Recent content by TwoSix

“You’ll never get me Strawberry Smiggles!”

Oh, I definitely think the result of an arbitrary algorithm still counts as a simulation. Any one of the 5 billion planets generated for No Man’s sky is a simulation. Creating a survival mode world off a random seed in Minecraft is a simulation. That’s why I don’t think the “modeling” aspect...

That just doesn't make sense. Blue Lightning is so obviously superior, how can it be a competition? :)

I think it's a little deeper than that. A lot of the support for simulationism comes with the attached idea of "I want to feel like I'm in a real place." And far more than any particular rule or technique, what disturbs that sense are reminders that the table activity is functionally...

Fair point. To build on that, I do think it would be challenging to design a truly arbitrary resolution process, a process that doesn't attempt to simulate something, simply because the usual resolution tools for these kind of games (an encounter table, a weather simulation table, a NPC/faction...

That would be how I think of them, yes. They're designed mechanics to avoid even the appearance of "contrivance". From many years of these discussions, I think avoiding any hint of "contrivance" (where the GM or player makes decisions based on what would be interesting or challenging) is the...

When I see that term, I think of survival games like ARK or exploration games like No Man's Sky.

I think the simulationist impulse is to NOT have the GM make a decision because they think it will be a more interesting challenge or because it's relevant to the characters' interests at that point in time. The rationale for a dragon to appear is that according to setting logic, a dragon could...

I don't think about simulationism in TTRPG as really about "modeling". To me, it's more about introducing procedures into play that reduce or eliminate occurrences of narrative contrivance. Nothing happens in the fiction for reasons of "making the story more impactful" or "ensure the...

I'm fine with that mix, it's just been done already. My personal thought is simply that de-emphasizing "ancestry as cultural marker" makes sense within modern 5e's philosophies towards what ancestry should represent.

I mean, it would be weird and notable if there was absolute parity across every town in the continent, so I don’t think anyone wants that. I just think it’s ok if most places in this hypothetical setting just have random assortments of every race, and the setting doesn’t have “elven kingdoms”...

I'm actually pretty OK with a broadly cosmopolitan setting where racial distinctions aren't noticed much. That's what Al-Qadim did back in 2e, and it worked just fine.

I was sure trying. :)

Yea, I wouldn't try and generalize. All I would say is that the presentation and options within the books carry moderate weight towards making people more willing to play nonhumans over time. TSR editions wanted the game to be human-dominated both textually and mechanically. 3e moved away...

So I'm looking at that data (released in early 2024, for end of 2023 stats). Summing up the values on the chart, I'm seeing just under 50% of characters as human/elf/half-elf. 750k human, 575k elf, 250k half-elf, and about 1.6M everything else. (Making rough estimates based on the bar graph.)...