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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8623446" data-attributes="member: 42582">As presented in their rulebooks and typically played, and using the Forge terminology, most of those are either high concept simulationism (a lot of D&D, a lot of TSR Marvel, Star Wars, Cyberpunk, L5R) or else gamism (a lot of D&D, quite a bit of TSR Marvel, some approaches to Cyberpunk, a lot of Palladium). A given group might even move between the two priorities in a session of play.High-concept sim is used to describe the approach to play where the GM is laying out the setting and story, and you're immersing in your PC, and imagining what is going on, and picking up on the GM's hooks and cues, and it's like being there.Gamisim is used to describe the bit where the story falls away a bit, and everyone is rolling the dice and doing their best to beat the opponent/challenge the GM has put in front of you.If you ever had the experience where the GM really wanted the players to enjoy their setting and story, but the players were more interested in building optimised PCs who could curb-stomp anything the GM threw at them, then you had what Edwards would call a clash of agendas: the GM was wanting to run a high-concept sim game; but the players were wanting to play a gamist game.The one system you mentioned that I haven't commented on yet is Classic Traveller. There are different presentations of this - the 1977 version and the 1981 version. It's an early RPG so both are a bit "raw", especially the 1977 version. If you played Traveller in the form of roll up PCs, roll up a star map, and the PCs travel around the map trading and having encounters and sometimes getting into trouble, that was what Edwards calls "purist-for-system sim" - basically it's like inhabiting and exploring an imaginary sci-fi world, RuneQuest in space. But if your Traveller was more like the referee presenting patrons to your group, and you took the job and did the mission - basically a type of proto-Cyberpunk - then that would be high-concept sim.I don't think Traveller is very satisfying for gamist RPGing because it doesn't have enough scope for the players to flex their "I win" muscles (unless you were playing super-gonzo with everyone getting battle dress and plasma guns and taking down the Imperium, or something like that!): if you ever had players who found Traveller a bit "boring" or not really giving them the chance to develop and do things with their PCs, that sounds like a bit of a clash of agendas between players who want something more gamist and the limits of Traveller in that respect.I'll finish this part of my post by saying: we don't know one another outside of this forum, and all I've got to go on is your list of RPGs you've played, and your other posts that I've read. So the preceding is necessarily fairly general and broad-brush. If it doesn't resonate with you in any fashion at all, I guess it will reinforce you scepticism about the Forge terminology and analysis. But if any of it makes sense, or does kind-of fit with your experiences, it's not because I'm any kind of sage! It's because the Forge analysis is actually useful for understanding some of the basic trends and patterns in RPG design and RPG play.So you'd  know, then, that AW is very different from (say) playing White Plume Mountain in D&D.Here's one difference. In WPM, part of what the players are trying to do is minimise the risk to their PCs. Now, in reality no one wants zero risk because that would be boring. But the design of a module like WPM makes zero risk impossible in practical terms - eg it has a wandering monster table with wights on it! So one of the basic dynamics of play is the players trying to reduce all the risk they can, by clever dungeoneering, working out the traps and tricks, not getting surprised by all the monsters, etc. If the players are being clever about that, a GM who fudged things or introduced extra opposition because they thought the players had been getting things too easily would be tantamount to cheating.Compare AW: when everyone looks to the GM to see what happens next, the GM's job is to make a soft move, unless either (i) a player has just got a 6 or less result on a move, or (ii) a player hands a golden opportunity to the GM - in those two cases, the GM can make as hard a move as they like. And a soft move is always a way of increasing the pressure on the PCs, and thus the players. A GM who doesn't make soft moves that amp up the pressure isn't doing their job. And the game will break as a result, because without soft moves there is no underpinning for hard moves that have to be made on those 6- results.So GMing WPM and GMing AW are pretty different things. Part of the aspiration of the Forge analysis and terminology is to be able to talk about those differences.I don't think any of those terms have natural language meanings myself - perhaps "simulationism" does, meaning "being the goal or art of simulatiing something"? But not the other two.For what they mean, see my post 176 upthread.As to why we need jargon? If you want to talk about how Picasso differs from Monet differs from Michelangelo, you're going to need terminology. Probably my favourite sculpture is the Pieta in St Peters. I can explain a little bit what I find so astonishing about it: it's so modern, especially when compared to all the statues of Popes that can also be seen in St Peters. Part of what I see as modern in it is its sense of emotion, and resultant energy about to burst out: I can imagine Camus being moved by the Pieta, but not by any of those statues of Popes.But the preceding paragraph is pretty limited. A serious art critic (I'm not one) would have the vocabulary - beyond words like "modern", "emotion", "energy" - to describe what it is that I'm seeing in the Pieta, and why it reminds me of sculpture made 400 years later (eg Rodin) more than of works contemporary to it.The Forge terminology is trying to do something similar for RPG play and design. To really talk about what is involved in the play and GMing of AW, compared to WPM using AD&D, we need more terminology than just "player", "GM", "railroad" and "sandbox".</blockquote>

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