NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5460524" data-attributes="member: 54877">Don't own the Dying Earth game, so pardon me if I missed some crucial build up. But I'd say that with genres, emulating and simulating are not the same thing. Sure, there is a sense in which all such games are simulating something, but at some point that takes all the useful meaning out of discussing "simulation". Burning Wheel games aren't simulating much. In BW revised, the combat mechanics are not simulating actual combat. (The final resolution of combats will often be strikingly similar to gritty fantasy stories. So there is a kind of macro simulation. But any micro-simulation of process is really mainly a thin veneer of tags attached to skills and equipment.) Rather, BW is emulating a particular facet of combat--namely that it intends to make you sweat over the fate of the character the way real combat makes a person sweat over their life (with the obvious caveat that the stakes are much smaller in a game).  And BW isn't even a narrativist game. I know Luke Crane has considered Forge theory, because there are some credits to Forge folks in the books. But I get the distinct impression sometimes that he doesn't even care about it on the theory level, beyond any practical tools or rules of thumb that he happens to pick up. He merely wanted as one of his goals for BW that it be a game where combat made you sweat. So he picked mechanics to emulate that. Anything else is rather an accident of preferences, genre, theme, etc. (Also, see Mouse Guard, with similar goals but somewhat different preferences, genre, etc.) Apparently, there are also some influences from Riddle of Steel on BW, which I understand to have somewhat of a simulation bent, though that is somewhat misleading with the way the drives of the character dictate effectiveness.  It's another one I don't own, though.</blockquote>

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