Are you a gamist, narrativist or simulationist?

[Wyrmlord]

Then take dialogue options out completely if they don't matter at all.

He said it!

The dungeon crawlers have won!

 

[mondblut]

Also, you said that the character should be free to do what he wants in spite of anything he said... which is fucking stupid.

How so? A character is free to promise to save a princess and immediately forget about that. A character is free to complete a quest nicely and kill the questgiver immediately afterwards. Characters can, you know, lie. And change their minds. And just act irrationally.

Many games of old didn't even have formalized "sidequests" (as is, you are formally asked by an NPC to do something, formally agree to, get a special entry added to a journal, get another entries once conditions are fulfilled, shit like that). You just discover some unusual bit of information, get curious and go investigate. Or don't. And exploring such vague informal clues was far more entertaining then running ordered errands in the games of today. You don't feel compelled to go somewhere and do something specific because a journal entry has appeared telling you to do so and so, you're just given subtle hints that something somewhere could be interesting to check.

Then take dialogue options out completely if they don't matter at all.

Why, limiting fluff and information gathering to reading books alone is boring. A bunch of NPCs giving away clues are perfectly ok

 

[FeelTheRads]

How so? A character is free to promise to save a princess and immediately forget about that. A character is free to complete a quest nicely and kill the questgiver immediately afterwards. Characters can, you know, lie. And change their minds. And just act irrationally.

The way I read it was "whatever the character says there should be no consequence because they're scripted and only if I put 1 point in strength more than in dexterity should have a consequence because only those are real consequences I hate dialogs in games they suck I hate stories in games they suck blaaaaaaaarrgh.... urka"

What you described instead is what you are able to do in the RPGs that are hailed here as the best: Fallout, Arcanum, even Torment, and which you and a couple of others (along with the kiddo at the top of the page) think are not even RPGs because they also, OMG, feature dialog choices.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I'm very much a narrativist.

 

[Joe Krow]

Let me ask you this. Do the conversations in a PnP rpg dictate a players options? Then why should they in a crpg? They can be informative and in some cases restrictive but they are never binding.

Can you imagine sitting down to play a PnP rpg and having the DM read you off the few choices that he's decided you should have at any given time? It would be great if all you expect from an rpg is to be told a nice story but that's not what roleplaying is. There is no collaboration. What's worse, those choices have nothing to do with the character you rolled up. You're neither offered real choice nor playing a character at that point.

By keeping the "choice as actions" paradigm and then making actions dependent on character attributes, we avoid both these issues and create a more accurate representation of the PnP roots of the genre.

Then take dialogue options out completely if they don't matter at all.

Why, limiting fluff and information gathering to reading books alone is boring. A bunch of NPCs giving away clues are perfectly ok

This (as they say).

 

[zenbitz]

Seriously what the fuck? I'm assuming this wasn't written by anyone involved in actual game development.

They are, but not computer games usually.

 

[Tigranes]

Bullshit theory is worse than no theory at all.

(Hory) It's about categorizing players based on their preferences and expectations from the RPGs they play.

Except it doesn't really come from empirical study or well-grounded and principled theoretical thought. It's just "oh well come on, those three things exist right?" It's about as true as "Casual/Hardcore".

You can't judge/score individual games by the GNS categories. Nor can you players, because their conscious attractions to games, or the way they approach different games, or the way they value games, is very often completely out of wack with this GNS shit. You know why? Because it's not grounded in reality.

 

[Aikanaro]

This discussion is stupid. They're called 'creative agendas' - they're about what the player is doing creatively while they play. cRPGs require no creativity - if you're bringing creativity to the game then you're probably 'LARPing'. They have no relevance to cRPGs at all. Torment isn't a narrativist game - narrativism requires the freedom to make your own thematic statement. The game has plenty of theme, but it's not narrativsm because it didn't come from the player through play.

As the definition from Vincent Baker I posted before said - PnP games are a 'conversation' between a bunch of people. cRPGs aren't conversations - it's a product, or work of art, or whatever - it's there to be experienced as it is.

The theory does quite well at what it does, which is give general catagories of why people play PnP RPGs and help create systems that will help support those sorts of play. As the indie PnP scene shows, it's been very successful at this - and even if it is all bullshit when you get down to it, it's hard to argue with success.

 

[peko]

Gamist-Narrativist. Good story, good presentation, fun game, please. Realism can fall by the wayside.

Agreed. Realistic games usually tend to be the least fun, with a few exceptions like Operation Flashpoint.

Way to completely fail at reading comprehension. And how exactly is Operation Flashpoint an rpg?
Simulation as Kavax said has nothing to do with realism, it's more about a consistent believeable alternative to reality. It's one of the parts I've always found to be more interesting in rpgs, to peek in to the worlds of other peoples imagination and see how believeable they get.