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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8621920" data-attributes="member: 7032025">To simplify things to the extreme, from my perspective:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Simulationist comes from the story and the narration: someone wants to cast a tornado of flame, how do I implement this in the game's term. I choose this on purpose to show that it's not realism, it simulates something happening in a non-real game world.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Gamist from the game's engine, I want to create an effect that doers X damage in Y area with Z effect, how do I describe it narratively.</li> </ul>For me, the advantage of the gamist view is that it creates something which is balanced and controllable. If you allocate that power to a class, you can then balance another class to have something similar in technical power.My only (personal) problem with that is that I don't care about technical balance in general, I care about the story and the narration. As a DM, I have so many tools at my disposal to make sure that players have (roughly equal) fun (and that the fun of one does not destroy the fun of another) that I consider technical balance to be very unimportant, especially when it's not what a lot of my players are looking for either.And the problem is when the gamist aspect creates constraints on my narration, whether because it's blatant or because it generates discussions that are focussed on the technical aspect of the game. One of my major problems is about grids and maps, there are no grids in my game worlds, I don't want to have maps prepared, especially ones with squares all over them, and I don't want creatures to be aligned precisely and people counting squares. If I want people to be clustered, or fighting back to back, or hiding in a doorway or behind a corner, I want to imagine them there, describe them there just like in any work of the genre. I don't want, as happened in 3e and 4e, to have a DM tell me: OK, you were whispering in each other's ear and want to fight back to back, but now I'm putting you there and there on a grid just because the game system requires it.And honestly, even if you have players who are challenged by TotM and spatial location (I know there are people like this), and even if you want to use beautiful maps, you don't need a grid. Position and distances do not have to be precise, people are moving around anyway, and most maps and VTTs do NOT need grids on them.Now, of course, if some players want to play in a gamist fashion, or really tactically, it's fine as well, it's just a question of preference, and there are editions which support this way better than 5e. But it's why, with our preferences at our tables, we are extremely happy with 5e, fuzzy rulings, and more than anything the return of Theater of the Mind as the basic option, because it allows us to have a game that is way more simulationist of the genre (and therefore narrativist) than gamist. Again, preferences only, not looking down on other ways of gaming.</blockquote>

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