[Silvered Glass]

The Threefold

The Threefold is the first major three-way division of playstyles. As previously mentioned, it arose as an attempt to distinguish between the 'make your campaign feel like an action movie' style that Theatrix' creator was advocating, and the 'make the world feel as real as you can figure out how to make it' style that some other people favor. The 'make your campaign the best game you can' idea came later, when the first division didn't seem to cover all the bases.

The Threefold doesn't classify game systems (although some systems lend themselves more easily to particular styles). It doesn't classify players or GMs (although some people have fairly consistent preferences). It doesn't cover anything that happens before play begins, nor is it concerned with how the GM presents the events in the campaign world. Rather, it classifies the GM's motive for determining what happens in the campaign world during play: what is the aesthetic purpose behind the GM's adjudications?

The three aesthetics are story-oriented (or dramatism), world-oriented (or simulationism), and game-oriented (or gamism). Some said that the Threefold should be the Fourfold: that some decisions are made for purely social reasons, rather than because they improve the story aspects of play, the game aspects, or the realistic-feeling-world-simulation aspects. Others gainsaid this on the grounds that it's impossible to imagine a campaign where all the decisions are made for purely social reasons (except in the sense where that applies to every campaign imaginable): the social considerations exist on a different level. The latter view generally prevailed.

The Threefold is not a statement that there are only three ways to roleplay, not a statement that one plays for story or simulation or game exclusively. Rather, it was thought that most people play for some mixture of the three aesthetics, but that they often have preferences -- that one aspect of play may be more important to them than the others, and that they may favor the most important aspect in situations in which there a given resolution makes for, say, a good story but a bad game. People whose prefences are strongly at odds may not enjoy each other's campaigns.

A triangle was often used as a visual representation for the model, with one aesthetic at each vertex. If a GM weighted simulation and story considerations equally in her resolutions, but paid no attention to whether the result made for a good game, then she might mark her style as falling at the midpoint of the side of the triangle between story-oriented and world-oriented. Someone with mostly gamist preferences and some desire both for natural development of events and good story might mark their preferred mixture inside the triangle, nearer the game vertex. And so on.

Of the Threefold aesthetics, the world-oriented aesthetic, or simulationism, needs some explanation. The term 'simulationism' is an analogy to the concept of running a simulation from initial conditions: you set up a scenario and rules for how the elements in it behave, and then you set it in motion to see what happens. Since the idea behind the simulation is to see what would really happen if the initial conditions actually existed and the behavior of the elements in the simulation really is as described, you don't reach into the simulation to change something because you don't like the way it came out: that would defeat the purpose.

The roleplayer with simulationist preferences wants to feel as if the campaign world is real, and wants to see what would 'really' happen in it. According to this aesthetic in its strongest form, every effect that happens in the campaign world should be the result of an in-world cause. If a PC survives combat, this should be because he really would have survived, given his characteristics and actions, compared to the enemy's characteristics and actions: the GM shouldn't reach into the world and make sure the PC survives for a dramatic reason like "it's a lousy story if the main character dies in chapter 3." If a group of NPCs is weak, the GM shouldn't reach into the world and toughen them up "because it'd be a better game if all the encounters are difficult but winnable challenges." Everything should happen as it would naturally happen.

My preferred style is closer to Threefold-simulationist than to anything else. I used to classify it as about midway between the simulationist and dramatist vertex, but more practical experience with other people's play has given me the impression that more like 75% simulationist 25% dramatist 0% gamist would be less misleading. This distinction has proven useful to me in practice, in that it helped me to identify what was going wrong in two different campaigns; also, it and some related ideas have helped me to set up campaigns that would suit particular players.

I would, these days, prefer to describe my preferences using Levi's differentiations of goals rather than the Threefold, because the Threefold is a bit lumpy and biased in spots, and because Ron Edwards swiped some of the Threefold terms and redefined them to mean something else, meaning they're even more likely to be misunderstood now than they were when rgfa coined them. So I regard this theory as a source of imperfect but valuable insight to me.

The Threefold was not exclusively the work of people whose preferences were Threefold-simulationist, but they were probably the heaviest contributors to it. Some of the language that isn't really part of the theory itself, but was often associated with it, could easily and probably justifiably be viewed as having an anti-dramatist slant to it, which was a source of contention. In addition, the fact that it classifies the GM's motives for decision-making biases it in the sense that it's not all that handy as a method of describing the preferences of people who don't see the GM's motives as of great importance. Aside from that, it has a bias toward the idea that the GM designs the world before play begins: it doesn't handle improvised creation particularly well. I see it as flawed, therefore.

Nevertheless, it was a serious and to my mind useful attempt to say, "Hey, if you keep clashing with so-and-so over such-and-such, it might not mean that he's intentionally being a jerk. It might be that he's trying to do X instead of Y, and X is a reasonable thing to be trying to do, even if it doesn't always mix that well with Y."

Next: DAS & DIP and assorted other terms