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Knave 2ed is a fantastic purchase. I love games with relatively little starting character building and the bulk of progression is diegetic.

The timing also mattered quite a bit too. The time period for the bulk of the Forge discussions was the early '00s. This was just after the release of 3e, which saw a not-large but not negligible portion of the D&D playerbase decide they didn't want to move on to another system. At the same...

Hmm. Does that mean that we're classifying 2e era, Hickman revolution AD&D super-trad play as not simulationist? Or is that just style of play just functionally agendaless?

Yes, but it's only weird if you're working under the assumption that the game is meant to be a toolkit, and there aren't any standard setting assumptions underlying them. For 5e, my assumption is that the game will run in a setting that fits within the broader "D&D multiverse". And that...

We call them roguelings now.

It’s definitely the “why are you spending all this time on something virtually no one cares about” aspect I’m arguing. If making tons of notes about a campaign setting is fun for you, then by all means, follow your bliss. But don’t expect that your players are going to be super interested in...

Heck, I think it’s OK to exclude things. It just needs to be very mindfully and cautiously, and with full player buy-in. It’s the “mindful” part a lot of setting designers skip.

GURPS is a toolkit game. I don’t think D&D should be used as such without careful consideration; I think it causes more problems than it solves.

That is the stance I’m arguing against, yes.

To me, the issue is that the number of DMs who think making a super-specific setting is great fun vastly outstrips the number of players interested in exploring them. Like, I have a bunch of fantasy setting ideas I’ve loosely fleshed out over the years. If I had groups that wanted to explore...

There’s a big difference between a Wookiee Jedi in Star Trek (where both concepts belong to a separate IP) and wanting to play an ancestry that’s in the core rulebook of the game being played. The apples-to-apples comparison would be a Star Trek game where Vulcans aren’t allowed.

“Not wanting to suck” isn’t a creative agenda according to the definitions the Forge discussion used. I suppose it could be considered very loosely “gamist”, I guess. But it lacks the drive and impetus a creative agenda is supposed to have.

What I think a lot of people forget about play agendas is that there was not an assumption that every player had one. A creative agenda was something a group of players could choose to pursue. A lot of play, perhaps even the majority, is functionally agendaless.

Because the point of a setting is to be a set of tools for players to use to support themes and modes of play. There are plenty of races and classes I don't care for, aesthetically. I don't typically weave them into play as NPCs or background info if I don't like them. But I'm not going to...

Installing an expert to makes decisions could feasibly be called a mechanic. (I might not call it that myself, but I can see an argument for it.) What decision making processes go in that expert's mind is what I would not call a mechanic or set of mechanics.

I don't see much of a particular difference between those use cases, no. My question is more of "Did you, as a DM, spend a lot of time detailing that setting, such that you wouldn't be amenable to changing it or from moving on from the concept if you don't have player buy-in?" A DM who spends...

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.