A Little Thing About GNS Theory

I have previously mentioned GNS Theory, and I think noisms's recent post on the subject is fairly accurate.  It's a nice thought exercise, but broad classification tools tend to ignore the weird little idiosyncrasies that people have.

I might be inclined to disagree with his statement about "simulationists," though; it's probably pretty small, but I think there is a base of people who like roleplaying games purely for the world-building aspects rather than the playing-a-game aspects or the telling-a-story aspects.

I might also direct readers to brave the comments, as Zak's comment on GNS ignoring the fact that roleplayers might want different things from day-to-day is also worth considering.

For every comment you read, however, you will spend another month each year in Hades, though, so keep your sojourn a short one.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Narrative

I've previously mentioned GNS Theory and the fact that I typically keep it in mind while gaming, plotting, whatever (which is to say, I think about it occasionally, y'know, as a thought exercise).  Note that I'm not sure if it's correct — the field of human endeavor in any activity cannot be simplified to a few core concepts — but it's something that I consider.  So that means it's time for another anecdote.

When I started gaming, I could be considered a simulationist.  I liked the fact that you could model reality with these games, and you could add increasing complexity to make everything more realistic.  It was important not to get lost in the fact that you were telling a story and playing a game, but modeling reality was my secret joy (my notes regarding intricately-detailed neurotoxins in old World of Darkness no doubt still lurk somewhere).  My first game, The Imperial City, primarily reflected this fact by being the most deadly game I've ever run — mistakes were frequently fatal, and the only players who didn't lose a character at some point were the players who only ever played one session (going off alone carried a huge risk of becoming fatal about halfway through the game's run, when it became obvious that the world was full of things that wanted you messily dead).  The characters could pull off marvelous feats together, but any one was squishy and vulnerable (and as a group, they still feared the black cloaked things used by the main antagonist as enforcers).

The Imperial City also had a second simulationist stamp — pretty much anything the characters encountered had full statistics and enough background to render it playable as a full NPC.  I have no idea how many characters I made for that game; I lost count around forty, and that was within, maybe, two years of its eight-year run.

Unknown Armies really emphasized the narrative aspects of gaming, though, and since then I've kept that in mind.  After all, the game only has the model reality in the sense that it has a coherent, logical scope.  It should tell an entertaining story (even if that story is just mindless hack-and-slash or just a story of people dying over and over again in hilarious ways).  And when it stops being entertaining, either bring the story to a close or take a vacation to reinvigorate it.  It's a good time to play that new system you've been wanting to try, or to try that totally wacked-out module that you cribbed together from the ramblings of a homeless guy on K street.

Expect a point to this whole blog post in the next blog post.

The Great Retrogaming Debate

Though retrogaming typically refers to computer consoles, I also use the term to refer to roleplaying games (though I saw the Chatty DM refer to it as the "Old School Renaissance" on this post).  Bear with me for a second while explain some meta-nerdosity.

As noted previously, I came to gaming in the late nineties, and started on the Storyteller system by White Wolf.  I came to Call of Cthulhu and the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and now my collection is so bloated that I'd be hard-pressed to unravel that tangled skein.  Regardless, by the time I assembled a group that wanted to play fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons, I had read a lot about gaming.  I was well-acquainted with the flak Wizards of the Coast received for D&D 4e, and even some of the arguments about it (namely that it attempts to emulate the styles of MMOs and computer RPGs in an ironic bout of recursion).  However, it wasn't until I started looking around for D&D stuff that I became better versed in the debate.

In planning the aforementioned 4e game, I had several players who were new to the hobby, and all but one are new to D&D.  They showed interest in dungeon crawls, and I decided that I wanted to include some classic references and classic dungeons to help the new players score a little geek cred.  Of course, this led me in search of the aforementioned classic dungeons (and I'm now amassing a weird little library of first and second edition AD&D books, and even a few basic/expert D&D books), which brings me to the present.

I came across this post about the Hickman revolution on the blog Grognardia (which I would be inclined to recommend, particularly if you want to know about the history and early traditions of D&D, as well as RPG retrogaming in general).  Go ahead and take a little time to read it.  I'll wait.

If you didn't read it, it's basically about how Tracy and Laura Hickman saved D&D by introducing heavy, story-laden modules (they're probably best known for the Ravenloft module and the Dragonlance setting).  Before this time, modules were comparatively simple, generally just being wargaming scenarios with little pretense as to why the characters are doing what they do, only that they are facing the dangers of what might possibly be a dungeon that possibly contains a dragon.  This in the hope that they become richer and more capable.

However, he then says that the Hickmans' meddling is what splintered the hobby into the various factions today, and that the hobby lost something through the introduction of this imposed story (it is now pretty much assumed that story elements will be included in any published adventure).

It's a valid argument, but I'm not certain I agree.  Admittedly, I'm biased; I went through the trouble of giving you a synopsis of my gaming background to so that you would know that I started gaming in the post-Hickman era.  However, I'm still not sure I can even objectively agree with the argument.  The hobby has people who want to play a game vs. the people who want to tell a story (I daresay this has been true since the beginning), and they still have that option.  Though the inclusion of story as an innate function of RPGs has occurred since AD&D second edition, and most games have a section on running the game that focuses more on storytelling techniques than charts and tables, it's still out there, and it's still talked about.  Most games suggest against it, but ultimately concede that there's nothing wrong with pure hack-and-slash gameplay if that's what your group wants to play.  D&D still has a section (albeit a small one anymore) about running the game as a pure game; you spend an evening running the monsters in the dungeon against the adventurers in a dungeon, and that's it.

Ultimately, I'm not certain the Hickmans depleted the roleplaying hobby by emphasizing story elements, as that's still largely the purview of individual Game Masters.  Though there's some debate about it, I hold to the GNS Theory, and suggest that there's a game for every type of player.  The game is still whatever you make of it.

P.S. If you want to make your brain bleed, feel free to follow up your visit to Grognardia to this post on Wax Banks, just to get a feel for the debate.  Like Grognardia, it makes some good points, but also features arguing on the internet (although, unlike Grognardia, a lot of the venom comes from the author).