Sectarianism In Rpgs

 By Felipe Lohan Pinheiro da Silva

Some time ago RPGs were classiƒіed as narrativist (focus on storytelling by the gamemaster), simulationist (focus on treating the RPG as a simulation of the real world in one given aspect) and gamist (focus on the nature of RPG as a game itself).

People from RPG world frequently says that in order to design a new system you must chose one of these three approaches. Otherwise, says everyone, if you chose to make something good at these three aspects at the same time, you will end up with something that is not good in any of these aspects. This kind of view implies that there is a kind of automatic trade-off between these three alternatives.

The only thing that this kind of classiƒіcation (that DOES NOT correspond to the reality) do is split the RPG community between three big factions. Don’t believe in such classiƒіcations, because it is arbitrary and is perfectly possible to do things good in the three aspects at the same time.