Gamism and Narrativism: Mutually Exclusive
Ron Edwards:
Hi Norm,
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The only thing I look at skeptically (this is an understatement. I am an eternal skeptic sometimes), is the idea that I'm narrativist and done. What about wanting esteem for success in conflict or for coming up with good story ideas? I definitely want that too, just not as much as I want those hard questions. Simulationism only ever appeals to me when I am playing within a constrained setting in which I have no control, such as many published adventures for DnD or the campaign settings they publish. I like them well enough, but I like them more as sping-boards for my own imagination than as creative constraints.
So if I seek this esteem, is that a shred of gamism creeping into my narrativist desires, or is it just the general human need for appreciation and recognition?
You should look at that idea skeptically, because I didn't say that. There are several points in there that need some refining.
First, the whole GNS concept is not a Briggs-Meyer personality test. We're only talking about that play experience and where you and the group were at with it.
Second, one of the most important early dialogues about these ideas back at the Gaming Outpost was between me and Mark J. Young, who was at that time totally committed to the idea of percentages: 20% Gamist, et cetera. The conversation was resolved when I suggested that he consider those moments when push comes to shove, if for instance esteem for strategy and guts were to be set aside in favor of addressing Premise, would that be a joyous moment, or an annoying one? Mark then articulated the key issue: it's not about whether a person "is" Narrativist, it's about that he or she cannot play more than one CA at once.
Now, there are some hassles inherent in that point, specifically that Creative Agenda is not about moments but whole cycles of play, but the point is valid insofar as it talks about priorities.We've actually already seen all the necessary information about this in your thread, especially with the actual play staring us in the face. Keeping in mind that we're not talking about you as a personality but your desires during this particular game, you have already stated that the addressing-Premise content was your hard-line, can't-lose, must-be-there boundary. That's why I'm saying that you have described Narrativism-alone in these posts. I'm not claiming to read your mind; I'm telling you how what you're saying directly translates into jargon terms.
Third, I think you may be missing something I said a few posts back, that Gamist play isn't about esteem for just anything. It's about esteem specifically for strategy and guts. When you say "esteem for coming up with a good story idea," that has nothing, zilch, to do with Gamism anyway. Yes, obviously esteem plays a role in all enjoyment-based socializing.
Great play summary! I'll return to its details in a bit, especially the part about killing things easily and drastically.
Best, Ron
Callan S.:
Heh, it reminds me of those comics where the villain threatens two things the hero cares about, and he can only save one. Which one would he save? Here, if gamism and nar (and even perhaps sim) were being threatened by a super villain(lol), which one would you save? "But, like spider man, I'd figure out some way of saving them all!!!1!". And if you couldn't and were going to lose them all? Which one would your group put ahead of the rest and save?
I'm probably not adding anything new, but it's a fun way of thinking about it :)
Ron Edwards:
Hi Norm,
As a minor point, if you were using D&D 3.5, we are definitely not talking about "far in the past" play, from my perspective.
Now for the fun of talking about actual play in Big Model terms. I have to say that you've provided a remarkably easy and fun one for those purposes. So let's start at the biggest and all-encompassing layer or sphere, and work our way inwards.
I might need a little more light shed on the Social Contract, which is to say, my understanding of who was playing and in what circumstances. Was it a college group, or old pals get-together, a one-time-thing, or what? age range? Had the group played together before, and for how long? On a more personal level, who invited whom to play, and who if anyone got shoehorned in? Did any person deal with any serious travel or inconvenience in getting to play? And this is an optional topic, so ignore if you prefer: were there any romantic ties or history among any persons involved?
All right, leaving some of the perspective on Social Contract for later, let's look at Exploration, specifically its five components.
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... its the colonial expansion, DnD style. The Orcs (and goblins and kobolds) are the native americans, the elves are the canadians, dwarves are mexicans (rumored to exist, but nobody knows for sure) and Humans are the colonists from a far off land. The humans follow a national deity (Serin) who mandates Divine Expansion, telling humans it is their duty to rule this new land for the betterment of all races. The deity is Lawful Evil, but everyone believes he is Lawful Good.
