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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5459946" data-attributes="member: 42582">Fully agreed, and I didn't intend to limit my remarks to simulationionism. It's just that, in my experience, it's less common for people to assert that they can run anything you like using My Life With Master, Dogs in the Vineyard or The Dying Earth. I think it's generally recognised that these non-simulationist rulesets are intended to deliver a particular type of experience at the table.I'm not sure that an added component becomes harder to remove just because of the pressures it creates. The difficulty of removing it is more likely to be related to its overall integration in the rest of the system. For example: removing the Craft and Profession skill from 3E would I think be pretty trivial. Removing hit points, rather non-trivial.I do think that an added component can be harder to ignore on account of the pressures it creates, precisely because those pressures might become too much to ignore. So the existence of Craft and Profession skills in 3E, in combination with the obvious pressure on many players to make builds that are tactically optimal, tends to make questions like "How did my guy make a living before he started adventuring?" have a salience, and a difficulty of answering, that I'd rather not have in my game. 4e resolves this issue by allowing (for example) the player of the wizard to say "My guy was a pastry chef" without having to expend any character build resources for the privilege. Rolemaster resolves this issue in a different way, by granting lots more character building resources, but also using a type of siloing device to avoid making the player choose between "background" skills and "optimisation" skills.I'm not sure what you mean by "sim" here - I've read your exchange with LostSoul, and I tend to agree with him that what you're describing seems something like what the Forge calls High Concept Simulationism (ie play that conforms to genre tropes and expectations).Anyway, I'd like to avoid debating the merits of the Forge if we can (and given terms like "simulationism" are being used I'm not 100% sure we can). But my response to your comment about "simming any genre" is this:*If you try to use Spacemaster (Rolemaster's sci-fi sibling) to play a game with a Dune or Star Wars feel I think you'll be pretty disappointed - purist-for-system simulationism will have a lot of trouble delivering that sort of experience in play; *If you start to tweak the purist-for-system mechanics to make them "simulate the narrative events" you'll get a game more like Pendragon or Cthulhu - which will guarantee the genre experience, but which aren't really narrativist games. They deliver an experience that is, in some sense, predetermined or prepackaged - it's someone else's idea (the game designer's, mostly) of what that genre is. *Whereas if you pick up a non-sim game like The Dying Earth, and play it with the "tag line" reward rule, you should get an experience which isn't like reading a Dying Earth novel in an especially intimate way, but more like authoring a new Dying Earth novel.That's a bit of a rough-and-ready description, but my own RPGing experience has led me to believe there are real differences here - in particular, between being rewarded for conforing to someone else's conception of the gameworld/genre, and making one's own creative contribution.Now your conclusion here is something I've certainly accepted as a premise for participating in this thread, and am inclined to accept more generally, seeing as I have no personally-available evidence that would lead me to differ from what seems increasingly to be the received opinion.I would query the why, however. I tend to agree with Vivyan Basterd that the situation with the OGL has made a significant difference. This is the first time that the owners of D&D, in trying to transition to a new edition, have faced commercial competition from their old edition.I don't think that's all of it, but I think it's a good part of it, in two ways: (i) it puts pressure on WotC to come up with an edition that is very different from their previous edition, so that those with whom it becomes popular won't be subject to capture by those continuing to sell the old edition; (ii) it puts pressure on WotC to come up with an edition that is so popular with those who like the old edition that they will buy the new WotC edition and not be subject to capture by those continuing to sell the old edition.I think satisfying (i) and (ii) at the same time is a pretty big ask. You might even think that the more you satisfy (i), the less likely you are to satisfy (ii) - on the assumption that those who liked the old edition weren't radically mistaken as to their real preferences in RPGing. And it seems to me that maybe this is what happened. WotC took a gamble that Ron Edwards was right, and that many people were mistaken about the sort of RPG they really wanted. And WotC got it wrong.(Of course there's a bit more too it than that. Like Edwards, WotC also perhaps thought that there was a big untapped market of RPGers, who would be attracted to a non-simulationist game more than to a simulationist one. They seem to have been wrong about that too, although the sheer gamey crunchiness of 4e's character build and combat rules means that they might not have fully tested this hypothesis.)</blockquote>

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