NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5791395" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think so. Others apparently disagree. It also depends on what weight you're giving "honest". Is he lying? I don't think there's much evidence of that. Is he trying hard enough to put himself in others' shoes? When I read his essays and his posts, I think he tries about as hard as any RPG commentator that I've read, but others mightn't think so.I certainly enjoy simulationiost play - both RQ/RM purist-for-system, and CoC high concept - and I don't feel slighted or misdescribed by Edwards or the GNS idea. I think that they are both exploratory play, although what is being explored is obviously very different in each case.Trickier, in my view, is Edwards' claim that the ideal of a 1:1 correlation beteen mechancial resolution and ingame causal processes is at the heart of all simulationist play. This is obviously true for purist-for-system sim, but is it true for high concept? One reason to think that it is is that, when it breaks down, then space for the metagame wedge opens up (eg think about the endless hit point disputes, either driven by gamists whose PCs jump over 100 foot cliffs, or the more narrativistically-inclined who want "0 hp" to correlate to dead, or swooned, or disarmed, or . . ., as the mood strikes them). Conversely, part of what makes immersion very easy in CoC (at least in my experience) is that the mechanics make it very clear what is happening to your character, so you know who it is you're meant to be "inhabiting", and what the events are to which you are adding colour and characterisation.Is this a plausible part of a "comprehenisve" theory? So far in this thread I've heard that GNS is inadequate in its characterisation of simulationist play, but the only account of why that is so (that I recall at the moment, anyway) is Rogue Agent - namely, by running together purist-for-system and "storyteller", GNS obscures that storytellers are really frustrated narrativists. But is this claim by Rogue Agent any better grounded than Edwards' claim? I'm not sure, but I see a lot of hostility on these boards to players with their metagame agendas, so I'm not sure that Rogue Agent is right.TL;DR - I feel that Edwards gets my simulationist experiences right, but I'm not a big player of the the sort of game whose classification seems to be controversial, namely, GM-driven, plot-heavy high concept which (unlike CoC, at least as I've experienced it) is not expressly predicated on the players just sitting back and enjoying the ride.</blockquote>

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