AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Heh. After some long edition-war-era rants from 'simulationists,' I concluded that a simulationist game is one that makes the kinds of sacrifices you would have to make to modify a playable game into an accurate simulation. That is, balance and even basic fairness are right out, anathema to the agenda - and playability is just the bare minimum to make the exercise possible, if tedious. But, it makes those sacrifices for their own sake, not to simulate anything.
The players exploiting the necessarily imbalanced mechanics to maximum advantage? (I guess that's 'skilled play.')
The DM showing off his imagined world with the players as tourists?
Re-running a typical genre story but having it turn out 'right' instead of conforming to genre tropes?
(ie: Thulsa Doom polymorphs Conan into a nematode, Dominates(pi) the hot princess, and takes over the world; Ganfalf uses The One Ring to destroy/become Sauron, Dominates(pi) Galadriel, and takes over the world; Merlin disintegrates the Stone, renders Excalibur for Mana, Dominates(pi) Morgan le Fey, the Lady of the Lake, & Guinevere, and conquers England; etc...)
Well, I might be a bit less harsh I mean I 'get' what [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] is attempting to do. I just think its mostly vain and what you really end up with, given that narrative and gamist considerations perforce must be considered in order to have workable play experience, is something that is a limited form of gamist or narrativist play that IME simply improves when you take it at face value. The IDEA is OK, the problem is there's not a huge reason to do it except for 'skilled play', so maybe the agenda REALLY is 'skilled play', the testing of the player, not the character, at which point there is an antagonist that is embodied by the GM and so some semblance of fair play is necessitated. Naturalism is presumptively then an objective standard of that.