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Not just "what if..." but "what would really happen if..."? I hope you can see how a GM whose focus is on presenting a fair challenge for the players or on creating a narrative that "feels" emotionally similar to a satisfying novel will GM a scenario (invading hobgoblin army; rescuing your...

It is! I don't agree with those who say it's not. I crossed out the part that is not a requirement as far as I'm concerned. How the players react affects the quality of your game but not what the GM was trying to acccomplish.

I'll take that as an invitation to say what I like about simulationism. For me it's not strongly tied to "feels real," although I appreciate that too. For me the best thing about it is satisfying curiosity, and "feels real" is merely a prerequisite for that. Finding out "What would happen...

Now THAT'S a fun idea! "Somebody just opened a portal to Falx!!! Ten thousand tarrasques and a million mind flayers incoming!" My players once did something far less destructive but still wound up gathering up a shipload of refugees from the capital city and fleeing to a nearby planet to form a...

If you can say to your GM, "hey, it normally doesn't make sense for bears to live in the Sahara desert. They're adapted for temperate forests. Should I view the fact that I just encountered a bear as more than an oopsie?" and they say, "oops, I'll change it," then they care about the quality of...

One of my first experiences with 5E was going home after my second session, calculating the encounter difficulty of a fight we'd had, and realizing that the fight we'd just had was beyond Deadly, what Kobold Fight Club called Ludicrous, and getting very scared and excited and proud of surviving...

Count me in as someone who would hate both arbitrarily adding HP to a goblin and arbitrarily adding thousands of tarrasques to an adventure enough to quit the table. It's not that I can't see a difference between them, but in a practical sense it doesn't matter: it's like the difference between...

Fun fact: 'blorb' is both the name of a file format for interaction fiction games, and also for roughly this style of GMing (Blorb Principles). According to Blorb: The Technoskald Interpretation they both ultimately originate in the name of a videogame spell for preserving things.

I've seen that (and some people genuinely never move beyond that level of skill), but I've also seen slightly higher levels of skill such as staying in melee getting mauled by a monster with only 10' of movement speed, or spending several rounds attacking a meatshield when everyone else is...

Surprisingly, I think there is disagreement on the thread about which things are simulations, but I don't think you and I are arguing about that. And hopefully we're both in agreement that the output (story) from a simulationist simulation and a dramatist simulation and a gamist simulation can...

There's an interesting Brandon Sanderson short story wherein a character in an extremely deadly island paradise has a magic pet bird which causes him to see various visions of his own corpse, dead on an anthill, dead with some fruit in his mouth, dead from trampling by rhinos along a jungle...

If Player A can beat a new pack of goblins using PC X but not a lich or a Tarrasque, and Player B can use X to defeat a pack of goblins OR the Tarrasque, and player C can't even defeat a pack of goblins with X, then B >> A > C in skill. (Partial ordering.) I remain very surprised you've never...

I don't understand (A). What does "which I think can benefit from extrapolation" mean in this context? Extrapolation to what domain? Is that a phone typo for "elaboration"? Are you ready to move on from asking or proclaiming what a simulation is to discussing what are some pros and cons to...

Hard disagree. You're conflating "crude, low quality model" with "not a model."

Agreed. I chose different systems to make the play agenda as obvious as I could, but obviously both agenda(s) and system matter, as you say, and many systems are usable with multiple agendas. (GDS mostly came out of AD&D after all.) And most people are attracted to more than one agenda to...

Yeah. Even a simple Fighter can be played well (action surging at the right times, choosing targets wisely, spending superiority dice on effective maneuvers in the right fights) or poorly (attacking low-priority meatsacks when everyone else is desperately trying to kill a glass cannon, action...

Pithy. I like it! Aside: one interesting thing about oracles is that they are relational mappings, not functional, unlike almost every other die roll in most RPGs. (Reaction rolls for friendly/neutral/hostile/etc. are the only other exception I can think of.)

A story about a bear ISN'T a simulation, which is why the bear/goldilocks discussion is baffling. However, it can be the output of a simulation, which itself can be built around the mental model of a bear and can therefore have bear-like properties like a sense of smell keener than a...

I think we're at an impasse here. You're reverting to (B) because you think (A) is impossible, and I have nothing to say about (B) beyond the obvious. You're looking for addition, I'm telling you it's subtraction. You're still looking for addition. [helpless shrug] Sorry I can't be of more use...

Dumb question: am I included in "you all", and if so what is it exactly that I object to? I don't even remember railroads being mentioned in this thread.