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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8621994" data-attributes="member: 16814">To elaborate a bit on D&D being gamist vs simulationist (it's absolutely not narrativist, outside 4e which is gamist or narrativist), almost all of the core systems of D&D are gamist.  They're creating a game foremost are are largely unconcerned with internal cause in their approach.  You can easily play it in this mode with no problems.  Again, B/X is the cleanest example of this gamist approach to system.However, there's always been a strong drift to many tables in D&D towards wanting simulationist games.  Where the point of play is to experience the fantasy world, where the world operates in a coherent and causal manner.  So, from an early point, many of the gamist elements of D&D were <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reify" target="_blank">reified</a> into having some fictional world existence and causality.  And this grew.  The entire point of a "living world sandbox" is simulationist.  However, the D&D system is bad at producing this from play, so the growth of the role of the GM changed from neutral arbiter of the rules to resolve odd corner cases or conflicts to having authority to override the rules when they "don't make sense."  And what made sense got progressively blurred into wider categories such that you see modern arguments that the GM can just do whatever and they have this authority because the rules hint at it.  And the rules only hint because they are trying to not push players that want this out.  But what this means is that the GM is replacing the system, effectively becoming the system, and then relying on the GM's ideas of cause/effect in the system to generate play.  It's abandonment of the existing system to replace it with GM as system to create the simulationist play desired.  This, though, gets weirdly attributed to D&D as a feature of D&D -- that you can ignore it.D&D is ultimately written as a Gamist RPG.  It can be drifted into Simulationist play, but usually by dint of the GM taking over more of the system.  It's not really capable of Narrativist play at all.  4e, again, a notable and unique exception.</blockquote>

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