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Like other people I'm confused about the idea that this is happening now. For one as mentioned upthread, 5e already seemed to be moving away from that player centric culture when it was released (and all those adventure paths were aimed at DMs). Some of the games mentioned as indicative of...

Yeah I seem to recall this isn't the first time I've ignore listed you.

I'm really not entirely sure what you mean here.

Reading the room. And how do you know if the group want's that or not. By reading the room! (Also why do people always treat the players as one mind with several bodies. It's not group dependant it's player dependent - which is why you really need to read the room). I can't think why you...

There is a school of thought that says that as long as the GM just sticks to what is predetermined all's fair in love and war. To which I always think, no sometimes the GM has to be able to read the room.

I think the Isekai thing is actually one of the most interesting challenges in rpg design. You can of course get around it by having the players contribute to the setting. Another way is just to choose a genre and lean into it heavily. But for more setting dense worlds (which I prefer) this...

The thing with this is that it skirts the issue - which is: was modelling the real chances of someone being able to successfully do something even actually a consideration? You are right that the dice mechanics are essentially binary - but the odds of success equate to percentage chances. And...

Only if you treat the context of the game as an interchangeable slot to put the widget in. Not everyone is running campaigns with 20 year established histories. If for example you are putting together a campaign world for your friends to game in, it would seem to make some sense to me to...

If whether you are willing to make an accommodation for the player is not dependant on who the player is and the nature of your relationship with them, then at least for the purposes of the discussion here, they are interchangeable widgets.

The issue here is what D&D is supposed to be simulating. (Also I don't understand the Sim-meter comment - all games have secondary worlds therefore, in the common meaning of the world, they have some element of simulation - that's trivially true - it doesn't tell us anything about priorities.)

People have enough in common that we can meaningfully talk about system tendencies.

To be fair I've been reading a lot of the defences of the traditional GM role in this thread and thinking the whole time "you are writing as if players are interchangeable widgets"

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: