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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4239981" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not necessarily "fade into the background", because when playing RM (the game I play the most) the rules are very much there and in your face. It's more that, at every moment of rules resolution, you know what in-game state or property is represented by the mechanical operation you are performing. There is no fortune-in-the-middle in RM.I am a lawyer, and accept your points about interpretation in relation to normative rules. But descriptive rules (eg those of natural science) are arguably different, and not in need of interpretation in the same way.Simulationism (especially purist-for-system) aspires to produce rules that can be treated as descriptive in that way (although they are also normative, as they dictate the parameters of player action in playing the game). It's a difficult task. It's a cause of tremendous rules bloat in RM, for example. There can be a ton of frustration - but also a type of bizarre satisfaction in making it work. At the moment, my group is using this system as an extremely intricate simulationist chassis for vanilla narrativist play.The next game I'm hoping to run, once my current RM campaign finishes (it's getting close to its end) is a modified version of HARP. This is roughly RM light for character build and action resolution mechanics, but with quite different XP rules from official RM (I am using a version of those rules at the moment for RM), and with Fate Point mechanics, both of which are intended to give the game a much more narrativist focus.That all sounds to me like vanilla narrativism, not illusionism, because the player control is genuine and the GM is just one (perhaps pre-eminent, but not overwhelming) participant among others.I think that Ron Edwards, in his GNS essays, overemphasises the artistic dimension of narrativism. He is quite critical of pastiche, for example, whereas I think that material that is mostly pastiche can still have some sort of (perhaps rather lowkey) thematic or aesthetic significance for the players who actually create it.</blockquote>

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