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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 5765005">I think the issue isn't so much about "how much simulation" the game contains, but whether the mechanics that do exist in the game disrupt suspension of disbelief. There will of course be varying degrees of reaction, but on the whole I think you can produce a game using this baseline assumption and it could be something would would appeal to a wider audience. For instance you could still make 5E with many of the playability considerations that 4E assumed. But each innovation has to be carefully considered. There are going to be cases where this will be very difficult (I think healing surges are an example of something that appeals to people who want the game to play a certain way but run into some belivability issues with certain gamers). In these instances I would say you remove the mechanic and replace it with something else or you revise it.   Here I think you are talking about granularity and size of the rules system (rules heavy versus rules medium or light). You can have consistency without devising mechanics for for all the effects of fireball (this is actually another issue in my opinion as the only place I've really seen this come up is this thread). That is really more of how deep the rules are, and how many things in the setting they address. Consistency is still important even in a rules light game though. There is nothing rules light or heavy about Healing surges and describing what happens to wounded characters. But the consistency issue emerges. What happens when you apply this mechanic to this situation. It may produce logically consistent rresults in 5 out of 8 scenarios, but if it produces illogical results in the three remaining ones that could produce believability concerns.  Consistency keeps getting brought up by people who think believability is important. So I think it is a valid thing to consider. There may be some width to the term itself that is creating a problem in this discussion however.   I think it is a mistake to see this as a simulationist concern. People who want heavy simulation play rolemaster or harnmaster. But there are those of us in the middle who want the game to hit a number of sweet spots (I want balance, I want playability, I want flavor, I want believability). The issue with 4E isn't that it is a bad game (it does what it set out to do very well), but that it is perhaps too narrow in its focus to attract the core D&D audience. Emulating heroic action tale is fine, but in previous editions the game has been used for so much more than that. So suddenly you have lots of folks who found the previous system broad enough to do other things, and now it seems it isn't. If D&D were going after a smaller more focused audience like Savage Worlds is, I'd say keep going in that direction. But D&D has always been the standard fantasy RPG. In order to hold that place it has to appeal to the largest number of fantasy gamers possible.</blockquote>

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