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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9024618" data-attributes="member: 71699">My posts #709 and #721 answered the OP through a lense of RPG as conversation. Through that lense, rules serve a normative purpose: they convey candidate descriptions to consequences in game state (fiction + system.) I suggested that they can even invite descriptions that would otherwise not occur.That fits with the observation that games are ergodic literature, and should suit narratologists. A ludologist will say that a game is also a mechanism. Consider a relatively simple problem - what is the ideal probability distribution across favourable, mixed and unfavourable consequences, and what is the ideal responsivity of that distribution to circumstantial modifiers? Another problem - how do opportunities for action and survival in scene interact to produce an action economy translating to some, but not too much volatility, and some, but not too much snowballing? How might the resultant tempo offer opportunities for both challenge and mastery? Or a simulationist problem - how many supplies can be carried, what distance can be attained per unit, and what tempo does that produce in the overall game system? (Torchbearer 2's grind offers an ideal example of structured tempo.)As this post points out, what might be simulated may be outside the knowledge of participants. The post focuses on the possibility that some participant has the right sort of knowledge and others do not, but it is equally possible that no participant has the right sort of knowledge. Especially if the domain is esoteric.This purpose of rules - to fabricate a mechanism that successfully controls and simulates the desired play - falls outside of viewing play as narrative that "by its very nature places specific people front and centre rather than the world itself." As it turns out, the nature of an RPG can include modelling the world itself. Almost all do, to a greater or lesser degree.Sure - "to at least some degree". In the case of immersionism, that degree is that the only parts of the world that will turn out to be played in will be those the PCs choose to explore. Generally speaking, player characters in an immersionist game are to some degree exceptional. RuneQuest character arcs take them to becoming rune lords/priests. In Traveller you can start with your own spaceship! In L5R you may be a samurai.Is a cake better made with only flour? But more seriously, I don't think so. Let's imagine the immersionist world sans player characters. That does not at all satisfy the itch! It's the opportunity for the characters to explore the world and find out what happens there, that is the draw. And on the other side, player characters sans world? That's scarcely reflective of most RPGing: players seem to delight in having some sort of world to play within. Hence I would say that the choice is as to relative quantity of each ingredient in the mixture... not whether it will be a mixture.</blockquote>

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