In some cases, the entire group may quit the game, because it's too much effort to reconcile what the rules are saying with any sort of simulationist principles. Not every game out there will work for every group of players.
There are very extreme 'games' out there, that are so wholly simulations or so wholly collective storytelling exercises that they are hardly games at all, and certainly couldn't be used for the contrary agenda. I think they're exceptions, though. Any RPG that lays legitimate claim to all 3 letters can be used for any Forge agenda pretty easily. Using D&D (any ed, really) as a story-leaning or process-leaning /game/, is not so hard that a reasonable gamer need give up on it, entirely. Using it as a simulator gives you some pretty whacked results (which, non-the-less, some simulationists have gotten used to), but using it to 'tell stories' is only slightly inhibited by d20 resolution quirks and lack of genre fidelity.
While individual players and groups may have their own preferences, some rule sets do not lend themselves to easily supporting preferred play-styles.
Meh. Any decent RPG, by virtue of being flexible enough to handle the range of things players might do, is flexible enough to be used with any creative agenda. It's histrionic, IMHO, to say that one 'can't' be used in a given style, and when people start insisting that one "doesn't support" a style, it seems to me, more often that they're complaining it doesn't /force/ that style on everyone. The differences between games that promote one agenda or another is mostly in what they preach, not how they work. Storyteller, for instance, was very evangelically 'narrativist' (before that jargon was even coined), but, weak though they might have been, still had useable resolution systems and could be played as a game, or even thought of as 'simulating' a (superficially familiar, but very strange) imagined world.
If you've read (or played) Savage Worlds, many of the rules are designed to encourage interesting outcomes rather than realistic ones, even within the context of a fantasy world.
I have played it once or twice, and I didn't notice that, specifically. If I had, I might have found it less disappointing. Any game whose designers are smart enough not to try to implement an oxymoron like "realism in a fantasy world," should be given a fair chance.
The presence of non-character player resources is a good example of a game mechanic which doesn't lend itself to support of a simulationist playstyle.
This is a point where it seems, to me, that the simulationist agenda gets a little schizophrenic. On the one hand, the idea is a simulation. Anyone running a simulation is acutely aware that they are not doing the real thing - often for very practical reasons. Yet 'simulationism' is sometimes taken as including some sort of immersive element, which strikes me as being less about simulation, and more about character-identification, a quality of a good story. A non-character player resource - any sort of player-managed 'luck' resource for instance, but, really, almost any managed resource that isn't as concrete as how many arrows you have left in your quiver - doesn't hurt simulation in the least, the resulting action can still perfectly simulate the characters, setting, & situations in question, rather, some folks claims it hurts their sense of 'immersion' (more than playing a game as profoundly abstract as a TTRPG must already do). That's struck me as nonsensical since the first time I heard it, and repetition really hasn't made it sound any better.
Presentation matters, too. It may be easier to accept a break from simulationist principles where doing so is necessary to keep the game playable. That's pretty much the underlying principle of GURPS, which is a strong contender for the most-sim-focused game on the market; for the game to be playable at all, it must be simpler than the reality it's trying to model.
Presentation matters to ease of understanding and to personal/emotional reactions, and yeah, the latter can influence personal preference, while the former is a meaningful practical consideration.
Narrative concessions might be harder to accept, when presented as such. Again, going back to Savage Worlds, it may be harder for a heavy sim-focused player to accept that anything should happen because it's dramatic.
That just makes "heavy sim-focused player" sound like a baroque way of saying 'jerk.'
You might be surprised. They aren't called indie games any more for a reason.
"Indie Games" doesn't seem to have left the gamer lexicon. But, yes, Saelorn is extremely quick to assume that what he believes to be true about D&D is what most gamers believe to be true of most games. and the way RPGs /should/ be, to boot.
There may be styles of games today that you might not want to play (I know that's certainly true for me), but that doesn't make them any less valid. Nor do I understand the point of even trying to argue such.
Indeed.
I don't really want to get caught up in this, and my comment is really just a clarification because you may very well agree. For almost all of the examples used in this thread, the DM resolving it one way rather than another may not be noticeable in a single case. Even in a hard-core simulationist, exploration-focused game, a DM can pull off "Yes, there's a box" or even "Yes, but..." or "Yes, and..." on-the-fly narrativist resolutions from time to time without pinging most players' radars. In many cases, for a single instance, or even scattered instances, there's no way to tell the difference.
But if the DM makes these kinds of determinations with any regularity, it will be noticeable and will affect the game experience.
IT might be. But, by the same token, you could have an as-honestly-sim-as-you-like DM, betrayed by a series of coincidences come out /looking/ like he's pulling such tricks ("truth" often being stranger than fiction).
Either way, the critical thing is not what the DM is doing nor what the qualities of the system are, but the perceptions of the players, and how willing they are to moderate their reactions to some sort of perceived deviance from their personal ideals.
When you're playing in a simulationist, exploration-focused game, you know it. The difference is tangible. You become accustomed to answers such as "No, there are no crates or boxes in the alley. Timber is quite rare in this region and the winters are very cold, so anything like that left lying around would be broken up and used for firewood."
You'd certainly get used to answers like that at my table. Notwithstanding the fact that I'm makin' up as a I go.
Over time and across multiple DM decisions/resolutions, it will become very evident to anyone paying attention what kind of game it is. And to players who strongly prefer one style of play to another, that distinction will be very important.
Again, makin' them sound like jerks.
This is one reason I think the original Threefold formulation was more useful than what was done with it subsequently. Game, Simulation, and Drama were explicitly used to describe the priorities and processes for making decisions and adjudicating resolutions in a game.
That I'll agree with. The earlier articulations seemed more about style and how you played a game, rather than about agendas and why you condemned a given system.
