Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9569349" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that it's obvious that a role-playing game as it has been played and continues to have been played is some part game, some part simulation, and some part story - and probably several other things besides.  "RPG" covers a lot of territory, so that we could say "Nethack" is an RPG and "Mass Effect", and "D&D" and "Dogs in the Vineyard" and "10 Candles".I don't agree with all the elements of GNS theory, least of all that those three things are always competing and you can only support one (or should only support one).  But in this case I do think there is an inherent conflict between the RPG as a game (that people participate and make choices in) and the RPG as a simulation (where we are trying to bring to life some fictional reality in a shared space).  The game part of the scene wants to give the player as much freedom to direct his role in the story as possible.  The simulation part of the scene however says, "But you aren't yourself in the fiction, but are instead playing a character whose choices should depend on their desires, emotions, feelings, and so forth and not your own."  I don't think there is any one right answer here.  I don't even think there are two right answers here.  I think you have to consider the table and the goals of the group and come up with procedures that address those two (or more) different competing interests.  I outlined above how I do it, without addressing I think the real problem being addressed which is - "What is really the best engine for determining how a character should feel and behave?"  I decidedly come down for various reasons on the side of "Most of the time, the player best knows who the character is and is best equipped to decide how the character would respond to any given situation."  There is a lot of reasons by that but one of them is that it avoids me passing undesirable metagame information to the players.  If I have an NPC persuade the players to do something, I don't have to dice for whether he persuaded the characters.  If I did have to dice as to whether the NPC persuaded the characters, then I'd also have to tell the player, "You've been persuaded by his words." or "You've not been persuaded by his words." and in doing so I fear I'd give hints to the players as to what they should or shouldn't have been persuaded about.  I want to avoid as much as possible conducting the scene out of character and passing metagame information like, "You've successfully been deceived."The truth is that the game can be made "most fun" but the simulation can never be made "most perfect".  It's beyond my power to make the simulation perfect and the metagame is always in play.  And even if I could make the simulation perfect, the only way to do it was to remove the players from it and not give them a chance to make choices.  You'd have to somehow quantify the whole of a character's personality and then dice for every choice to be made in every situation and somehow have this "engine" be more correct in its judgment than the player.  Such a simulation would have more rules than a Large Language Model, and be totally unplayable as a game - you could observe it but that would be all.</blockquote>

Verification