Whoa. This is hard core Setting-based Premise. We barely started talking about Setting and already CA is leaping off the page. In addition, I also see a focused punch on a key rules-issue in all play of D&D, alignment - and it's Drifted. Apparent alignment is drastically contrasted with actual alignment. If you think in Model terms, that's an Exploration component (Setting) connected to a System element and Character element (i.e. character alignment), then all three of those (or their point of juncture) being the start of a skewering line deeper into the Model, drilling into specific Techniques.
OK, Setting and Character are present, united through a key System feature, and the combination absolutely screams "Situation" to the extent that prepping powerful, fruitful scenarios will be easy (as demonstrated soon). But we're not really talking about real Situation (and hence the full Exploration) until we get into play.
How about Color, at this prep stage? So far, it's a little light on Color. Perhaps the whole "we're playing D&D!" with its attendant illustrations and subcultural cachet was serving as a kind of substitute for Color; as the very phrases "the elves are the canadians" and similar suggest.
Again, unlike the vast majority of prep for a game, when Dave set up for play, he wasn't talking just about levels of the Model in isolation, but rather about the skewers that unite the Model for a given group in play. This is rare and masterful. One looks at the other well-known aspects of D&D 3.5 and gets a bit worried, and then Dave instantly rides to the rescue:
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He wanted a low-magic setting (in the sense that he wanted to control certain aspects of the campaign), so he flat out denied flight magic of any sort, along with resurrection magic. People could theoretically still be ressurrected, but it was extremely tough, and definitely high level stuff. Since we all started at level 1 (and never got higher than 5 or 6) we knew that if we died, it was time to introduce a new character. Also, any magic item technically belonged to the human government (as far as they were concerned), but they only pursued things with a bonus of +3 or higher.
Right on cue, here's more Technique Drift, reinforcing the same line and and linking Character (higher level) to the reward mechanics aspect of Technique. OK, maybe that's a little abstract sounding. How "character death" happens in a given game is part and parcel of the reward mechanics. What I'm saying is that in all text-based D&D play, and 3.5 is no exception, character death is a problematic issue especially at low level. Different groups cope with it differently: making death less likely in a variety of ways, making resurrection easily available, having healing spells and potions readily available, starting at higher level in the first place, and who knows what-all.
I'm also looking at a well-known higher-level feature of all historical D&D text-based play: once past a certain point, magic capabilities give players remarkable authority over situational and other elements of Exploration that until then only the DM has enjoyed. Dave basically said, "That's not a feature for us, and even lower-level stuff which hints at it is getting ramped down." The flying aspect is interesting, as it seems like a tactical expression of the same thing, as well as a powerful visual reinforcement of the idea that your characters are not superheroes (and here I speak in terms of genre rather than effectiveness).
All right, to summarize, when I think of this just-before-play visually, I see the Big Model like a beach ball with smaller beach balls inside it. The second ball in, well, it's a complicated one; it needs a more elaborate interlinked structure on its own level in order to function. In this case, it's a rather wonderfully interlinked set of parts, almost a skeletal or otherwise-jointed structure rather than a membranous ball. One really "glowy" spot on it, for me, is the System component, which itself sprouts a connecting strut straight down/in to the next beach ball, Techniques. That ball is also quite nuanced and pretty, with arrows or pathways pointing outwards from the point of contact with the strut, and then coming back to it. Although granted, a lot of it is left unconstructed, with signs that say "like D&D 3.5 says" posted on blank spots.
The Exploration ball isn't done yet because we haven't talked about its most powerful property or component, Situation. Also, to talk about the innermost ball, Ephemera, we have to see the rest of the thing in action first.
