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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4246766" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think every sim game is abashedly narrativist or gamist, but I do think you are right to say that every sim game needs a metagame to establish the point of the sim (as Lost Soul says).The difference between sim and narr/gamism is that the metagame happens in character build and campagin/encounter design (these are all done so as to facilitate exploration of the right thing) rather than during the course of play (eg no metagame in action resolution). Ron Edwards I think acknowledges this in his essay on sim in which he complains that sim gaming texts frequently don't do a good enough job of handling this metagame asepct (and so, for example, two players turn up to the game with an assassin and a paladin, because no metagame discussion & resolutioin took place in advance).My own belief is that sim can be a useful platform for narrativist provided that the players are able to have some control over the content of the simulation. Now in your post above you try to do a reductio on sim play, by arguing (as I take it) that it is either pure GM railroading, or else really something else, because the players (in having some control over the sim) are exercising agency.I don't agree with your argument, because I think you are leaving out one very common aspect of sim play: the players railroad themselves (eg by specifying a personality for their PC and then sticking to it - D&D alignments are a crass example of this, Pendragon passions or HERO/GURPS personality flaws a more sophisticated example).In my experience, this sort of sim play can drift into lowkey vanilla narrativism when the players realise that instead of being beholden to pre-determined personalities for their PCs, they can shape their PCs (both in terms of mechanical development and non-mechanical asepctes of personality development - though in many games, including RM, the two are intertwined) in order to pursue a thematic point. This tends to be accompanied by a shift out of actor stance ("true roleplaying" according to many sim players) into author stance.I don't think the sort of narrativist game I'm talking about is going to deliver the most profound insights of all time into the human condition - but then, to be honest, I'm not 100% sure that a session of I Kill Puppies for Satan or Life With Master will either (though I have no doubt that both are very good games).I think you are right about this.I don't know that the RM game I play is entirely coherent - for example, it uses a roughly narrativist XP system (XPs for accomplishing goals) but getting a level allows the player to spend simulationist-style currency (development points derived from stats) according to his or her own metagame agenda (ie narrativist or gamist character build). But the incoherence doesn't affect play too badly. One reason for preferring HARP over RM is that it tries a little harder to achieve (and can be more easily drifted to fully achieve) coherence in character build, with fully narrativist XP, development points and fate points.To look at it in another way: Suppose you took TRoS and stripped away the Spiritual Attributes - you have mechanics to support a game of detailed, gritty interpersonal combat. Then suppose you added in other aspects to character build - detailed knowledge skills, social skills, magic skills and spells - which gave players a lot of control over when and if their players get into combat. And suppose you tweaked the combat rules a little so that a reasonably experienced PC, even against a roughly equal foe, was able to exercise a high degree of control over the danger faced in an encounter and the risk s/he wishes to take. Then you have RM (it does the last bit via its attack/parry rules - an interesting case of a simulationist mechanic serving a narrativist purpose) - and like TRoS, it can still be a game about what is worth killing and what is worth dying for. The lack of Spritual Attributes/Fate Points can make things a little hairy at the edges (there's no narrativist mechanical buffer for a player who miscalculates) but most of the time (at least at mid-levels and above) the system can muddle through.</blockquote>

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