Why do RPGs have rules?

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/theme-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.

Narrativism, as per its other label "story now", is premised on the avoidance of such pre-loading.
Both nar and sim can pre-load, or find out in play and then conform with, all sorts of causes. What nar can't see pre-loaded is theme: how premises are answered in play. Sim either must pre-load theme (insert reasons) or has no particular position on pre-loading theme (which can wind up in the same place.)

A missing argument is why sim needs to pre-load theme?
The pre-loading of theme (where it is present) is constitutive of simulationism - that is what creates the material for exploration.

The primary difference I am seeing between the narrative play you guys are describing and the ‘sun’ of rob and myself is in both players can do what they want and the GM has to react but in our games players tend to be more limited to acting through their character alone (this is a somewhat sloppy generalization though) abd the GM is expected to bring some amount of world consistency to the experience. Pre-loading can be as present or non-present according to taste (if I understand the term correctly). I have run plenty of games like this with zero preloading.
In a sandbox the mission is whatever the players want to pursue. But it can also arise from things like tables, interactions with NPCs, etc.

<snip>But on the whole one important rule of thumb in sandbox is occupy a finite space in the game setting, through your character, and the players don't have narrative control outside that. Which means you sometimes have to ask the GM what you know.
I will say if the players declare an action, the action is always permitted in sandbox. What is not always certain is the outcome.

<snip>

there is no problem introducing elements that connect to things the players have established about their characters (as an example a player wanted to explore a relationship with his character's long lost father and that became part of the campaign).

<snip>

Things are never independent of the PCs. If the PCs are not engaging a particular area and something is going on there, it may march on without them. But I am usually more focused on the stuff and people going on around the PCs. Sometimes I roll randomly to see what is going on in the broader world or advance the historical timeline, but that still is all stuff the players could potentially influence if they chose to.
The second and third of these three quotes describe various sorts of "preloading": the use of tables; the use of NPCs; GM control over setting, and sometimes outcome; "the broader world marching on"; etc.
 

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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.
 


I did. I posted it in my reply to you. And again, in my post just above.

I don't quite get your definitions.

The pre-loading of theme (where it is present) is constitutive of simulationism - that is what creates the material for exploration.

This isn't providing me with a lot of clarity. Looking at the above post I am also not gaining clarity on your use of the term (I am also not finding very much googling the term)

The second and third of these three quotes describe various sorts of "preloading": the use of tables; the use of NPCs; GM control over setting, and sometimes outcome; "the broader world marching on"; etc.

And this part doesn't really clarify either because those all seem like things that could exist in any number of styles, approaches and systems. I can certainly see the bolded being important to sandbox. But NPCS, tables, and the broader world marching on all seem like they could exist in virtually any style of play (including narrative ones)
 


1) I'm not sure what work your "pre-load" is supposed to be doing here, but setting content is 100 % not "Story Before" in Blades' Duskvol or Stonetop's Wider World etc. Outside of a few things that are locked in to serve as broad setting parameters for anchoring premise and establishing color, the overwhelming amount of material is mutable or contingent and employed exclusively for framing thematic conflict around the PC-built or overtly evinced interests of the players. It isn't there to serve as metaplot to hook the players, to distribute as breadcrumbs for player engagement and their delight at later reveals, to filter permissible action declarations, or to manage a prescripted continuity/chain-of-events.
The term is @pemerton's. I'm trying to work out what it covers. Especially whether there is sufficient justification to say that theme is necessarily part of it.

2) You're kind of doing what I said above (focusing on a particular statement, and one that is rather nebulous, without integrated textual analysis of everything else). Euro said a lot of things. In that same paragraph there are a a lot of words you could be focusing on. Almost surely, the most important are "Explored for the sake of discovery" and "At some point you stumble upon worthwhile insight, and that’s your reward" and "every time it is about the thing in itself."
The first block of words I quoted are separated out by Eero in a blue box and concretely characterised by him as definitional. I also pondered those words that you have bolded (they struck me, too), and formed a view of their impact. I want to preface describing that impact with an interpretation of simulationism making use of Baudrillard's concept of simulacrum.

Briefly, Baudrillard outlines four stages. In the first stage is the faithful copy: for simulationism the reference is accurately recreated for play without alteration. There are few pure examples of this. I think most of traditional simulationism falls into stage two: an altered reality. RuneQuest is an example of this. The stage two simulacrum is based on an underlying truth, but alters it; in this case facts about Glorantha extend the real world into an imagined realm of bronze age fantasy. (There is no real Bladesharp 4 or krarshtkids, etc.) In the third stage, the simulation becomes unanchored from any original version. Simulationist procedures can still be applied, but they are working upon phantasms.

