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...
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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.)
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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.