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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8301452" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I find that a big problem is that people mean two entirely orthogonal things when they say "realism" or even "verisimilitude," and thus the conversation gets all tangled up, with both sides getting deeply confused by the other's position. "Realism"/"verisimilitude" is used for covering both what I call "groundedness" and what I call "proceduralism."A "grounded" work is one that presents sensible, self-consistent consequences and which explains exceptional cases satisfactorily. Most superhero works are particularly non-grounded, which is why references to them get thrown around pejoratively in these discussions: superheroism has a lot of genre conventions that are maintained because, without them, the story becomes boring or ends far too quickly. Secret identities that don't get revealed despite the ease with which they could be, "rescues" of love interests that don't shatter their all-too-human spines, etc. Works like Watchmen and Kingdom Come attempt to provide a more grounded take while still being superhero stories.Proceduralism, on the other hand, is about the predictability of outcomes. It doesn't matter if it's entirely ungrounded that gaining five levels causes a perfectly ordinary Fighter to be able to survive a 100' fall with nary a broken bone, or that a night's rest can take you from Death's door to being right as rain. What matters, for proceduralism, is that the process of going from any given initial state to the final state is clear, has its own internal logic, and avoids ambiguity, arbitrariness, or interruption of the causal chain as much as humanly possible. Events happen for specific causes, and a given cause either always produces a given event for a given context, or probabilistically sets a fixed range of outcomes for that context.A superhero game can be perfectly procedural, without being particularly grounded at all. Conversely, a hypothetical noir detective game might be perfectly grounded, but especially non-procedural (e.g. I'd argue PbtA, Fate, and DitV care little about being procedural but are especially concerned about being well-grounded.) Fans of ultra-simulationist games value both groundedness and proceduralism extremely highly, and because of the common thread of "consistency" in both concepts, they often conflate the two despite them being orthogonal. To use your non-game example, time-skips are grounded but not procedural. By comparison, having a displayed timer ticking down, that never skips any time but which is not physically part of the world, is a procedural but not grounded technique of adding tension: the timer isn't attached to anything concrete, but does communicate to the audience that these events are occurring "in real time." (A Greek chorus, or a Shakespearean soliloquy addressing the audience, would be other examples of narrative tools that aren't very grounded but are procedural, showing the audience what's going on in order to heighten the experience.)  I'd like to dig into this more, because I'm not sure I see how the latter could be a "game" in the sense that I would use for an RPG. "What is the best story development for me here?" is...well, I just don't see it being subject to the kind of analysis that "what would this character do now" or "what is mechanically wise to do now" are. All three questions have some subjective elements, but I don't really see how it's even possible to have objective elements for the story-development one, whereas there are pretty clear (if contextual) limits on what a character might choose, and objective rules limits on how a character can mechanically perform. Can you give some examples of how these story-direction things would work in a game-able, analysis-friendly sense? Or, failing that, why my expectation of gameability and analysis is mistaken? (I'd prefer the former but will accept the latter.)For me, the difference lies in intent, and the tools you avail yourself with. With "social gamesmanship," the intent is "manipulate the adjudicator until she gives me what I want, knowing that some gestures on my part will not serve that end." The tools one uses, then, are outward-directed and manipulative (in a mild way, but still manipulative): one avails oneself of all things that will achieve this end, and no tool that is plausible to achieve it is off the table.With "same-page thinking," the intent is much more self-directed or bilateral, "I will adjust my approach until the things I seek are compatible with what the adjudicator seeks." This leads to diplomacy rather than manipulation, where the goal is to reach consensus, not to get one's desired outcome and taking any plausible route to get there. This means you do not avail yourself of any tool that might get you what you want, but rather restrict yourself to those tools that the adjudicator would approve of you using.It's a matter of what matters: getting what you want by shaping another's perceptions sufficiently, or making what you want compatible with what another already perceives.This strikes at the heart of my opposition to illusionism. An illusionist game is one where it really is a monologue, but the players are deceived into believing it is a game. Whatever does stick, does so only by the illusionist DM's sufferance; choices and outcomes not only can be but will be secretly overridden whenever and wherever the DM thinks they "should" be.I think the problem here is that a DM should have some biases. They're biased toward an entertaining experience, for example. A truly neutral arbitrator wants to be as distant from the specific emotional investments of their clients as possible, so they can render fair judgment between all parties. A DM, I would argue, should not be so distant, because the very fact that they CAN adapt to the preferences and desires of their players is vital to what makes TTRPGs great.</blockquote>

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