GNS Theory

1d4chan.org/wiki/RPG#GNS

What's Veeky Forums is opinion of the threefold model/GNS theory of game design?

Personally I find it to be quite a informative and insightful way of categorising game design goals.

However the very mention of it on forums tends to get the same visceral hate filled reaction as bringing up a carl jung or sigmund freud quote to a psych undergrad...

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_genres
jrients.blogspot.com/2006/02/i-got-your-threefold-model-right-here.html)
twitter.com/AnonBabble

The problem is that GNS theory is just tribalism at this point.

It's one group claiming that everything "good" or "pure" about RPG's actually belongs to their super special part of the pyramid while everything "shitty" or "ruining the industry" belongs to the other two points.

Case in point: people's utter insistence that Simulationism refers to both simulating "reality" while also simulating the narrative conventions of a genre despite that logically falling under the realm of narrativism but no narrativism only REALLY applies when it's in reference to abilities that're more player input on the world than actual character derived powers. An arbitrary distinction but one peolpe will fight tooth and nail over to claim is really their own game's style rather than someone else's.

It's certainly one way of examining it, though I'd argue not the only lens by which we might categorize games and game theory.

The visceral hate comes from people married to one extreme (or trolls pretending as much) hating on the others. A good example is the dedicated crowd that shits on the narrativist goal, where it can actually be fleshed out into new elements to enhance other design goals. A Narrativist element to a Gamist design goal could add a narrative campaign system to a wargame, and a simulationist aspect allow for elements of resource management and upkeep for a continuing campaign.

Also ; it's devolved into tribalism by idiots.

it's useful as a general and vague model. any attempts to go beyond that have turned out to be retarded.

It's incredibly stupid and divides rpgs on arbitrary lines.

bullshit. different games are different by nature; the theory serves as a tool to describe the differences.

The problem is that it doesn't describe the content of the games like genre would supposedly do but rather creates some nebulous ideology to go with them in 3 very general and vague "slots".

I could, for instance, describe D&D as a game of tactical resource management where a group has to work together to survive an onslaught of monsters to get gold and treasure through cunning, guile, tactics, strategy or crazy gambits that takes place primarily in a medeival fantasy european type setting with races from the world of JRR Tolkein and priests/wizards and shit hanging around and you'd get a pretty decent idea of the game but if I call it "simulationist" then that just raises a lot of questions and assumptions about which maybe 40% of them are in the ballpark of accurate.

Veeky Forums's opinion remains a fractured shitpile because we refuse to admit that words mean things and strive to agree on what they mean.

My opinion on it is that's it's an extremely useful tool for examining the question of "why we play:" some people want to win, some people want to tell a good story, and some people want to explore a fictional but self-consistent world. And for that it's great.

Alex, Beth, and Charlie all miss their footing rolls and fall off the mountain and die. Alex is slightly PO'd because he wanted to "win" but is working on rolling a character that's going to be less vulnerable to environmental hazards for the next game, Beth is livid and probably won't be back because she put dozens of hours into her backstory and 3 months into playing the character and it died "for no reason," and Charlie is thrilled because they feel like every single choice and bit of bookkeeping they made mattered and had an influence on the result thus the experiment had a clear result (namely, crampons would have been worth the weight after all.)

GNS is a great tool for understanding where each player was coming from and why they feel the way they do. It's useful for a game designer who's trying to figure out who they want to appeal to, it's great for a player to be able to articulate what they want out of a game, and it's fantastic for a DM who's trying to herd cats. Alex might have had a better time if "scale the mountain" had been more involved and gave more room for cleverness. Beth could have been salvaged if it hadn't been presented as "roll failed, story over" even if the alternative was to make things complicated or difficult for her character in ways that would piss Alex off, and Charlie is possibly having too much fun at the expense of the table and no one, including the table, may be aware of that. (This tends to happen because they take great notes and give great reminders, subtly influencing how the game ends up being played.)

(cont)

(cont)

Perfect? No. Useful? Yes. Using it as a loose guideline will go a long way towards understanding situations, especially where people want or *get* different things out of the same game.

But people get fucking married to it and that's a disaster. Nobody's all one and not the others, you can't really build a system just for one or two and it still be an RPG (not even Narrativist, and I've tried) and thanks to DM influence people of all stripes happily play all games.

Great tool. Sometimes amazing tool. Shitty religion.

first fo all, if anything ia vague and nebulous, then it is the term genre. secondly, you're not completely wrong about this - but people use genres to describe literary content nonetheless. the same applies to RPGs, except RPGs are not just fiction, they also have a rules mechanic aspect. all which justifies the propagation of main aspects of a given RPG.

as for D&D, it is not simulationist. it makes no serious attempt to recreate a real or imagined setting. you can see that most clearly in 3.pf, where monsters level with you in the sense that as you level up and increase your stats, you start encountering different monsters to match those stats. the game encourages this, it is the default state of play. as such, D&D is GAMIST. later editions didn't change anything about that. I mean.. 4E is often called an MMO.

