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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9451428" data-attributes="member: 71699">Your perceptions here remind me of the similar thinking around what has been labelled FKR, freeform, or ultralite RPG. That the effort of internalizing rules forms a barrier to immersion, and thus it is more immersive to have few or no rules. One question that raises is whether it would or would not be possible to play in an FKR mode with simulationist intent? And if not, what those Prussian generals (after Verdy) thought they were doing?I wouldn't want to define simulationist as a preference for rules that are hard to internalize. Similarly, it doesn't seem right to count consistency into any difference along a simulationist axis between 4e and 3.5e, seeing as consistency is often cited as essential to simulationism. Setting aside therefore a number of unexamined assumptions about game design techniques, is it right to understand you as defining them as follows"immersion is where you spend most of your time thinking as you would expect your character would think" simulationism is where you "think in the way the simulated world works" If that is right, you describe something quite interesting“this monster is kicking our front-line fighters butts; maybe I should kick in my daily stun on it, but I’m pretty sure there’s something nastier deeper in the crypt”Isn't knowing there's something nastier deeper in the crypt thinking in the way the simulated world works? That is, it's the sort of world where nastier things lurk deeper in crypts. What I'm getting at is that it's not at all clear how one really thinks as you would expect your character to think in isolation from knowing the way the simulated world works.One earlier conclusion I came to about the above is that perhaps your post should be read as defining immersion more in terms of player experience and simulationism more in terms of game design techniques. Making them ontologically distinct. That then begged the question, what would defining them on an equal footing look like, i.e. defining simulationism in terms of player experience?Alternatively, you define immersion as a fundamental objective or faculty, with differing overlaid experience preferences some of which involve extra steps (that you explain as impediments to immersion). What isn't explained is why those extra steps are necessary, which I think comes down to focusing on artifacts that have been associated with them in the past, rather than the experience preferences themselves. In any case, immersion is in this case differentiated hierarchically from simulationism... which seems plausible so long as we're thinking about some form of "strong-simulationism" i.e. a palpable preference rather than simply knowing (or even I think curiousity about) how the world works. (One might see there how "weak-simulationism" could seem like part of immersion.)</blockquote>

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