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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8608630" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I posted, BW uses the trappings of classic simulationist RPGs for PC build. The PC sheet would warm the cockles of a RM player's heart! The Lifepaths are amazing. As a player, you can see the internal causal logic of the system manifesting in the process of building your PC. The contrast with PC build in (say) 4e D&D, or Agon, or even Prince Valiant, is striking.(There is also a contrast here with Torchbearer, which uses much the same basic character sheet, but uses a much less simuationist, much more "Pick one from list A, and one from list B, and . . ." approach to PC building. As befits its character as a homage to Moldvay Basic.)But actual play of BW is not simulationist at all! There is a superficial illusion of simulation in the rules for setting DCs, and for building a dice pool (if artha are ignored); but as soon as you get to the rules for narrating failures, and the rules for using or awarding artha, it becomes evident that these key drivers of play do not have any sort of goal of modelling in-fiction causal processes.The Riddle of Steel is similar in many ways, which is why it's fitting, and not coincidence, that Norwood wrote the Foreword for more recent editions of BW.Traveller PC build is, like BW's, highly simulationist - the lifepath process models the unfolding of the character's career. We get aging, and the notorious survival checks. (Yes, these also serve a risk-vs-reward function, but that doesn't stop them being part of the causal modelling, like RM's fumble rules.)The combat is similarly simulationist, although light on the details of injury (swooning/lightly unconscious, in a coma, dead) and (like BW, interestingly) adopting armour-as-defence-buff as opposed to RM's and RQ's armour-as-damage-reduction.But non-combat resolution is a mix. The patron encounter system can be understood and applied in a simulationist spirit, and so can the rules for writing computer programs. But the rules for chases (found in the Air/Raft skill entry, I think), for encounter avoidance, and for using vacc suits without incident - just to pick a few examples - are much closer to AW-style "moves" than to processes for modelling in-fiction causal processes. They set parameters around who can say what, but they don't tell us what has happened in the fiction. Someone has to make it up - usually the referee by default, though Traveller is pretty open to player input.EPT - at least in its classic OD&D-ish version - does not strike me as simulationist very much at all. It's kind of like NWP-proficiency era AD&D, but its resolution processes don't model in-fiction causal processes, and thereby determine the fiction, very much at all.It's the core of purist-for-system (or "process") simulation RPGing, which I think is pretty key to what the OP has in mind (though the OP isn't using that specific terminology).There are three reasons I don't think of 3E as a remotely successful simulationist design.First, its core resolution framework remains AC, hp and saving throws, and these are no more simulationist in 3E than they were in Gygax's AD&D.There are other parts of the system - its rules for combat manoeuvres and skills - that are closer to simulationist design, but they get swamped by the second and third reasons:Reason two: PC build is not remotely any sort of attempt to model in-fiction causal processes (only prestige class requirements get even with cooee of this). At each point - building a 1st level PC, levelling up, choosing feats and multiclassing, etc - it is just "pick from list A, pick from list B". Related to this is that a PC sheet is not even close to a total picture/presentation of the PC.Reason three: the system allows numbers to stack, and to grow, in ways which are purely mechanical in their significance but don't actually mean anything in the fiction. What is +30 natural amour, in the context of even a god of forging finding it a great task to forge +6 plate armour, which grants a bonus of around +15 to AC? It's just a number. Likewise having a +20 STR bonus, or +60 as opposed to +50 to pick pockets, etc.</blockquote>

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