Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8161308" data-attributes="member: 42582">What's your point?In the fiction remembering where a tower is doesn't bring the tower into being. This is the case whether it's my PC remembering where the tower is, or a NPC telling my PC where the tower is based on his/her memory.That all seems obvious.But there is no difference in the real world between the authorship process whereby I, as a participant in the game, establish the fictional element the Orc is dead, killed by me (ie my PC) and the authorship process whereby I, as a participant in the game, establish the fictional element the tower is known by me (ie my PC) to be at such-and-such a location. Both are acts of authorship. Both are mediated via action declarations for my character - one about engaging in a feat of combat, the other about engaging in a feat of memory.You and [USER=6795602]@FrogReaver[/USER] are arguing for a subject matter constraint - something like the player of a RPG should not be able to establish any fictional element which is not causally downstream of his/her PC's actions - but seem to want to assert that it's a process constraint.You also don't seem to apply your subject matter constraint consistently - as per [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER]'s repeated example of the foraging check, you seem happy to allow it to be violated where the fictional element is relatively trivial generica (eg that there are rabbits to catch in the woods) but get worked up about it when the fictional element has a proper name (like Evard's tower or my brother Rufus) or is specific or unique in some similar fashion (like a bridge across a river).It seems a very particular aesthetic preference. Ron Edwards gives a good account of some (I think not all) of its features <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">here</a> (written early in 2003):In Simulationist play, cause is the key, the imagined cosmos in action. . . . Resolution mechanics, in Simulationist design, boil down to asking about the cause of what . . . Two games may be equally Simulationist even if one concerns coping with childhood trauma and the other concerns blasting villains with lightning bolts. What makes them Simulationist is the strict adherence to in-game (i.e. pre-established) cause for the outcomes that occur during play. . . . The causal sequence of task resolution in Simulationist play must be linear in time. He swings: on target or not? The other guy dodges or parries: well or badly? The weapon contacts the unit of armor + body: how hard? The armor stops some of it: how much? The remaining impact hits tissue: how deeply? With what psychological (stunning, pain) effects? With what continuing effects? All of this is settled in order, on this guy's "go," and the next guy's "go" is simply waiting its turn, in time. . . .I say "not all" because this still leaves open who among the participants gets to set up the situation (including such matters as the location of Evard's tower or of Rufus) which is then resolved linearly in time.In the same essay Edwards describes the role of the GM in a significant amount of RPGing:I also recommend examining Theme carefully. In this game, it's present and accounted for already, before play. The process of prep-play-enjoy works by putting "what you want" in, then having "what you want" come out, with the hope that the System's application doesn't change anything along the way. . . . [T]he more common character creation methods . . . almost always the relatively clumsy "GM approval" proviso. . . Dice-based resolutions sometimes represent much noise and effort about not much effect, i.e., random factors tend not to deviate from expected results very much. Some games display a small range of possible Effect (i.e. damage rarely harms an opponent very much at a time), slight metagame adjustments to minimize extreme results, or a lot of offered strategies for the GM to soften or redirect the effects that occur. . . . [W]hen it's done badly, resolutions are rife with breakpoints and GM-fiat punts . . . The key for these games is GM authority over the story's content and integrity at all points, including managing the input by players. Even system results are judged appropriate or not by the GM; "fudging" Fortune outcomes is overtly granted as a GM right. The Golden Rule of White Wolf games is a covert way to say the same thing: ignore any rule that interferes with fun. No one, I presume, thinks that any player may invoke the Golden Rule at any time; what it's really saying is that the GM may ignore any rule (or any player who invokes it) that ruins his or her idea of what should happen.Approaching RPGing in this way will answer the question of who gets to set up the situation which is then resolved linearly in time. It will also produce a game that resembles pretty closely [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER]'s and [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER]'s characterisations of 5e D&D (though Edwards is perhaps a little blunter in his account than they have been). I think it's obvious that in a game approached in this fashion player agency is less than one in which players have ongoing influence (directly via mechanics, or by giving suggestions to which the GM is obliged to have regard) over theme, situation, effect and outcome, and more generally "what should happen".</blockquote>

Verification