Big Roleplaying Concepts

I think I’m beginning to develop a severe agnosticism about a lot of the Big Concepts in roleplaying. From the RGFA Threefold Model, to the Forgish GNS, I’m beginning to think that as dogma it’s a bunch of malarky.

Which is not to say “there’s no such thing as …” anything. I completely accept that people play games to compete, to tell stories, to pretend that they’re in a different world and to pretend that they’re different people. I accept that it’s legitimate to term these activities Creative Agendas, to call them Narrativism, or Immersion, and useful even to call them these things.

What I really think is unhelpful is to talk about a triangular arrangement of these things, or to balance them against each other in terms of cohesion or coherence or some such nonsense. Trying to arrange them in some crazy Unified Model of Roleplaying serves no other purpose than drawing lines in the sand of the huge huge universe of all possible roleplaying.

Yes, it’s useful to have the concept behind the word Narrativism (or Dramatism), for the same reason that it’s useful to know what “savory” means if you’re cooking. But I don’t think it makes sense to try to say that cuisine must be “Coherent,” and only include savories, or that if there are sweet elements they’re just “color.” Or that a chef fits somewhere in a graph of sweet, savory and spicy.

Because, honestly, we realize that sometimes we want different things in a meal, or in a game. And it’s useful to be able talk about those things, because that’s how we get what we want.

But trying to fit them all into some correlated philosophy of play is just nutty, and wrong. Like Nazi Ethnology: it’s an evil pseudo-science.

Let’s talk about what makes for Gamism, and Sim, and Narrativism and Dramatism (if those are different things,) and how it can be promoted. Let’s be honest about wanting to take a directoral stance, or to attempt character immersion, and encourage each other in those endevours. Let’s recognize that some game texts, and games that we run have those various flavors, and play to their strengths because we have names for them and recognize them. But let’s not try to fit them all into an overarching holy writ system of roleplaying.