Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9788082" data-attributes="member: 42582">"Simulationism" - in the sense that the players of a RPG should have no aspiration beyond experiencing the fiction, as some combination of mechanics and GM narration present it to them - seems to have become a predominant orientation in the early-to-mid 1980s, and to have continued, perhaps in fluctuating degrees, since then. Classic D&D was not this sort of game: the aspiration of a player of (say) Tomb of Horrors or Gygax's Castle Greyhawk is to beat the dungeon, and thereby earn treasure and thus experience points. The fiction is a means to an end, not an end in itself."Simulationism", in the sense that the mechanics of a RPG should yield the fiction with little need for anyone to decide/inject their own view, has always been a minority approach to RPGing I think. RQ, RM, GURPS etc exemplify this, but they have never been predominant. 3E D&D seems to be the closest that D&D got to this, but it has so many other mechanical elements (both inherited from earlier D&D as well as of its own invention, like multi-classing and feats and so on) that it isn't really a sim game in this sense.There is also "simulationism" in the sense that each move/decision/roll made by a player should, in both its origin and its consequences, mirror some causal process that the player's character is engendering in the fiction. This can sometimes be a special case of the preceding paragraph, I guess. I don't think D&D has ever been this sort of game - attack rolls, saving throws, memorising spells, making decisions based on hit points remaining, etc tend - especially in combination - to lead to absurdity if interpreted through this sort of simulationist lens (see eg Order of the Stick).</blockquote>

Verification