Of course, bullshit miracle herbs as such don’t actually enable avoidance of consequences.
In one of the first campaigns where I handed out prospectuses and put together player groups based on them, one of the players specified at the outset that her character, a member of the courtesans’ guild, charged triple prices for vaginal as opposed to oral and anal intercourse. When there was an incident where one of her customers, a soldier, got the wrong slot and refused to pull out, she ended up suing him for civil rape and getting three times her triple fee, as well as having him publicly rebuked by his CO for not treated a highly paid professional with respect. That sort of specificity has been common in my campaigns.
And even if that approach is rare, it doesn’t lessen my feeling that anachronism should be avoided when it is taken.
I ought to make it clear that I learned about the Threefold on r.g.f.a back in the mid-nineties, before Edwards borrowed the terms and redefined them. I still tend to use “gamist”, “narrativist”, and “simulationist” in the way that makes sense to me, i.e. as terms in the Threefold rather than in GNS theory.
I was never able to understand Edwards’s writing; it made no more sense to me than abstract algebra or American revisionist Marxism. So I don’t use its terminology. If I meant to do so, I would capitalize the words—Gamist, Narrativist, Simulationist—because I used to see them capitalized in his writing. If I lower case them, I mean the common sense notion that an rpg is comparatble to a game, a narrative, or a simulation, as those words are used in ordinary English.
I’m not sure why you think the presence of the reasoning was supposed to be exclusive. There was a whole post that went with that line. We can think more than one thing at a time. If session length was the only reason for something to happen we’d just stare at a timer ticking down. I think that goes without saying, though.
I didn’t mean anything terribly technical about Edwards’ design paradigm, I just meant, roughly speaking, the story focused/game focused/simulation focused triangular coordinate system. I see why some people like those axes and I don’t have anything against them, I just haven’t personally found them helpful in describing games. I find them slightly more useful in describing modes of play, but they start to fall apart for me again when describing players themselves and their holistic play preferences.
I’m a bit baffled anyone would give you grief over the idea that games and scenes tend to have a combination of all three when they’re flowing nicely, though I might push back a bit on how necessary that is vs. how much it results from an inelegant breakout of design and play principles. More personally, I’ve had excellent experiences that leaned entirely in a particular of those directions–hence quibbling on necessity–but I think most games tend to muddy the waters sufficiently to make your point more true than not. If that makes sense.
I was reacting to your foregrounding “the play has to go on” as the reason that Hamlet doesn’t just kill Claudius right away. It seems like the least interesting reason that could be suggested, partly because it could explain just about any narrative choice in any fictional work.
And, in particular, you refer specifically to “the author’s motive.” But the reason I say that it makes Hamlet a crap play is that in judging how good a play is, I don’t care what the author’s motives were; but I do care about what the characters’ motives were. If the internal world of the play doesn’t include Hamlet having a believable motive for delay, then the play doesn’t make sense. (But you should take this as a kind of “proof by contradiction”: I don’t think Hamlet is a crap play, and therefore I think that Hamlet has reasons for holding off.)
It’s not a piece of intensely rigid literary criticism, it’s a humorous way of alluding to other concepts which I addressed much more directly just as the original speaker addressed other related concepts more directly in their rendition.
In that context, it was a response to the (often flippant) criticism of works where a character does something that “doesn’t make sense.” Where they act in ways that do not directly address the problems laid in front of them or similar. In particular, it’s a response that notes structural influence.There are many possible alternate Hamlets of equal quality, but only some would work as a 2-3 hour play. We got such a one and no matter how good the character motivations and emotional impact was, if Hamlet ended an hour or more earlier it would be a satisfying 1 hour play not what it is.
So with role playing games. If we intend to play out a campaign, certain stories don’t work. I said very similar in my initial post. There are a number of editing and framing tools in RPGs that help build satisfying scenes where, say, a combat is taking place but there isn’t any meaningful sort of defeat on the table. That’s the context here.
It just reminded me of the other thing; clearly it would not have reminded you of the other thing but there’s no need to dissect a dissect a ghost and complain it lacks bones.