Much discourse on simulationism seems to me to take it to be static. A mode of play that has more or less always been with us and is available only for historical analysis. We can say something about what it is or was, but nothing about what it can be. Whether or not that is true for others: I take simulationism to be as vital and capable of evolution as gamism and narrativism.

With that in mind, what Eero intended by those words might (as I think @pemerton is suggesting) be indicated by the list of cases he provided, and in that regard it is worth going on to read his application of that list to brief critiques of specific game texts. An apposite example is
Dungeon World offers us the opportunity to do “dungeon fantasy” (the D&D subgenre of literature) in a more genre-emulative rules system than D&D itself boasts. The game revolves around [substantial exploration], [princess play], its own brand of [mechanical simulation] and maybe a bit of [GM story hour], but not in such intense amounts as many other games; it’s overall a rather casual game, I might say, which may well be its greatest virtue.
However, I am primarily interested in the words that you were requoting in terms of their impact on my thought. (Coming to different conclusions isn't the same as not making a holistic reading.)

So back to those specific words that you bolded, in particular "explore", "stumble upon", and "the thing in itself". Starting with the last, in an imagined world there a many instances of things that are - like simulacrum - altered or unanchored from real references. They're true by virtue of their authorship... the more so to the extent they are indicated, constrained and cemented through conformance with internal causes. Just as some above have laid out for Tolkien, this process can stumble upon things that resonate internally... that fit with known internal causes or reveal causes that their authors weren't yet aware of. The conversation is the exploration. To put that together succinctly: we can author things for which nothing pre-loaded could turn out to be more true than what we authored.

EDIT You should be able to see how the idea expressed just above embraces the player duality of audience=author. That duality isn't private to narrativism: it's ludic. However, narrativism requires certain possibilities implicit in authorship to be not just available but wielded at the table. (I could limit "authorial" choices to solely those that fit with what Edwards-ian narrativism demands: hedging simulationist TTRPG into a non-overlapping area of the Venn diagram. I think that is unnecessarily limiting and not, so far as I understand it, the view adopted in post-classical narratology.)

Put those three together and that is what Sim-priorities are and how they are differentiated from Narrativist priorities. Players in Narrativist games aren't situated (and certainly should NEVER self-orient) such that they are "exploring <Story Before metaplot or prescriptive setting> for the sake of discovery." There is no "at some point"...its instead at every moment. "Worthwhile insights <into Story Before metaplot or big reveals or prescriptive setting>" are NOT your "reward." And not only is it not "every time it is about the thing (Story Before metaplot, the model of the world's physics/backstory/cosmology, breadcrumb/hooks and their conclusions/reveals, the march of prescripted continuity, the touring of canonical/iconic material) in itself;" it is NEVER that.
I love your example of The Road (omitted for brevity.) I very much accept that when simulationists are using an appropriate game text in a committed fashion, and narrativists are doing likewise, ne'er the twain should meet. How much does that happen at the table? I've noticed and been told about more relaxed and flexible play of both. Whether those are heresies and we ought salt our mouths for speaking of them, or wonderful testaments to the human ability to want whiskey on Friday and wafers on Sunday. What I'm especially curious about is why P1 (sim) must object to P2's (nar) process, if the result is perfectly plausible and not in discord with internal causes? Is it principally that the play-performance in itself is jarring?

Finally, you've been on here long enough to read very posters consistently using laments outlined by "contrived" or "continuity and canon cannot be maintained <without x or played in y way>" or "all conflict/fun all the time = no conflict/fun" or "jarring to my immersion" or "shrodinger's < >?" Those posters are expressing an exclusive Sim orientation to running or playing games (and that should be pretty clear).
Per my above, absolutely. Hundreds of posts ago I said that I thought some fundamental simulationist principles would be at odds with narrativist. What I note, however, is that if P is a narrativist and happens to make choices that turn out to be not inconsistent with internal causes, as has been claimed, then to that extent, conflicts (that jar) might not be noticed in play. And if a simulationist does not pre-load theme (why should they? the necessity of that still hasn't been explained) then they've done nothing to thwart P's addressing of premises.

