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Genre and style are definitely different things. You can run noir / horror / four-colour supers / fantasy / sci-fi with Fate, Savage Worlds, GURPS or HERO and each would deliver the same genre with a different feel through their approach. Systems like Cortex and Fudge are more like toolkits in...

GURPS gives you a lot of tools for this in the core books, including advantages and disadvantages for allies, dependents and enemies. There are also a range of different social and influencing skills / ads + disads that can affect NPCs where the player doesn’t have an established relationship...

Boardgames are my secondary hobby, and I’ve gotten in pretty extensively over the last five years or so, building up my own collection. One of my regular gaming buddies also has an extensive board game collection (more extensive than mine). Personally I tend to buy fantasy-themed games (with...

The game still continues… in that video she was a kitten but even now she still likes to wrestle ratty from time to time We have a leather glove inside the hand puppet as those claws got too sharp for plush a long time ago!

We’ve played a fair bit of Savage Pathfinder. Both the ancestries and class edges are slightly up-powered compared to the versions in core Savage Worlds and the Fantasy Companion, so you would potentially want to adjust for that. It probably isn’t a significant factor, especially after the...

I find this, too. Reading how Pinnacle implemented Deadlands, Pathfinder, and Rifts using Savage Worlds taught me a lot about how to home brew and customise the game to better fit a desired campaign concept.

As a person who is generally happy to play a genre-flexible system (Savage Worlds) and that system happens to have good support for action-adventure which helps with a bunch of popular IPs the advantage of licensed games isn’t really for me, it’s for the other members of the group. What I mean...

Why yes, I do…

I think the warlock mechanics could fit an action adventure game well - lots of spamming Eldritch Blast and invocations. A couple of uses of bigger powers (spells) per level before they reset.

I think it depends on where a company gets it money from. Smaller RPG companies with one tent-pole property kind of need to keep generating content that will sell, and that usually means player content, typically new classes or the equivalent. That tends to mean the game starts to sag under its...

Speak for yourself. I have more empathy than that.

I think that is key. In my opinion of immersion, the player is looking at things from a first person perspective.

There is a desire to avoid temptation in both the player and the character in GURPS, that does not hold in Fate where the character wants to avoid temptation but the player seeks it out for reward in the form of Fate points.

Seems like your mileage does indeed vary then 🙂

I disagree; GM decisions based on in-world phenomena and likely cause / effect count as simulation in my book. YMMV :)

I’m not @Micah Sweet but I can give a solid example of the point. Consider a character who is an alcoholic. This is probably a strong driver of behaviour and (assuming being in recovery) it might well make sense for the character to avoid situations where they are tempted to succumb to their...

@Celebrim , @The Firebird , @pemerton - while you all make very reasonable points about the codification of play, my point was that this is not a feature of simulationist games but rather a trend with games of all kinds. So it isn’t a defining quality if simulationist play in my opinion.

I don’t think those logically follow from each other, although I agree some people go that route. As evidence, I would offer Kriegspiel, which was a war simulation used for training real officers by the Prussian Army very successfully. It is most definitely a simulation with no need to consider...

I think it is useful to remember George Box when thinking about simulation: “all models are wrong, some are useful”. It’s often applied to physical laws like Newtonian Physics versus General Relativity - both will tell you what effect gravity will have on a body and while General Relativity...

That sounds more like a specific counter-punch to Runequest (subject to the exact publication dates) which brought in mechanics similar to what the quote mentions. Runequest’s pitch was essentially ‘more realistic than D&D’ and this is a pitch of ‘yeah but D&D is more fun to play’.