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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8636394" data-attributes="member: 82106">Sure, I just don't read Edwards as considering this sort of thing to be 'incoherent' at all. It is just foundational definition stuff, bedrock that practically every RPG in existence MUST have. I mean, even TOON, a game where there effectively is nothing even close to a 'natural world' and half the play is 4th Wall stuff, still assumes that if your toon falls off a cliff it will crash to the bottom, right? I mean, the game wouldn't work otherwise, as who would think its funny if none of the laws of nature exist or get lampooned? I mean, its funny because your toon crashes to the bottom of the cliff 'falls down' and then gets right back up again and does more stuff (IIRC the falling down kind of ends your scene or something, been decades since I played it). I'd expect the only way to subvert "how the world works" kind of stuff would be to actually invent a setting where none of it applies, maybe something like The Matrix, but then you'd have THAT as a setting, supplying its own logic, lol.So, IMHO, we should look at it as there's a base level of 'stuff' that constitutes the shared imagined world, and agenda only relates to how we use it, with the obvious understanding that a Purest-for-system Simulation agenda will want a rather different setting than a Story Now Narrativist one, even though the base assumptions about these worlds could actually be entirely identical.Well, yes, I think that would potentially be true. Lets think about it: So, a High Concept Simulation... lets say 5e D&D Forgotten Realms. The object is to experience FR, and life as a character in FR as imagined by Greenwood et al. So we're going to be guided around via whatever sorts of plots and hooks and such, which are intended to give us as much exposure to the atmosphere, geography, history, etc. of FR as possible. The 'Sim' is of FR, the game is simulating the various characteristics of the FR setting and the genre that is attached to it. So we will not only be exposed to stuff, but to a D&D milieu style of fantasy genre. Everything is in service of those ends. Elminster will hire us to perform some secret mission that just happens to be barely possible for level 1 PCs. We're going to be squarely in the path of the main metaplot and it will be a red carpet to greatness (but there may be SOME danger).Now, imagine a Purist-for-System Simulation: We'd want a system that provided us with an experience that was as close as possible to some sort of plausible experience of actually living in, say, Waterdeep (granting that we're adventurers and not ordinary folk). The experience should provide all the considerations and elements of what is deemed, by setting logic strictly, to be such an experience. Thus we're just as likely to end up ignominiously robbed and our throats slit in some back ally by thugs after drinking a bit too much at the wrong bar as we are to end up being recruited by Elminster to accomplish some mission or other. Why would Elminster need the likes of us dirt kickers? He's probably got 500 of his own recruits already lined up, and whomever he would send us against is 99% likely to be able squash us like bugs anyway. Whatever metaplot exists will grind on and we're unlikely to even notice it until it hits us in the face.These two are both going to use exactly the same FR (except it may have slightly different features described in each case).</blockquote>

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