One could say that this is just a hypothetical accommodation. That doesn't help me, as I think I've witnessed it in play. Those same hundreds of posts ago, I investigated the possibility that no-myth modes could prove suitable for simulation (@pemerton thought so, but felt it likely to be boring.)

They're two very different ways to orient toward games, to design games, to run games, to play games. They serve different appetites.
I am questioning a number of different things, which may be joined up in the end in different ways
  1. Does a simulationist have to pre-load anything (let alone theme)? What about no-myth simulationism?
  2. If a simulationist must pre-load something, why does that have to include theme? Where is the proof of that?
  3. If a narrativist makes choices that turn out to be consistent with internal causes, why should that inevitably jar simulationists sitting at the same table?
 
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Can someone provide a definition of preloading? I am just not sure I follow the argument
Given that Clearstream's attempt to answer isn't terribly clear... (a touch ironic, IMO)

it's all those things Gygax, Arneson, Barker, St. Andre, Danforth, Peters, MacAlistair, Stafford, Perrin, and Tourney produced lots of because many people needed the help ot get rolling...

Places to explore
The encounters in those places
overworlds to get between exploration sites
encounter tables for the overworlds
Lore to make a cohesive whole of the same
All those predefined actions with specific rules....
Any plot the GM imposes unbidden
any backstory the party puts forward
any backstory the GM imposes.

I've run one of the most narrativist games, and enjoyed the hell out of it... anything not set during play wasn't true until someone spent an action result to make it true, and lasts as truth until another action makes it untrue.

It's not 100% pure narrativism - essentially, once you start getting randomizations involved, you've added a touch of game or sim, but it's mechanics are, outside combat, about who gets to say what's true, not whether it is known to be true. (John Wick's Blood and Honor)

Blood and Honor is rather hard to run - not that it's technically complex, but the amount of planning is very limited - literally, only NPCs with public sheets; anything not public from moment of intro is subject to change without prior notice by anyone.... so situations are insanely fluid.

The thing is, if any player in the group cares about continuity, each adventure becomes beheld to continuity with prior, another form of preloading. Sufficiently so that certain members of the board have recently advocated for ignoring continuity in play. (I don't know if Loverdrive was being facetious or not, so I'm taking their OP at face value. https://www.enworld.org/threads/case-against-continuity.698494/page-3#post-9063477 )

And in B&H, continuity is only as long as players respect each others' desired minimum.

I've run truly episodic, no continuity, campaigns before. Not fun for me. But I can understand the concept of no-continuity games and the appeal... it just isn't one I share.
 

Given that Clearstream's attempt to answer isn't terribly clear... (a touch ironic, IMO)
This feels to me like a needless insult slung in my direction. I hope you'll respect my request to desist from that. The clarity or otherwise of poster A is not determined by the clarity of poster B.

If you find anything I post unclear, please quote that and I shall be sure to respond. These are complex matters about which folk hold strong views, so it's all too possible that my comments will not be well enough articulated. I'm more than happy to accept that something I say isn't clear but that isn't the litmus test for whether what another poster writes is clear.
 

I don't quite get your definitions.

This isn't providing me with a lot of clarity. Looking at the above post I am also not gaining clarity on your use of the term (I am also not finding very much googling the term)
I would expect Google to tell you it's drinking booze before one goes out partying!

It's not a term of art. I used it to summarise something that I had already described in a reply to @clearstream:

You can't "explore" or "discover" what's not there. So if play is focused on discovering things, someone has to put those things there. Putting those things there: loading. Doing it in advance of play: pre-. Hence "preloading"!

I gave particular examples. The drama in DL is put there in advance of play, via the plotting of the story. The stuff that one might discover and re-discover playing a FR campaign, from knowing the heraldry of Cormyr to enjoying an interaction with Elminster, is put there in advance, via the work of Ed Greenwood et al. Likewise, the work on creating metaplot in the setting is what permits players to enjoy experiencing it, and knowing they are experiencing it, in play. In the case of a more "mechanically" or "system"-focused sim, like RM or RQ, the "pre-loading" takes the forms of writing the possible results of actions into the resolution tables/processes. Both make a particularly big deal of combat.

all seem like things that could exist in any number of styles, approaches and systems. I can certainly see the bolded being important to sandbox. But NPCS, tables, and the broader world marching on all seem like they could exist in virtually any style of play (including narrative ones)
Do you have examples in mind?
 

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