Now bring more humans to the table in terms of concrete contribution:
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So, I played a human War-Mage ... et cetera
In your description of the players and characters, I see a lot of Social Contract and CA here, expressed through the Exploration component of Character. You and Jenn were most obviously the Premise-y players in terms of prep. I suggest that your "real" group began as Dave and the two of you, with the others being left more or less as social reinforcement of play itself; stay tuned, though, because that's a crack in the foundation. In terms of the Model, the outermost Social Contract ball looks a little fragmented or flaccid, not as "beautiful" as the inner layers, and I suppose one might imagine this means that the interior structures are going to roam and wobble a bit.
So much for prep; on to the show itself.
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... Our first adventure was a cattle theft. We investigated and found out a corrupt sheriff had killed the old sheriff and "sold" the land to a bunch of goblins nearby. They were just taking what was rightfully theirs. After raiding the goblin lair only to discover this fact (we left them with no warriors), we went in search of said corrupt sheriff. We ran the bastard out of town, and made a deal between the goblins and ranchers so that they could share resources and work to each other's benefit. I took one of the goblins (Kra) under my wing. Maybe I was trying to make up for what I had done to his tribe, maybe I just wanted to prove Serin could impact the other races. At the time, I had no idea, I just thought it would be cool to teach a goblin all about the human way of life. A growing dislike began between Ptolemy and Valenathia. The two world-views were just too different.
The first adventure immediately demonstrates that Situation is a local expression of the overall tensions and problems of the Setting. Colonialism, check; property rights, check; exploitation, check. The neatest thing I see about it is that as the scenario resolved, (i) certain mistakes were in fact made and a lot of goblins unfairly died, and (ii) the two most relevant characters (i.e. Premise-rich one) saw the beginnings of a values-based conflict between them. Perfect. This is a reward cycle.
What I mean by that is that the events of play changed the local setting, meaning a different relationship among the various communities, and changed the characters themselves, such that going to a new situation, next time, has more meat to work with. A new conflict in that situation may well be handled very differently by your two characters based strictly on the consequences of the first situation.
I see the whole issue with nerfing your character's damage as another Drift issue. If the adversity were not adverse, then your characters' actions would have reduced consequences for them, and as I see it, the whole vision of play that Dave had offered, and that you and Jenn especially had accepted, relied on consequences. I think it's interesting that at the time, you were only able to process this entirely-understandable Drift in terms of "Dave wants to win more."
And in the second adventure, boy, talk about consequences and having to live with them! The first application is to note exactly the previous-to-this adventure effect I mentioned above regarding yet more tension between the two surviving characters, and the second is the lethality. Despite the mechanical ease of killing low-level D&D characters, it takes a lot of Social Contract guts to follow through with a stated willingness to do so. Two out of four! (Although I do note they were for the non-Premise-y characters.).
If I'm reading right, Gerald now got into the groove after all with his cleric character. It doesn't surprise me that the three characters represented three different ethical takes on the contradiction between perceived Lawful Good and actual Lawful Evil, and what would under some other circumstances be the dreaded "oh no! inter-party conflict!" is here an expression of the most desirable aspect of play (for you in this case). In my weird little imagery, the Social Contract ball just got more pumped up, because now four out of five people are explicitly saying, and expressing through real play, the key phrase "let's play this game this way."
Also, that's a very interesting cleric who won't heal on demand. How did that arise, as a thing suggested in dialogue before it happened in play, or was it a surprise during play, or was it something everyone was comfy with based on previous play history?
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So much for the teachings of Serin.
Wham. Premise answered. Creative Agenda reward cycle complete. "This is what it's about."
As you recall, did Jenn enjoy the characters' ethical disagreements? When your character's actions led to the death of her character's best friend, did it seem to you to "work" for her?
Plus, all that interesting business about adopting goblins and kobolds. It reminds me of how in many westerns, even as Indians are getting villainized, there're all these sidekick and borderline and halfbreed characters that seem to be central in some way.
Your account of the third adventure is more telling than it might seem. Let's look at Mike's situation.
