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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8966794" data-attributes="member: 42582">A thought or two prompted by these posts:Who doesn't like things making sense - a consistent fiction - in their RPGing? Setting aside deliberately nonsensical set-ups like Toon and perhaps Paranoia, what are the possible exceptions? There are "funhouse" dungeons like White Plume Mountain, Castle Amber or even Tomb of Horrors, but these still assume consistency at the local scale (eg the inverted ziggurat room in WPM is silly, but you can still solve it by reasoning about how volumes of water will behave in a room of that shape). There is "arena"-style play (whether PvP or PCs v monsters/NPCs), but that seems almost a limit case of RPGing.But there are different ways of providing consistency. This can be done by way of process - eg a carefully worked out set of resolution rules, a carefully worked out set of content-introduction rules (such as ecologically sound random encounter tables) - or by way of GM decision-making as things go along. The process approach can be consistent with gamist play, for the reasons you give - I say "can be", not "will be" because the processes may be so convoluted (imagine an interlocking system of yearly, monthly, daily and turn-by-turn event/encounter charts) that they are not in practice solvable. The GM decision-making approach tends not to be suitable for gamist play, again for the reasons you give - especially if some of the consistency that is maintained applies directly to the PCs and hence to the players' action declarations (eg "No one has ever broken in here in 100 years, therefore your solution that you've just come up with must have already been tried and failed, therefore I'm now retrofitting on an in-fiction reason why it fails" - I think someone upthread mentioned more-or-less this exact example).But even the process approach, where the process is solvable, may not support gamist play. The processes may be too brutal in their consequences (whether these are deterministic or probabilistic consequences) to support gamism - RM/RQ-esque crit systems in combat can be an example of this. Or consider a process aimed at simulating a "living, breathing world": if it generates events/encounters that are primarily mundane, with little or no prospect of threat, reward etc, then there may not really be anything for the gamist player to do. In practice, I think this latter state of affairs is part of the explanation for the degenerate sort of play one hears about from time-to-time where the players rob shops, burn down farmhouses etc: the GM's focus is on presenting the "realistic" world of the village, the shopkeepers etc; the players' motivations are straightforwardly gamist; and disaster is the predictable result.A slightly less degenerate/disastrous but similar sort of thing, that one hears about quite often (and that was an issue back in the late 70s/early 80s also), is groups who gave up on Classic Traveller because it's boring. This came up in a thread on these boards just this week! That also seems to me to be a result of a type of "living, breathing" sim approach on the GM's part simply not providing sufficient material for gamist players to work with. One can see the response to this unfolding over editions of Traveller: by 1982, the Traveller Book is including advice about how to use "illusionist" techniques that supplement or override the game's mechanical processes - both for content-introduction and for resolution - in order to make play more interesting. Of course, this undermines gamism in other ways - it's part of the high concept simulationist convergence of 1980s/90s RPGing that still reverberates today.</blockquote>

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