What Does "Simulation" Mean To You? [+]

[TwoSix]

The value I personally see in that is not because it feels more like reality, but so that players never wonder if there was a finger placed on the scale.

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 storytelling.

Narrative "contrivance" is avoided because it's a reminder that the setting is actually a created entity. Participants know it's "not real", but don't need continual reminders of that during the course of play.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The value I personally see in that is not because it feels more like reality, but so that players never wonder if there was a finger placed on the scale.

If clean, simple gameplay in general and serving your player's wants and needs in specific are your primary goals (as this reads to me regarding your interests), pushing hard into sim may not be the best choice for you. But we all weight different aspects if the hobby differently.

 

[dbm]

Verisimilitude is very important to me, however I don’t see that as intrinsically simulationist. A good set of narrative mechanics would create verisimilitude for a specific genre, and good supers games often fit into that space, for example.

For me, a more defining feature of sumulationist rules is building them on diegetic concepts. That doesn’t mean they need to be real-world diegetic as long as they are game-world diegetic. If you consider Vancian magic as described in The Dying Earth, ‘spell memorisation’ is actually a diegetic concept as mages kind of metaphorically wind up a mechanism in their mind to prime a spell, and when cast that mental structure is expended. Re-preparing spells takes time and effort and holding more than a few primed at the same time is extremely difficult. It’s explainable based on the physical and metaphysical rules of that fictional world.

You can also have a wide range of granularities that might all still be simulationist, so it doesn’t inherently mean the rules need to be very granular.

 

[The Firebird]

To me simulationism means that any actions are adjudicated based on what would reasonably happen in a setting.

This can be done via rules, or can be done through a GM with extensive knowledge making rulings. It's better to do it through rules, but in some cases that may be impossible.

It's distinct from modeling reality, but modeling reality is a valuable way to do it because it is very hard to create an internally coherent world that is different than reality. For example, if I come up with a weather table I probably have an idea in mind: this place is like Egypt so I will make the weather like Egypt. It is hard to do that without understanding what Egyptian weather looks like.

Getting weather wrong isn't a huge deal. But it can have downstream effects for the internal consistency--if my mechanics don't simulate years of plenty and famine along the Nile, then the GM has to introduce those another way.

The further you get from reality, the more this debt piles up, and the world makes less and less sense.

 

[Umbran]

But it still depicts characters with statistics representing something real in the setting, traveling through a world full of things also represented mechanically, so I wouldn't say there's as little sim as you suggest. I've read that game. Unless you're using rules different from Pinnacle original, d20, or Savage Worlds, there's still a lot of modeling going on.

With respect, I feel like you really want to point at pretty trivial elements, and say, "Hey, look! It's simulation!"

Yes, there's gravity. And when things get shot, they bleed. If that's simulation enough for you, cool.

But, for example - there's no systemic expression for weather on this alien world, though the setting material asserts it as remarkably different from Earth's. The economic system is limited to game balancing "good equipment is expensive, you can get crappy equipment for cheap", even though scarcity is a major setting issue. There's no modeling of social dynamics in the setting's complicated political landscape. And, perhaps most glaringly, the game has psychic soldiers, nanobot-users, and spiritual shamans, and they all use the same "magic" system.

And, beyond that - Savage Worlds is a generic system, using the same core mechanics whether you are playing a Tolkien fantasy game, (unofficial) Star Wars, or Deadlands, rather than bespoke systems.

 

[dbm]

Savage Worlds is a hodgepodge of influences, to be sure.

I don’t think being genre flexible is a barrier to being strongly simulationist. GURPS is probably the poster-child for strongly simulationist games, though even it has bits which move away from that ‘platonic ideal’.

 

[Argyle King]

In a nutshell: some general ballpark of plausibility-of-outcome and in-world consistency for how things work.

Even if fantastic foes, supernatural situatios, or genre conventions are involved, there should be some underlying logic that an observer/player should be able to use to extrapolate information and make decisions based upon what they expect or suspect may happen given a particular situation.

Note that "verisimilitude" is defined as "the appearance of being true or real" and not defined as 'real.'

Also note that sometimes smaller details often matter more than large details. Example: In professional wrestling, there is a referee. In theory, that referee indicates that the rules of an athletic contest matter. While a match may include typically unbelievable elements such as Undertaker being an undead wrestler or his opponent not being a dead wrestler after a piledriver, it bothers my brain when a wrestler blatantly cheats in front of the referee without any consequences.

 

[Campbell]

A given mechanic might be representative of things in the game's fiction without being simulative because the game purpose came first and rationalization of that game purpose came later. Magic and spells in D&D are like this. The game purpose came first and then things were rationalized later.

Contrarily if you look at Modiphius' Dune or Dishonored games the way supernatural elements work started from a defined fiction first.

 

[Micah Sweet]

With respect, I feel like you really want to point at pretty trivial elements, and say, "Hey, look! It's simulation!"

Yes, there's gravity. And when things get shot, they bleed. If that's simulation enough for you, cool.

But, for example - there's no systemic expression for weather on this alien world, though the setting material asserts it as remarkably different from Earth's. The economic system is limited to game balancing "good equipment is expensive, you can get crappy equipment for cheap", even though scarcity is a major setting issue. There's no modeling of social dynamics in the setting's complicated political landscape. And, perhaps most glaringly, the game has psychic soldiers, nanobot-users, and spiritual shamans, and they all use the same "magic" system.

And, beyond that - Savage Worlds is a generic system, using the same core mechanics whether you are playing a Tolkien fantasy game, (unofficial) Star Wars, or Deadlands, rather than bespoke systems.

Certainly there are many more simulative systems, I agree. But it's not like Savage Worlds is a storygame.

 

[Umbran]

The same could be true in simulation of reality, not just a genre simulation.

Here's an example to demonstrate the difference between two ways the word is being used: a the player of a high-level character wins a contested strength check to break free of a flying dragon, and a result falls thousands of feet. He takes the maximum of 20d6 damage, and lives. Which was part of his plan; he knew 20d6 couldn't kill him. The GM frowns, says "that's not realistic" and rules the character dies.

The GM broke the simulation in order to simulate reality.

You haven't established Hit Points as simulation to begin with. I'd more likely buy that Hit Points are a gameplay-oriented mechanic, perhaps with some genre-enforcing aspects.

As previously noted, I don't strongly connect "realism" with simulation. As a term, "realism" was about 19th century art styles long before it was about role playing games. And that leads me to think that "realism" is really a genre choice that happens to be supported by many forms of simulation.

Which means, to me, that in saying, "that's not realistic," and changing the result, the GM is reaching in to enforce desired genre, rather than reaching in to simulate. He's more invoking a preferred style of outcome than a model of people falling.