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Yea, I have a very different view, such as I don't think there's an obvious compromise. A game oriented around delivering a planned final outcome (like an AP) is very distinct from a "play to see what happens" type of game. Now, obviously you don't know for sure what's going to happen in an AP...

Sure, but the article does tease them apart as being distinct techniques. They simply both fall under the umbrella of Simulationism, which has a host of various techniques under it, just as Gamism and Narrativism do. It's certainly difficult to do genre emulation and world simulation at the...

People have been doing that on this forum for 25 years. :)

Come on, man, we don't want to have that argument. Everyone was more or less getting along.

Yes. That's exactly the problem; when a participant brings in concepts from other games rather than approaching a game as coming from its own stated procedures and nothing else. And it's fine for a game's premise or procedures to not work for you! The problem is only when it's presented and...

I'd really rather not. It engages with a LOT of topics, and I would almost assuredly not get across a lot of the important context.

It's certainly worth it to read the entire blog post. It engages with precisely these points.

Tuovinen describes that separation this way in the blog post linked above; I find their description compelling but that's just my personal opinion.

Sorry; must be the brain damage. :)

Yea, I had read that article a few years back, but I totally forgot about how coherent and encompassing it is.

Agreed. This is 100% me; I am absolutely a neophile. I enjoy the onboarding and "gaining proficiency over the rules" aspect of gaming, and I have almost zero interest in gaining any sort of mastery. I'm a proud dilettante. :)

That makes sense. My only concern is that usage might elide some of the distinctions between, say, A) Playing a trad game sandbox. B) Playing Stonetop. C) Playing a Pathfinder-style adventure path. D) Playing Fiasco. C and D both have a focus on "telling a story", as I evaluate it...

Double post.

OK. Can you clarify which portions of my provided example you disagree with, or which portions need more context or greater granularity?

If I said “this game will be set in Eberron”, as an example, would that be sufficient?

To my mind, “telling a story” is how I’d describe the orientation of a session of Fiasco, or playing through a metaplot-heavy module of Vampire or other old-school White Wolf. There’s a focus on playing through a series of scenes to get a desired “narrative endpoint”. What something like BW or...

No, then that would be crappy DMing, as we’ve all said. Once you establish something as true in the fiction, you’re supposed to build off that, not contradict it.

Going back to OD&D or Basic, a lot of dungeon play is oriented around minimizing time spent in the dungeon, such that wandering encounter checks are minimized (which I would characterize as "avoiding" or "negating".) For more trad/sim play, I feel like a lot of Random Encounters are there to...

I mean, it makes sense since classic/trad play is generally oriented around negating or evading obstacles through specific action declaration.

You said "I don't see the same process working for D&D". Since I've used very similar processes in D&D, my experience is different than yours. My interest in this thread is what it's always been; to try and understand what motivates different preferences such that I have tools to support a...