NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9711637" data-attributes="member: 6790260">See, this shifting meaning of "simulation"--on the one hand, precise and predictable modeling of physical(ish) situations and their consequences, on the other, accurately capturing the conventions and flavor/tone/structure of a specific style/author/genre/etc.--are precisely why I dislike that "process-sim" got lumped in with...I don't remember the term but something like "genre-sim".I separate these things, and find it significantly easier when we make clear that, though the two have similarities, they're very different beasts with very different goals.On the one hand, you have process-sim, which I just call "simulation." Specifically, I have a few (non-exhaustive) "game-(design-)goals" which reflect what a game is made for doing. One of them, I call "Groundedness & Simulation" or G&S. Groundedness is the thing we evaluate with, and Simulation is the state or process we pursue. I've already defined "groundedness" here and it seemed relatively copacetic to you, so I won't repeat that. "Simulation", here, is that whole iterative-world-engine concept. It will never 100% perfectly meet that goal, but that's what it's aiming for. The idea being, we sort of build up how the world works. Not quite "from first principles", but that's the ethos behind it, if you will. Naturalistic reasoning is king.Conversely, we have what I call "Conceit & Emulation". The "conceit" is some kind of imposed structure, theme, concept, etc., because that is the thing the group wishes to explore. "Supers" is one of the most distinct such concepts, but there are others, e.g. "grimdark post-apocalypse" is another distinctive one, or "Redwall-like stories", "Arabian Nights", "Murder mystery", or the like. These are things where it's, in a certain sense, partially "top-down" rather than the pure "bottom-up" approach of G&S. We're here to explore a thematic, literary, or tonal context--so the world needs must suit that context. We expect, accept, and use the Conceit as our guide, and thus seek to emulate some particular space as a result--even if that space is not grounded in the way we would expect a "similar to real life" story to be grounded. Again, going back to Supers, it's pretty silly from a pure-physicalist perspective that titanic strength would result in being able to lift whole buildings by just pulling them out of the ground--that's patently un-grounded, but it's an iconic visual and an enjoyable experience, so it's accepted as part of the Conceit in order to bring about the Emulation we wish to create when we set out to play Supers RPGs.(There are two other game-(design-)purposes, again a non-exhaustive list as I don't claim to know everything, but they're less relevant in this context.)</blockquote>

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