>Perfect? No. Useful? Yes. Using it as a loose guideline will go a long way towards understanding situations, especially where people want or *get* different things out of the same game.
note that the same goes for genre when it comes to fiction

one could say that GNS describes the main GAME MECHANIC GENRES

>if anything is vague and nebulous, then it is the term genre
Illiterate moron.

uneducated pisstard. i recommend you start with the wikipedia entry and then do further research from there.

>it's fantasy
>it's science fiction
>it's urban fantasy
>it's steampunk
>it's reality bending shenanigans
>it's a mystery game

Genre is exceedingly descriptive and not fucking vague at all, you dipshit.

as in every classification, you have the issue of fringe cases/genre-mixes, faggot. which is exactly the same problem with GNS.

for example, nobody (educated) will claim that Apocalypse World has a simulationist system, nobody will claim that D&D has a narrativist system. what about Vampire the Masquerade? is it gamist? is it narrativist? it certainly has aspects of both.

none of them are major literary genres; they are subgenres at best
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_genres

>it's reality bending shenanigans
>part of a list of supposed genre names
>fullonretard.png

It's a limiting and limited set of categories if you're interested in either the genre of a game or the reasons people might play it. And the whole line of discussion on incoherence is bullshit. Jung is a pretty good analogy here.

Forge produced much better work than their poor man's knockoff of the original threefold model. Fortune positioning, for example, opened an interesting line of discussion.

There's like, nothing narrativist in VtM. It's heavy sim as far as GNS classification goes.

In fact vampire was used as an example of 'incoherent' game design. A simulatist systerm aimed at a narrative player base.

Why so many women in your example, sjw shit pile?

Once again, some libtard college idiot comes into OUR world, demands attention and respect for writing down some half-assed retard classification of the sophisticated discourse of tg, and then tries to claim that it is in some way worth anything. No wonder academia kills gaming.

GNS is fine as a tool for describing what people want from RPGs. It's a bit dated but on the other hand there haven't been many other attempts at a serious reflection on RPGs.
It starts to fall apart when applied to game systems, especially because half of the time people use the labels with very little cognition of what they mean.
I agree that at this point it's mostly just an excuse for shitflinging, and the fact that the people behind the Forge were some of the most rabid faggots on the Net doesn't help its case. However, to this day it still is one of the few decent attempts at an alaytical approach, and has some merit.

GNS is not categorical, it works as a spectrum. You should be familiar with that, being an autist.

It's pretty self-evident.

I run GURPS mostly. It's super good at being simulationist, but the other two aspects are p weak barring certain contexts.

For something like a shounen game where it's far more about narrative and cool moments I'd read up a new system. Probably FATE.

By contrast DnD is almost 100% gamist, being hideously poor at simulating anything and having mechanics that make a lot of narrative shit not work (dagger to my throat? lel I have 500hp) but has a fairly fun combat system.

Just wish it wasnt so desu.

>Story Now requires that at least one engaging issue or problematic feature of human existence be addressed in the process of role-playing.
depending on the edition of the game we're talking about, the core mechanic of the game revolves around the struggle to retain one's humanity. by the same token, CoC's SAN is a narrativist element: a mechanic that (ideally, admittedly) shapes the narrative. It's an early narrative element and therefore remains rough. Trail of Cthulhu, on the other hand, models the descent into reality

the rest of VtM is arguably gamist: the vampire's powers are less aimed at accurately reflecting vampire's in fiction - they are aimed at giving the PC's cool powers, allowing for powerful builds. as evidenced by the game later descending into "vampires on superhero levels".

CoC, otoh, is otherwise simulationist: no cool powers, just a reflection of ordinary people being thrust into impossible circumstances.

>Trail of Cthulhu, on the other hand, models the descent into
...insanity much more faithfully to lovecraft's works. and it allows for both descending into pure madness or switching to the dark side; it's not only a better simulationist mechanic, it also opens up more narrative space.

Says you. Veeky Forums declared its categorization, and therefore, you're wrong.

i am Veeky Forums

The image you posted is a better model.

i read the blogpost of the creator, it's not.

>I suppose one could argue that Dungeons & Dragons fits the requirements to be Retro Stupidly Pretentious. But every RPG theory fails the moment D&D is taken into consideration, so I probably ought to quit while I'm ahead.
what did he mean by this?

It's bullshit.

