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Legos, nothing! Real gamers use d4's! Or 'caltrops', as they are often affectionately known.

I get what you're saying, but it can be in a good sense too. I was in a light-hearted OSR one-shot recently, and I rolled a 6 Int and had fun with it. So did everyone else, which is the important thing! As @Lanefan said in another thread, if the players are laughing even though their...

"Texture" is a very good word for what's going on. It needs to feel right, in ways that aren't always easy to quantify. "Simulate" still rings false to my ear; it connotes too much precision, too clinical an attitude... More fundamentally, I don't think the thought process used in actually...

I have no beef with 4e. I quite liked its lore and cosmology, much better than in any edition that had come before. And I stand in awe at the intensity of design effort to produce exactly the game they had in mind. It was an astounding achievement. Unfortunately, the game they had in mind...

I see, thank you for the clarification. I think the word 'model' is getting us back into the weeds of whether one is really trying to "simulate" something or not. My take has been that isn't really the case, that nobody is really trying to simulate the world - but that many people do want to...

Eh? I wasn't referring to danger of death (I realize that not all narrative games make death rare or impossible) but to the ironic, subversive realization that everything was meaningless. That sort of story is, I submit, not one that many games try to support.

While I'm sure that players exist who don't care much about consistency, I think caring about it is very far from being a trait exclusive to "simulationists". Narrative gamers often have a strong sense of responsibility for the fiction, to ensure that inconsistencies don't arise.

In other words, it's a patch on another bad design decision, or a number of them. Why should playing a demi-human be mechanically superior in the first place? Or if it should, why disincentivize it at levels that many campaigns didn't reach? I can testify that it didn't do a very good job as...

Yes. As I said above, we don't insist the dragon be slain. Only that the result be moving, that it drive character development and plot, no matter what happens.

Sure, such stories exist. I think seeking such stories through RPGs is likely to be a pretty rarefied taste, but it's a big world! I certainly don't have much interest in playing that out.

Indeed. And as the conversation has developed, we've identified this as the distinctive element in narrative games as opposed to "simulationist" ones. (There's been some dissatisfaction expressed about that word.) That said, narrative gamers don't insist that the dragon must be slain. They...

To elaborate on the "as if"... It was common back in the day, and still is in some corners of the OSR world, to explain some of the more bizarre design decisions of early D&D in terms of "realism". For example, level limits for demihumans were explained by, "If they could keep levelling over...

I'm not sure that arguing about simulations here is helpful? It seems to be broadly accepted that "simulationism" isn't really about "simulating" anything, despite the name? I liked your (@AbdulAlhazred) phrase "commensurate with the fiction". While all styles of roleplaying so far as I know...

Yes, thank you, that's it exactly! It's not that we want things to be easy, for success to be handed to us on a platter - in fact, we want it to be hard, to force the character to change! What I came to realize over the course of developing a preference for storytelling games was that the two...

C&S was around in 1975?! Good heavens. Well, it sounds extremely awesome, I wish I could be involved!

"Found brother... He's Schroedinger's cat!" So while Marco worked on finishing the crystal, Ludovico, Jurgen, and their associate Professor Bergdokken (the quasi-vampire) used Asim's ring in a divination ritual to try to track him down. (Giovanni was along for the ride.) Turned out he was on...

Still the same system the whole time? Some early version of D&D, or something completely homebrew?

Found brother... He's Schroedinger's cat!

I forgot to mention that in that game, Sorcery carried the death penalty! That's a pretty important factor. (In the Italian one, it's feared but not illegal.) 300 years before the campaign, the Church of the Logos became the official religion of the local continental Empire - a religion based...

Ditto! I've got nothing against it at all! Heck, I spent two decades happily Sim!