You talked about (or quoted someone talking about) a potential direct effect of simulation being that the hero would have an "off screen failure" of not getting there on time.
I feel you may have misread either me or Ron Edwards.
All I said is that, in a "no failure offscreen" approach, timelines won't work for 15 minute day problems. And I quoted Ron Edwards, on the contrast between various approaches (he calls the "no failure offscreen" approach
narrativism), as having influenced my own approach to "no failure offscreen" and therefore why I didn't want to use timeline solutions to the 15 minute adventuring day. Feel free to go back and reread the posts (as I did when I then requoted the salient bits a few posts up).
And I'm also saying that regardless of WHY other things trump simulation, a direct result will be a break down in cause and effect.
This is simply not true. And I want to ask - what non-simulationist systems do you have in mind when you assert this?
There are a range of ways of handling cause and effect in the fiction of an RPG. One widespread one is via what Hussar is calling process simulation, and what The Forge calls purist-for-system simulation - roughly, the action resolution mechanics are a model (more or less abstracted) of the events in the fiction. On this approach, some ingame causation is established by free narration and feeds into the mechanics ("I walk up and say hello to the guards" . . . GM rolls reaction roll). Some ingame causation is established by the mechanices and feeds back into the fiction (Player: "I rolled a 20 - wahoo, its head is cut off"; GM: "OK, the dragon's head tumbles to the floor of the cave and rolls a few paces before stopping at the cleric's feet.")
Another one, also fairly common in designs dating back to AD&D (saving throws, as expressly set out by Gygax in his DMG, and I would argue also Gygaxian hit points) and Tunnels and Trolls, but adopted in a more thoroughgoing fashion by many "modern" RPGs (HeroWars/Quest, Maelstrom Storytelling, 4e to a signficant extent) is to establish ingame cause and effect almost entirely through free narration, with the action resolution mechanics being treated not as a model of those fictional causal processes, but rather as a metagame device for distributing and limiting narrative authority.
A simple example of the contrast in the resolution of a climb attempt. Purist for system mechanics (I'm thinking here of Runequest, Rolemaster, and also 3E as best I recall it) might proceed via a combination of (i) knowing high the cliff is, and (ii) knowing how fast the PC can climb, and (iii) dividing (ii) into (i) to determine the number of successful checks required, then (iv) making each of those checks, the GM narrating the PCs progress up the cliff, and the hitting of the occasional obstacle, as the PC inches his/her way up the cliff. Rollling the dice correlates, at least roughly, to the PC reaching for new handholds and pulling him-/herself up.
Possible alternative mechanics (this is a somewhat simplified amalgam of HeroWars/Quest and Maelstrom Storytelling, and also is how I think skill challenges in 4e are mostly intended to be resolved): the GM sets a target number for the climb, based on a posited difficulty of the climb for the PC - which difficulty may draw on a range of considerations (what would be dramatic here, how high is the cliff, is the PC energised or traumatised, etc, etc). The player makes a climb check. If it is a success, the player narrates his/her PCs successful climbing of the cliff (perhaps emphasising the difficult struggle, perhaps indicating that it was in fact a breeze). If a failure, the GM narrates how the PC fails to achieve what s/he wants (perhaps s/he falls; perhaps s/he struggles to the top, but takes longer than s/he hoped and therefore is disadvantaged in some way).
There is no breakdown of cause and effect under the alternative mechanics. If a PC climbs the cliff, it is the PC's strength and agility, as well as the absence of impossible obstacles and fatal winds, that causally explain that. (And the narration will reflect this - the general assumption is that shared genre expectations play a role here, so in some contexts it may be permissible to narrate a wind spirit carrying the PC to the top of the cliff, but in others it may not.) The narration establishes facts of the fiction, which may matter for all sorts of reasons - morally or thematically, perhaps, or placing constraints on future narration - for example, if success is narrated as a result of the climb being an easy one for the PC, and then on a subsequent occasion the PC comes back to the same wall and the GM wants to up the difficulty (say, for dramatic purposes) then the GM must narrate some change in the causal context - perhaps now there is a fierce wind blowing, whereas last time was still. (The HeroQuest revised rulebook has good advice for GMs running this sort of system, which gives rise to these sorts of issues of "ingame causal facts management".)
