Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9813055" data-attributes="member: 4937">Simulation means to me that we take seriously the imagined fictional universe as a real place and we try to imagine and inform the narrative by those things in a consistent manner.We try to make the world feel lived in and the people in it feel like they have real motives and desires and are behaving as would be believable for those motives.  The story we have in mind has to feel like it happened organically, and not because I the narrator made everyone jump through stupid hoops involving big lapses in judgment merely to get to my desired result.  Characters generally should be behaving according to their best understanding at the time with the information they have available according to their own motives.  Nothing merely springs into being just because the story needs it.  Everything is grounded in past choices by other characters who are operating with limited information and limited resources.  Now, they might be very intelligent and have planned things out really well, but they can't account for every contingency and don't suddenly acquire resources that they need later.  What's established already is true, even if the players never learn about it.  Every wandering monster had to come from somewhere.  Every encounter preexists the time the players encounter it.   Timelines and distances actually exist. In the case of a dungeon with intelligent monsters, they have some industry or some reason to be there.  They have economic activity and food sources and there is an ecology and so forth.In the case of basing an RPG on another medium like say a movie which lacks this sort of rigor, it means we're often more real than the thing we are simulating.  The movie's relationship to truth as it is observed in the game universe becomes complicated.  For example, I run Star Wars WEG D6.  Canonically within the game universe, at some future point after blowing up Aldaraan, the Death Star with attempt the blow up the large forest moon of the gas giant Yavin.  What may not be obvious to someone watching the movie, is that the battle above Yavin occurs more than two weeks after the destruction of the planet Aldaraan.  Because you can't just fly a class 2 hyperdrive in the most expensive battle station in history from Aladaraan to the Gordian Reach in a few hours.  Flying through hyperspace is not like dusting crops.  Meanwhile, the Millenium Falcon, one of the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, makes the trip in just three days, leaving 11 days for the Rebels to evacuate non-critical personnel and decide what to do about the emperor's new death weapon.  Yavin wasn't about as you might think saving the rebellion in the sense of if the Rebellion failed at Yavin everyone would be dead.  Yavin was about saving the rebellion in the sense that if Palpatine could destroy planets at will, basically no planet was going to openly rebel or even be as dissident as Aldaraan had been.  And if that was true, then the Rebellion would remain just some small, scattered incidents of terrorism that never really threatened Imperial security.And these sort of things end up having to be "true" even if some other author with a better claim to canon says otherwise.  The canon needed for a game is just more rigorously "true" than is needed for other mediums.However, being a simulation doesn't mean we have to be completely realistic.  It might not be realistic in any universe to construct massive dungeons all over the place, and it might not be realistic for those dungeons to be littered with mechanical traps, and it might not be realistic that ships can get halfway across the galaxy in two weeks, or that warriors fight with laser swords, but we accept a few things as conceits and then try to make them work.</blockquote>

Verification