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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8608657" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I haven't played those systems you give as examples, so I can't speak to their success, but given how often they're referenced I assume they do quite well. Overall, though, I do think simulationist design is difficult, in a way that narrativist and gamist design necessarily aren't, namely, that they have a sort of "additional requirement" outside of the question of whether they function as designed. A narrative-focused design is simply interested in whether it is effective at producing the types of narrative experiences the designer seeks. A gamist-focused design is in some sense even easier, since it only needs to be "a good game"; I don't actually think that makes it easy in an absolute sense, but relative to the others, it is the easiest of the three.Simulationism cannot just produce sensible results, though. It must be sensible at all the points between input and results, and it must be so even when subjected to unusual or unexpected inputs. That's what makes it hard. A hardcore gamist that runs into unusual or unexpected inputs is likely to just shrug and say "that's how the game works, you learn to play with the rules you have." (Though such areas are likely to get errata or updates in future revisions if they work substantially against the intended spirit of the game. This shows up a lot in how computer games are designed.) A narrativist game has more standards to meet, because it must produce an experience that reflects the right tropes, story pacing, etc. and those things are much harder to test than encounter pacing, HP recovery rates, resource schedules, etc., but those things are still in general referenced to a finite and somewhat definite list of things that need to be achieved (hence why most narrative games focus on a single genre rather than trying to capture ALL narratives EVER.) But a simulationist game can break down in its simulationism even if all the parts are working as intended, purely because you feed them data that wasn't expected or ask a question no one previously thought to ask. Your later examples with the places that 3e D&D fell down on simulation are exactly those sorts of places; the earlier ones, by comparison, are the gamist legacy of D&D that is too traditional for all but the hardest of hardcore simulationists to jettison (though you did, and still do, see a lot of people trying to rework AC as DR, for example, showing that even with some of those things, the urge toward greater simulationism is there.)</blockquote>

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