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Guys, I've enjoyed talking with you but I've just been reminded why I hate Enworld. I'm going to go elsewhere.

Mmmm. I can see how this would be the practical effect among toxic people, but it's not the practical effect among the sorts of open-minded, intellectually humble people I enjoy talking to. Among such people, the practical effect of asking where Morrolan e'Drien and Aliera e'Kieron sit on the...

Interesting. I had a different impression, but if it's just an interesting contrast to Brandon Sanderson's exhaustive pre-plotting instead of Tolkien's then it's irrelevant to this thread's Tolkien discussion and I apologize for bringing it up.

You're missing the point. If it's contrived, it's not simulationist. You should be asking "was that aspect of your campaign (GDS) simulationist?" and the answer will be "no, but subsequent play with this villain was (GDS) simulationist." You keep assuming that we're talking about GNS...

One of the nice things is that it can preserve a sense of fairness and trust in the GM, and willing suspension of disbelief. I had the experience a few weeks after picking up 5E of playing alongside a truly awful player who made his 20th+ level character (Wizard 11/Cleric 10 or something, loads...

Don't try to make this personal. I'm talking about ideas here, not people. If you want to prioritize S over G or D, you can. You don't even have to pick the same one all the time! As I've said repeatedly, I myself care less about verisimilitude during worldbuilding than during gameplay, so if...

It's part of a style discussion, not a system discussion.

I've played DramaSystem and it was educational, but I don't love it. Some of Ron Edwards's ideas around scene framing are interesting, but I'm basically 95% simulationist at heart. I'm okay with fast-forwarding until something interesting happens, but not really okay with contrived events...

Great comments! That moment with the bishop is awesome. I find that sometimes players have very different feelings than GMs realize they do, and it can feel really awesome when a player opens up to you about how much they are enjoying their sense of agency (the feeling of being able to act...

Sorry for the lack of clarity. I meant to ask whether events that LOOK prima facie arbitrary and nonsensical, like Palpatine returning to life out of the blue, are always bad even if (hypothetically) they have a hidden explanation that makes sense, like a pre-established cloning technology...

Good point, thanks. A follow-up question on a related but not identical subject: Table time is not identical to game time. When it comes to moving proactive enemies around a (hidden) dungeon map, do you have any advice or observations to make about how quickly to do so? Do they amble around at...

Without a quote link I can only speculate that that was a generic "you" within the context of a hypothetical like "if you do XYZ, you are doing ABC and you might as well say so."

One of the things I struggle with continually is the tension between wanting a living world, and wanting to be fair to the players by giving them lots of information (since I am the bottleneck on all their information about the gameworld). In particular I struggle with offscreen NPC activities...

Does it matter where I draw the line? Are we having a conversation about false dichotomies and whether it's possible to run a game entirely without contrivance (it is), or a discussion about how I personally prefer to play the game, or a discussion about the various modes I sometimes run the...

I "refuse to see" how it's not coincidental? Is that a typo? It is coincidental and rather contrived. It's not the kind of contrivance I hate most (that would be contrivances happening during gameplay, as opposed to during scenario hooks), but what in the world gave you the idea that I don't...

If it were the same kind of plausibility (as opposed to e.g. cinematic plausibility), you'd just shrug and say "I guess I lean simulationist then" in response to someone answering a question about "what's the point of simulationism?"

I just wanted to call this out as an example of reasonable dialogue that I'd like to see more of in this thread. "Cinematic" is a good example of a non-emotionally-defensive contrast to "realistic" gameplay. It is possible to like either for various reasons.

I call shenanighans. You defined the hooks as things that happened near the PCs: "Hooks spring up all about... (A) this NPC has a favor to request, (B) and that NPC has lore about a nearby site, and (C) another wants his brother rescued from the Brotherhood of the Ebon Hand." You cannot now...

I don't understand what questions you're trying to ask in 2. 1 is not possible. You can always construct a system which yields a specific outcome as a possibility--it could even be a system which ONLY allows that outcome. The union of all such systems produces every outcome in E. Ergo, the...

They're the same set. For every outcome e in E there can exist a rule system S[e] which will produce e. What makes rules interesting isn't just the outcomes they can potentially produce, it's how those outcomes are connected to each other. I.e. gameplay.