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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8630640" data-attributes="member: 71699">Where would you place journalling RPG's like Thousand Year Vampire? How important really is causality to the experiential quality of exploration? What about setting details that are present acausally? It's horses in barding, say, rather than flying cars. I think one can play sim based on model alone (in the sense of model + rules = simulation) with freeform resolution. It's not that causality cannot support sim, only I think one can have the experience without causality (in system), too.[EDIT Perhaps this can be leveraged to split immersionist out from simulationist? The latter care about systematic causality.]The system isn't reliable, is the counter-claim. The GM - being an expert in life in Georgian London - can say what happens far more accurately than the system. That's the FKR position. One can insist it is a failure condition, but in experience of play it may not be.I've always found it super-straightforward to see for gamist that system must matter, but for narrativist? No one has ever explained why in a way that accounts for all actual play. GM decides, and the experience is just the same as if we rolled biased dice (i.e. dice with modifiers or pooled). No one can really say why it matters that GM decides some things, except to say that they are passionately against it and it gets in the way of their personal expression. That's subjective.When playing Chivalry and Sorcery, in some places the system would produce results at odds with sim (the magic system is very clunky for example: you feel more like a school pupil doing sums than a mystic of any sort). It's only if we first posit that system is perfect, should we commit to trusting system on every detail. System is never perfect, and our simulations are only ever takes - just enough to convince those around the table.A gamist likes to know that doing X results in Y (or at some likelihood). That reliance is an end in itself (as you describe, the procedural integrity is compromised.)I've been increasingly enamoured of colour in the form of describe to influence what follows. It's very valuable for a gamist because it gives you leverage over the judgements you all will make as to the fictional positioning.Collecting. Building. These too are gamist. They need not involve conflict (although they can also have conflict integrated very successfully with them.) And then there is lyricism, not covered by the model at all.</blockquote>

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