Dramatic Realism

One last thought on simulationism before I move on to Edwards’s essay on Gamism. By Edwards’s definition, “Simulationism heightens and focuses Exploration as the priority of play,” and those elements of Exploration are Character, Setting, Situation, System, and Color. I wonder if there’s not a weird sixth element that is Dramatic Narrative. I know that sounds odd, since all games create Dramatic Narratives in their way, but then all games have the other elements as well.

What got me thinking this is the way that every RPG strives to reproduce some aspect of our world, lives, or experiences in a recognizable way. That is part of the pleasure of the game, after all. And while Vincent Baker eschews simulation of reality in his game mechanics, what he loves to create through his mechanics (and thus have them reliably and reproducibly) are moments of Dramatic Narrative.

The most exciting example of this is the resolution system in Dogs in the Vineyard. The raises and stakes of any conflict will always reproduce the beat by beat exchanges that we see in excellent television and movies and read in excellent books. It’s the best mechanical representation of this dramatic structure that I have seen.

Similarly, all of the moves in Apocalypse World, for both the PCs and MC, are built to recreate (again reliably and reproducibly) the Dramatic Narratives of great fiction. The MC’s moves are a collection of dramatic elements, challenging experiences that can (and should) befall the protagonists in this fiction (separate them; capture someone; take away their stuff; offer an opportunity, with or without a cost; etc.). The variation available to the MC to create softer or harder moves allows the drama to escalate rhythmically as it does in fiction’s other forms, with the mechanics making it so that softer moves occur much more frequently than harder moves, ensuring that those climactic moments are rarer. The division of the PCs’ moves means that sometimes the characters will get what they want, sometimes we will be surprised by how bad things go, and usually things will kind of go the characters’ way but further entangle them in the fiction. Through play, we as both players and audience, get to experience the narrative as though it were a dramatic show unfolding right in front of us. It’s an incredible piece of design

Nothing else in Apocalypse World is designed to simulate “reality.” Everything in it is designed to emulate the stylized “reality” of fiction, written and visual. It is “simulationist” to the extent that it (and Dogs in the Vineyard) prioritizes our play in the Exploration of the Dramatic Narratives they create.

Is that just a crazy notion +Vincent Baker & +Meguey Baker?

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To which Vincent Baker responded:

​You're absolutely right that Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World are designed to create dramatic narratives.

My Big Model answer is, they work this way by working on the elements of exploration. Dramatic narrative isn't a sixth element of exploration, it's a higher-level phenomenon; it emerges from the patterned interactions of system, color, situation, etc. Same with modeling reality, same with any other structure you might choose to design into your game.

To put it into Apocalypse World's back cover terms: System, color, character, setting, situation - these are what you've got, yes. What are you going to do with them?

GNS goes on to propose that there are three coherent answers. Whether that's true or not, answering the question coherently is, I think, synonymous with rpg design.