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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4035079" data-attributes="member: 4937">At heart, I'm really a 'narrator' type-player.  What I want to be doing is creating a story.  That's why I mostly DM, I think, even though I enjoy being a player.  (That, and most of the time after I play a while, the rest of the players decide I should be the DM and I'm 'volunteered' on the basis of the fact that otherwise there won't be a game.)However, the reason that despite this I'll never let 'simulation' die - even if I have to dig up its body and reanimate it - is that it doesn't really matter if the game rules are intended to be the physics of the game world.  Like it or not, sooner or latter they get volunteered for the job on the basis of the fact that otherwise there won't be a game.  Sooner or later, the games rules end up defining how the world works, and once that happens glaring violations of the rules end up detracting from the game and story of the game in the same way that glaring violations of logic and cause and effect detract from a movie.  It doesn't matter how good your intentions are.  It doesn't matter if you understand that the spirit of the rules or the needs of the story are more important than the rules.  All that does is delay the inevitable.  Sooner or later, everything will either conform to the rules or the 'audience' will rebel because they'll feel cheated.  They'll feel that your violation of the rules is just lazy sloppy story telling by someone who doesn't care or isn't able to do it right.  And sooner or later, you going to feel the same about yourself - and you'll realize that your probably right.And this is why a rules set has to be well thought out.  When it comes down to it, what we think of as a 'good rules set' is one that - one way or the other - doesn't much get in the way of the game and the story.  And that means that it has to be both superficially good when the detail would get in the way by jolting the players out of thier in-game reverie, and have depths for when its superficiality jars the players sense of belief in the story.There are good reasons for having good rules that you'd probably almost never use because the situation would just almost never come up.  Because sooner or later you are going to find that your game 'matures' (or moves on to some different terroritory if you prefer a more neutral word) where suddenly these things are coming up, and suddenly you need detail because taking things happens 'just because' becomes as hard as accepting 'you missed' or 'I shot you' just because.</blockquote>

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