One practical difference between these two approaches is that, in Rolemaster, the higher the dice roll the better the PC's effort, whereas in the second approach, the dice roll correlates to success or failure, but is no measure of the PC's effort. So in Rolemaster, an attack roll of 01 on d% is a fumble (in RQ, where lower is better, it's an 00 that is an auto-fumble). Whereas in 4e, a 1 on the die roll is an automatic miss, but otherwise doesn't constrain the narration of the failure. So the 1
could be narrated as a fumble. Or could be narrated as a demonstration of one of the most impressive displays of swordsmanship ever, unfortunately for the PC parried by the NPC's equally impressive display. Again, no breaking of ingame cause and effect - if the PC displayed impressive swordsmanship, and yet failed in the attack, the NPC must have fought equally impressively - but the relationship between ingame cause and effect is preserved via free narration within parameters, rather than being "read off" the process of mechanical resolution.
Another system which takes bits of both sort of approach and puts them together in interesting ways is Burning Wheel. It starts with your basic purist-for-system approach - detailed skill list, skill ranks, objective difficulty classes, etc - but then introduces three twists:
*first, "say yes or roll the dice" - when nothing dramatic is at stake, ingame cause and effect is left to free narration (generally by the players, sometimes by the GM, depending on the exact subject matter of the relevant ingame event);
*second, "let it ride", which says that the first check stands for all subsequent checks on the same skill for the rest of the session unless there is a dramatic change in circumstances (and "dramatic change in circumstances" is fairly narrowly defined by the rules) - so ingame cause and effect becomes, after the first check, becomes a matter of free narration;
*third, "intent and task", which is a requirement that whenever a player has his/her PC attempt a task an intention must also be stated - what is the PC hoping to achieve by undertaking that task - and also a guideline to the GM that the consequences of failed checks are to be narrated primarily with reference to intent rather than task - so a failure on a climb check, for example, is not necessarily to be narrated as a fall, but instead perhaps as a dropping of the MacGuffin (if the intent was to get the MacGuffin to the top of the cliff) or a failure to get to the top on time (if the intent was to get to the top on time) or whatever - so a failed check isn't a determiner of ingame cause and effect, but rather sets parameters on what sort of ingame cause and effect the GM may narrate.
I'm sure there are lots of other possible action resolution mechanics, with various subtle relationships to ingame cause and effect. Even many d20 games, for example, use various sorts of Fate Point mechanics, which sometimes may be conceived of in a simulationinst fashion - spending a Fate Point correlates to something like a divine blessing in the game - but sometimes do not. In Conan OGL, for example, a player can spend a Fate Point so as to be permitted to narrate an NPC ally coming to the PC's aid. This doesn't violate ingame cause and effect - part of spending the Fate Point will require explaining where the NPC came from, how s/he knew the PC needed aid, etc - but it is cause and effect established via free narration subject to constraints, not via the action resolution mechanics modelling any ingame process. In particular, the Fate Point
does not, or at least need not, correlate to something like the PC sending the NPC a message in a dream.
I don't think I've quoted
this particular passage in this thread, but it seems relevant:
Step On Up is actually quite similar, in social and interactive terms, to Story Now. Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things:
*Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. This isn't an issue of whether Author (or any) Stance is employed at all, but rather when and for what.
*Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion.
*More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.
*Reward systems that reflect player choices (strategy, aesthetics, whatever) rather than on in-game character logic or on conformity to a pre-stated plan of play.
All of these involve separating ingame cause and effect from mechanical resolution. In adopting author stance, the player makes a decision first
as a player, then retroactively imputes the relevant desires/inclinations to his/her PC; FitM and negotiating exploration through ongoing dialogue (what I've been calling "free roleplaying") uses the system to set constraints (=parameters) but then settles the details of ingame causation via conversation rather than via mechanics (and shared genre understandings can be pretty important for this to work); and reward systems, on this approach likewise decoupled.
Which is reminisicent of another respect in which Gygax's DMG decouples cause-and-effect from the mechanics - PCs gain levels by collecting gold, but this is not because, in the gameworld, gold makes you tougher. It's a metagame, and the ingame cause of getting tougher is (i) the stuff the PC did to earn the gold, plus (ii) a whole lot of offscreen stuff which is assumed to be taking place although ever talks about it because doing so would be "conducive to nongame boredom".
TL;DR - a long treatise on why dropping simulationist action resolution mechanics need not have the consequence - be it direct or indirect - of breaking cause and effect in the fiction.
