Why do RPGs have rules?

[Micah Sweet]

You're already forgetting what was established previously. Since we have no referents for, say, Orcs; all we can use for criteria here is how we feel about the resulting fiction. Thus even all your models and functions and whatever you are playing with, all they can do is present an aesthetically pleasing result!

You may try to insist that bears and such fare better, but do they really? Sure we have a slightly more substantive idea of how bears act, their capabilities, etc. However we don't have any of the inputs required to gauge a given bear instance. Is it male, female, has cubs, hungry, feeling territorial, what? Again, we simply have to go by some sort of aesthetic judgement.

We're talking plausibility, challenge, drama, genre adherence, etc. Now, I can see a genre being something like high realism survival drama or something like that where the game focuses on a high level of overall realism and within that 'zone' where it focuses you have what RE called purist-for-system play. Maybe that takes on a certain FKR-like aspect where the referee is a genre expert. I still see only a veneer of sim and frankly the few games I've experienced which tried to do this were not much fun, or proved largely unplayable.

Is there a reason you can't just say, "I don't really care for simulation-based agendas in my RPG preferences"? I've certainly said words to that effect regarding my feelings about narrative/storygame RPGs, but I've never claimed it was impossible and therefore a consensual illusion for those who think they're doing it. I don't do that because I don't believe that to be the case, and also because making such a claim is imo incredibly rude and dismissive of other people's preferences, people I know are reading my words.

You are not convincing anybody of your Forge-inspired agenda to stamp out the idea of simulation as far as I can tell. I'm not sure why you're trying to.

 

[pemerton]

Hard disagree. You're conflating "crude, low quality model" with "not a model."

Because you were not attempting to simulate the effects of a lightning bolt striking a house. A simulation is more than just, "is consistent with the fiction." Simulation also needs to attempt to model to some degree how real lightning bolts work. It doesn't need to be perfect or anywhere close to perfect, but it cannot be obviously wrong. cannot find one on Google cutting a house in half.

Why is my imagining a lightning bolt blasting a house in two, which my two players accepted without query in the course of play, not a "crude, low quality model"?

Upthread I (and some others) understood @Imaro, @Maxperson, perhaps @clearstream and maybe (?) @FormerlyHemlock to say that simulationist play occurs when the GM extrapolates the fiction in a way that they think is plausible and that is accepted as realistic/verisimilitudinous by the players. If that understanding is correct, why is my example of play not a simulation? If that understanding is mistaken, then what is the correct understanding?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why is my imagining a lightning bolt blasting a house in two, which my two players accepted without query in the course of play, not a "crude, low quality model"?

Upthread I (and some others) understood @Imaro, @Maxperson, perhaps @clearstream and maybe (?) @FormerlyHemlock to say that simulationist play occurs when the GM extrapolates the fiction in a way that they think is plausible and that is accepted as realistic/verisimilitudinous by the players. If that understanding is correct, why is my example of play not a simulation? If that understanding is mistaken, then what is the correct understanding?

Did you have the lightning bolt blast the house in half because, to the best of your knowledge, that's what the lightning would have done?

 

[pemerton]

In such cases, the GM will look to the rules of the game (presuming those rules are designed to simulate a particular process), or by their best understanding of how such a process would work in the real world. If you wanted to simulate a plausible economy, for example, you would either use your understanding of a real economy (current or historical) as a base, or the rules of the game would do so, based on the designer's understanding of those factors.

It is, as has been mentioned, about motivation. Why are these monster-filled dungeons here? Is it to provide an exciting challenge to the PCs? Is it to provide dramatic progress toward their emotional goals? Or is it because they're the ruins of an ancient temple built by a now collapsed civilization, overrun with local wildlife in the centuries since said collapse and now grown dangerous and avoided by travelers?

Of your three motivations: the first describes a reason a person in the real world might do a thing; the second provides a reason a person in the real world might do a thing; the third describes an imaginary thing. Presumably the GM made up the imaginary thing (or bought a book - a "module" - which contained a record of its authors imaginings). Why? What was the GM's motivation?

Upthread I posited that it is to provide the players an experience of "being there". But that appears to have been rejected by you and others. So what is the GM's motivation?

