Finding El-Dorado in the Zombie Apocalypse
Alfryd:
Look, it's possible that I'm reading too much into this, or that I'm just fussing excessively over arbitrary labels. And I apologise if I've pored over some article from years ago and seized upon some isolated remarks out of context.
I would add that I have an immense respect for the body of practical observations that folks on the forge have built up over time, and that I have found the various on-site articles and discussion threads to be enormously informative and full of useful insights- Ron's in particular. I absolutely do not dispute that various techniques associated with the different modes can severely undermine and contradict eachother in non-obvious ways, and I entirely agree that analysis of player motivations is hugely important. There is, in my mind, absolutely no question that discussion of The Threefold Model, GNS, and The Big Model has had a huge and overwhelmingly positive impact on system design and promoted healthier habits within the hobby as a whole.
However.
I don't understand how Premise-expressing elements can be included and players not be considered addressing a Premise when they can't resolve the Situation without doing so.
I don't understand how a heavy focus on in-world causality that incorporates observations of how people behave in the real world cannot be considered Simulationist.
Because apparently, you can have High-Concept Sim with a strong focus on drama and player autonomy, and that'll be just Simulationist, and you can have Vanilla Narrativism with a strong focus on Exploration, and that'll be just Narrativist (even when the group itself had no conscious notion they were playing that way or the other, and if you asked them, might give totally different answers.) But hey- these are, evidently, both potentially totally functional creative agendas that the whole group can groove to. And apparently, very very difficult to functionally distinguish from eachother, in terms of how much time and attention is paid to which bits and pieces during play.
If it's a question of 'no artificial additives, flavourings or preservatives means Sim', and 'inescapable moral questions with consequences equals Nar', to whatever degree, then I contend it is possible to accomodate both. Or, if it's a question of procedural tradeoffs being involved between promoting one or the other, then it seems there are viable positions all along the spectrum between that can be totally functional creative agendas for particular groups. I have absolutely have no problem with that idea. But either way, that invalidates one of the key predictions of GNS theory, which is that groups that 'muddy' their agendas should experience at best mediocre and at worst dysfunctional play.
I'm just getting a distinct sense of 'oh, it's a particle', or 'oh, it's a wave' depending on how on how you interpret the results, with the implication that never the twain shall meet.
stefoid:
Im the wrong person to talk forge theory with -- I find the way it is defined by "story now" where players collectively agree to address an ethical theme as a bit freaky in some contexts. However I can see how playing nar games where the entire ruleset revolves around a specific premise means you cant possibly avoid it if you play that game. So perhaps thats all the 'agreement' amounts to -- lets play this specific game that is about this premise. Agenda. But I havent played any of those games.
I just know what elements of role playing I prioritize - drama over 'realism', cinematic style conflict resolution, conflict res over task res, improv over predefined plot, etc... What classification that falls under doesnt matter.
contracycle:
Things is that, back in the day, when the internet put large numbers of gamers into direct contact with each other for the first time, it rapidly became clear that there were massively conflicting ideas about people in games should be doing. This collapsed into a whole bunch of you're-doing-it-wrong type arguments, and worse, you're-a-pervert-dteroying-the-hobby type stuff. And to cool this down somewhat, a model was devekloped that recognised that not everyone was after exactly the same experience of play.
So the one thing we know is that there are a bunch of people out there who would have liked to address premise, but the rest of the group compromised that goal becuase they were more interested in The Dream, and vice versa, and that there are whole groups who would look at other groups play style and say it's sucky and boring. The GNS categorisation is an attempt to explain that phenmonon, not to assert or impose it.
I'd agree that if players really CAN'T resolve a situation except by addressing premise, and if this is a CONSISTENT feature of play, then that is Narr. But I'd bet real money that in a sim game most of the time players COULD resolve the situation without addressing premise, and that even when it does occur it's NOTa consistent feature of play.
Now at the risk of making gross and unfair assumptions, I think the example you gave is one of an essentially accidental occurrence. It looks to me rather like the following happened: the GM wanted to intoriduce a pet character, or a source of plot or setting information, into the group; and chose a female character in the hopes this would arouse greater sympathy, and gave her a lot of weapons so she would appear useful and competent. When you rejected her, she was disposed of, because the GM is either going to abandon the attempt or try another device to introduce whatever function that character was supposed to fulfill. It's probably caused some sort of prep rewrite.
That doesn't seem to me like the GM pushed a situation that was intended to invoke a premise addressing response, not least because ther decision was so sharp and binary, without buildup. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe you will find that the GM is indeed doing precisely that, and similar situations continue to arise, and are in fact the important part of play, both to the GM and to the players - rather than the exploration of the dream world that you're inhabiting. From the rest of what you've said about the game, the strong interest seems to lie in the pseudo-reality of the game world; it doesn't seem to me that the players or GM are actively seeking out opportunities to address premise. So I see no reason not to describe this as sim.
Caldis:
One of the things to remember about premise and addressing premise is that it's something that remains constant throughout the game. You dont just do it in one instant of play its something that affects play throughout the game. The idea comes from Lagos Egri's work on stage plays and it referred to the whole play being focused on addressing the premise of the play. Now there are differences between a stage play and a roleplaying game so it's not a direct translation but the idea holds true. Your one moment of ethical choice doesnt necessarily express premise, if it doesnt have any further impact on the game. I'd suggest that setting up a post-apocalyptic game world where your characters will constantly be challenged to survive and they have to make ethical choices based on that challenge to survive is predisposing the game towards narrativism, it could go towards gamism if it's a test of the players ability to see if they can get the characters to survive or sim if it's not so much about what ethical choices the characters make but how there physical abilities and possesions change over time as they live through the apocalypse.
