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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9713582" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes, I know. The structure of your play includes the GM using secret information to establish secret fictional positioning which is then used to resolve declared actions that involve looking, searching, wondering, etc - what one could very broadly call actions of "knowing" or "learning" about the PC's surroundings.We could talk about how those sorts of actions are declared and resolved across a range of other systems - eg how Wises work in Burning Wheel; how reading strange runes (which have been established as a scene distinction) works in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic; how I resolved the Insight check in 4e D&D that I posted about not too far upthread; how the GM of Dogs in the Vineyard actively reveals the town in play - but that would require looking at other structures of play beyond mainstream/conventional D&D.This example suggests a few things to me:(1) A focus on character wealth as a type of "victory" marker;(2) A lack of attention to the framework for declaring and resolving actions.I mean, it looks like it's supposed to be a "gotcha", about how the game will break (and similar posts were made upthread in response to the runes example, and over the years as well as 1,000,000 gp I've seen holy swords and other D&D-esque goodies). But as I already posted, in the same game as the strange runes the rune-reading PC succeeded in a roll to establish, as an asset, the dark elves' stash of faerie gold, which he ran away with, leaving the other PCs stuck in a fight at the bottom of the dungeon. The action declaration wasn't ridiculous, and its resolution didn't break the game.And to bring this back to "simulationism": why is what I've just described not simulationist? The game participants had a conception of the dark elves at the bottom of the dungeon, Vault of the Drow style. That conception was explored and developed; one of the participants introduced as part of that the idea of them having a stash of gold; and then the game system allowed that idea to be given concrete form in play. That is "heightened appreciation" of a subject matter. (As per [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER]'s conception of simulation in RPGing.)</blockquote>

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