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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9028595" data-attributes="member: 42582">That's not a simulation. It's just a description!I mean, in my last session of Torchbearer, my final bit of narration for the session was to describe a bolt of lightning blasting the house the PCs were in, blasting it in two.That's not a simulation either. I just made it up!OK, let's make up some answers:*A bear is the sort of thing that I see on TV and read about in books that is called a bear. And it lives in a house and sleeps on a bed much like an idealised 19th century European villager.*A morning is when the sun comes up.*Thirst is the desire to drink, which is why I and everyone else feels the need to take a drink.*Wells are holes in the ground, typically with brick or stone walls about them, with water at the bottom (unless they're "dry" wells, which are a type of deficient or defective well).*Water quenches thirst.*Bears walk on four legs in real life (but sometimes on two), and on two legs in my story,*Walking is the mode of getting to places, such that one can do things at places (like get water out of wells).That's not a model! That's just me having read Goldilocks. Four years olds can do what I just did: I know, I use to live with some of them, and read and listen to their stories.Now, let's put some pressure on the story: how does the bear (or the pig, in my Three Little Pigs supplement) build a house? What industry produces the building materials, sinks the wells, produces the clothes my bear (and pigs) are depicted as wearing, etc? How does the bear, with a bear's brain and a bear's mouth and throat, speak? Why does the sun rise? (Any explanation in terms of real world celestial phenomena is probably going to entail fact that are contradicted by my walking, talking, bears and pigs.)Making stuff up is not a simulation. There's no model. It's just authorship.But that would be a false description.JRRT doesn't have a model of Middle Earth from which he extrapolates. He has ideas about Middle Earth which he adds to, writes down, changes from time to time, etc.What is possibly gained by turning all our nouns into mush, so that "model" = "idea', "simulation" = "imagination", etc?These two statements are not synonymous. I don't know which is "canonical" for simulation.The first (from Imaro) implies that narration, in a RPG, becomes simulation if it has no point other than producing the narration for the other participants to take in. On this account, players as well as GMs can engage in simulation.The second (from FormerlyHemlock) implies that narration, in a RPG, becomes simulation if it (an attempt at) dispassionate extrapolation on the part of the GM, that will be experienced by the other participants as realistic. On this account, only the GM can engage in simulation. And on this account, a lot of classic dungeon crawling counts as simulation; while what makes Apocalypse World count as non-simulation is not the nature of the fiction (which is extrapolation) but the GM's motivation (which is not dispassionate).</blockquote>

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