Not necessarily because the concepts themselves have no value. You can certainly talk about narrative elements or gamist elements of a system. However, the idea that the three elements are opposed to one another, or that they are the inclusive range of values, or even that they are the most important or even relevant values to consider when making a game, are pretty much bullshit. It was devised by a couch philosopher and used only by couch philosophers for a reason.

I understand that the people who developed the idea later went back and said the theory was flawed, and apparently they have moved on to developing their ideas further. The fact that people still use GNS, and primarily use it as a means to aim hate towards specific systems, is rather telling about the theory's quality.

>but if I call it "simulationist" then that just raises a lot of questions
Yes, the main one being "what the fuck are you saying?" as D&D is clearly a gamist system if anything.

It's bullshit for a number of reasons. One of which being that it mistakes the components of an RPG for the goals.

Empirical data blows it the fuck out

AD&D is gamist with narrativist elements, 3.+ were gamist with simulationist elements (that made the gamist parts of the game suck), 4e was pure gamist, 5e is gamist with narrativist elements again.

Think of it like pokemon: pokemon have a main type that heavily defines them, then a sub-type that often differentiates it from other pokemon with that same primary type.

What's really interesting with GNS is how when you apply it to D&D, you realise that the reason D&D is gamist because it was developed from out of wargaming rules, and the most gamist elements of AD&D and 4e as whole were due to taht wargaming/miniatures connection.

Then you realise that while there are simulationist wargames, there are no narrativist wargames.

and thougths like that are why things like GNS theory do have value, even if they're not perfect descriptions of what they're trying to analse

>missing the point so hard it kills the person behind you

This desu.

Although I'd argue that BrickWars is a narrativist wargame.

The RPS theory in the OP pic (read more about it here: jrients.blogspot.com/2006/02/i-got-your-threefold-model-right-here.html) is actually pretty useful too. It's not all-encompassing either, but it's also useful. I think both these models are most powerful when used combination to describe individual elements of a game. For example, you can describe systems or elements of system design as narrativistically pretentious or simulationistically pretentious. Using this method we can describe BrickWars as a stupid-narrativist wargame.

I'd argue that early, pre-2e D&D was retro-gamist stupid, 2e was retro-gamist and pretentious-narrativist, 3.5 and PF were pretentious-simulationist gamist-retro, 4e (at least in the group I played with, I don't know about others) was stupid-gamist retro, and 5e is pretentious-narrativist gamist-retro.

It requires a bit more thinking to describe games this way, but ultimately, the purpose of both models is to give us ways to think.

can you qualify on the "with X elements" part, respectively?

>Then you realise that while there are simulationist wargames, there are no narrativist wargames.
good one

>I suppose one could argue that Dungeons & Dragons fits the requirements to be Retro Stupidly Pretentious. But every RPG theory fails the moment D&D is taken into consideration, so I probably ought to quit while I'm ahead.
>what did he mean by this?
It's actually a fairly important point, that doesn't get mentioned enough.

Since D&D predates 99% of all other RPGs and is the ur-progenitor of vast swathes of geek-dom, it sits mostly outside any possible classification method. Its creators were forging/blundering/evolving ahead blindly, rather than building something for a particular purpose. That means the reason any particular mechanic or way of doing things exists in it is simply "they thought it was a good idea at the time".

A good example of this is the reason Elves have immunity to sleep and paralysis: there was a wargame that was happening in the same universe, and the Elvish army was consistently losing to the Undead. But the Undead used alot of sleep-magic, so they patched-in an immunity, which got carried across to D&D. Which by modern standards is a nonsensical way to build a game system.

You can chart the evolution of RPGs in terms of the ones that spun off from D&D, and the ones that leapt into uncharted territory because D&D didn't let them play what they wanted too. I hold that D&D's great strength is being "almost good enough": it keeps gamers coming back for more, but they eventually get frustrated enough to go off and build something better, thus keeping the hobby alive.

I think it sets up narrativism on a pedestal. All RPGs are fantasy wish-fulfillment in the end.

If it was really about narrative per se, where are the games where you get weaker as the game progresses and play as an everyday shlub?

Those narratives aren't boring necessarily, they just aren't escapist.

>Since D&D predates 99% of all other RPGs and is the ur-progenitor of vast swathes of geek-dom, it sits mostly outside any possible classification method.
nope that is a non-sequitur. furthermore, to me the history of a game system is irrelevant. let's forget about it and judge it by system alone.
D&D is a gamist system with simulationist elements. classified it kinda correctly.

i think we're just talking about GNS as game system genres here. not about the specifics of what someone said about GNS. just broad categories like fantasy, sci-fi, etc. but system related. and as with genres, there are crossovers.