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I'd give the players some extra Hope if they narrate their character descriptions in the style of the openings of He-Man and She-Ra. "I am Adam, Prince of Eternia and defender of the secrets of Castle Grayskull..."

Tuovinen’s blog post articulating sim as an agenda argues for it more strongly than I can, and we already discussed it on this thread last month. I can’t come up with explanations stronger than the ones already presented.

Maybe he’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

Because it makes it seem like a creative agenda is something a player is, rather than something they pursue. When I play Daggerheart, I’m pursuing a primarily narrative agenda. When I play OSR, I’m pursuing a sim agenda. When I played Pathfinder, I was pursuing a gamist agenda. I was not any...

Why what?

Players aren't simulationist or narrativist (or anything else). Play is. You might label a player who only wants to play games that pursue only that agenda as "simulationist" or "gamist", but that's a weird shorthand that honestly confuses the issue.

If it's OneTrueWayism to make a judgment that "thinking deeply" about a topic is superior to "not thinking deeply" when discussing said topic, then I am happy to accept the title. I would expect you to have valid and serious positions about some of the minutiae of D&D play, like what classes...

Thank you, sir. I know we often end up on opposite sides of these various discussions, so I do appreciate the support.

It’s not an attack. But you can’t “not think about your play with deep introspection” and also be expected to be taken as seriously as those who do. As an example, I have a ton of respect for the individual who made the blog posts about “blorb principles” we discussed a month or so back. And...

On that, I would very much agree. I have multiple players I’ve played with for a decade-plus who have no engagement with TTRPGs at all other than to play with our group. My wife is one of them. All of them would absolutely agree that they are casual players.

To be fair, a decent portion of the earlier epoch of this thread was Robert Conley going into detail on his highly prepped, “living world” games; I have absolutely no desire to dip into that well again.

If you accept hit points while wanting simulationist mechanics as a general principle, it makes it very hard for us, as outsiders to your perspective, to anticipate what mechanics will trip your sim sensors.

Challenge away.

That would be the conservative argument, yes.

That certainly makes it sound like the “purpose of a role-playing game” is a bunch of in-character dialogue and thespianism; that might have been the conventional wisdom 25-30 years ago, but I think we’ve moved past that.

So?

Other than gaining some biographical information that you’re willing to cut away a broad swathe of games and play techniques to fulfill your aesthetic needs (like most of us, I imagine), I’m not sure what information we’re supposed to take away from this.

If it’s something that the PC would “never do”, then obviously it can’t be the result of a successful resolution roll in the game. If it’s a valid option for a successful resolution roll, then it seems like the player is making a categorical error in thinking this is something the character...

I think you’ll have to explain why it matters, because it seems like a fair amount of people (myself included) aren’t understanding this distinction you view as important. It’s coming across to me like this definition of success is almost tautological.

But that’s just terminology. It doesn’t matter. 10 is the “success with complications” target, 15 is the “success free and clear” target. The only thing that might matter is if the system has some specific mechanics for that middle 10-14 area. (Sort of like how Daggerheart has specific...