Doesn't encounter budget/CR address this? I mean it gives a measuring stick for the different types of encounters and thus constraints that skilled play can be judged upon. How well does someone deal with an easy vs. hard vs. deadly encounter. There are even guidelines for what is expected in an "adventuring day". Yes these can be ignored but then so can the constraints in any other game.

How do the things you point to here fit within a "simulationist" agenda which is meant to avoid metagame motivations?

 

[pemerton]

That's the same for every single game that has a DM/GM.

No it's not.

 

[pemerton]

There are guidelines that the DM uses to set up fair challenges.

Presumably, as per the posts I've quoted not far upthread, this makes it not a simulation?

 

[aramis erak]

Yeah, this is essentially what we did when I ran core 1977 CT. I generated the Home World and the PCs followed the core book trading, patron, and encounter rules, etc verbatim as they wandered the subsectors. Up to a point it does work, but of course the setting gains details over time, and we had to make rules tweaks and add stuff to make new things happen. That and we ran into stuff like the lack of any system for on-planet stuff.

The on-planet stuff is a combination of buried in the adventures and use your experience living on world.
One of the key things to remember is that most people in modern US, UK, and EU have Wheeled Vehicle 0, and that most driving requires no roll.

What Traveller lacks mostly though is some way to really drive a story aside from needing money.

There is a second mode: in-service play; it's hinted at, and is the railroader's choice of campaign mode.
Book 4 lends heavily towards enabling it.
Book 5 is pretty much useful only for either big stick GMing or active duty campaigns.
Book 6 is useful if you want expanded systems. (The 'Verse of Firefly can be generated on about a 1/(6^8) odds)
Book 7 is useful in either mode.

I'll note that I didn't spot the support for in service play until I'd gotten T2K 1E & STRPG, but if one looks, support is there. Pay scales are in Bk4.

But at the end of the day, many of the adventures are not cash motivated, but curiosity assumed. Annic Nova, Secret of the Ancients, Twilight's Peak, Research Station Gamma, about 2/3 of TTA (which is really an adventure path, and uses a contractual obligation to drag players along the initial points).

CT RAW is procedural/simulationist - reducing the realism to a playable sim. It's also an incomplete sim, as all sims are incomplete in some way; if they weren't they'd be emulation, not simulation.
The way Pemerton uses it is very much not how written, and is an unusual but not unprecedented mode of use. (Running Marc Miller's Traveller board for the last 8 years, and been on staff for the last 14 or so, I've seen a lot of playstyles mentioned. Few use CT the way Pemerton does, but there are a few who do; it's much easier to see and describe when one has knowledge of the AWE/PBTA space, which most using it that way apparently do not.)

 

[clearstream]

Why is my imagining a lightning bolt blasting a house in two, which my two players accepted without query in the course of play, not a "crude, low quality model"?

If that's how imagined lightning bolts work in your imagined world, I've no issue with it.

Upthread I (and some others) understood @Imaro, @Maxperson, perhaps @clearstream and maybe (?) @FormerlyHemlock to say that simulationist play occurs when the GM extrapolates the fiction in a way that they think is plausible and that is accepted as realistic/verisimilitudinous by the players. If that understanding is correct, why is my example of play not a simulation? If that understanding is mistaken, then what is the correct understanding?

What is the internal cause of house blasting bolts in your imagined world?

 

[pemerton]

in my Tyranny of Dragon campaign, I know several ways the party could improve their standing with the Council and strengthen themselves against the Cult of the Dragon.
They're aware of the fracture that occurred in the Lords' Alliance due the War of the Silver Marches and yet none of them have thought let's try reach out to ex-Lord Alliance members in an attempt to recruit them against Tiamat and her forces. That would be skilled play.

How do the players now that reaching out to those ex-Alliance members wouldn't (say) attract the attention of assassins who would kill them; or trigger a curse that has been set up to secure the sequestration of all ex-Alliance members from any who might try and ally with them against Tiamat? Or any of dozens or hundreds of other fictional possibilities?

To me, this also relates to the notion of simulation = GM extrapolates what they regard as plausible from both the revealed and the secret fiction. The GM knows whether or not the various possibilities I've mentioned are part of their notes. The players don't. So from the players' point of view, just about any outcome could be a manifestation of a "simulation".

 

[clearstream]

How do the things you point to here fit within a "simulationist" agenda which is meant to avoid metagame motivations?

The discussion drifted there to trad modes of play.