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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6680397" data-attributes="member: 996">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.  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. 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. 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 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.   That just makes "heavy sim-focused player" sound like a baroque way of saying 'jerk.'   "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.  Indeed. 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. You'd certainly get used to answers like that at my table.  Notwithstanding the fact that I'm makin' up as a I go.Again, makin' them sound like jerks.   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.</blockquote>

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