Addition to GNS Model
Nexus6:
Hi, this is my first post to the Forge forums.
I'm a relative role-playing neophyte, but am vastly interested in the theory of it and the like. While reading through the articles on GNS theory, I was surprised to not recognize myself in any of the three reasons for role-playing. Some Simulationist ideas are close, but the reason I role-play is fundamentally different at the core. I considered writing a full article, but thought I would post a preliminary post to see what the community thinks, in case this has been covered somewhere already. So, for that reason, I will keep it brief.
I present, for consideration, the idea of Emergentism. I role-play to discover what emergent content will arise from the combination of a set of rules, player ideas and reactions, and GM ideas and reactions. This sort of play shuns the idea of the GM as storyteller, and lets events occur organically. The real reward of this type of play is the true surprise. The events and story of the game are unpredictable (even by the GM), and therefore strive towards a kind of ephemeral state, working similarly to many other decentralized systems, such as evolution or ant colonies. I would love to take it further than this if anyone has any interest.
Ron Edwards touched on this a bit in his Simulationism article, but it seems to me that it is a different subject altogether, not relying on any sort of Simulationist play.
I hope this post is in the right forum; I would have posted it in GNS Theory if it was still open. Thanks, and I anticipate any and all feedback!
-Morgan
Caldis:
I'm not a moderator but I'd say this is probably in the wrong forum. Your best bet is to try and showcase your idea of Emergentism through an example of play you've had. Try and show how all the participants, players and gm alike were trying to persue this goal of emergentism. Tell us what you mean by a 'set of rules'; is this a physics engine, a way to moderate player input, or what specifically? What types of ideas do the players bring to the game, how does that compare to the ideas the gm brings?
If you can do this I believe the discussion can be fruitful and will likely be moved to the Actual Play forum. My initial reaction to the idea is that you are confusing Exploration, the base activity of all roleplaying, for Creative Agenda (GNS). You may want to look over the glossary in the articles section and see if you can highlight how your version is more related to a CA.
Ron Edwards:
Hi there, and welcome.
I'm happy to discuss your idea, but it will have to be positioned differently to be an eligible topic at the Forge. As Caldis said, you should demonstrate what you mean by describing play. It can be at any scope or scale, it can be from long ago in the past or yesterday, it can be anything, as long as it really happened and you can explain it to us.
That's absolutely required for this topic to be continued. If you like, state that you'd like to do that, and I'll move this thread to the Actual Play forum.
Best, Ron
Nexus6:
Great, thanks for the guidance. Here is an actual play example of how I view what I am calling Emergentism:
(The game is D&D, and I was GMing)
Two players are being held in a castle. The King leads them to a room that contains a portal (to a location unknown by the players) and two centaur guards. As the players are being pushed towards the portal, they decide that they are going to do everything in their power not to go through the portal. So when they get close, they grab one of the centaur guards. After a series of strength and grapple checks, they end up pulling the centaur through the portal with them. They end up in a place they know nothing about, and through a tense conversation, the players and the NPC centaur decide to work together to get out of their predicament. The centaur ended up becoming a major NPC in the campaign.
As the GM of this campaign, I had no idea that the centaur I haphazardly placed into the room would become such a major NPC, with a back story and stats to boot. It was the emergent result of the situation I presented, the players motivations, and a few dice rolls. A different GM more concerned with the story as he had it laid out might have neutralized the centaur by making him aggressive and necessary to be killed by the players, hence bringing the campaign back to how the GM intended it to go. This isn't a bad thing, but it isn't as interesting to me.
I'm sure these sort of events happen all the time in different games, but it's things like this that make role-playing fun and interesting to me, and I see it as different than Gamism, Narritavism, or Simulationism.
Does that make any sense?
JoyWriter:
Totally, to me anyway. It's been suggested that that angle corresponds to "let's see", when compared to "step on up", "story now" and "right to dream". It's also one of my favourite things. Seeing the difference between that and right to dream has helped me understand why when plot events totally shift a character, my brother gets a little sad at the loss of his concepted character, and I go "cool, I wonder where this will lead?". An exaggeration, but one of the dividing lines in how we play.
In the past few weeks I've been trying out the definition and it seems pretty legit as a fourth agenda, but one that conventionally shares a lot of mechanical elements with right to dream. If you want things to go "the right way" then you need to specify what changes keep it within "the right way". If you want to have it go off somewhere unexpected but reasonable based on the current situation, then you need rules that can respond flexibly to players decisions and to lots of elements in them. Now both of these can work well off of detailed cause and effect based systems (very crunchy systems), sometimes even the same system, depending on whether the GM feels compelled to add in extra story elements to get things "back on track". But they can go in very different ways; for example, a GM who doesn't try to restore the "original" path will need new advice relating to how to respond flexibly to players and keep giving them surprises of their own, and games can presumably be focused into charting out a particular area of possibility, by being more sensitive certain elements of what the players decide.
Now I may be wrong and this may just slide streight into "story now", but as I've currently understood it that doesn't have the same chaotic experimental feel as what I'm talking about; where one player makes an off hand comment and we expand on it to produce a larger plot or take previous elements out of context and reintroduce them elsewhere provoking new and interesting interactions, like long lost magic items turning up in the modern day.
I've heard Shock does this a bit, by twisting the world we know and exploring the ripples, but if I remember it focuses on asking specific questions, rather than just going off into that place and seeing what it turns into, by focusing on how things can change.
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