I think another problem is you've set out that you think certain elements are essential sim elements but you havent really been outlined what those are. I notice in the one thread you linked to Eero started to talk about how your assumptions fell in line with nar thought, character integrity being essential to nar whereas you had claimed it for sim territory. So it might be more fruitful to discuss what are the baseline assumptions for sim play and see if we can come to agreement on those rather than just continue what looks to be talking past each other here. That might warrant another thread or maybe we can just discuss your bullet points I see problems with associating several of them with sim play and not play in general.
Alfryd:
Quote from: contracycle on March 29, 2011, 05:38:55 AM
Now at the risk of making gross and unfair assumptions, I think the example you gave is one of an essentially accidental occurrence. It looks to me rather like the following happened: the GM wanted to intoriduce a pet character, or a source of plot or setting information, into the group; and chose a female character in the hopes this would arouse greater sympathy, and gave her a lot of weapons so she would appear useful and competent. When you rejected her, she was disposed of, because the GM is either going to abandon the attempt or try another device to introduce whatever function that character was supposed to fulfill. It's probably caused some sort of prep rewrite.
I'm not holding up the zombie campaign as an ideal example, and I totally agree that might well be what was going on (I definitely suspected the GM of lapsing into illusionism on occasion.) But again I don't consider illusionist techniques to have anything to do with simulation. Spontaneously inventing an NPC for Plot Reason X, with a basis in prior events, is not internal cause being king. However, anything like a fair assessment of the larger situation would essentially mandate bumping into other ragged survivors sooner or later- sooner, to be honest.
To give a different example, in a Traveller game I took part in recently, one of the other PCs was arrested for lingering around the scene of a murder (that my character had, incidentally, instigated by cheating at a gambling game and flubbing deception rolls.) The GM clearly didn't want the PC to be dragged off into custody, since that would interfere with the central plotline he had in mind, so he had an angry mob coincidentally storm the plaza at the precise moment that they were reading the PC his rights. Even when the PC chose to go along quietly, the GM had the mob pursue and knock out the windows at the interrogation chamber when they sat down. Now, this is railroading with 'positive' pressure rather than 'negative' pressure, but it's still a concatenation of miracles that had nothing to do with the impartial assessment of in-world causality. That is not Sim, and it strikes me as unfair to make this mode the collective GNS scapegoat for that kind of nonsense.
Conversely, if the other PC had been arrested, the other group members would be confronted with a choice of whether and how to rescue him, and/or the arrested PC might have been offered terms of release if he agreed to spill information on his comrades' likely whereabouts- both totally logical developments which raise valid ethical questions about loyalty, and don't require systemic distortion of in-world causality.
Quote from: Caldis on March 29, 2011, 12:40:47 PM
I think another problem is you've set out that you think certain elements are essential sim elements but you havent really been outlined what those are.
I thought I outlined this in the OP, but my understanding is largely as follows:
* You have certain starting 'seed' assumptions that, ideally, resemble those of particular source materials.
* Beyond that, events ideally unfold based on in-world causality and ONLY in-world causality. Internal Cause Is King. (This is subject to the understanding that player input as expressed through character decisions, along with certain random outcomes, are valid forms of in-world causality.)
* The events that unfold should, in turn, ideally exhibit properties that resemble the source materials. (However, 'unpredictability' may well be one of those properties.)
This applies on the level of physics/system, politics/setting, psychology/character, and everything in-between, though I acknowledge this doesn't mean that every Sim-inclined group is going to enjoy every aspect of Sim equally. One group might go bananas for physics and care nothing for psychology, another group might be bowled over by politics and psychology and care nothing for physics, and might not care if certain aspects of Sim are heavily enforced and others are played very fast-and-loose.
But this basic idea that's present in so many Sim-oriented RPGs- namely the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast- has absolutely nothing to do with allowing in-world causality to reign supreme. Nothing. Not a damn thing. Zip. Nadda. Nil. Zilch. It doesn't make inherent sense in terms of politics, it doesn't make inherent sense in terms of psychology, and it doesn't make inherent sense in terms of physics- particularly not when you take reality as your 'source material'. In reality, we are not just puppets dancing on the strings of some magical force that predecides our fate, or rigid automatons with fixed patterns of stimulus/response. If the world were a character, a railroad plot would be Pawn stance, not Actor.
Now, sure, there are certain kinds of Simulationist play where foregone conclusions might be justified to a fair degree- anything based on the Cthulhu Mythos, for example. There's definitely a strong 'trend' within the original H.P. Lovecraft stories that the protagonists wind up insane, dead, or corrupted by the end of the proceedings, so if you want the system-expressed theory to make predictions that accord with observations, you'd want to reproduce that. But there are ways to model this using explicit, above-board mechanics, precisely as From Beyond is currently attempting to do, in a way that isn't wholly dependant on illusionism, and allows for much more improvisational play (at least as I understand it.) Hell, Arkham Horror's 'doom track' is more honest about it, and that's for pure Gamism.
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