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In BW, as per the example I gave, there is a pretty tight correlation between the fiction and the difficulty. This is the underpinning of the explanations, and exhortations, in the rulebooks and commentary about using the obstacle system to establish the nature and texture of the setting. I'm...

I'm not.

I have been asking multiple posters this question for some pages now, but without any clear answer other than that they do not rely on GM narration as the overwhelmingly principal technique for introducing fiction.

I dunno. What mechanics are you envisaging? I mean, upthread lots of posters - @Crimson Longinus, @AlViking, @Micah Sweet, @Faolyn, I think probably you - have described the player in my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy game as having decided what the runes say. Are you now saying that all those posters...

On "I believe them": multiple posters in this thread have talked about how they find playing (say) Dungeon World or Burning Wheel or some other game that is generally described as non-simulationist more immersive than RPGs which rely heavily on GM narration to tell the players what their PCs...

So are you now saying that those who don't value playing in highly GM-curated settings are suffering a cognitive deficiency?

Huh? Among friends, being nice is a perfectly good reason all on its own. And friends have no real reason to indulge one another in playing in their worlds beyond the bonds of friendship. (I mean, you began this particular strand of discussion by positing that the world in question is not so...

There is a slight irony here. (I think you typed "4" for '3".)

Yes, there is a long history. And if you review that history, you'll see that games like RM, RQ, C&S, GURPS and the like are characterised as simulationist, generally in contrast to D&D. I 100% agree with @Hussar that this notion, basically dating from 2009, that D&D is a simulationist RPG makes...

These two phrases don't say the same thing: (A) The players declare their PCs actions, and everything else is worked out by the GM (either directly or, as you say, mediated via the mechanics). (B) The players declare their PCs actions and everything else is worked out by the directly or...

Nothing is stopping you from reading the relevant Burning Wheel rules for free, to see whether or not they are "lying". I've also quoted them extensively upthread. The reason I quoted the BW skill rules is because they are very simulationist as that is being characterised by at least some...

Just to add to this, and to address some comments about skill systems (which have come from @Crimson Longinus and @Don Durito): Here is the entry for Climbing skill in Burning Wheel Gold Revised (p 264): This skill allows the character to navigate sheer surfaces using rope, harnesses and...

The runes mean something when the PCs see them. But perhaps the PCs don't know what that is (eg in the actual play episode, when they first saw them, they didn't know what they meant). And of course perhaps the authors of the fiction, who have written in the strange runes, haven't yet authored...

As I posted, in Classic Traveller it's identified as a procedure for GM-less play. (Traveller calls that playing without a referee.)

So according to you, procedural-generation play of the sort flagged in the Classic Traveller rulebooks (1977) or the DMG Appendices (1979) is "reality warping" because the players/participants work out the setting as they go along? No one ever saw it like that back at that time. It was...

Some people, when they play RPGs, prefer that all the setting backstory and the like is established prior to play. And some RPGs - including RPGs that support "narrativist play" - work best in this fashion. Some RPGing involves the setting backstory and the like being created during the process...

Huh? Authoring a fiction is not "warping reality".

The making of a decision, guided by a heuristic. "Mechanic" is cognate with "machine". Using a machine to generate a result stands in contrast to making a judgement. This is a red herring. When I draw a lot out of a hat, or shuffle and deal cards, or rolling dice, I need to make decisions -...

Doesn't everyone who is playing RPGs? I mean, isn't "treating the sub-creation of the setting as real for the purposes of the game" just a fancier way of saying "pretending"? I'm not sure why we're talking about analogy here. The PCs are imaginary people who live in the imaginary universe...

Is this based on your experiences of play? Or is it conjecture? What are your thoughts on the role of prep in (say) Dogs in the Vineyard compared to (say) what I described in my MHRP/Cortex+ game? And how does either compare to (say) playing out a hex crawl by way of random generation of the...