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Mike didn't like it too much when Dave told him to erase all of his possessions when we found him. Dave thought this rather funny, but Dave and Mike never really got along, so it only made things worse between them. After some whining on Mike's part, (and some support from Gerald and I) Dave agreed to return some of the possessions when we found them in the dungeon. This amounted to a sword and shield, but hey, I guess you can't have it all.
OK, people say "Blah blah blah" about how they plan to play, especially any stripe of D&D, and most of the time it's all bullshit and the group plays in the same fashion (whatever it may be) that's familiar to all of them anyway. It would really help to know more about the Social Contract details I asked about above, but even without them, clearly Mike's the odd man out here. He was all set to play D&D his way, no matter what blahdy-blah he had to listen to at first. He made up a character that had no Premise-y meat at all, who got killed in the second adventure. Now he gets to make up a new character, and guess what? He doesn't get to keep the stuff that by right (as he sees it) he gets to have as a player. These aren't Sir Richard's things we're talking about; they're Mike's! He has to "start over," and he "gets screwed." None of this makes sense if he were in tune with the CA and the way that all the aspects of play tied into it ... but since he's not, the only way to interpret this is that you guys are simply being dicks.
Plus then he gets ganged up on, with all three of the other guys (h'm - not the woman? interesting) saying "Yeah, give it up," and he has Hobson's choice: play even though he's getting screwed, or don't play.
Don't mistake me: I'm not adopting or agreeing with my hypothetical version of Mike's point of view. I'm saying what that point of view may well have been, assuming that Dave had not bought into the obvious CA orientation. And I also suggest that it took two strong reward cycles (in terms of situations) and one strong reward cycle (character death, i.e., "Dave means what he said") encompassing those, before he realized that the agenda in question was real and the pack of you would instantly back it up. You were immune to the implicit blackmail: "Oh yeah? Then I won't play."
Again, to be clear, I'm not saying that I absolutely or magically know that we're looking at an instance of clashing Creative Agendas, but I am saying that in the presence of such a clash, this is the sort of thing which happens. And if that's the case, then the days of either Mike's presence in the group or the group's survival itself are numbered.
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This all leads up to the next adventure, which is the one I had the most fun with, and where I suspect we hit the premise, at least for my character.
Oh, Premise is firing very hard already, no question about it. I think you had the most fun because after two or so cycles, you believed that it was really going to happen, that the "reverberations" I talk about in one of the threads referenced below were actually happening, and so could throw yourself right into it. Therefore what you collectively "hit" was the climax of your character's initially-stated tensions in Premise terms - which in Narrativist terms, is the largest and most significant reward cycle.
(more in next post)
Ron Edwards:
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In the next adventure we were exploring a cult. ... the government seemed to have mixed feelings about our little group). That, and a Goblin threat had been investigated by the government, and they were going to move to wipe it out. As it turns out, Kra had gathered up his old tribe and taught them everything I taught him, which turned out to be a very peaceful message that caused the community to prosper together. The government saw it as a threat, so my character lied to the government to protect his friend, even if his friend wasn't firing on all cylinders about Serin. In the process of eliminating the cult, I had the chance to use a couple of action points (Dave gave us some as the campaign got harder, and they could be used to "cool story things we normally couldn't" in addition to the standard 1d6 added to a d20 roll. I brought down the mine by turning my fists to stone with one of my spells (normally you can only turn one fist) and knocking out support structures as we ran from a blob monster that we could not kill. This trapped it beneath the city, but made the government declare us fugitives, even though they knew we had eradicated a cult. Turns out some agents of the government were in cults too! My character had to run from the government, and come to grips with the fact that everything he thought was stable was not, including the divine rule of his god. This is where we took a break from the campaign, but it sadly never restarted.
Oh, for this adventure, there is so much to talk about. First, it's a fantastic example of Premise-heavy scenario generation, with the government and the cult and Kra and all the rest of it; Dave gets a high five from me, and you were absolutely right to identify the content as a Bang for your character. Second, the action point things: another example of beautiful, classic Drift. Third, the ultimate consequence: the starting assumptions of your character were invalidated, and that raises the wonderful new question of who will he become?
