Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9043763" data-attributes="member: 42582">This prompted some thoughts:(1) To the extent that the setting is readily amenable to player cognition, and that players can engage with and &quot;manipulate&quot; it, that makes me doubt that it is actually realistic. A mediaeval village is, for a typical contemporary American or Australian, a foreign place. And a striking thing about going to foreign places, at least in my experience, is that they are hard to engage with because norms are different, social cues are different, practices are different, motivations are different, etc.This relates to what you are saying is my &quot;high bar&quot;. But to be clear, the &quot;bar&quot; I'm focusing on here is realism, which is a virtue that some posters have claimed for &quot;simulationist&quot; RPGing.(2) On the ideas of verisimilitude, consistency and believability, I don't see how the worlds that are part of my Torchbearer play, or my Burning Wheel play, are any different in these respects. I can see the contrast you are drawing between, say, your play with [USER=13383]@robertsconley[/USER] (on the one hand) and relatively shallow &quot;dungeon of the week&quot; play (on the other hand). But multiple posters in this thread have asserted or implied that the same contrast obtains between the sort of play you are describing, based on heavy GM prep, and the sort of play that comes out of [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER]'s Dungeon World or my Burning Wheel or Prince Valiant. And to be perfectly frank I'm not seeing it. When I play Thurgon in Burning Wheel, the knightly order and the family and the connections between things are all very vivid, and I engage them as a player and the action flows from them. And much the same is true, in my view, in the Prince Valiant game that I GM.I think it is this assertion, that there is a type of seriousness or verisimilitude that non-&quot;simulationist&quot; RPGing of necessity must be lacking, that is regarded as doubtful by me, [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] and [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER].(3) In your posts, what you point to that strikes me as different from some of my RPGing is expressed in these phrases: &quot;the world he presents&quot;, &quot;highly navigable&quot;, &quot;function within&quot;. These all point to a relationship between GM, players and setting that is different from my typical approach. But they don't point to anything distinctive about the fiction itself - I am asserting that equally verisimilitudinous, consistent and believable fiction can arise out of different relationships between GM, players and setting.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9043763, member: 42582"] This prompted some thoughts: (1) To the extent that the setting is readily amenable to player cognition, and that players can engage with and "manipulate" it, that makes me doubt that it is actually realistic. A mediaeval village is, for a typical contemporary American or Australian, a foreign place. And a striking thing about going to foreign places, at least in my experience, is that they are [I]hard[/I] to engage with because norms are different, social cues are different, practices are different, motivations are different, etc. This relates to what you are saying is my "high bar". But to be clear, the "bar" I'm focusing on here is [I]realism[/I], which is a virtue that some posters have claimed for "simulationist" RPGing. (2) On the ideas of verisimilitude, consistency and believability, I don't see how the worlds that are part of my Torchbearer play, or my Burning Wheel play, are any different in these respects. I can see the contrast you are drawing between, say, your play with [USER=13383]@robertsconley[/USER] (on the one hand) and relatively shallow "dungeon of the week" play (on the other hand). But multiple posters in this thread have asserted or implied that the same contrast obtains between the sort of play you are describing, based on heavy GM prep, and the sort of play that comes out of [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER]'s Dungeon World or my Burning Wheel or Prince Valiant. And to be perfectly frank I'm not seeing it. When I play Thurgon in Burning Wheel, the knightly order and the family and the connections between things are all very vivid, and I engage them as a player and the action flows from them. And much the same is true, in my view, in the Prince Valiant game that I GM. I think it is this assertion, that there is a type of seriousness or verisimilitude that non-"simulationist" RPGing of necessity must be lacking, that is regarded as doubtful by me, [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] and [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER]. (3) In your posts, what you point to that strikes me as different from some of my RPGing is expressed in these phrases: "the world he presents", "highly navigable", "function within". These all point to a relationship between GM, players and setting that is different from my typical approach. But they don't point to anything distinctive about [I]the fiction itself[/I] - I am asserting that equally verisimilitudinous, consistent and believable fiction can arise out of different relationships between GM, players and setting. [/QUOTE]

Verification