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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5781891" data-attributes="member: 42582">I brought it in, as an explanation for why simulationist mechanics (and other sorts of mechanics that focus on, or encourage, exploration in the Forge sense) can cause problems for non-simulationist play.One example: spells that have durations of 10 min/lvl, or low single digit hours per level. A player who has his/her PC cast such a spell has a natural incentive to get the maximum benefit from it. And therefore has a natural incentive to care fairly precisely about the passage of time in some detail - did that negotation take 1 hour (my spell is still up), or 90 minutes (oops, I'm only 7th level, my spell dropped)? Did the trip through the woods take 5 hours or 7 hours?And suddenly crisp scene framing, and scene conclusion, is gone out the window!There are solutions - the GM can make (more or less arbitrary) calls. But this runs the risk of being arbitrary. The GM can roll percentile dice, or even let the player roll a percentil die, to see if the spell is still up. (I used this method from time to time GMing Rolemaster.) This is a type of ignoring, supension, or ad hoc variation, of the action resolution mechanics. I'm not too fussed about how excactly one describes it, but it's the sort of adjudication I would rather the game mechanics not compel me, as a GM, to make.Now I'm not saying that those sorts of spell durations are in any absolute sense bad. For those who want to play Gygaxian or Pulsipherian D&D, for example, they're great. They introduce another element of operational complexity into the game, and provide an opportunity for players who are careful in their use of ingame time to be rewarded. (Provided the GM is good at tracking such time. Classic D&D advice is full of guidelines and techniques intended to help the GM both calculate time passed in a fair manner - look at how much of this there is in Gygax's DMG, for example - and also to keep track of it without timekeeping completely bogging down play.)And maybe some pure simulationists like that sort of stuff as well - detailed timekeeping supports the goal of "immersion" into the fiction.But this sort of stuff is death to vanilla narrativism. Which goes back to my earlier point - a system which supports "deep" simulation is not necessarily suited to supporting other playstyles, even if it provides various sorts of shortcuts through the detail.</blockquote>

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