Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6599462" data-attributes="member: 42582">I take it, then, that you don't think it's unreasonable to refer to Ron Edwards' analysis just because [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] doesn't like it?And obviously I consider Ron Edwards a much deeper thinker about RPG design than Justin Alexander.Next time feel free to mention me - though I'm not sure that I'm [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s friend; I've never interacted with him except on these forums.Also, Edwards didn't say that people were brain damaged for liking WW. He said they were brain damaged by playing WW - and after he then apologised for having done so.As for whether he dismissed simulation as a viable thing in RPGs, I guess <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">this</a> is what you think is a dismissal:Simulationist play looks awfully strange to those who enjoy lots of metagame and overt social context during play. "You do it just to do it? What the hell is that?" . . . The key issues are shared love of the source material and sincerity. Simulationism is sort of like Virtual Reality, but with the emphasis on the "V," because it clearly covers so many subjects. Perhaps it could be called V-Whatever rather than V-Reality. If the Whatever is a fine, cool thing, then it's fun to see fellow players imagine what you are imagining, and vice versa. . . . For play really to be Simulationist, it can't lose the daydream quality: the pleasure in imagination as such, without agenda.Personally, I don't think that's dismissive at all. It seems to me to capture perfectly the spirit of early RQ, early Traveller, and the sort of game that a contemporary RPGer like [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] is aspiring to. Edwards is writing an essay directed at a community (The Forge and its antecedents) who were sceptical about the existence or feasibility of simulationism, and telling them that it can be done and explaining how. That's not dismissal; that's inclusion.When it comes to particular systems, in the same essay Edwards says:Pound for pound, Basic Role-Playing from The Chaosium is perhaps the most important system, publishing tradition, and intellectual engine in the hobby - yes, even more than D&D. It represents the first and arguably the most lasting, influential form of uncompromising Simulationist design.Again, that is not a dismissal of simulationism.He also very accurately describes the key goal, and challenge, of simulationist design:In Simulationist play, cause is the key, the imagined cosmos in action. . . . What makes [mechanics] 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. The few exceptions have always been accompanied by explanatory text, sometimes apologetic and sometimes blase. A good example is classic hit location, in which the characters first roll to-hit and to-parry, then hit location for anywhere on the body (RuneQuest, GURPS). Cognitively, to the Simulationist player, this requires a replay of the character's intent and action that is nearly intolerable. It often breaks down in play, either switching entirely to called shots and abandoning the location roll, or waiting on the parry roll until the hit location is known. Another good example is rolling for initiative, which has generated hours of painful argument about what in the world it represents in-game, at the moment of the roll relative to in-game time.(For anyone who thinks Edwards is exaggerating about initiative, I point you to the history and multiple iterations of initiative and action-economy rules for Rolemaster.)My puzzle with simulation and D&D players is this: I am a 20-year Rolemaster GM and player. I have played RuneQuest and Stormbringer and CoC more, I think, than most posters on these boards. I understand simulationist gaming. But what all those games have in common is that they reject most of D&D's non-simulationist elements (they even try to avoid metagamed action economies, although not entirely successfully). If simulationism is such a big thing for D&D players, why aren't they all playing HARP (or RM, or RQ - GURPS and HERO might be a bridge too far in virtue of their thorough-going points-buy PC build).4e, on the other hand, rather than rejecting those non-simulationist elements of D&D, embraces them and develops them in interesting and in some cases powerful new directions. Yet gets derided for being non-D&D. Mechanically, I find it truer to what makes D&D D&D than 3E, which to me is a pale shadow of AD&D's non-sim combat engine combined with a pale shadow of RQ or RM ultra-sim skills.That's not to say that anyone has to enjoy anything ahead of anything else. But for someone like me who has spent a long time playing and enjoying serious simulationist RPGs, and who went to them in part out of dissatisfaction with the non-sim mechanics of D&D, to see 4e attacked for not being a sim game is somewhat bizarre.</blockquote>

Verification