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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8963758" data-attributes="member: 42582">Please point me to this record.Edwards is a huge Champions player, and Champions is a primordial Sim game.You can read him <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">here</a> saying thatPound for pound, Basic Role-Playing from The Chaosium is perhaps the most important system, publishing tradition, and intellectual engine in the hobby - yes, even more than D&D. It represents the first and arguably the most lasting, influential form of uncompromising Simulationist design.Where is this alleged failure to give simulationism its due?Micah Sweet, I don't know what your play history is with Champions/Hero, RQ, RM, C&S, GURPS or similar, classic purist-for-system RPGs. What things is Edwards saying about them that you disagree with? My play experience with RM is massive, and with RQ and allied systems is well above zero. And in my view Edwards is an insightful commentator on the, which is unsurprising given his own experiences with Champions and RQ.I don't really see how this bears upon whether what he says about purist-for-system simulationism is true or false.I've played thousands of hours of RM. I don't need Edwards judgement - abrasive or otherwise - to tell me whether or not that was valuable RPGing. I can work that out for myself. (Some of it was time-sinky. Some of it was wonderful. I got better at it after I read Edwards's essays.)I'm interested in analysis of RPGing. My assertion is that what distinguishes purist-for-system RPGing from other approaches is the emphasis on resolution process (ie the system in action without the need for participant decision-making) and certain associated approaches to framing and consequence narration. There is nothing in purist-for-system RPGing that involves "trying to simulate a world", which as [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has pointed out is a quixotic goal.The point can be reinforced in other ways too. For instance, both RuneQuest and HeroWars/Quest can be used to play in Glorantha. Glorantha doesn't become a more or less "real" setting depending on which PC build and resolution system is used.In my Prince Valiant game the setting is a loose interpretation of mediaeval Europe. That is pretty real, and we can get as fine-grained as we want, with our Celtic Britons and our Celtic Dacians our Huns and Constantinople and Cyprus and our use of a historical atlas to work out where the castles are in Cyprus.. That doesn't have any bearing on the fact that Prince Valiant is not a purist-for-system simulationist RPG.From the point of view of GM prep, this appears to be a desire to write a "setting bible" that is (perhaps) updated from time to time.From the point of view of action resolution, this appears to be a desire to resolve actions through a combination of metagame-free resolution process and GM decision-making by extrapolation from the prep.These are well-known approaches to RPGing. No one thinks they don't exist: they were practically normative from c 1980 to c 2010.The RPGs most frequently used to pursue this approach are AD&D and 3E D&D (and variants thereof). I reckon the majority of GURPS play also probably aims for this, and quite a bit of RQ play too.</blockquote>

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