GNS Theory: Good, Bad, or Ugly

[angelfromanotherpin]

You don't fucking know what I went through, you son of a bitch.

Actually we do know due to, you know, frequent (and frequently unprovoked) monologues on the subject. Personally, my sympathy is limited, having seen people endure much worse with much less trauma and much less desire to display their damage after the fact.

[Crissa]

What happened to your sense of humor?

He was making a Family-Guy style reference to you.

-Crissa

[Count Arioch the 28th]

You don't fucking know what I went through, you son of a bitch.

Actually we do know due to, you know, frequent (and frequently unprovoked) monologues on the subject. Personally, my sympathy is limited, having seen people endure much worse with much less trauma and much less desire to display their damage after the fact.

You're lucky you're on the other side of a modem, you fucking pussy.

[angelfromanotherpin]

You're lucky you're on the other side of a modem, you fucking pussy.

Well, we are what we eat, dick.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

What happened to your sense of humor?

He was making a Family-Guy style reference to you.

-Crissa

You know what, I haven't mentioned my marriage for a long time on this forum, and yet people seem content to bring up the worst, most painful part of my life up and mock me for it long after the fact.

The following is not directed at you, Crissa, because despite our massive philosophical and personal differences, you have never gone this route at any time, and I do appreciate it.

I am SICK of this shit constantly being brought up. That was a long time ago, I haven't mentioned anything about it, and yet you people seem content in bringing up my darkest days and mocking me for them. And ANY time I mention I had a bad day or anything like that, it comes up again.


JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, I went through a period of fucking depression a while ago, and it's just ammo in your fucking quiver, to use every time you want to take a dig at me.

Look, attack my ideas, attack my opinions, if I say something really stupid feel free to tell me so as creatively as you like, that's the board atmosphere. I don't care.

But can we PLEASE fucking stop bringing that shit up? I haven't mentioned my divorce for a very long time, why can't you people just let me live my live without shoving it in my fucking face?

[Bigode]

Best taunt I remember having heard since "I'm not your father just because your mom didn't have change for $5." But anyway, could all sides drop this before TGFB locks the thread? Trivia: was anyone ever banned from TGD?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

You're lucky you're on the other side of a modem, you fucking pussy.

Well, we are what we eat, dick.

What the fuck is your problem? I don't even think I've said one goddamn word to you, why the FUCK are you attacking me all of a sudden?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Best taunt I remember having heard since "I'm not your father just because your mom didn't have change for $5." But anyway, could all sides drop this before TGFB locks the thread? Trivia: was anyone ever banned from TGD?

I know of at least one.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Look, I'm perfectly willing to let well enough alone, but the appropriate response to a post you find annoying is to ignore it, or to actually address the annoyance. 'Please don't bring this up' is much more effective than spouting off about your special non-understandable victim-hood.

The biggest difference is that I can respect the request. And I will.

[zeruslord]

My biggest problem with GNS theory is that half the capitalized terms don't mean what anyone thinks they should mean without a glossary. For example, a Premise is a question that you are trying to answer through play. This kind of makes sense for the Simulationists ("what does it feel like to be a vampire?") but is a silly idea for Gamists ("can I be more powerful than the other players?") and even Narrativists (Is the life of a friend worth the safety of a community?"). Under these definitions, Narrativism comes out more like old-school sci-fi short stories or thick books everybody has to read in high school than any story that people would want to sit around and create.

[rapa-nui]

Definition problems aside, I subscribe to GNS theory. I'm surprised it hasn't been brought up until now.

Here's how I see it (and I know some will disagree):



Gaming means competing.
Narrative means storytelling.
Simulation means a self-directing system, where the story is more the outcome of the parts of the system interacting than player input (although player input may act as a 'seed').

Narrative and simulation are NOT the same.

Examples:
I sit down and tell the story of Aladdin. GNS:
0% G
100% N
0% S.

