My recent rabbit hole is researching the raising sims and dating sims in the Flash era. Not just Flash games themselves (although I have found an excellent starting point there) but it's good shorthand for the period and enthusiast scene I'm investigating here.

• English Otome Games has a wealth of information collected in one place

• Longtime developers like Hanako Games and Winter Wolves have also helped me gain a better picture of the era

• ...and you can get solid results from restricting Google search results to "before September 2017"

I'm getting confident enough in my ability to identify and gather these that I might put together an Itch collection for them... but I'd need to come up with a good name for it, "character sims" is just my mental shorthand for them. "Character Sim RPGs?" "Life Sim RPGs?"

when i actually went back and read posts from Forge alumni, i started realizing that I had the wrong idea of what "narrativism" meant there. It's not actually about producing the dramatic arc of conventional fiction via play or using rules to enforce/produce genre conventions in general, it's about a specific kind of doing that.

Bankuei calls it "player characters freely make choices and actions based on human issues." Forge narrativism wants well-defined protagonists who can confront Big Questions and Important Themes, whether those Big Questions come from a systems' specific thematic anchors, or whether they emerge from characters' personal thematic anchors. This is strongly reminiscent of a specific genre, but it's the genre called literary fiction. Interest in the conventions of horror, fantasy, and other "genre fiction" was called simulationism, another term that often gets used in very different ways than the Forge's definition.

By drawing this kind of contrast between "narrativism" and "simulationism," GNS reiterated the classic divide between literary and genre fiction that's caused so much nerd resentment of "serious" literature and academic contempt for "popular" literature historically. This is helpful for understanding what was going on back there, but is nearly useless for understanding the ways the terms get used now.

For that we have to go even further back!

John H. Kim has some fascinating firsthand accounts of the RGFA usenet group, an early outpost for TTRPG theory and/or flame wars and the origin point for an earlier three-part theory of play. Not gamism, narrativism, simulationism, but gamism, dramatism, simulationism.

Mary Kuhner's description of the Threefold Model brings us much closer to the modern ttrpg discourse version of "simulationism," while "dramatism" seems to have survived under the new name "narrativism"... kind of. There's some odd assumptions about the GM's power to direct the story that don't seem to have survived transmission. If I had to speculate: vulgar narrativism combines the dramatist emphasis on Interesting Story more generally with the Forge narrativist emphasis on player-driven play. But in most cases, the boundaries between terms in common discourse seem much closer to Mary Kuhner's model than Ron Edwards'.

apparently RGFA developed this whole model to explain to a writer for Theatrix why Theatrix wasn't the game for them. Simulationism was first described by self-identified simulationists, rather than just being an appendage to the Forge narrativist theoretical project as some may assume based on other accounts.

Chapter two: Protagonist Creation!

Intro material has some advice before the rules themselves show up: Don't powergame, don't make a character that's too annoying (i'm under attack), be okay with bad things happening to them eventually, and also you can ignore the character creation rules completely if you really want. I expect I'm going to get pretty tired of "you can ignore this if you really want" by the end of the book.

( Read more... )

One of my weaknesses here is that it's going to be really hard for me to tell how much of the book is weird because it's trying to be Vampire, and how much is it because it's just a weird book. But I persevere.

( Read more... )

Jon Peterson continues to be an extremely worthwhile read. currently in the section of Playing at the World 2e that describes the development of "character" as RPGs understand it. Apparently there were hacks of Diplomacy that used a map of Middle-Earth instead of Real-World-Earth, and put the players in charge of Lord of the Rings nations... and in the positions of LotR characters. We know these guys. They're in the books.

This is, if I were to describe art in terms of its component parts instead of as a social phenomenon, sufficient for a role-playing game in my mind. The game gives you a role to play, fulfilling that role is playing that game. LotR Hack Diplomacy is missing several components that are essential to the TTRPG experience for a lot of people (it's PvP, the GM handles paperwork instead of being a narrator, you're not creating your own character, there's no principle of "anything can be attempted") but I'm not a lot of people, and for me it's good enough to count.

has anyone created a dungeon crawler version of diplomacy. hold on lemme look this up

sometimes you research TTRPG events and incidents and run into something called the Babylon Equity Project and i'm like oh cool i didn't know we were doing Evangelion or perhaps patlabor. and then you get zero hits on google for it.

papercult has had two different threads on generic systems. which is fine. which is cool. both have come to the conclusion of "it's better when a game has specific goals rather than trying to be the One Game For Everything." which is fine! which is cool!

...but. i do not think that so-called generic systems should be reduced to trying to be the One Game For Everything. i think "this game doesn't work for every campaign concept" is always going to be true! which makes it a boring observation to me. It's much more interesting to me to drill down into the specifics of what they do work for and why. In this sense, "generic" can still be a meaningful (if not perfectly accurate) label for gesturing at some setting flexibility, but it's not like, the main appeal. I don't think the genericism is ever the main appeal, really.

idk i have a vague dissatisfaction with Generic Systems Discourse because it takes a foundational bit of design theory (different mechanics produce different outcomes, so should be used intentionally) and then stops. once you start talking about several generic systems at once, they aren't mechanically unified, so you're no longer talking systems! you're just saying "games should have goals" without trying to analyze the goals of the games you're discussing!

i think this means i don't have any beef with any individual generic system i just think people talk about them weirdly

big ol' survey but it's from reddit and we know that won't be the full story. In the meantime, would like to hear anecdotal amendments to these (for example there's a surprising amount of Fabula Ultima/Exalted fandom overlap, and my Jennagame obsession came from friends in the Lancer server)

Fascinating review of a.. dating sim rhythm game RPG? i'm still a little unclear.

One of the things that really fascinates me about dating sims is the way they let the player decide their measure of success: "victory" is ending up with the romantic interest of your choice. Cordo d'Oro has its own set of romance options, but also separate notional goal, victory in the recitals. But from what I'm reading here, the game doesn't condemn you for deciding that pursuing that goal isn't worth your time. I imagine that I'd try optimizing to get both the romance option and the victory at the recitals, but that probably says more about me than about the game.

The notional goal with the well-supported possibility of ignoring that goal reminds me of some TTRPG design motifs, but my thoughts on the resemblance aren't terribly well-formed

perhaps my grand networking schemes and my "refuses to get a bsky" idiosyncrasy are in conflict or perhaps contradiction with each other. alas!