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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9243208" data-attributes="member: 42582">So as you know, I'm a little bit of a Forge-ite about this stuff, so I'm going to respond to this provocative post from that perspective!I agree with you that Torchbearer can toggle between gamist and narrativist play, and given your GM I'm not surprised that you had that experience! In my own GMing, the gamist element tends to be downplayed to form something like a "platform of urgency" for the (pretty light) narrativism - that reflects my own predilections, including my difficulties in driving home really hard consequences. (Which makes my gamism fairly soft.)But I'm going to express doubt about the simulationism. Yes, Torchbearer sometimes has strongly "exploratory" elements - eg in some parts of PC build, and setting obstacles. But I think if, in Torchbearer, that ever becomes the focus of play then someone's foot has come off the accelerator: the GM is not pushing consequences, the grind has dropped away, Beliefs or Goals have been forgotten, etc.The preceding paragraph is an instance of a thing Edwards does quite a bit in his essays - to distinguish between the importance of "exploration" (what Baker calls the fiction, the clouds, the imagination), which is there in all RPGing; and the making of it the focus as such. <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">For instance</a>:Obviously the thing to do is to get as clear an understanding of "Exploration" as possible. It's our jargon term for imagining, "dreaming" if you will, about made-up characters in made-up situations. It's central to all role-playing, but in Simulationist play, it's the top priority. . . . What's fun or good about that? Simulationist play looks awfully strange to those who enjoy lots of metagame and overt social context during play. "You do it just to do it? What the hell is that?" However, contrary to some accusations, it's not autistic or schizophrenic, being just as social and group-Premise as any other role-playing. The key issues are shared love of the source material and sincerity. Simulationism is sort of like Virtual Reality, but with the emphasis on the "V," because it clearly covers so many subjects. Perhaps it could be called V-Whatever rather than V-Reality. If the Whatever is a fine, cool thing, then it's fun to see fellow players imagine what you are imagining, and vice versa. (By "you" in that sentence, I am referring to anyone at the table, GM or player.) To the dedicated practitioner, such play is sincere to a degree that's lacking in heavy-metagame play, and that sincerity is the quality that I'm focusing on throughout this essay.I think this passage describes what [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER] is getting at with "neo-sim" and by reference to <a href="https://www.arkenstonepublishing.net/isabout/2020/05/14/observations-on-gns-simulationism/" target="_blank">Eero Tuovinen on sim</a>.But I don't see that Torchbearer can have much of what this passage describes - metagame-free exploration - unless one or more participants have dropped the ball.</blockquote>

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