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<blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8966116" data-attributes="member: 7026617">The idea is, however, if the setup doesn't at least try to throw up a challenge--and in the case of some old simulationist ones it didn't--it isn't very gamist.&nbsp; Cooking the books isn't gamist, but setting things up with a challenge in mind in the first place kind of is.&nbsp; Because if most things are either nearly impossible or really easy, its not very interesting from a game standpoint.&nbsp; Whereas to the simulationists, that's only relevant to the degree the setting doesn't make sense when its true.(I mean, to use an example that comes up fairly often, walking into a problem you can't deal with and at least had to make extraordinary efforts to foresee&nbsp; wouldn't have been considered beyond the pale for them.&nbsp; The most you'd need to do was make sure the situation was such that it made sense in the setting.&nbsp; For example if you've got a dragon who kills everybody who gets within a given area, and where visibility is such that you aren't liable to realize until its too late, all you'd know is that an area had a reputation for people going in and not coming out--which could be signalling a lot of different things in a gamist context, the simplest being &quot;proceed with caution&quot;, but in this case the only thing that was liable to help was avoiding it altogether.&nbsp; And to the simulationists in RGFA, that'd have been okay occasionally.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Thomas Shey, post: 8966116, member: 7026617"] The idea is, however, if the setup doesn't at least [I]try[/I] to throw up a challenge--and in the case of some old simulationist ones it didn't--it isn't very gamist. Cooking the books isn't gamist, but setting things up with a challenge in mind in the first place kind of [I]is[/I]. Because if most things are either nearly impossible or really easy, its not very interesting from a game standpoint. Whereas to the simulationists, that's only relevant to the degree the setting doesn't make sense when its true. (I mean, to use an example that comes up fairly often, walking into a problem you can't deal with and at least had to make extraordinary efforts to foresee wouldn't have been considered beyond the pale for them. The most you'd need to do was make sure the situation was such that it made sense in the setting. For example if you've got a dragon who kills everybody who gets within a given area, and where visibility is such that you aren't liable to realize until its too late, all you'd know is that an area had a reputation for people going in and not coming out--which could be signalling a lot of different things in a gamist context, the simplest being "proceed with caution", but in this case the only thing that was liable to help was avoiding it altogether. And to the simulationists in RGFA, that'd have been okay occasionally.) [/QUOTE]

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