Question: did Jenn and Gerald really get into this one? It seems that Gerald did. What kind of character interaction among the three of you highlighted - or better, transformed - the tensions going into the scenario? Were the elf and warmage reconciled at all? And correct me if I'm wrong: was Mike pretty peripheral to play during this adventure?
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I know Mike and I enjoyed killing things left and right. We loved giving each other high fives for the critical hits and marveling at the sheer destruction we could wreak.
Effectiveness, or the potential for it, is a key part of protagonism. That's what I think you were aiming toward, especially given this part of your post:
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I think (key word) that Everyone enjoyed watching me grapple with personal loyalty and my loyalty to the state. The damage-dealing is fun I can have in any campaign. What made this one stick in my mind is that it was so customized to the characters that I actually felt like my decisions had more consequences than just success or failure. Killing something wasn't always a path to victory, and it always complicated things.
Dave apparently had the good sense to damp it down a bit to keep it from becoming "I do anything" (he was hampered a bit by working in the constraints of fighty-damage-death focus of the system) and also to think in terms of consequences just as you describe.
Again, I wasn't there and don't know Mike. It could be that the raw "kill'em" power of his character was the only thing really keeping him engaged. If that's so, then sure, it can work for a while, but enjoyment of a Technique only lasts so long before the CA-frustration overwhelms it.
Thinking more about why you said you enjoyed it so much, I suggest that the phrase "enjoy the most" can be tricky. If what you enjoy most deeply is reliably happening, then the obvious enjoyment may be expressed more about the secondary material, or about something that hadn't worked in the past much (and effectiveness in low-level D&D would be a prime candidate), or about some detail which facilitates the primary enjoyment.
Norm, I see red-meat Narrativism. Honed Exploration. Focused Drift. Social Contract (well, not bad anyway). Reward cycle feeding into the fiction. I couldn't have invented a better example of the Big Model.
I'm interested in your account and reflections upon why the game didn't continue. There are tons of possibilities: the raw work for the DM/GM in this kind of play/Drift is brutal; play had reached a chapter-level ending, itself rare in many groups' experience; one player may not have had any Agenda-based satisfaction, which may have been compounded by the social fallacy that "we all have to stick together;" any number of things which had nothing to do with play like schedules or whatever.
Best, Ron
Here are some crucial references that serve as the foundation for this post:
The Sim Nar Blur (Anna labors under some of the same CA confusion you displayed earlier in this thread)
Narrativist games and "winning" and
Beating a dead horse (these two threads were parts 1 and 3, with part 2 being a long conversation between Frank and me when we met in Berlin)
Ayyavazi:
Hey Ron,
Thanks for the very in-depth answer. I'll try to clear up your questions about social contract first.
Gerald and Jenn were together in a relationship, (and Gerald's first character, Luthor, had very much the same outlook as Aiden, just less faith, more pragmatism). Gerald and I were 21, Jenn was 26, and mike was 17 or 18. Here's the short and long of how our little group formed.
Gerald comes to me with the Eberron Campaign setting for 3.5 and I read it and love it and buy it. He promises to get a game going. Then a month or so later he purchases the World of Darkness from White Wolf, and wants to play that. We don't get a game started (what would have been our first published game played) until I take the reigns and get Eberron started a year later. The initial group is Gerald, his girlfriend Jenn, Me, BIf (an aging fat-beard, as he calls it), Danielle (a co-worker of mine), and Morgan, my girlfriend. Over time Danielle flakes out and we keep her character around until there is a good dramatic way for me to do away with her. When I introduce Mike to the game (whom Bif did not get along with), Bif refused to play. Initially, I had intended to give mike a trial run (convinced he would hate D&D because of its complexity), and then when he didn't like it, boot him and bring Bif back. Bif refused, and good thing too (he was an asshole, though very respectable for other traits) because Mike loved the game. Dave was a friend of the group, but never dealt very well with Mike's immaturity. He was brought in on the same night Mike was. Morgan and Jenn didn't get along, everyone accused me of favoring her, and eventually she left the group and the game ceased.
