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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8268353" data-attributes="member: 42582">My own view is that Edwards is right to draw the distinction. He does so, in a slightly negative way, in <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/" target="_blank">his gamism essay</a> where he mentions "the person who wants to see full-blown Narrativist values 'just appear' from a Simulationist-play foundation. It's possible, but not as easy and intuitive as it would seem."The more that the focus is on "exploration" per se - be that the players just enjoying the characters they've come up with, or the GM and/or players enjoying the setting, or some interaction of these (eg seeing how the GM riffs off the players riffing of the GM's initial situation) - then I think the less likely it is that story will emerge. Of course there will be a series of events, and they may be engaging, charming, even thrilling - but will they be dramatic in a story-telling sense?Of systems I'm familiar with, the one that might come closest to this is The Dying Earth - but this is at least in part because it pack so much dramatic trajectory into its PC build rules (eg temptations) and its reward rules (taglines), and also its resolution rules can compel PC behaviour (persuasion rules). I believe that it's for these reasons that Edwards classifies it as a "narrativist"-oriented system even though it doesn't actually satisfy his formal definition of such a system (ie it doesn't expressly set-out to address a "premise"/theme in the literary sense thereof).My play of Rolemaster, over nearly two decades, shifted in a non-self-conscious way from simulationism towards story now, but as I posted upthread this did lead to a lot of bumping into the minutiae of the system. I would also say that the "now" in our "story now" RM play was often "story next session" - there is such a lot of system/mechanical overhead in RM that often that would soak up the bulk of a session which would become, in effect, a lead-up to the enusing pay-off. These days I wouldn't have the patience for that. I want things to move along at a speedier clip!</blockquote>

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