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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9043835" data-attributes="member: 42582">Right, so here is where I get off the bus, because it's hard not to see an implication that verisimilitude, setting consistency, plausibility and feeling like a real place are not important in my RPGing.I think we're both agreed that Apocalypse World is not a simulationist RPG. But the following is from pp 96 and 108 of the AW rulebook (it is addressing the GM):SAY THIS FIRST AND OFTEN To the players: your job is to play your characters as though they were real people, in whatever circumstances they find themselves — cool, competent, dangerous people, but real. My job as MC is to treat your characters as though they were real people too, and to act as though Apocalypse World were real. AGENDA • Make Apocalypse World seem real. • Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring. • Play to find out what happens. Everything you say, you should do it to accomplish these three, and no other.This is why I have posted, multiple times, that the difference between simulationist RPGing and non-simulationist RPGing is not about verisimilitude or "realism" or believability. As soon as we get out of "dungeon-of-the-week" type RPGing, and into something more serious, everyone cares about these things. (Putting to one side deliberately surreal or absurdist approaches, like Over the Edge.) When I introduce setting details, as a GM, I keep in mind verisimilitude. Otherwise the game would be silly!Description of a set of techniques - GM pre-authorship, GM extrapolation, GM introduction of fiction that does not speak to player-established PC concerns/dramatic needs - is here equated with "objectivity". That is what is contentious. Like [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER]'s talk of "warping".What is not objective about (for instance) Megloss's house being struck by lightning when the attempt to bind an evil spirit fails?You seem to be talking about methods of technique - how the fiction is established, how action declarations are resolved, etc - but doing so by imputing properties to the fiction itself - objective, verisimilitudinous - as if there is some tight correlation between the techniques and the properties. My point is that other techniques produce the same properties, so focusing on the properties sheds no real light on differences of technique.</blockquote>

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