I sit down to play Sim-City in sand-box mode. GNS:
Arbitrary % G (i set my own goals)
~50% N
~50% S
(percentages can add up to more than 100% because the categories aren't completely mutually exclusive, specially the 'gaming' part)

I sit down and execute Conway's Game of Life
Arbitrary % G (i set my own goals, if any)
0% narrative
100 % simulation

I sit down to play D&D:
GNS depends on DM and friend's play style. Generally, there are gamist elements (combat), a lot of narrative elements, and some simulation (random dice rolling for encounters, etc).

[Bigode]

Definition problems aside, I subscribe to GNS theory. I'm surprised it hasn't been brought up until now.

It has. Multiple times. I think all of them involved virulent insults by PhoneLobster.

[PhoneLobster]

It has. Multiple times. I think all of them involved virulent insults by PhoneLobster.

Well I think its entirely understandable that I hate GNS with a vengeance.

Many years ago, before many of your grandparents were born and computers were made of chipped flint and dead animals I tried to find RPG design communities on the "internet", or what we then called "Ug Ooog Ug".

Long story short blah blah blah, and arguably the biggest most relevantly defined thing I found was The Forge.

And all it ever talked about was GNS.

And GNS was the most useless imaginable thing ever.

All that community, all that effort, all that endless wanking for... nothing I could even begin to use. Not even a functional community I could talk to about anything without being drawn into the GNS grand wank-athon

Then I found the gaming den. Hurray. Its a bit more D&D and a bit less indy and that has shaped my gaming significantly, but its a lot less STUPID.

How stupid? THIS stupid...

I sit down to play D&D:
GNS depends on DM and friend's play style. Generally, there are gamist elements (combat), a lot of narrative elements, and some simulation (random dice rolling for encounters, etc).

Combat is not a gamist element! Its the most important Narrative element of all! OR is it the most heavily Simulationist part of the game?

"a lot of Narrative elements" is pretty poorly defined (Many would say "by its very nature") but even the twists in the story are Simulated and Gamed.

Rolling for encounters is so totally not Simulationist I mean Simulationist would involve modelling wandering actor paths and behaviours. It's clearly Gamist since its exploitable and abstracted and all about action action action! Or is it Narrative because it's designed to create generate plot twists and side stories?

But even your (utterly demonstrably and TYPICALLY) flawed GNS attributions are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory.

G, N and S are SUPPOSED to be distinctly incompatible, the whole, indeed ONLY point of the theory is that using it is supposed to save you from a three way knife fight by mixing up your motives. You aren't SUPPOSED to be able to get away with a mixed GNS thing like your D&D description, and if you ARE then GNS fails to provide even what very little it claimed to!

Seriously you are a fucking idiot if you think GNS means something of any value to anyone. And I will call you on it repeatedly and, ultimately, with more venom than I call anyone on anything because if people start GNS wanking around here this place will quickly be of no use to any bugger.

[Crissa]

It's only useful in that a game should have features from the table 'Gamist' 'Narrativist' and 'Simulationist', if it's really a roleplaying game we all want.

But like Frank says, you totally can have an RPG with only two of the items. WoD gets you G and N. Rolemaster was N and S all the way.

-Crissa

[Judging__Eagle]

You know PL, I actually at one time looked at the forge's forums. This was also long ago.

They were sort of not having what I wanted at the time, so I I didn't register.

The fact that those forums seem like such a bad place makes me feel better that I never spent a meaningful amount of time there.

[Username17]

G, N and S are SUPPOSED to be distinctly incompatible, the whole, indeed ONLY point of the theory is that using it is supposed to save you from a three way knife fight by mixing up your motives. You aren't SUPPOSED to be able to get away with a mixed GNS thing like your D&D description, and if you ARE then GNS fails to provide even what very little it claimed to!

Yeah. Perhaps the most insulting of all claims of GNS theory is that you aren't supposed to mix the motivations. Seriously, you're actually supposed to recoil in horror that someone is trying to get their character to be able to win a sword fight for reasons other than trying to explore what it means to tell a story about someone trying to figure out how to win a sword fight and say "We're doing a Narrativist gaming session here! Get on board or Get The Fuck Out!"

