Tabletop games are the oldest games.
Tabletop games include board games, card games, dice games, paper and pencil games (homework?), strategy-based games, tile-based games, and tabletop role-playing games.
I want to talk about the last one mentioned, a niche in the nerd world that I have recently discovered and become obsessed with.
Tabletop roleplaying started with Dungeons and Dragons or D&D. Most people have heard of D&D through pop culture references such as Stranger Things. If you haven’t, here’s a brief description: improvisational fantasy story telling with fickle dice as your merciless gods.
In D&D, one player acts as the storyteller, world builder, and rules keeper. This player is called the Dungeon Master. The other players are actors, pretending to be characters in the Dungeon Master’s world. Whenever the players want to do something, they roll dice and the Dungeon Master determines whether they succeed or fail based on the quality of the roll.
The game is one of the most unique games I’ve ever played because of its infinite possibilities. You can technically do anything you want. The story is only limited by your imagination.
It’s a ton of fun.
In the tabletop roleplaying ludology world, there is a theory that has caused some drama.
I’m not going to get into the drama, but I will explain the theory. The theory is called GNS theory. GNS stands for Game, Narrative, Simulation.
GNS theory was an attempt to explain the reasons people play role-playing games, specifically three reasons. But rather than being a fun thought experiment for a beloved game, this theory split the community into three groups that had three separate goals when playing roleplaying games.
The Gamer: to win.
The Narrator: to tell a fun, engaging story.
The Simulator: to simulate a fantasy world
This divide caused many games to be specifically designed towards one aspect of GNS theory, catered only to either gamers, narrators, or simulators.
The GNS theory was a point of contention because its creator, game designer and theorist Ron Edwards, made it clear that roleplaying games need to focus on only one of the three aspects of GNS. They should not combine all three if they want to be fun.
Ron’s theory was inspired by an earlier theory called the Threefold Model or GDS theory. GDS is the same theory as GNS save that it called Narration Drama and it wasn’t trying to divide the entire community. GDS stated that all three aspects were a part of every role-playing game, whether you like it or not.
I’m going to go even further.
GDS or GNS or whatever you want to call it is involved in every game ever.
In soccer, the game is to score more goals; the narration is the journey of both teams and players throughout their respective franchises and careers; and the simulation is the lines drawn on the field and the many arbitrary rules in place to create the game.
In my post called “Playing Pretend,” I concluded that all entertainment is a form of role-playing. All role-playing contains GNS. Therefore, all entertainment must contain GNS.
What’s the game of a movie? Or a book?
To finish, I guess.
The narration is obvious.
And the simulation is both the medium and other tools used to simulate a fantasy world, such as the literal words in a book or computer-generated imagery in a movie.
If you think about it, all entertainment can be boiled down to games, narration, and simulation.
We can only be entertained by three things.
It’s no wonder I’m bored all the time.