>From: Ashley Munday <aescleal_at_...>
>Rob describes HQ as "narrativist." But if you read the rules, there's a lot
>more "gamism" lurking around in there than anything else. Most of the
>examples of play, FREX, are gamist.
Actually I could argue that what seems like gamism is actually narrativism - narrativism is pretty misunderstood and has a lot of similarities to gamism. But then I'd also be arguing that some of it supports simulationism (for example, the sample adventures are very sim supportive). What I think we can agree on is that, as I've said, since the designers weren't shooting for one particular mode, that what you get has support for various modes. All three GNS modes in some measure, and all sorts of other agenda parameters.
Which individuals may or may not find problematic. What I think it usually leads to are some changes to how the game is played from written to support particular forms of play. But that's far from unusual, almost all RPGs are this way to some extent (which, again, explains the RPG tradition where everyone is always creating house rules to make their game work "right"). And, again, I think that HQ needs less work than most games to make it work for several kinds of agenda - assuming that you find it to need work at all.
In any case, since agendas are local, you really can't talk in generalities here. For one group of players looking for narrativism, they might find HQ ideal, and another might find that it doesn't work for their version without some serious modifications. I'm actually a rather "vanilla" narrativism player, you should see what some people do to HQ in the name of pushing a strong narrativism agenda.
In any case, I agree with Ashley that most discussions of this particular sort don't produce much that's useful. It suffices to say, "What works for me..." and let people sort out if they have a similar agenda to your own. Because any "This is best..." statement will only be true for those who have your agenda - and given that the people here have many agendas, any such statement will only be true for some subset.
Again that's why I never said that Rob's solution to the situation that started this thread was wrong. I only wanted to put out a "what works for me" in terms of the particular case.
Mike
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