So, I've been reading a fair amount of Deeper in the Game this past little while (thanks, /r/rpg!) and I've found some incisive gems. This section on flag framing, for example, is just about the most useful idea I've ever heard for the setup of a role-playing game, and is basically a formalization of what groups composed of players with a decent amount of experience under their belts tend to do informally. However, I've got to take issue with A Way Out (a post intrinsically connected to The Same Page tool, which Bankuei's blog is probably most known for) because, at least as written, it seems to imply that everyone must have the same goals for the game and want to have the same kinds of experiences at the table.
Bankuei's central thesis seems to be that most problems come from players wanting different things out of the game, which are in some way impossible to merge. That is,
"Most of your 'problem players' are just people who want to play a different game and are either under the illusion that you were playing a different game to begin with, or that different games could be mixed."This idea relies on GNS Theory [1]. Click that link and read through if you haven't already; it's basically required reading for a person who wants to GM a successful game with new players whose play-styles she isn't familiar with. To give it a woefully inadequate summary, basically, we either want to win, we want to experience a story, or we want to build a world.
I don't see any reason why a single game, or even a single session, can't encompass all these goals. Many different events will happen in an average session. There will be descriptions of the environs. Characters will be attacked. Skill challenges will need to be passed. The characters could be betrayed. The characters could betray an NPC. The characters could betray each other! The 4E DMG does a really, really good job at hitting this point home hard, in a way that should have been front and center when 3E first came out (Onyx Path could take a hint from here too.) There's a "The Players" chapter that further breaks down gamists, narrativists and simulationists into more categories, explaining what they probably want from the game and giving suggestions on how to engage them.
The problem comes—and yes it does come often—when players or the GM can't expressly [2] agree to let some things be in service to some player's goals while letting go of others. And this is where I'm in greatest disagreement with Bankuei. To suggest that different styles of gaming can't be mixed is tantamount to suggesting that, as gamers, we're too narcissistic to brook even a momentary breach of our expectations, even when we know it's in service to someone else's fun. That we're so entrenched in the sacrosanctity of our idea of how the rules of the game should function that it would be impossible to negotiate a compromise.
If I'm a narrativist and want to experience a good story, and I'm sitting down on a Friday night with my friends, some of whom are gamists and love the kick-in-the-door and fight to win style, I should know that the story might be derailed by a really good or really bad dice roll, and it's up to me and the GM to get it back on an interesting path. Railroads aren't necessary for a great story. Conversely, if there's something that would make for an exceptionally interesting twist and would make me jump out of my seat and exclaim "No way!", the gamists should know and be prepared for the possibility that the GM might fudge a die roll once in a while to make it happen. Failing once because because the GM needed something to happen doesn't negate the three or four other times you kicked the werewolf so hard he fell off the cliff.
The key is trust and being on the same page [3], though. If I expect that every good plot twist is being thrown out the window because the player on my left has an optimized character that is chewing through everything the GM planned, I'm probably not happy. And if the player on my right assumes that every enemy is unreasonably strong because they need to survive for a plot, she's not happy.
To be fair, I'm probably not giving Bankuei enough credit, considering the quality and depth of analysis found on the rest of his site. He probably understands this well, given his focus on understanding what players want out of a game. But it's way too important a point to be glossed over: we can and should accommodate (and ourselves be accommodating of) multiple reasons for coming to the table, even in the same group. If we can't compromise, how can we game together?
[1] GNS Theory was later expanded into The Big Model, which I'm much less familiar with, so I won't address it here. But yes, I know it exists.
[2] Experienced groups sometimes do this implicitly, but that's a poor substitute.
[3] See what I did there?
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