loseth
First Post
What do people want when they say they are simulationist? Some people want realism or verisimilitude.
Realism (Encarta definition): The simulation of something in a way that accurately resembles [reality].
Verisimilitude (Oxford definition, my emphasis): The APPEARANCE of being true or real.
Verisimilitude is simple enough—it’s when the designers of a game try to make it feel like it imitates reality, whether or not it actually does. On rare occasions, achieving verisimilitude may actually involve going against reality because the average player’s beliefs about what is true may conflict with what is actually true (this is especially likely, IME, to be the case when it comes to weapons and combat).
But realism isn’t as straightforward as verisimilitude. In my travels in the lands of RPG game design, I’ve found that people often use ‘realism’ to mean three different things: realistic detail, realistic probabilities and both. So, let’s establish two different kinds of ‘realism’:
Realism (detail): Providing a mechanically-detailed game system that marries up its mechanical detail with narrative details of things that really could happen (adjusting for the non-existence of a small number of game conceits).
Realism (probability): Providing a game system that causes things to happen with roughly the same frequency they would in reality (again adjusting for a small number of fantastic conceits of the setting), maybe with lots of detail, maybe not.
So, for example, FBI: the Roleplaying Game’s designers may have spent weeks on end scouring reports of FBI shoot-outs and found that an agent’s chance of dying in a fire-fight is 0.8% and their chances of suffering a non-fatal injury 2.7%, while the chance of any given criminal dying in a fire-fight is 2.8% and their chances of taking a non-fatal injury 6.3%. But the game doesn’t focus much on combat, so whenever there’s a fire-fight, you just roll d100 for each character, with agents dying on a 1 and being injured on a 2-4, while criminals die on a 1-3 and are injured on a 4-9. This system has very high realism (probability) but low realism (detail). I’ve seen other game systems (won’t name names to avoid a flame war) that claim to be very realistic, but actually have very high realism (detail) combined with low realism (probability).
However, sometimes simulationists want a system that simulates something other than reality. More often than not, that ‘something other’ is the tropes of the particular genre they’re playing in. So, for example, if dragons in Western pseudo-medieval fantasy are usually powerful and dangerous, and you’re playing a Western medieval fantasy RPG in which all dragons are cute and cuddly, you might complain that the game is failing to simulate genre well. Similarly, if superheroes in comics & movies always survive falls of a few hundred feet or less, but your game has falling rules that put them at risk of dying from such falls, then again you could say that the game is not very simulationist in terms of genre emulation.
There may be other forms of simulation, but these are the ones I’m most interested in.
So, posters of EN world, I ask you: which sorts of simulation do you like in your games?
NOTE: None of these types of simulation are mutually exclusive, so the poll is multi-choice.
Realism (Encarta definition): The simulation of something in a way that accurately resembles [reality].
Verisimilitude (Oxford definition, my emphasis): The APPEARANCE of being true or real.
Verisimilitude is simple enough—it’s when the designers of a game try to make it feel like it imitates reality, whether or not it actually does. On rare occasions, achieving verisimilitude may actually involve going against reality because the average player’s beliefs about what is true may conflict with what is actually true (this is especially likely, IME, to be the case when it comes to weapons and combat).
But realism isn’t as straightforward as verisimilitude. In my travels in the lands of RPG game design, I’ve found that people often use ‘realism’ to mean three different things: realistic detail, realistic probabilities and both. So, let’s establish two different kinds of ‘realism’:
Realism (detail): Providing a mechanically-detailed game system that marries up its mechanical detail with narrative details of things that really could happen (adjusting for the non-existence of a small number of game conceits).
Realism (probability): Providing a game system that causes things to happen with roughly the same frequency they would in reality (again adjusting for a small number of fantastic conceits of the setting), maybe with lots of detail, maybe not.
So, for example, FBI: the Roleplaying Game’s designers may have spent weeks on end scouring reports of FBI shoot-outs and found that an agent’s chance of dying in a fire-fight is 0.8% and their chances of suffering a non-fatal injury 2.7%, while the chance of any given criminal dying in a fire-fight is 2.8% and their chances of taking a non-fatal injury 6.3%. But the game doesn’t focus much on combat, so whenever there’s a fire-fight, you just roll d100 for each character, with agents dying on a 1 and being injured on a 2-4, while criminals die on a 1-3 and are injured on a 4-9. This system has very high realism (probability) but low realism (detail). I’ve seen other game systems (won’t name names to avoid a flame war) that claim to be very realistic, but actually have very high realism (detail) combined with low realism (probability).
However, sometimes simulationists want a system that simulates something other than reality. More often than not, that ‘something other’ is the tropes of the particular genre they’re playing in. So, for example, if dragons in Western pseudo-medieval fantasy are usually powerful and dangerous, and you’re playing a Western medieval fantasy RPG in which all dragons are cute and cuddly, you might complain that the game is failing to simulate genre well. Similarly, if superheroes in comics & movies always survive falls of a few hundred feet or less, but your game has falling rules that put them at risk of dying from such falls, then again you could say that the game is not very simulationist in terms of genre emulation.
There may be other forms of simulation, but these are the ones I’m most interested in.
So, posters of EN world, I ask you: which sorts of simulation do you like in your games?
NOTE: None of these types of simulation are mutually exclusive, so the poll is multi-choice.