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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9031083" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Never fear!  You don't need to grant the premise because I don't accept that 3.x is a sim RPG either!  My "Sim-ifying" and the subsequent example (leading to a giant pile of discord) was meant to convey "insufficient attempt to render D&D as a robust purist-for-system Sim engine."Simulationism doesn't demand that zombies can't be wrong-footed.  In my dysfunctional conversation (not as a conversation per se, but as "a nexus of play") that I rendered, I meant to show that both the GM and the player had some level of support (IMO, not equal as my rendered player's perspective on this seems difficult to surmount) for their positions; from either a particular viewpoint on internal causality or game engine integrity.Where I land on things (which was the player's point-of-view I rendered), is that the GM was wrong on both game engine integrity grounds and, if you're going to point to internal causality, there is a very strong case to be made that "there is no such thing as mindless for things that must be possessed of sufficient goal-directedness and sensory receptors that allow them to move, perceive, and interact with their environment in the way that zombies do."  Therefore, a GM adding the charm tag to the Defender suite of mechanics would be (a) an example of the last part of your prior post; GMs making game engine adjustments to resolve edge cases that bring about, their sense of, Sim-incompatible fictional results.  And, to extend my point, we know for a fact that there is a contingent of very vocal D&D GMs who would agree with my GM above.  They told us constantly during The Edition Wars everytime they called D&D Defender mechanics (and the like) "martial mind control" as an epithet and examples exactly as I created were brought up.  Its the "martial mind control doesn't work on mindless (among others)" version of "you can't crit zombies/constructs/elementals because Sim-incompatible fictional results" contention.Where I land on that is, D&D Sim-play (not referring to Rolemaster or Traveller or Runequest here) has a potentially fraught play loop where GMs can make wrong decisions that are both "game engine integrity harming (therefore player decision-space and experience harming)" like the above and are simultaneously "not sufficiently supported (or at the very least, confounders, like the above in my post, aren't interrogated and sufficiently resolved) when mapping/remapping some of their, very important due to their gamestate-perturbing nature, extrapolations onto the fiction."  This isn't even touching upon the intersection of the above with GMs attempting to toggle on/off or admix (i) story imperatives and the temptation of illusionism, (ii) drama logic & genre logic and how those can confound extrapolations based on earth-system internal causality, and (iii) prep-intensiveness and the allure of using GM Force to ensure your hard work sees play. [HR][/HR]To touch on things we've discussed elsewhere.  While working from a vast experience-deficit relative to you and [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] , I agree that Purist-for-System Simluationism of Traveller, Rolemaster, and Runequest doesn't fundamentally require Illusionism.  Skillful, disciplined GMs can absolutely run those games and let the gameplay machinery see where they go + adjudicate edge cases.  That being said, my thoughts on the subject would be this:Because dynamism (I'm talking about play taking dynamic shape which can change aggressively and be shaped aggressively by players) isn't coming from the game engine-at-large (thinking of Torchbearer or D&D 4e or AW etc) nor various techniques for GM Consequence/Twist handling/Fail Forward, that puts a significant amount of pressure on GM situation framing and scenario design.  That kind of pressure can absolutely lead to either (a) Illusionism to infuse play with dynamism or (b) falling back on using a Purist-for-System engine for Gamist scenariors and imperatives.  Then you have the added pressure of resolving those idiosyncratic game engine moments where there might be disagreements over how internal causality and extrapolation should inform adjudication.  That might not be Force...but it might feel like Force to a player (because they disagree or don't understand the extrapolation that governed the adjudicative process).Disciplined and skillful GMs can frame compelling situations and design scenarios sans Force and players can have a nice chunk of say (sans GM Force) and they can collectively follow these systems to their action resolution conclusions (system's say).  But (again, coming from an experience deficit relative to you) the pressures are immense.  While my play of those three systems spans perhaps 10 sessions (40ish hours) some 30 years ago, I've known a lot of Traveller, Rolemaster, GURPS GMs and am intimately familiar with their games and the players they ran for.  Illusionism or Gamism masquerading as Purist-for-System Sim or stale games lacking dynamism or burn-out or the sort of calamitous in-situ disagreements over edge case internal causality/extrapolation-based handling (like the conversation I envisioned for "3.x-ifying 4e" above) were the rule...not the exception.Running and playing those games well while producing dynamic, exciting experiences and little to no "feels bad" moments might be the most difficult ask in all of TTRPGing.  Could be wrong...but that is my sense of it!</blockquote>

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