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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8629097" data-attributes="member: 16814">Wait, you chastise me for not following, and then agree that I had it right?  So weird.Yes, if you think that simulationism is everything, then it's useless as a category. However it doesn't do that.  As for the quoted bit, you didn't highlight that as important to you in that response or any further response but instead were responding to that entire post which cannot be summarized by that snippet.  Further, that snippet is an attempt to clarify a more general concept, not the specific definition under discussion.  It's like if I took something you said that was related to the point you were making but then treated that snippet as the entirety of your argument.  It's a strawman.Simulation is the agenda of the players -- ie, what the players want most from play -- to experience the fiction for the sake of the fiction. Mostly this means that play has to have internal cause -- that actions in play have a traceable and clear connection into the fiction that results. That can be achieved in a few ways, as talked about in the essay, either by a clear and detailed process that generates the fiction in play.  This is referred to as "purist-for-system" simulation, or process sim.  Another option is to emulate a genre or story and make sure that play produces the desired effect for the players, which is called "high-concept" simulationism.  An example of this is the WotC APs.These are very distinct from an agenda to be challenged and to overcome the challenges in play through skill and luck.  Or an agenda to have characters that are questions and play to see how those questions resolve.  Neither of these is placing the experience of fiction for the sake of the experience foremost.  Neither want to be told a story, or have the system tell them exactly how an action unfolds.  They want different things than a simulationist agenda wants.And, as has been mentioned, this is a categorization of people's wants.  Games serve these wants in different ways, but like how you can use a wrench to hammer a nail, systems can be used to deliver more than one agenda.  But you can look at how the system works and see how well it would support one of these agendas.  5e serves high-concept sim, doesn't do very much at all for process-sim (given it's system rarely produces fiction but instead offloads that onto the GM).  It weakly delivers gamism because it's system intentionally reduces risk through it's damage and recovery systems.  You can get to gamism, especially if you lean hard into the system it does have, and that works (I do it) but it requires leaning into the gamism which reduces the high-concept sim space (you have to accept some of the gamist conceits which have no good analog in any kind of consistent fiction -- no clear internal cause).If you look at simulationism from the question of "is internal cause the important thing here" then it's much easier to see how it does do a good job of categorization and difference with the other parts of the model.</blockquote>

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