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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6571132" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, that was a little odd. EGG, AFAIK having never met the man personally, was interested in a fun game. I don't think he or his group really cared about 'process-sim' so much as they cared about player vs imagined dungeon world. Rules that emulated reality in some sense were only useful to the extent that the player's goal was to figure stuff out, to outwit the DM's traps. So the player was acting as a sort of 'sleuth' and it was important that he could reason about what he was encountering. The dice, as I understand it, serve 2 purposes in that agenda, to determine how well the character performed some task, and to stand in for all the unknown and unknowable variables that couldn't be filled in because no GM could list or track them all. When the thief fell off the wall maybe it was because it was wet, and maybe he just messed up and picked a bad hand hold. Or maybe the god of thieves didn't like him that day! Overall though, as Tony has noted, Gygax prized PLAYABILITY, he was a gamist, as any perusal of what he wrote on the subject of combat will instantly reveal. Beyond that he was a very intelligent guy with a lot of interests and I think he liked putting a lot of that into his game. He had detailed rules for building a castle because castles were fun to him and he knew a lot about it, not because it was serving a game agenda beyond that.</blockquote>