It's just puzzling. Even what little benefits yo could potentially get by ascribing peoples' gaming motivations into arbitrary categories are lost a hundred times over by the GNS claim that those motivations are incompatible. I mean what the fuck? Narrative and Simulation incompatible? What the fuck does that even mean?

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

GNS have a lot of disagreements and here's why...

Lets take weapon stats.

Gamist wants weapon stats to be different but basically equal, so it offers you a series of complex choices. Weapons can be better than others, but the cost to wield that weapon needs to be higher to compensate.

Narrativist just cares that the weapons are equal and probably doesn't care if all weapons are the same. But the narrativist wants to be able to make a dagger master and have him be competitive with a swordmaster.

Simulationist wants to come at you with a bunch of rules that try to capture the individual use of each of weapon against different armor types and so on. And simulationist doesn't really care if some weapons are better than others, because in real life, some weapons really are more effective than others.

Or another example. Star Wars

Gamist wants every class to be playable and balanced, because if Jedi are plain better, then everyone will want to be a jedi and that'd make for a boring game. Unless the game is of course about different flavors of jedi.

Narrativist generally wants equality, unless the story is going to focus on something other than combat, and then it may or may not be okay for some characters to be combat specialists and others to do other things.

Simulationist will just tell you that Jedi are superior to everyone, evident by the movies, and the RPG should handle that the same way. Jedis pwn j00. Plain and simple.

The gamist and the simulationist tend to argue about fair play. The gamist wants it and the simulationist doesn't. They both get along in that they like having complete and complex rules sets, and the gamist, once he's accepted the simulationist's rules, can still powergame them to his liking, though he may find it really dry and boring, because there may be one obvious glaring choice that it'd be stupid not to take. On the other hand, a simulationist playing in a gamist system tends to constantly remark about how it's stupid that someone can get crushed by a 2000 lb boulder and be still alive. The narrativist tends to like the fair play aspects of gamism, but dislikes complex and sometimes complicated rules that get in the way of roleplaying. The narrativist more so than anyone, prefers lite rules systems that let the DM be a bit flexible to represent out of the box thinking. The main problem with a narrativist style as far as the gamist is concerned is that often winning may not be challenging enough, and narrativism taken too far can almost appear as though you're playing in a novel instead of a game. Further, the narrativist generally hates system mastery, because it prevents people from making certain characters if they aren't a given archetype. The simulationist's main problem with the narrativist is that the simulationist is all too eager to kill off character concepts if he deems them unfeasable, where the simulationist sees the narrativist as having a lot of silly and unrealistic ideas.

Now they can get along... but it requires some compromise. The gamist has to be willing to simplify the rules set for the narrativist, and make the rules set apply to some kind of logic for the simulationist. the Narrativist has to be willing to accept a structured rules set and apply some physics to his storylines, and the simulationist has to alter the reality he's simulating to both encourage game balance and storytelling.

Now some RPGs are clearly more on one side than another.

D&D (any version) is highly gamist.

GURPS on the other hand is very simulationist.

[Username17]

GNS have a lot of disagreements and here's why...

Lets take weapon stats.

Narrativist just cares that the weapons are equal and probably doesn't care if all weapons are the same. But the narrativist wants to be able to make a dagger master and have him be competitive with a swordmaster.

This is basically you just restating the theory to be something vaguely palatable as opposed to what it actually is, which is crap. The actual description of Narrativism as used by GNS is Here.

It's a huge rambling tirade that is at times contradictory and off-topic. I'll save you the brain ache and get to the one statement that really sums up what he means to say about Narrativism as distinct from Simulationism:

In Narrativism, by contrast, the major source of themes are the ones that are brought to the table by the players / GM (if there is one) regardless of the genre or setting used. So, to sum up, themes in Nar play are created by the participants and that's the point; themes in Sim play are already present in the Dream, reinforced by the play, and kind of a by-product.

So basically, a narrativist player is one who wants to play a gnomish star crossed lover in your Star Wars game, and doesn't give a flying fuck whether daggers are balanced with halberd, he wants a fucking rocket launcher. In short, as defined a "Narrativist" player is a fucking asshole. And that's one of the three major types of play, according to GNS theory.

