" do not at all mean the same things in these two theories, and the word "Narrativism" has very little to do with the concept behind the word "Dramatism".

For an explanation of what is being called GNS, see Theory 101: Creative Agenda (http://ptgptb.org/0028/theory101-03.html) at Places to Go, People to Be. (There are two other articles in the series which give context to that small part of the theory of role playing developed by Ron Edwards in part through discussions at Gaming Outpost and The Forge, which are I believe linked from that one if you're interested in a fuller understanding.)

RGFA simulationism is about maintaining the integrity of the modeled reality; Creative Agenda simulationism is about using role playing as a path to discovery. The latter works better within the context of the former, but can work in other contexts as well.

Also, there is a separate confusion in the article between Narrativism/Dramatism on the one side and what Jonathon Tweet called Drama Mechanics (in a three-fold division that included Fortune and Karma as the other two categories). Drama Mechanics are about having a person (usually but not necessarily the referee) decide an outcome. They can work for Simulationism or Gamism (in either theory's definition) as well as for Dramatism or Narrativism. At the same time, Ron Edwards prefers Fortune Mechanics in many of his Narrativist games, and Karma can work in those contexts as well. It was because of the potential confusion between the RGFA's use of Dramatism to describe a mode of play and Tweet's earlier use of Drama to define a type of mechanic that Edwards used the word Narrativism in his restructuring of the three-fold model (and not to distinguish it from the earlier version, which had not been his intention).

I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young

[Tarafore]

I'm one of those that thinks that simulationism, dramatism and gamism are not opposed objectives, contrary to what Ron Edwards thinks. On the contrary, I think they have to go hand-in-hand, specially in the long run for an ongoing game.

If you were able to achieve your simulationist aims, then you must have a game system that works in terms that the gamist player, the one that focus on competition and achieving well defined objectives through a game system, will be able to get it... within the constrains of the setting as modeled by the game system. Just like in real life where we can as "gamist" as we want or feel inclined to be within the constrains of our environment.

Likewise, a good simulation is essencial for dramatic build up because drama is part of the environment being simulated.

Just think about any fictional or real setting. Take, for instance, the build up for the Iraq intervention in 2003 and all the drama associated with it (and the political gamble it involved). A game set in such a setting, a game that wants to simulate it correctly, also has to support the drama of the times because that drama was part of it. It also has to simulate the huge political gamble being played at the times, for the same reason. Things go hand-in-hand.

While it's been amply pointed out that I don't know enough about GNS to comment on this from that perspective, I can shed some light on the RPGA Threefold (GDS) perspective, because I raised the same objections myself back in the day.

The Threefold is about decision making. And it's certainly true that the three areas (Game, Drama, and Simulation) don't conflict all of the time, it's also true that the conflict <i>some</i> of the time.

99% of the time, world concerns and story concerns may coincide (verisimilitude is the term, I believe), but the 1% of the time when they don't coincide can change the whole tone (and course of events) in the entire game.

For example, everything's going fine, until in the last minor battle before the huge climax of the two year long chronicle, some mook gets a lucky shot in and kills one of the main characters. You rolled the dice behind a GM screen. Do you keep the result, because it's what happened in-game (simulationism) or do you fudge it to keep from derailing the story (drama)?

That decision is played out as either drama, sim, or gamist. Over time, the collected weight of the decisions within a chronicle will set a tone that favors one of the three (or some combination of them). Some chronicles and groups will very heavily favor a particular approach to making those decisions, and will strongly "feel" Dramatist, Gamist, or Simulationist. Some won't have a strong preference either way. The Threefold isn't meant to be a perfect unified field theory, but a way of explaining the different approaches and preferences that people have (beyond "good" and "bad" roleplayers).


For more information, follow this link to the Threefold FAQ:
http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/threefold/faq_v1.html