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This resonates with me, even though the game of the RPG is very important to me. Because the game itself is a social thing, in the sense that it's a joint creative activity. That's one way in which it's different from going out to dinner - the food I eat at a restaurant is (at least largely) a...

I was thinking about this thread cycling home yesterday evening, and was puzzled by what seems to be an assumption made in many of the posts: that the GM comes up with the lore, and the players are either (i) under some sort of duty to appreciate/engage with it, or (ii) virtually guaranteed to...

The notion that there is some sort of trade off between player and GM enjoyment of the game - on some posited spectrum from "dancing monkey" to "viking hat* - is just really foreign to me. Buying and selling involves trade offs. Building a house on a budget involves trade offs. But social...

I don't think that it really makes sense to talk about a "sim aspect" to fiction writing. Simulation is an attitude towards, or an approach towards, playing RPGs, that is concerned with how the various participants orient themselves towards the shared fiction (both as an input into, and an...

Your reference to "pressure" here makes me thing I may have not properly understood your earlier post - apologies for that! I now am inferring (I hope correctly!) that when you referred to a "focus on the interaction and exploration of the 'game world' itself" you meant that sort of...

Related to this: when it comes to RM attack table, it is as much about the relationship between them. For instance, if changes were made to the club table, but not the mace table, such that clubs became comparable to maces when fighting metal-armoured foes, that would be a hit to verisimilitude...

Most people can probably agree that RQ, and RM, are designed to support a simulationist approach to RPGing. But they contain plenty of rules that are not "diegetic" - rules like *each player, to prepare for their participation in the game, must create (or otherwise obtain) a player character"...

I laughed; but as I reflected I thought this is a really interesting reply that implicates a whole lot of assumptions that are present in D&D. For instance, if hit points are really divine favour in the sense you describe, then is it possible to play REH-esque S&S?

Can a high level D&D fighter voluntarily submit to execution at the hands of an ordinary axe-wielding executioner? Gygax's hp rules don't answer this question, because I don't think he thought it would ever come up.

But the GURPS player doesn't have the same incentives as their alcoholic PC. The PC craves alcohol. The player doesn't have any comparable or parallel craving.

But being in control of an imaginary character's mental stat is just authorship. All RPGing involves players authoring characters. I take immersion to be more than just that. I mean, in classic dungeon crawl play, the player controls the PC's mental state. But to me it would seem weird to...

Right. The GURPs player doesn't actually feel any desire to drink alcohol. They're not playing an alcoholic. They're playing a rational optimiser.

I just want to elaborate on this a little bit. The only time characters in fiction do things that "don't make sense" is (i) if the fiction is poorly written, or (ii) the fiction is deliberately absurd. One feature of well-written fiction is that it communicates its context and presuppositions...

If, from a first person perspective, alcoholics always tried to avoid the temptation to drink, the world would be a very different place.

I don't use "simulation" to mean follows a rule. In the context of RPGing, that tends to mean that all RPGing is either simulatiionist, or "GM decides" - and that seems like an unilluminating classificatory scheme. A simulation is paradigmatically a simulation of something. It has some sort of...

I don't know what it's simulating, though. The GM could make up whatever they like, and it would count. A simulation has some sort of correctness condition, in that either it produces the right outcomes (like a free kriegsspiel referee, based on their expertise) or that it models a process in...

But the GURPS behaviour is not immersive at all - there's no temptation or longing to drink.

I'm not so much talking about codification, as expertise. In the absence of expertise and an objective standard of correctness, decision-making by a referee won't be simulation. It will just be authoring.

You have the wrong version of Traveller!; but get a thumbs up for Torchbearer.

A key feature of free kriegsspiel is - as your post says - the expertise of the referee. The referee makes decisions about what happens, based on their knowledge of how things would actually work out in a real war. This means that, for the referee, the "game" is not a simulation. The referee is...