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

[Umbran]

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

Indeed! An important thing to recognize is that what seems real to people, and what happens in actual reality, are often at odds.

... it bothers my brain when a wrestler blatantly cheats in front of the referee without any consequences.

Because... blatant cheating without consequences is... unrealistic?

 

[Bill Zebub]

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.

Agreed. That’s why I inserted “personally” instead of stating a universal truth.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Because... blatant cheating without consequences is... unrealistic?

…must…resist…politics….

(head explodes)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Agreed. That’s why I inserted “personally” instead of stating a universal truth.

And why I never claimed you were speaking any other way.

 

[Argyle King]

Indeed! An important thing to recognize is that what seems real to people, and what happens in actual reality, are often at odds.



Because... blatant cheating without consequences is... unrealistic?

It's more that it breaks the illusion of the athletic contest. Why have the referee there at all if the rules don't matter?

Also, from the perspective of kayfabe, genre conventions, etc; the referee should (in theory) have some level of authority. How can I get angry at the heel (antagonist) for cheating if the rules are being presented as being essentially not there? Instead of that generating heat (negative sentiment) from the crowd toward the heel (and generating an emotional response,) it instead either causes the crowd to be angry at the official OR (and this is even worse) it undercuts the babyface (protagonist) by making them look like an idiot for choosing to follow rules that are not actually there.

 

[Deset Gled]

An important thing to recognize is that what seems real to people, and what happens in actual reality, are often at odds.

Or, coming at it from another direction, we get to choose what will be real in the game. Something can be a simulation by following a set of rules, even if those rules don't match actual reality.

Which is a round about way of getting to my personal pet peeve: "magic" does not inherently make a game more or less of a simulation. Yes, sometimes magic can be an excuse to break away from a simulation. But magic can also be a way of creating a different simulation. Or a way to patch a simulation. But you can't just handwave "It's magic!" as an excuse to say a game is or isn't a simulation.

 

[Celebrim]

Simulation means to me that we take seriously the imagined fictional universe as a real place and we try to imagine and inform the narrative by those things in a consistent manner.

We try to make the world feel lived in and the people in it feel like they have real motives and desires and are behaving as would be believable for those motives. The story we have in mind has to feel like it happened organically, and not because I the narrator made everyone jump through stupid hoops involving big lapses in judgment merely to get to my desired result. Characters generally should be behaving according to their best understanding at the time with the information they have available according to their own motives.

Nothing merely springs into being just because the story needs it. Everything is grounded in past choices by other characters who are operating with limited information and limited resources. Now, they might be very intelligent and have planned things out really well, but they can't account for every contingency and don't suddenly acquire resources that they need later.

What's established already is true, even if the players never learn about it. Every wandering monster had to come from somewhere. Every encounter preexists the time the players encounter it. Timelines and distances actually exist.

In the case of a dungeon with intelligent monsters, they have some industry or some reason to be there. They have economic activity and food sources and there is an ecology and so forth.

In the case of basing an RPG on another medium like say a movie which lacks this sort of rigor, it means we're often more real than the thing we are simulating. The movie's relationship to truth as it is observed in the game universe becomes complicated. For example, I run Star Wars WEG D6. Canonically within the game universe, at some future point after blowing up Aldaraan, the Death Star with attempt the blow up the large forest moon of the gas giant Yavin. What may not be obvious to someone watching the movie, is that the battle above Yavin occurs more than two weeks after the destruction of the planet Aldaraan. Because you can't just fly a class 2 hyperdrive in the most expensive battle station in history from Aladaraan to the Gordian Reach in a few hours. Flying through hyperspace is not like dusting crops.

Meanwhile, the Millenium Falcon, one of the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, makes the trip in just three days, leaving 11 days for the Rebels to evacuate non-critical personnel and decide what to do about the emperor's new death weapon. Yavin wasn't about as you might think saving the rebellion in the sense of if the Rebellion failed at Yavin everyone would be dead. Yavin was about saving the rebellion in the sense that if Palpatine could destroy planets at will, basically no planet was going to openly rebel or even be as dissident as Aldaraan had been. And if that was true, then the Rebellion would remain just some small, scattered incidents of terrorism that never really threatened Imperial security.

And these sort of things end up having to be "true" even if some other author with a better claim to canon says otherwise. The canon needed for a game is just more rigorously "true" than is needed for other mediums.

However, being a simulation doesn't mean we have to be completely realistic. It might not be realistic in any universe to construct massive dungeons all over the place, and it might not be realistic for those dungeons to be littered with mechanical traps, and it might not be realistic that ships can get halfway across the galaxy in two weeks, or that warriors fight with laser swords, but we accept a few things as conceits and then try to make them work.

 

[Umbran]

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 reaction table, etc.) require their elements to be derived from some source.

Okay, so I am going to be picky about language. While I think I get what you mean, I want to put focus on something here.

Does a shovel attempt to dig a hole? Of course not. A shovel is a tool a human can use to attempt to dig a hole. The shovel cannot try, or accomplish, anything on its own. ANd a person can use the shovel to kill a snake that surprised them, rather than to dig a hole.

Same for processes. People attempt to simulate things with processes. But, a person can use a process without attempting to simulate anything, too. Like, I can use an encounter table to simulate a monster ecology, or I can use it because I just don't wanna think much. If the latter, I may, as you note, choose a source that is quick, rather than one that simulates things. I can have Bird Encounter table that I sourced with an internet search, and mixes arctic, tropical, and desert birds, and use it for an encounter in evergreen forest.

I want to avoid the idea that sets of arbitrary systems end up being "simulations". Because then we get...

"Game X is a simulation!"
"Oh? What does it simulate?"
"It simulates that thing that Game X does!"

Which is clearly self-referential (even degenerate, as all games become 100% simulations) which isn't helpful in our discussions.

Once you put a dragon on your encounter table, that detail alone has specified quite a few facts about your setting. Likewise putting "thunderstorm" on a weather generator.

For me, the table does not establish the facts. You establish facts first, and assemble the table to express those facts in play.

 

[Umbran]

It's more that it breaks the illusion of the athletic contest. Why have the referee there at all if the rules don't matter?

I mean, sure. But, then again, looking around us, I suspect that people see more breaking of rules without consequence than they see athletic contests these days.

And, if the heel felt consequences for their rule breaking, they'd get thrown out, and the show would be over! The hero cannot be heroic if the referee just tosses the heel out of the match.

 

[Laurefindel]

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.

Woah woah woah! Are you insinuating that wrestling is FAKE!