In the lightning example, a possibility came up that a result could generate (reveal, if preferred) a cause. In this case, the group would wait to see what sorts of results came up in their play, and infer causes from them, which would go on to inform results in future circumstances. Discovering world-laws indirectly through authorship has also been discussed.
I don't understand what improved understanding of play this paragraph is supposed to provide.
The lightning example is from my game. I can tell you what the cause of the lightning narration was,
at the table: I was establishing the consequences of an utterly failed binding ritual; the principal consequences were that the evil spirit in question, rather than being bound into the spellbook so as to carry that book into Fea-bella's dreams (so as to enhance her Dream Palace), instead carried the spellbook into Megloss's dreams, possessing him and enhancing
his Dream Palace; a prior roll on the weather table had established that it was raining; and I decided that a blast of lightning would be a fitting crescendo for the failed ritual, leaving the two PCs outside in the mud and rain while Megloss looked down on them from the surviving half of his house, hand raised and laughing maniacally like a Marvel Comics super-villain. Such a result was also consistent with (even suggested by) the rule that "Summoning and binding spirits against their will is a transgression against the will of the Lords of Chaos and Law, and breaking this law causes freak events to transpire at the conclusion of the ritual".
This, then, tells us (more-or-less) what the (imaginary) cause of the lightning was, in the fiction: it was a freak event that transpired at the conclusion of the ritual, due to the transgressing against the will of the Lords of Chaos and Law. And it was a
sinister freak event, reflecting the sinister character of what had transpired.
There is no real mystery here, it seems to me. The tropes, the ideas, are well-known. Lightning flashing while Dr Doom stands at the window of his castle proclaiming his future victory over the Fantastic Four was not all that innovative the first time it was done. In the context of my Torchbearer play, I don't think it reveals any particular interesting or subtle "world laws".
The second sorts of cases become worth entertaining once it's mooted that "internal cause is king" is about methods not purposes. Tuovinen doesn't outright say it, but he does say what he thinks the purposes of simulationism are; and they are not "making sure that internal cause is king". For convenience, this is how Tuovinen puts it
That twice-repeated "subject matter", and introducing "relevant material",... is this back to preloading?
It's not as if we need to read entrails and parse tea-leaves to know what Eero Tuovinen is talking about.
He gives examples of simulationist approaches to play, which he also suggests can be combined in various ways to produce different sorts of play experience:
“GM story hour” is a roleplaying game activity where one of the players – the titular GM – prepares a structured agenda platter for the session of play, and the play activity itself then concerns processing through this pre-prepared content. The content is usually structured analogously to a linear narrative, so there’s “scene 1”, “scene 2”, etc. that are processed through play in the order pre-determined by the GM. The story hour is defined by the content authority of prepared material, delivered in fixed order.
“Princess play” is a Simmy play structure strategy where a character player is encouraged to develop a character they find entertaining to occupy as a thespian role. During the game they have opportunities to exercise the role in various fictional circumstances. The role is affirmed by the way the SIS reacts to the role.
“Dollhouse play” is a joint activity, usually not strongly chairmanned, where the players build something together. There might be a reason for the building, some sort of purpose to which the project of planning and designing is directed.
“Substantial exploration” is a type of game that involves a major external reference source. This is not just a big pile of GM notes; every player may or may not be familiar with the source material, but either way, exploring this material is core to the game’s creative purpose.
“Mechanical simulation” means having the players expend significant time and effort quantifying, formalizing and then calculating outcomes for all sorts of fictional things. The enjoyment is in witnessing the mathematical structure of the game engine in action, and its dance with the game fiction.
“Subjective experience” is a roleplaying activity where a player focuses on experiencing content of play rather than learning, observing, etc. The method is basically similar to image training used in some fields, and the successful player experiences an integral (undifferentiated) understanding of the subject matter produced in a partially unconscious process inside their own head.
And there are fairly prominent examples of each that we can give:
DL is the primordial GM story hour. Modern neo-trad RPGing exemplifies princess play. Building vehicles in GURPS, or worlds in Traveller, is dollhouse play. A lot of D&D play involves substantial exploration (of FR, or Planescape, or whatever). RM, RQ and Champions/HERO are the poster children for mechanical simulation. CoC, at least when the GM is able to provide evocative scenes and clever insanity effects, is one game that is good for producing subjective experience.
We can also see the way
internal cause is operationalised in each: in GM story hour, the GM curates events from A to B to . . . to Z; in princess play, the player exhibits the character, and the GM affirms the character through responses in the SIS; in dollhouse play, internal cause is managed in part through the build rules and in part through consensus (eg as when
my group had to work out how long it would take a Traveller starship's triple beam laser to blast through kilometres of ice); in substantial exploration, the internal causes are managed through published metaplot; in mechanical simulation the internal causes is handled via the tables and allied rules processes ("purist for system"); in subject experience play, the internal causes are handled by the GM's narration, which the player is incorporating via a "partially unconscious process inside their own head".
The question on my mind is whether to call Duskvol or The Wider World of Stonetop pre-loaded? If they're not pre-loaded in the sense you mean (that closes down "choice in the moment") then it just remains to consider if they provide a subject matter? (Or looking wider, whether any other game text, accepted as a story-game, does?) Here I take myself to be asking something like - could I develop a simulationist's interest in what it's like to be "a crew of daring scoundrels seeking their fortunes on the haunted streets of an industrial-fantasy city". Aiming for elevated appreciation and understanding. That doesn't sound all that unlikely!
Obviously you're free to use the term "pre-loaded" however you like. But I used it in a particular way:
I would say, roughly but I think not inaccurately, that simulationism depends upon "preloading" - whether via the resolution engine that tracks and applies internal causes (say, RM combat tables or Classic Traveller's trading tables); or via the constraints of meaning/them-injecting processes (classic D&D alignment adjudication; or Pendragon traits and passions); or via GM pre-planning of how X will cause Y (the traditional "event-based" module).
This preloading is what permits internal cause to be king at the moment of resolution.
Setting is not, in itself, preloading that tracks or generates or permits the operation of "internal cause as king".
To the best of my knowledge, resolution in Duskvol or Stonetop does not depend upon rolling on trading tables or similar, nor upon the GM deciding what alignment or honour demand, nor upon the GM establishing a sequence of events that will occur in a pre-determined fashion.
Could someone use the Duskvol setting to play a sim game about
a crew of daring scoundrels seeking their fortunes on the haunted streets of an industrial-fantasy city? Of course they could. This seems no different from me using Greyhawk, a setting invented for wargaming and dungeon-crawling, as the setting for vanilla narrativist RM, and for Burning Wheel and Torchbearer.
But BitD probably wouldn't be the right system for that game.