Supposedly, in a game of Cops and Robbers, the interaction between a Gamist, a Simulationist, and a Narrativist would go soemthing like this:

• Gamist: "I brought a Thompson Sub Machine Gun, because it's the best weapon available to Robbers. Now I'm going to mow down all you mugs with automatic fire. KAKAKAKAKAKA!"
  
  Simulationist: "Fuck. I can't take a .45 to the chest, let alone three, so I go down. Fair enough."
  
  Narrativist: "I decided to be a Time Cop, so when you shoot bullets at me I phase out of time and the bullets miss. Now I'm going to go fight dinosaurs."

It isn't just that the theory is overly restrictive and non-generalizable and non-falsifiable, it's that the actual categories are completely fucked.

-Username17

[Koumei]

It's possible that GNS is why the term "indie games" leaves afoul taste in my mouth: the same types of sites tend to focus on them both. I mean, over here, we play with systems and make games and stuff all the time. Usually we try to stick with a basic concept that seems to work (such as d20 things, or the DMH/aWoD/WC/AS overarching mechanic), modified as the game needs.

The indie game crowd seem to despise that any two games could possibly be alike, and insist on insane changes. And they like the rules to flap about like a kilt in a hurricane, because leaving big blanks spots to houserule encourages creativity! Bonus points for trying to ensure there is no DM. Or no players. Or no dice. Or no numbers. Or no snacks. Final Destination. Whatever. They get so caught up in reinventing the fucking wheel, in bringing it to a new level of design and creativity and whatever else their acid trip showed them, that they forget to actually make a game anyone would ever want to play.

And you get a six page foreword on GNS, and how their game is mostly designed for G or N or S, and why the others won't like it and suggestions for them. It'll also have many pages of debate following the game that have nothing to do with the actual content, and everything to do with the category.

Immensely annoying.

[RandomCasualty2]

This is basically you just restating the theory to be something vaguely palatable as opposed to what it actually is, which is crap. The actual description of Narrativism as used by GNS is Here.

It's a huge rambling tirade that is at times contradictory and off-topic. I'll save you the brain ache and get to the one statement that really sums up what he means to say about Narrativism as distinct from Simulationism:

Yeah, reading that article, you're absolutely right, it really is a rambling tirade of bullshit.

Though I still think the categories have some merit to describing styles of play... just not that article, which happens to just use a lot of words and not say a whole lot. The guy who wrote that is just a terrible writer.

[Judging__Eagle]

I mean what the fuck? Narrative and Simulation incompatible? What the fuck does that even mean?

-Username17

It means retarded.

I've told stories based entirely on random dice rolls that told me the setting, location and NPCs that the characters would face.

But is that Gamist, since I used random tables?

Who the fuck knows, the GNS retards sure don't.

Hell, I've described so-called 'gamist' D&D combat narrativistically. I mean, what new DM hasn't?

[shau]

This is basically you just restating the theory to be something vaguely palatable as opposed to what it actually is, which is crap. The actual description of Narrativism as used by GNS is Here.

It's a huge rambling tirade that is at times contradictory and off-topic.

Jesus Christ that thing is 53 goddamn pages long. Who actually has the time for that?

[zeruslord]

It's a huge rambling tirade that is at times contradictory and off-topic.

Jesus Christ that thing is 53 goddamn pages long. Who actually has the time for that?

How many of us read any of the Tomes or The Ends of the Matrix straight through? On the other hand, those, while often rambling and off topic, are well written, clear, and interesting.

[Bigode]

Lobster: no disagreement - I just wanted to summon someone to confirm GNS had been brought multiple times before.

zeruslord: how many people didn't read them straight through? Also, which set's "rambling and off-topic"?

[zeruslord]

The Tomes are full of digressions and giant tangents on just how cool the sahuagin are. Frank's tangents are just a hell of a lot better written.

The comment about reading straight through came off really differently from how it sounded in my head.