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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwoSix" data-source="post: 7558160" data-attributes="member: 205">I'm going to try to isolate some points of contention.  I'll probably fail, but points for effort, right?1)  Zooming out, real life is of course driven by trillions upon trillions of subtle actions that lead to an indecipherable web of consequences.  Zoom in, though, and any one consequence usually looks pretty goddamn random.  If I get hit by a truck, the fact that the truck driver had an argument with his father 30 years ago that lead to a chain of events that caused him to fall asleep at the wheel that day is both absolutely true and utterly meaningless to my mangled corpse.2)  The fact that life appears random means that random determination of events can make a fictional playspace seem more like a real-life space, driven by the aforementioned web of consequences.Now, for the teahouse example, I think virtually every playgroup accepts that, for the characters, the teahouse was always an extant part of their reality.  No one is positing that the characters know the teahouse is being apparated into existence in response to the characters deciding to go there.Likewise, I think everyone accepts that for this example, the teahouse was already located in the fiction during prior play, so that "going to the teahouse" is a valid action declaration for everyone.  (A narrative group might simply assume that a teahouse is a valid location to visit in their current genre of play, while a simulationist group might wait for the DM to declare the existence of a teahouse before making action declarations involving it.)Additionally, I don't think anyone outside the most hardcore preppers of DMs has a detailed rendering of any one teahouse in the city and the schedules of who comes and goes already assigned.  And I think this where the break occurs.A simulationist group knows that the DM probably doesn't have the exact location of the sect members known at all times.   If the sim DM says "There are no sect members in the teahouse, and the owner has no memory of ever seeing any", then the sim group assumes that the DM already knows where the sect members hang out.  Or if the answer is "There aren't any here right now, but I have seen them come and go", then the assumption is the DM used some kind of random process to determine if they were there right now.But what they do expect is the appearance of extrapolation from prior knowledge, and the use of algorithm and procedure to derive the answer.  Even if the DM is just deciding extemporaneously, it's assumed that the DM is reasoning based on an already extant structure of the game world.  What this is trying to prevent is the appearance of contrivance, which is the bane of simulationist play and simultaneously the heart of narrative play.tl;dr:  Randomness makes things look more real.  Sim minded players value the appearance of process and derived results in their play, even if the derivation is purely a mental construct of the DM calculating odds and rolling dice.</blockquote>

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