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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6297074" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree that is one issue. For me, a bigger issue - one that I have actually encountered via many years of play - is that simulationist mechanics tend not to produce emotionally and dramatically satisfying situations and resolutions to those situations.While it might be the case that truth is stranger than fiction, on the whole fiction is more satisfying than truth. It has resolution. Not all fiction is contrived in the pejorative sense, but all stories are contrivances in at least a literal sense, of having been made up by someone for a reason.That is hard to get out of a simulationist game.Simulations of what?D&D has at least one fundamental difference from go: go has a finite number of possible move-types (and therefore a finite, through very large, number of possible game-states). The permitted moves in D&D (and hence the number of possible game-states) is unlimited. Rather than a list of permitted moves (as in chess, or go, or even Monopoly despite the colour of the latter which creates the veneer of simulation of the life of a tycoon), D&D uses the content of the shared fiction to constrain what is permissible. (For instance, if the GM describes a door in a dungeon, then the players are allowed to declare that their PCs try and dismantle it, take the timber for torches and fashion the metal components into crude weapons. This game move does not need to be written down in any rulebook in order to be permissible. The GM adjudicates it, at least in part, by reference to the content of the shared fiction eg how robust is the door? and how well equipped are the PCs for some impromptu demolition work?The fact that D&D depends upon fictions, in this sense, of course doesn't mean that it involves stories. Not all stories involve fictions (eg narrative history), and nor do all fictions involve stories (eg thought experiments used to prove or illustrate aspects of special relativity).</blockquote>

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