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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 9029924" data-attributes="member: 6787650">(A) I mentioned a couple posts upthread that I don't think players need to have bought into the notion of simulationism per se in order for it to be simulationism--you don't need to explain GDS to them. They do need to be okay with the implications or they'll have a bad time, e.g. expecting the dragon to land and give them a fair fight but then it doesn't. (Honestly I haven't ever had this be a problem for long, because unhappy players IME adapt to the reality of the gameworld. E.g. if it's 5E, the barbarian's player makes a fiendlock and starts playing her more often than the barbarian because she can hit flying creatures with Eldritch Blast.)(B) I actually don't necessarily start with something external. If I'm trying to build a reasonable fantasy ecology and economy, for example, I start by trying to reason out food production, population density, internal tech levels, and social structures. And because I'm not strictly simulationist about worldbuilding, I inject a constraint that there needs to be a compelling reason for the players to kill monsters and get rewarded for it, instead of e.g. getting arrested, or starving to death as unemployed hobos. I also like it if society is kind of corrupt and selfish (like Ebenezer Scrooge or worse), so that players have the opportunity to make a positive difference if they so choose (helping widows avoid starvation, buying children out of slavery and teaching them to read, etc.).That doesn't sound to me like what you're referring to as something external.(C) Yes to C.(D) That looks like a yes too. Different dragons behaving different ways looks fine to me.(E) Beats me. As I mentioned, I'm personally less strongly simulationist when worldbuilding than when running the game. At the point where the dragon is attacking some humans, I'm no longer thinking about WHY I made a megalomaniacal dragon who likes melee combat.(F) Yes there's tension. The whole point of the Threefold Model (GDS) is to give us a language for describing this tension so we can talk about the tradeoffs and effects. Unlike Ron Edwards's GNS model, there's no stigma of "incoherency" cast on anyone who likes a non-pure mix of some of each G/D/S. Everyone is probably a mix of all three! I know this may sound like it conflicts with (E) above <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> but if I thought hard about any given dragon I could probably tell you whether I had my G hat on or my S hat when I invented any given feature of that dragon.</blockquote>

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