What Does "Simulation" Mean To You? [+]
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Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
This is very cool! The recently released Explorer's Guide for Star Trek Adventures covers very similar territory also in a "grounded in science" way.If you want a real simulation of planet creation; look no further then Architect of Worlds!
Architect of Worlds: Comprehensive Rules for Worldbuilding — Ad Astra Games
THE GALAXY IS YOURS WITH ARCHITECT OF WORLDS . We live in a golden age in astronomy. Fifty years ago, our understanding of our own planetary system was just being upended by NASA missions. We could only guess at worlds circling other stars. Now we know of thousands of exoplanets, with hundreds mowww.adastragames.com
Celebrim
Legend
If you want a real simulation of planet creation; look no further then Architect of Worlds!
Architect of Worlds: Comprehensive Rules for Worldbuilding — Ad Astra Games
THE GALAXY IS YOURS WITH ARCHITECT OF WORLDS . We live in a golden age in astronomy. Fifty years ago, our understanding of our own planetary system was just being upended by NASA missions. We could only guess at worlds circling other stars. Now we know of thousands of exoplanets, with hundreds mo
I went deep into this about 25 years ago doing tons of reading in the college library and downloading all the then latest simulation software, and what I discovered is that realistic galaxies are depressing. It crushed my belief (alongside working in a bioinformatics lab) that there was life anywhere else in the galaxy and ended my belief in Star Trek/Stellaris style interplanetary empires and along with it my desire to run sci-fi RPGs informed by realism. If I ever did, I'd probably do some more Expanse/Transhuman Worlds sort of thing, only without the fantasy elements Expanse leans into heavily. If I wanted "sufficiently advanced technology" I'd go more in the direction of The Golden Oucumene with its convenient islands of stability in very large unnatural atoms with convenient unobtanium properties that is otherwise pretty solid hard sci-fi and even its conceits are at least pretending really well.
That said, I didn't even know this publisher existed and they are kind of awesome in that 1980's retro style running computer programs on wetware thing.
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Committed Hero
Hero
I see simulation as an attempt to create a predictive model of a setting. This leads to some other assumptions:
In the absence of information to the contrary, we should expect that things are meant to seem as realistic as possible. A character that doesn't get enough sleep or food will not be as aware or active as they could be (to use two simple examples).
Complexity - or at least, more rules modules - is often used to bolster the simulative process. If I want my assassin to take a shot in the dark, I need night vision capability. Do I then need rules for encumbrance, or weather, or degrees of darkness, or how wearing the equipment reduces my peripheral vision?
The more unusual the setting, the harder it is to simulate, because people can have different conclusions about how the setting would shake out. If elementals pull trains and heat houses, why is there still scarcity in the economy? Why don't droids rebel?
In the absence of information to the contrary, we should expect that things are meant to seem as realistic as possible. A character that doesn't get enough sleep or food will not be as aware or active as they could be (to use two simple examples).
Complexity - or at least, more rules modules - is often used to bolster the simulative process. If I want my assassin to take a shot in the dark, I need night vision capability. Do I then need rules for encumbrance, or weather, or degrees of darkness, or how wearing the equipment reduces my peripheral vision?
The more unusual the setting, the harder it is to simulate, because people can have different conclusions about how the setting would shake out. If elementals pull trains and heat houses, why is there still scarcity in the economy? Why don't droids rebel?
Celebrim
Legend
Which is why I prefer games with strong sim attitude towards play, because the moment in the middle of a game when I must suddenly rules smith is to me one of the worst moments you can have as a GM.
But I think that there is more to sim attitude than just "We should have a rule for everything" because it's easy if you have a focus on having a game that works to define everything as being one of a limited number of moves and resolve everything abstractly. The sim attitude doesn't just want to have rules, but for each situation to have its own minigame to cover the particulars of the situation to produce answers that seem to result from the particular characteristics of the fiction. Sim attitude tends to produce a multitude of resolution systems because the particulars of flying a plane, swinging a sword, romancing a paramour, arguing a court case, or leading an army into battle seem different enough from each other that we don't want to just resolve all those things with the same type of fortune check. Sim attitude produces not just a rule for everything, but steps unique to each particular situation. As such, it's definitely the heaviest approach to the rules.
Argyle King
Legend
That's why a good heel finds ways to break (or bend) the rules without getting caught.
The most basic formula:
•The audience sees
•Ref doesn't
•crowd boos or makes some commotion
•Ref asks the heel if he cheated
•heel says "no"
So then, people are angry and have negative emotion toward the heel for two reasons: a) the cheating; b) the lying
Eventually, when the hero makes a comeback and the heel gets their comeuppance; the audience can live vicariously through their hero.
If it's just done right in front of the ref, the illusion is broken. None of that emotion is invested.
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dbm
Savage!
