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(A) is really the core of your argument and while it was clearly true in your situation that the 15-minute workday is the best strategy, it's not generally true in all cases, and I don't think it would be true in the situation I posited either (shipwreck in the course of buying low and selling...

The post-gameplay portion of play is intentionally Drama-inspired. I don't know if I would say "narrativist" in the RPG sense because nothing is actually happening except earning XP (character points). There's no RPG gameplay occuring. It's just writing and reviewing stories/poems/whatever, and...

To be fair, the GDS guys are far less rigid. 2) Which one am I? Drama-, Game-, or Simulation-oriented? Most likely, none of the above. Your individual style cannot be pidgeonholed into a single word. More to the point, you probably use a mix of different techniques, and work towards...

Since I obviously enjoy talking about myself far too much :-P in passing I'll remark that while I'm 95%+ simulationist as a referee, as an worldbuilder my agenda is a lot more tolerant of gamism. I don't mind building a world that will give players interesting decisions to make, but once the...

Clearstream's questions entail a Mental model - Wikipedia of a situation, which is certainly a widely-recognized and valid use of the word "model" that predates Wittgenstein. You cannot answer Clearstream's questions if you have no mental model of a bear.

No, they're not referring to Edwards's definition. You may or may not be aware that before Edwards came up with the GNS framing, there was the so-called GDS framing (Gamism-Dramatism-Simulationism) a.k.a. The Threefold Model which uses 2/3 of the same words but shares only 1/3 or less of the...

(A) To be honest with you I find that whole discussion about bears and goldilocks confusing. "Is this story about a bear a simulation?" is a question which makes about as much sense to me as "how tall is blue?" I was trying to explain to you what simulation means from my perspective (which I...

Bearslayer! An eco-action game in which you slay bears and level up to become a mighty warrior, while trying not to deplete the bear population so that your sons can someday follow in your footsteps! :p

(A) I thought you were asking which RPGs weren't about simulation, not which RPGs "didn't allow" GMs to have bears catch fish for other reasons. It's very hard to imagine a GM in a game of Hillfolk narrating a bear catching a fish because in Hillfolk, narration is mostly the job of the players...

"Not in the face! Not in the face!"

I'm not saying I disagree but I do want to note that I don't understand the sentence in bold. It's Greek to me! :) I think of simulation as a GM activity, an attempt at dispassionate extrapolation, not involving the players except through their characters, who act within the world and need to...

Yeah, and even if they completely trust the GM, losing a character and a set of relationships you're invested in can be emotionally brutal. I get that. How to make game sessions that contain TPK, and continued play afterwards, still enjoyable is a whole branch of the GMing art and I'm still...

Ones where the GM's or designer's agenda is entirely focused on Drama or Game. For example, I don't think any aspect of Diablo 2 is intended as a simulation. It's all just a platform for a hack and slash loot game. I don't think there's a single aspect of the game that arose from the designers...

Fair point, but hopefully it wasn't so much fun that you'll deliberately seek to TPK yourselves again. That's all I meant.

A player who can take his 20th level character (loaded with magic items) into a game alongside a bunch of 8th level characters and not only be less effective than they are (e.g. wasting his 9th level spell slot on upcasting Fireball in the first encounter of the day) but also be arrogant and...

I notice that you couldn't help trying to classify as fun or not fun anyway. ;) As clearstream already said, contrast amplifies.

Ah. I'll note that oracles fit under the category I had in mind when I said GMs can have (not-yet-generated) missing information but not factually wrong information.

This is only true if you mean "fun" in a very broad sense such that being miserable is "fun" sometimes. Is losing or even TPKing fun? I hope not! Players should try to avoid it! But they should avoid it by taking better actions in future games, not by failing to show up at the game table next...

Well, you can, but it's probably more helpful if you're a little bit more specific about what you learned and how you applied it to trad games. The same goes for anything really. Not that narrative and trad are the only categories that matter, but they're the ones you mentioned so...

I'm vehement about simulationism as play mode--it's important to me that metagame concerns not drive play, with specific exceptions such as character advancement as described above--but not vehement about the word. Like, if someone wants to call it something like "realistic task resolution to...