From there we had this nucleus of players that enjoyed playing together and knew how the game worked. Dave had this cool idea for a campaign (and I was begging to be able to play, not just DM all the time).
What has to be understood is that at first is that I was very much into all the crunchy bits of D&D. I loved fiddling with modifiers and min-maxing characters so I could cause maximum punishment. As a fledgling DM I had not done much of anything with premise (but my players loved the game, begging me for years now to get it going again and be their DM) at least to my knowledge. Mike loved my games because it offered plenty of combat and chances to show off how cool his character was in battle. He was pretty much silent when it came to non-combat encounters. Getting him to actually "role-play" was about as pleasant as pulling teeth.
As for Aiden, the reluctant Cleric, nobody liked it except Gerald. I still don't know his full reasons for doing what he did, but his rationalization at the time was that using his turn to heal was a waste of a turn, even if it would keep us from falling unconcious. As a player in other games, he had a tendency to de-rail the group, acting against group wishes, both story wise and encounter wise. By splitting away from the group occasionally, we would be forced to follow him, or else risk losing our cleric, which was all that was keeping us barely alive in Dave's gritty world. Mike and I were the most vocal about wanting healing, and Jenn was rarely upset as her paladin was fairly self- sufficient in the first place. Plus, Dave didn't attack her nearly as much as he did Mike's characters. I think.
The only times Aiden healed us when we needed it was when we whined and begged and cursed enough to make him do it, and even then sometimes he would change his mind and do his own things. We very nearly lost several fights because of his way of doing things, and never with anything to show for it other than more healing magic wasted altogether than would have been wasted if he had done it our way.
Why didn't the game continue?. There was growing tension between Dave and I due to his "nerfing" of my character. Were I in the situation now, I would look at it very differently, thanks to you. Anyway, that pissed me off. It also aggravated me that he took the colonial aspect of the setting and started introducing Lovecraftian horror, even though the group had expressed an "it might be interesting, but we like things as they are," attitude. That tension was draining Dave. Secondly, coming up with the creative content was draining him, and he wanted time off to be able to do something else. (we ended up playing a premade string of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay adventurers, heavily retooled by Dave to fit our characters, and it was another one of the most fun campaigns of my life). After that break, our schedules never synched up again, though Dave was pretty clear that he wanted to find a way to not include Mike in the re-start if it ever happened.
As for color, I don't think I understand what you mean. But if I do, there was plenty of color in Dave's head, just not that we could see immediately. So, we assumed things worked like in standard D&D until he told us differently. If you could give me an example of something you would see colored in the campaign so I could work from there, that would be great.
Jen most certainly enjoyed the dynamic in play between her character and mine. She was so into it, I sometimes thought she was upset with me!
As for Mike getting ganged up on, I think you mis-read what I wrote, or I mis-wrote it. Gerald and I were on Mike's side. We could only see through our previously established D&D rose-colored glasses that Dave was hurting Mike's rights as a player, not that what he was doing was making sense. To be sure, Gerald and I understood it made sense in the story, we would have just preferred Dave find a different way to introduce Sir Richard without taking his stuff. So, we wanted Mike to continue enjoying the game, and so we argued that he should have some of his stuff back. Plus, an unequipped knight does almost nothing for the party in a fight, so we were helping ourselves too.
Thats about everything I saw, though with the exception of the definition of Color, I now have a very good vision of exactly what you mean by System (not rules or mechanics, but those plus the entire social contract rules-set and the application of it all together, much of it that is probably not explained explicitly in the game text), and most importantly, what a reward system looks like in a Narrative game (and in a non-mechanical way!).
Also, I'll ask again, what happened to the Exchange? How do I get a copy. I just can't find it anywhere.
Thanks again,
--Norm
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