I don’t think those logically follow from each other, although I agree some people go that route. As evidence, I would offer Kriegspiel, which was a war simulation used for training real officers by the Prussian Army very successfully. It is most definitely a simulation with no need to consider gameplay / enjoyment or story yet it was mostly operated by the referees judgement based on experience. It did not have a whole stack of specific rules or procedures for different kinds of activities an army might undertake. Hence simulation does not need to mean lots of rules.
And there is a through-line of Kriegspiel > Braunstein > Original D&D so I would consider that relevant to the topic of RPGs.
A key feature of free kriegsspiel is - as your post says - the expertise of the referee. The referee makes decisions about what happens, based on their knowledge of how things would actually work out in a real war. This means that, for the referee, the "game" is not a simulation. The referee is not simulating anything - they are making decisions by applying their knowledge.
I don't judge kriegsspiel, but I do sometimes judge moots, and they are similar in this respect: for the mooters, the situation is one of simulation; but for the moot judge, it is not a simulation. It is a deployment of expertise.
Sometimes mooters can who should win don't, because the judge's expertise is not perfect; and so the mooters who make the better argument don't have that recognised by the judge. I assume that the same thing sometimes happens in free kriegsspiel - that the referee makes a wrong call, and so a trainee officer whose forces should have succeeded in their manoeuvre, loses.
Underlying all of this - that the judge/referee can exercise expertise; that the "players" can reason about the imagined situation; that sometimes the judge/referee can get it wrong - is that there is an objective standard of correctness, namely, how things would really unfold (in a battle) or what would really be a good argument (in a moot).
A difference between RPGing and free kriegsspiel is that there is no asymmetry of expertise. At least by default, the GM is no more expert in things like how hard it is to climb up a statue or how hard it is to pry a gem from the eye socket of a statue than any of the players.
In some approaches to RPGing - eg classic D&D - the GM has secret information, like the map and its key. This gives the GM a special role to play in dispensing information. But not more generally in the resolution of declared actions.
Celebrim
Legend
I'm aware of the history here. Among a dozen or more other books I've read Peterson's "Playing at the World", Fine's "Shared Fantasy" and Dunnigan's "The Complete Wargames Handbook". We can assume we are both very familiar with the history of games and the development of roleplaying games in particular.
That said, I think you are misunderstanding the role of the Umpire in Kriegspiel and understating the degree which as Kriegspiel evolved it more and more followed the path that I'm describing.
First of all, it was not the primary role of the Umpire in a game of Kriegspiel to decide the rules in the way we would think, nor was the refereeing deciding things like "in my opinion cavalry here would be successful" or how many units a cannonade removed. They had rules for that the Umpire was expected to apply. The primary role of the referee was to "roleplay" the troops that the player was pretending to command. In Kriegspiel the player (realistically) did not directly control his army like a puppet. Rather, the player wrote down his commands and "sent them" to his officers, and it was the job of the Umpire to interpret how the officer would receive and act on the order he received. This was to teach clarity in issuing commands. A player who wrote unclear commands or vague commands might find his units behaving in ways he didn't intend. That was the primary role of the Umpire's judgment.
Each edition of Kriegspiel brought with it more and more complicated rules to cover more and more situations.
As you probably know, "Free Kreigspiel" where the Umpire would dispense with the complex rules and just use his own judgment regarding whether a volley of fire from 500 yards would inflict significant casualties on a unit of cavalry rather than dicing for it was a reaction to the increasingly complex rules of the simulation. But, it was adopted not necessarily to make things more realistic, but rather because the military officers hated learning the rules and it was becoming increasingly hard to find people who were willing to devote the time to becoming Umpires. That is to say the real motivation here was in RPG terms gamist and not simulationist. So in fact, I would argue that enjoyment of the game was paramount in this decision. The games were becoming so hard to run and so lengthy to run that ardor for playing them was waning, so the Prussians moved to simplify the game by reducing the rules.
Incidentally, this was in my opinion a huge mistake because the Umpires are then always just fighting the last war. This would contribute to the massive failures of everyone to anticipate the realities of the first World War, and then later Imperial Japan overriding the rules telling them they had no chance of victory with the judgment of the Umpires that Japan's unique samurai spirit and will to win would overrule reality.
Not incidentally, when Kriegspiel jumped the Atlantic to the USA, the developments went the other direction than in Prussia. While Prussia moved to more "Free Kriegspiel" in the 1870s, in the USA developments continued toward simulation with more complex rules and more and more guidance to the Umpire in how to run the game. From an RPG perspective the most important of these as Strategos which is bewilderingly complicated in its tables and calculations.
And it was Strategos that Arneson was an expert at and which he had previously published variations for the Russo-Turkish war, the US Civil War, and most notably for our story Strategos A for wars in antiquity. And arguably, Arneson's game of Blackmoor was originally intended as a complex metagame (itself a highly detailed simulation) for setting up battles in Strategos.
A_Carrington
Explorer
I don't understand "plus thread". Is the default behavior here to assume that everyone has the same opinion about the thread topic?
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