I Love My DM

this is the opposite of a dumb question in that it's a question you would need like a graduate level paper to answer properly. im not a huge mecha person either so im not qualified to give you an in depth answer here but. i would say in extremely broad strokes a lot of the way mech anime deals with War Horrors is by exploring the way advanced technology makes war much more catastrophically violent while simultaneously distancing people from the violence they are committing

Anyhow, in Gundam, people fucking die. A lot. First episode? Cold open on an evacuation of the space station our fifteen year old protagonist lives in. It gets invaded by enemy commandos in these huge, uncanny, monstrous man-shaped machines of war, and the sole reason this mess doesn't end with everyone including the protagonist dying is that the protagonist- again, fifteen years old- discovers a latent talent for using these man-shaped machines of war to kill people and break things. A talent that the military is quite eager to exploit.

From there, the fighting and the killing and the dying continues and it's hammered home again and again that this is wearing the protagonist down, that he hates this, he can barely sleep at night, he feels like he's only valuable because of his ability to use the Gundam to kill people, he sometimes freaks out and goes berserk, wailing on an enemy with the robot's fucking fists long after that enemy has already been turned into a pile of wreckage.

Let me preface this by clarifying that the terms "gamist", "narrativist" and "simulationist" as most people use them today bear very little resemblance to how GNS theory uses them. Most people who talk about GNS theory in the year 2023 aren't actually familiar with how it defines those terms – they're just talking about what they taste like they ought to mean.

For example, someone might look at traditional RPGs and think "okay, so Dungeons & Dragons is gamist, and Vampire: The Masquerade is narrativist, and GURPS is simulationist, right?"; however, GNS theory classifies all three of those as simulationist.

As GNS theory defines its terms, "gamist" basically means board games with light roleplaying elements, like Betrayal at House on the Hill, while "narrativist" specifically means games whose mechanics are concerned principally – and, often, exclusively – with interrogating the interiority of the player characters: their identities, motivations, relationships, emotional states, etc. Its definition of "simulationist" weakly gestures toward some set of unifying features, but those features are so ill-defined that, in practice, it functions as a wastebin taxon which contains all remaining games that aren't classified as either "gamist" or "narrativist".

That right there is a fairly significant problem: for a schema that purports to be a taxonomy of tabletop RPGs, lumping nearly all published tabletop RPGs – and certainly all traditional ones – into a wastebin taxon seriously limits its utility. Granted, it's not altogether clear that utility was ever the point; Ron Edwards, the guy who came up with GNS theory, famously argued that playing traditional (i.e., "simulationist") RPGs causes actual, physical brain damage, even going so far as to assert that introducing young players to traditional RPGs is morally equivalent to child sexual abuse. This attitude comes through quite strongly in much of GNS theory's writing.

Gamism is "is this a fun puzzle?" or "is this a fair challenge?" (combat, literal dungeon traps, solving crimes, international diplomacy), narrativism is "what would make a good story?" or "what would make a meaningful character arc?" or "what would make a cool scene?" and the much maligned / ignored / misapplied simulationism is "what would happen next if this were real?" (whether this is randomly determined according to some probability distribution, or agreed upon by humans) or "how does this fit into the model?". (I love simulationism because it's where emergent behaviour comes from -- the spontaneous event caused by a random die roll that you would never have thought of because it's not an obvious story beat or tailored for your current task, but you run with it anyway and it's great.)

I don't think this breakdown fully encompasses all the options -- for example, acting or performance is definitely a tangible thing that some people enjoy in roleplaying games, and I would argue that it's in none of these categories (if you squint I guess you could shoehorn it into either narrativism or simulationism).

Ideas are bigger than their creators. Ron Edwards is not the god of what these words mean, and in actual practice they've meant the things everyone thinks they mean way longer than they ever meant Ron Edwards' weird RPG hangups.

In fact, they've meant those things for longer than they've meant what Edwards meant them as. GNS is not even really Edwards' idea. It's heavily derived from the Threefold Model, or GDS theory, which was very similar but strongly pro-simulationist.

The important thing to realize here is that all these models are products of a culture war on the Usenet RPG boards about styles of play, and all the attempts at formalizing definitions were in the context of people trying to prove their faction was "correct" about the one true way to design games.

A seemingly conventional quest to rescue a young princess from the dragon who rules the mountain reaches to the north of the kingdom takes a sudden turn when it transpires that a. the princess is a latent sorcerer of considerable power, and b. there is definitely something the Queen neglected to tell the party about the princess’ true parentage.  

