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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8167504" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, because there aren't a bunch of interesting (for some reading of that word) situations in the real world. there is a 'cloth' of interrelated things that all blend into each other. At a very granular scale you can kinda look at it like a very small 'sandbox', if you like. Shall I eat pizza or spaghetti? Maybe you can even think of &quot;Shall I travel to Greece or Italy for vacation?&quot; like that, but which you will actually do is very likely to be mediated by a large number of small factors (tour guide schedule, costs of each element of the trips, what the other 4 people want to do, whether it rained on the day you would need to see the travel agent to get the tickets for Greece and you didn't feel like driving over, so you ended up going to Italy). That sort of thing. It is not really reasonable to characterize life as 'menus of discrete choices', but it is perfectly possible to do so with an RPG. Very few of the things I've mentioned above are likely to come up in most RPGs, the players just choose based on some aesthetic criteria, or maybe someone dices for it. Beyond that, I said &quot;Greece or Italy&quot; but the real choices are probably a list 10 pages long, and then the more nebulous in-between choices. While [USER=5636]@estar[/USER] will rightly say that all these could be countenanced by a GM in a game, practicalities don't really make it feasible, and many facts simply don't exist. I cannot go to Tibet due to certain government restrictions, but does estar actually know the foreign travel rules for all the polities in his campaign? I doubt it, and there are 1000 other similar POSSIBLE considerations. EACH is operative in the real world, but in the game world such things are simply contrivances, someone thought to bring one up (invent it), or not. Certainly nobody diced for every one of a 1000 reasons you can or cannot travel to fantasy Tibet this year!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8167504, member: 82106"] Well, because there aren't a bunch of interesting (for some reading of that word) situations in the real world. there is a 'cloth' of interrelated things that all blend into each other. At a very granular scale you can kinda look at it like a very small 'sandbox', if you like. Shall I eat pizza or spaghetti? Maybe you can even think of "Shall I travel to Greece or Italy for vacation?" like that, but which you will actually do is very likely to be mediated by a large number of small factors (tour guide schedule, costs of each element of the trips, what the other 4 people want to do, whether it rained on the day you would need to see the travel agent to get the tickets for Greece and you didn't feel like driving over, so you ended up going to Italy). That sort of thing. It is not really reasonable to characterize life as 'menus of discrete choices', but it is perfectly possible to do so with an RPG. Very few of the things I've mentioned above are likely to come up in most RPGs, the players just choose based on some aesthetic criteria, or maybe someone dices for it. Beyond that, I said "Greece or Italy" but the real choices are probably a list 10 pages long, and then the more nebulous in-between choices. While [USER=5636]@estar[/USER] will rightly say that all these could be countenanced by a GM in a game, practicalities don't really make it feasible, and many facts simply don't exist. I cannot go to Tibet due to certain government restrictions, but does estar actually know the foreign travel rules for all the polities in his campaign? I doubt it, and there are 1000 other similar POSSIBLE considerations. EACH is operative in the real world, but in the game world such things are simply contrivances, someone thought to bring one up (invent it), or not. Certainly nobody diced for every one of a 1000 reasons you can or cannot travel to fantasy Tibet this year! [/QUOTE]

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