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More power to you if you can pull it off. For my life experiences, I usually start with the group, and then we pick games that fit the group. And all of my groups have multiple people who are not going to consume chapters of lore just to make a character.

The difficulty in getting a quorum of players to actually consume and then use in play the setting information in these thick settings is one of the main reasons I’m against them.

Agreed. My reading isn’t that Edwards was biased against all Sim; merely that there was visceral dislike of the storyline and setting driven play that was the assumed standard for most of the major games of the 1990s.

I’ve advocated players being flexible for a long time. I think a player being strongly tied to one character concept is equally onerous. Happy to dig up some old posts if receipts are needed.

That’s been a fairly consistent point of contention since the inception of Forge theorizing.

Of course they can. I’m simply urging them to ignore that dislike.

I’m shocked that in an 18,000+ post thread that some people have diametrically opposed opinions. :)

That’s fine. I still prefer my take to “20 page character backstories and 300 page setting gazetteers make the game better.” Don’t get me wrong, I like detailed setting guides. But I can recognize that liking something doesn’t mean its inclusion makes a game better.

For me, I find the madness of the Borg layout to be part of the fun. It encourages the “let it rip and don’t think too hard about your character” mentality the game wants you to adopt.

I think you can biased against something and still accurately classify it. Like, I assume the bulk of FBI profilers are anti-serial killer, and most virologists aren’t actually pro-smallpox. :)

Sure. That just puts us in “should the rules flow from our implicit understanding of setting, genre, and tropes, or should the setting flow from deriving rules” discussion, which is a well-trod discussion point among those who favor sim/trad play. I certainly remember arguing those points...

I think it's pretty rarely "done right", so that's probably why I have a difference of opinion. The most common occurrence, and I think the approach that causes the most issues, are the DMs who make a pseudo-"kitchen sink" setting, which has like 10 races but doesn't seem to have room for any...

Or change the fiction such that within the world, everyone knows it takes a lot of hits to take a high-level character down.

I agree that overly detailed PC building and overly detailed setting building are two sides of the same coin. They demonstrate that the interest is more in solitary authoring than in collaborative authoring. If your interest is in solitary authoring, then there's a decent and growing number...

I like “heuristic”, but I’m open to workshop it. :) I just think “mechanic” isn’t the correct term because if you said “I like FKR games because they have lots of mechanics” that seems farcically wrong.

I can’t speak for @EzekielRaiden, although I think we share similar sentiments on this issue. My take is that generally a GM shouldn’t attempt to author highly specific settings and then look for a group to play them, because that specificity causes more harmful issues than it adds positive...

Agreed. As an example mentioned in this thread, FKR play would generally be defined under the “simulation” label but certainly doesn’t have specific mechanics that are doing that simulation. (My gut feeling is that a referee’s specific mental processes to simulate don’t count as a “mechanic”.)

We can't just forgive the Forge for helping to make narrativism a popular design goal, can we? :)

I would think the 30 year creation period would make it more resistant, not less. I mean, a fictional place is like a computer file. It can be copied and edited as often as needed. What changes a gaming group do to a setting only carry over to other instances of that setting if the people...

Well, in a few of my games they do, but I’m consciously experimenting with some specific simulationist techniques.