Rediscovering Dramatism

There's a kind of informal education process that a lot of TTRPG players go through. You run into an unfamiliar term, you get an explanation (or maybe just gather enough context clues to where you think you have it figured out), you slot it into your understanding, and now you've gained another tool to navigate the conversation. And then the tool doesn't work like you thought it would, because it turns out other people have a different definition in mind, so you gotta restart the process. Since I like having a more solid definition to work from, I tend to search out writing where ideas get described a little more clearly. This lets me deepen my own understanding, and there's the bonus benefit of having something to link to others to make sure we're on the same page. All of this to say: Talking about narrativism (of "Gamism, Narrativism, Simulationism" fame) in my usual TTRPG circles and reading the old Forge writers who self-identified as "narrativists" are very different experiences. Making sense of that clash took more work than originally anticipated, but was surprisingly enlightening.

Whose Narrative?

The usual understanding of narrativism I run into tends to involve "doing what's good for the story," empowering players to describe their own characters/actions, and leaning into established dramatic conventions. The phrase "genre emulation" comes up a lot. But when i actually went back and read posts from Forge alumni, I didn't quite find that. Instead, they described a different set of concerns... which do end up leaning into drama and certain narrative expectations, but they don't get there by making "do what's narratively appropriate" the priority at the forefront of design or play.

According to Bankuei, the point of narrativism is that "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. You could call this a kind of genre emulation, but it's specifically the conventions of 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 then, but not for understanding the ways the terms get used now.

For that we have to go even further back!

RGFA and the Kuhner Threefold Model

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 (as defined by the table) 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, posters on RGFA developed this whole model to explain to David Berkman why Theatrix (a game he co-authored) wasn't a game that met their needs. Simulationism and gamism were first described by self-identified simulationists and gamists, rather than just being an appendage to the Forge narrativist project as might be assumed from other accounts.