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Eh. It might be subjective but it's not arbritrary. People generally have commonalities in their experiences.

And some of us never think or worry about immersion at all.

I don't think I really agree with Hussar's strict criterion in theory but I think he is onto something in practice. It is very hard to feel that anything is satisfactorily simulated if it is overly abstracted. This is why simulationist systems are so often a juggle between too complex and...

Here's an explanation.

It's not a problem as such - more like a structural constraint of the medium. I'm reminded of Greek Tragedy where the audience would sit through 3 days of serious high tragic poetry, and then it would be followed by comedy in which the gods had the same flaws and foibles as everyone else and...

Isn't the bigger issue with FTL settings that even if you have something like an Alcubierre drive that is powered by some kind of negative energy unobtainium it's then also a time machine with significant implications for causality? Which touches on something of the nature of rpgs - that in a...

This does to me seem to suggest that a game would only be simulationist when it takes the time to model a specific process like combat which I don't really agree with. This to me seems to imply that skills systems aren't simulationist - where I don't think that's the case - I think it's just...

Well it's definitely an odd statement, as is the whole argument about what kind of king or dictator a GM is. :whistle:

This reminds me of how I explain the role of IGOs in Global Governance to students. It's like a group of people of equal status (nominally) getting together to play a game of football and choosing one of their number to act as referee. The referee in such a situation has no genuine authority...

I think you are overly focusing on the example I gave here. My point is that you don't need to give the GM power to overrule the rules in the name of the fiction when the rules only give players the permission to do things if they are consistent with the fiction. Also I've found that when...

Ok I'll stay out of it then as I think there's so many things in there that don't necessarily follow from each other that the whole thing could be broken apart.

What is actually at stake here in the argument about how rare bad GMs are meant to be? Now, as in many times in this thread, camps seem to appear without it being actually all that clear what the argument is supposed to be about.

No don't be silly. The guy is calling his players idiots. "Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?".

There seem to be an awful lot of posts on reddit that say things like "We couldn't solve the GM's mystery so he said we are all idiots. How should I deal with this situation as he's a good GM?" So I don't think bad GM's are that uncommon - or players who put up with then far more than they should.

It does perhaps from that perspective. I offer it as food for thought - it's not a position I'm committed to. Personally I will have always have a desire for really tight detailed rules.

I feel that in some ways the tightness of a little of rules in many traditional games both restricts the GM heavily (and the players of course) and it is why you have the safety valve that ends up giving the GM the power to override any rules. In a game with more narrative rules (I'm not going...

Sounds pretty much like what I said, mundane, mundane weird and magic. And if in the case of a situation when it is uncertain where something belongs - such as a Fighter surviving a 100 ft fall - how does this help us decide? Is a higher level fighter mundane or mundane weird? There is...

Can a Dragon fly in an anti-magic sphere or a Giant walk? I don't believe it it's that simple. I would have at least 3 spheres, the mundane, the mundane weird, and the explicitly magical. But I wouldn't have these as rules. I don't think you could make a rule to sort everything into these...

I think we need to think of it as more like a collage then a system running on consistent rules. There's certain overlapping circles - one in which real principles like the normal rules of gravity seem to apply - or something somewhat like them at least - and others in which they clearly don't...

You did note I was referring to the context of running a historical game right? I bring this up because I have the strong impression you think I was making some kind of broader statement. I mean obviously I know that mice with swords are unrealistic and that you have to not avoid mice with...