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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8626235" data-attributes="member: 6696971">The reason why the "why this and not that?" gets thrown around so often (often by me) is because it reveals that the overwhelming percentage of the time its a completely arbitrary line in the sand.  Its nearly always an autobiographical footnote about the person rather than a decision driven by evinced principles.That is a problem if you're going to put forth some iteration of the position "this is gamist nonsense" and/or "this violates internal causality"...and it becomes particularly fraught when you (a) don't like the game that you attribute this to consistently while (b) you like something else that can/should get dinged for the same thing while (c) you can't articulate the litmus test/line in the sand (precisely because it is something you've felt your way through, and brought in all of your biases and tribalism in the process, rather than conscientiously developed a principle-based working model).But that is just talking about commenters on an internet message board.When it comes to design?  If I'm playing Torchbearer (for instance), there are so many areas where if I'm someone of serious Process Simulationist priorities, I'm getting dinged left and right.  The Weather in Adventure and Wilderness phases but never in Camp/Town (oh, so the open market never suffers from a downpour that will close it down...oh, so our uncovered shelter of which we're spending the evening at isn't vulnerable to a downpour...etc) is just one.* So our rations always go stale when we return to town?  Always?  At the gates...like clockwork?  Uh huh...* So we're these hypercompetent adventurers that pretty much never fail at our tasks (Fail Forward Success but Condition/Twist rules Test resolution outside of Contests and Conflicts) but the world just aggressively grinds us down?  Good god...imagine what it must be like for the layfolks!  How does anyone survive to reach puberty in Torchbearer-land to support functioning steadings/villages/etc?  This world and the gods utterly hate us!* Its crazy how having a map suddenly alleviates all possible complications of the Journey/Wilderness!  The beasts of the land tend to their burrows and the skies part because I've got this rusty-trusty piece of marked parchment between my grubby fingers!* It always seems to happen that my Enemy enters stage right or my Family/Friends/Hometown gets put into the crosshairs or I'm put in a situation to fight for or forfeit my Belief/Creed on a "failed" Ask Around or Circles check!  Kinda odd that crap I don't care about or that isn't personal to me rarely ever happens!Its littered with stuff like this which should tick the "gamist nonsense" or “narrative causality” clause.  It does it because it was intentfully designed to be a brutal game engine for challenge-based Adventuring first and second and third its intended to be a crucible to find out whether you will fight for your Belief/Creed/Hometown/Friends/Family and forgive/confront your Enemy in a brutally unforgiving imagined space that makes every decision count and brings cowardice/heroism/sacrifice/expeditiousness at great tension via its structure and reward cycle.There is a level of elision of Simulationist priorities within an intentfully designed game that has to at some point tick the "gamist nonsense" box for folks.  But the reality is, after decades and decades of these conversations and the last decade here on ENWorld, its pretty clear to me that Sim priorities + game engine get deeply inventoried, overanalyzed, misapplied (due to something being ignorantly or willfully misconstrued) and vociferously lobbied against to attack this thing I hate...yet simultaneously the opposite for this thing I love!That violates my sim priorities for functional conversation![HR][/HR]Back to Torchbearer.  The reality is, there are many, many, many ways they could have simultaneously (a) actually made the game engine less intricate/complex while making it (b) more internal-causality-gratifying.  They're trivial to enumerate.  However, everything has a cost.  And the cost would have been that (i) the decision-space of every moment of play would have been less consequential and (ii) the overall through line of play would have lost its deep, deep integration which is hell bent on distilling skillful play from unskillful play.So if the above paragraph is true (and it is), then it becomes a very difficult argument to make that this game was designed upon some meaningful synthesis of Gamist priorities, Simulationist priorities, and Narrativist priorities.  To whatever extent simulation exist in this game, it is merely the veneer of it sufficient to actually orient a group of 4 disconnected brains on a shared imagined space.  Its not there for high fidelity to internal causality nor is it there to promote some kind of state of deep experiential consistency of actually being in Middarmark (or whatever land your Torchbearer game might be in).  Its there to test how skillfully you can play individually and collectively, how your dramatic needs embedded in your character manifest within play, and to reflect upon the skillfulness and evolution of character.I mean.  I'll defer to my 3 players here.  [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] , [USER=70468]@kenada[/USER] , and [USER=71235]@niklinna[/USER] .  Do you feel like your experience in our play would ever produce the italicized orientation toward play/experience with play above?  You can certainly correct me with I'm wrong, but I'm pretty doubtful!  I'm not saying that the experience of play is shallow at all...but whatever visceralness comes from play doesn't derive from the italicized priorities above in my estimation (and it hasn't for any of the groups I've GMed TB in the past either)!</blockquote>

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