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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5574616" data-attributes="member: 54877">No, not necessarily simulationism. It's a tension between setting/genre fidelity, mechanics, and pacing/handling time. You'll get the tension with simulation, gamism, or narrativism. However, it is true that the trade offs you will be willing to make will be somewhat different for simulation or gamism or narrativism. No system every hits it perfectly. Which means that everyone hand waves on skils, whether they know it or not. It is simply which handwaves rub which people the wrong way. Like Danny, I have a varied set of skills for which I'm reasonably competent, and this was true before I hit college. But like Ryujin, I draw the opposite lesson from this--that even complex skill systems don't handle the way real skill works. Humans, at least, are very much about classification and pattern matching. Being a musician makes learning easier for some higher level math and the timing in weapon play, to name just two odd examples. Name me a game that models that fact. There are all kinds of odd learning connections like that, and we don't even fully understand the ones we know about, let alone the ones we don't. A simulation game, for example, might try to get around this by getting really specific about what can people can do. Never mind how you learned the higher level math. You've got it or you don't. Nothing wrong with that. And then to continue to be true to sim, it might simply ignore handling or game play issues and decide that things cost roughly as much as they are hard to do (or are represented in the world, or any number of choices). It will be clunky, but design intent is met. That is a relatively pure approach, but there will still be tradeoffs, even given the design intent. Footwork is vital for melee combat (along with a host of other things). Any melee combat. So you can't, in fact, learn to be really skilled with a gladius without also learning at least a little about every other weapon you could pick up. But even worse, you can't learn a gladius without learning a tiny bit about the skills needed for dance--and vice versa. This doesn't matter much in results. If you are a great dance but have never picked up a blade, the fact that your sword skills shows as -4 instead of the approximately - 3.5 that it really should be is eaten up in the granularity of the system. It does matter a great deal when you look at effort to learn things. And notice that this hypothetical system that I've outlined should care about learning. Some design choices in games are actually fairly stupid design. But a lot of the design choices that get pegged with that are simply situations where the designer had a trade off that had to be made, and they made it different than you would. Sometimes people go on rants that make it fairly clear that they are unaware that the trade off was even a choice that had to be made. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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