The party is hired to act as wedding crashers and disrupt an arranged marriage between a princess and a foreign noble. The party will easily learn that the arrangement was the princess’ idea, and that the ”rescue” is a ploy to secure more favourable terms in an attendant trade deal. What they may not learn so easily is that princess intends to deny knowledge of the party’s involvement and have them all executed.  

The princess is an aspiring wizard possessed of more ambition than good sense, and has managed to banish herself to gods-know-where thanks to a badly mistargeted summoning spell. The royal advisor has a short list of places she might have ended up, and the party isn’t going to like any of them! For extra fun, the spell might linger and continue to go off at inconvenient moments as the party is escorting her back.  

An ancient curse upon the land’s royal blood has been awakened. What it’s supposed to do is send the princess into an enchanted sleep and bring ruin upon her domains; however, as the monarchy was abolished generations ago and there are hundreds of descendants with plausible claims to the former throne, the curse is erratically hopping from person to person, bringing ruin on whatever it thinks each victim’s “domain” is.  

It’s just iron. It’s a poetic way of saying it, same as you might hear ‘cold steel’ referring to a sword. 

Weekend at Bernies

That’s one of several possible approaches the party could take, yes. Other options include:

choosing one of their own as a royal impersonator (gambling that none of the visiting dignitaries know exactly what the King looks like);

inventing some pretext for why the King can only be seen by private appointment (then keeping everyone sufficiently distracted that nobody individually pieces together the fact that none of them have actually gotten to see the King yet);

fabricating some rather less final royal indisposition (and ensuring that none of the visitors’ spies manage to ascertain that the King is more seriously indisposed than they’ve been led to believe); or

That’s an awfully specific brief – is there a particular source you’re trying to emulate here?

- Does it harm people? - Does it result in inequality? - Does it prevent people from engaging in society?

As long as the proposed idea (behaviour, policy) clears those two hurdles, it’s good to go for progressives.This type of thinking is super compatible with consequentialism. For conservatives, there are more foundations to consider - authority, loyalty, fairness, purity and “liberty from”. 

- Does it violate established social hierarchy? (in this approach, hierarchy is good and beneficial). - Does it damage in-group bonds? (again, strong in-group loyalties are considered to be good). - Does it fail to reward contributors and punish wrong-doers? (this is a big one - fairness is about just desserts and consequences for actions, not equality). - Does it breach the sanctity of the body? (this is a complex one, rooted in cultural notions of disgust and body as a temple). - Does it force people to engage in actions they disagree with? (this is the freedom from taxation, PC, and so on).

Libertarians pretty much care only about Liberty from things, usually the government.

This complex set of values means that the same idea or policy will get different moral evaluations. Let’s take a few examples:

Legalising weed: all fine in terms of the progressive foundations. But it breaches purity (the body is a temple) and to an extent interacts with conservative version of fairness by removing a punishment on what they consider to be morally wrong behaviour. 

Universal healthcare: again, all clear in progressive values. This policy will help. But in the conservative value set, the policy fails at fairness by ‘rewarding’ non-contributing behaviour (poverty and illness). Let’s not get into a debate over how this is even classified as behaviour rather than a condition. It also breaches freedom from for people who are mostly focused on being free from government, rather than private insurers. The interesting caveat is that purity should favour healthcare - if the body is sacred, we should as a society value accessible ways to keep it healthy and clean. However, because many health conditions have contributing behavioural factors, it can be considered unjust to help people out of the consequences of their actions - even at a net loss to society.

This is about Vid.me vs Youtube specifically, but I couldn’t help thinking of it when I saw that ‘’help us pls we’re just a smol baby website’’ Pillowfort post pop up on my dash that pretty much said the exact same things this guy describes as the death knell of Vid.me.

Points of note:

‘’I’m deeply suspicious of the ‘we’re just pals, help the site grow!’ mentality. We’re just pals… until we’re not. Any platform that doesn’t codify it’s relationship to content creators, that positions itself as ‘just pals’ and ‘we’re all on the same team’ without any structural commitment to that relationship… is ultimately lying.’’

‘‘Failing to codify this relationship ensures that the site will inevitably go through the change in incentives which will in turn lead to the decision making that overwhelmingly favors advertisers [or stakeholders, shareholders, etc] at the direct expense of content creators.’‘

Not saying that Pillowfort is setting out with the *intention* to manipulate their potential audience, I’m sure they have good intentions, but knowing this, it’s setting my red flags off. Tumblr started off as a smol bby website with idealistic intentions and look where we are now?