Recent content by pemerton

But the GURPS player doesn't have the same incentives as their alcoholic PC. The PC craves alcohol. The player doesn't have any comparable or parallel craving.

But being in control of an imaginary character's mental stat is just authorship. All RPGing involves players authoring characters. I take immersion to be more than just that. I mean, in classic dungeon crawl play, the player controls the PC's mental state. But to me it would seem weird to...

Right. The GURPs player doesn't actually feel any desire to drink alcohol. They're not playing an alcoholic. They're playing a rational optimiser.

I just want to elaborate on this a little bit. The only time characters in fiction do things that "don't make sense" is (i) if the fiction is poorly written, or (ii) the fiction is deliberately absurd. One feature of well-written fiction is that it communicates its context and presuppositions...

If, from a first person perspective, alcoholics always tried to avoid the temptation to drink, the world would be a very different place.

I don't use "simulation" to mean follows a rule. In the context of RPGing, that tends to mean that all RPGing is either simulatiionist, or "GM decides" - and that seems like an unilluminating classificatory scheme. A simulation is paradigmatically a simulation of something. It has some sort of...

I don't know what it's simulating, though. The GM could make up whatever they like, and it would count. A simulation has some sort of correctness condition, in that either it produces the right outcomes (like a free kriegsspiel referee, based on their expertise) or that it models a process in...

But the GURPS behaviour is not immersive at all - there's no temptation or longing to drink.

I'm not so much talking about codification, as expertise. In the absence of expertise and an objective standard of correctness, decision-making by a referee won't be simulation. It will just be authoring.

You have the wrong version of Traveller!; but get a thumbs up for Torchbearer.

A key feature of free kriegsspiel is - as your post says - the expertise of the referee. The referee makes decisions about what happens, based on their knowledge of how things would actually work out in a real war. This means that, for the referee, the "game" is not a simulation. The referee is...

Classic Traveller Burning Wheel Wuthering Heights In A Wicked Age

I'm having trouble parsing your sentence.

I have never spent 3 hours coding, so I can't comment on that. I also don't think my RPGing has an "empty calories" quality, so I can't really comment on that either. On Thursday afternoon I spent about two hours with a colleague working on a paper that we are authoring together. We wrote...

An implication of this is, I think, that TB2e is (to a significant degree) a simulationist RPG. I can cope with that; but it seems to be controversial to many of the self-proclaimed "sim" RPGers.