Foundational

 Recently, on Facebook, Jeff Dee (yeah, that Jeff Dee) has been talking about "simulationist" RPG design. 

Younger gamers might not know this but back around the turn of the century, Ron Edwards proposed the GNS Theory (later refined into what he called The Big Model, but I never understood the difference and TBM didn't catch public attention the way GNS did). GNS stands for Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist. 

According to Edwards and his group of thinkers/designers on The Forge, good game design stems from identifying which of these three modes you want to focus on, and really leaning hard into it. Because according to The Forge, all gamers are one of the three, and will have the most fun if their games cater to that strongest desire. 

Now, for my money, Gamist and Narrativist were well defined. Gamists want to "win." They play RPGs to smash all the orcs and loot all the treasure. They want to gain levels, more hit points, better combat power, more spells, more magic items. If, as the tech-bros say nowadays, the "line goes up" they're happy. Narrativists, on the other hand, are there for the story. They want their Big Damn HeroTM to protagonize all through the DM's hand-crafted narrative (if there is a DM--a lot of the indie/story game people came out of The Forge's "narrativist" camp, and may of these games are GMless). 

Simulationism, according to GNS (as I remember it) was a desire to...not make the game realistic, as we're talking about dragons and fireballs and aliens and FTL travel and so on...make the game as realist as possible without ruining game play, but also to focus on the world-building and emulation of genre tropes and... Like I said, it was the least well defined of the three. I feel like "simulationism" as far as consistent and sensible world-building is a GM concern more than a player concern. I don't know many RPG players who WANT to limit their characters because "in the real world, that wouldn't happen." 

Now Dee is taking a different tract with what he calls simulationist design. To me it seems like a rejection of "bennies" or other metacurrencies in modern RPGs meant to give the PCs a boost. This goes all the way back to early game design, with things like Force Points and spendable character points in d6 Star Wars, Karma in the old Marvel Superheroes game (the FASERIP one), to things like Action Points in d20 Modern to Inspiration in 5E D&D.  And again, many of the indie/story games coming out of the old Forge narrativist tradition have a lot of these. Some games are ONLY this as a mechanic, with otherwise free-form play. 

A quote from Dee that sums it up, replying to someone asking about "The Rule of Cool": 

The least egregious version of it, as far as simulationism is concerned, is that “players should be allowed to try things outside the written rules, as long as they’re ‘cool’”. And under simulationism, I reject that because it places an unnecessary emphasis on ‘coolness’. You know what simulationism says that players should be able to try, outside of the rules? ANYTHING. Cool or not.

Simulationism isn’t limited to rules as written, and doesn’t need to be trumped by ‘cool’ things. Simulationism is an attempt to provide rules which *can* be played as written, producing satisfactory results as often as possible when played as written. But OF COURSE more things are possible than just the ones directly mechanized in any finite rules set.

And so all that simulationism requires is that when characters try to do things, their chance and degree of success should be informed by the difficulty of the task and the character’s abilities. Regardless of whether the written rules cover it. Whether it’s ‘cool’ is irrelevant.

 

I get what Dee's saying here, but I have a hard time distinguishing this from Gamism as far as GNS is concerned. The game has rules, you're playing a game. From a designer/GM perspective,  yeah, you want a rule set that has reasonable and well-defined rules. But as a player, how would this be a concern as compared to a rule-set that allows for cartoonish superheroism with metagame currencies? 

Let me get this straight. I'm not criticizing Dee at all. He's got the best understanding of "simulationism" I've come across in the past 25 years. 

I think this points to the foundational flaw of GNS/Big Model thinking. They have things backwards. They think good game design flows from pandering to the wants of the players. But you don't know who your players will be when you're designing a game. And even Edwards admits that most gamers enjoy all three of his pillars of game design to a greater or lesser extent. Gamist players enjoy the story, and appreciate a logical, consistent game world. World-builders have fun facing and overcoming challenges, and seeing how the actions in game affect the status quo of the world. And even the most loosey-goosey narrativist wants some sort of mechanical system within the game (wouldn't be a "game" without one), and a big part of creating a compelling drama is having a consistent world that doesn't violate suspension of disbelief. 

They're all intertwined. So why would "good" game design seek to isolate and hyperfocus on one of these three things? Seems like a bad design principle to me.