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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8660794" data-attributes="member: 82106">OTOH from my perspective pure 'process sim' simply doesn't exist. People have beaten their heads against that wall, but there's no such thing, you cannot meaningfully simulate a world, so it instantly breaks down and ceases to exist in all actual play. What people really end up at is either HCS, or purist-for-system. For instance, I have talked about the quixotic quest to make the 'perfect sim game' that would magically produce the RP experience people wanted. The problem is, the real world is not dramatic, and just adding, say, magic and dragons, doesn't change that. If it was, our actual lives would be dramatic stories, but they're not... So as soon as actual play happened, the GM or some other participant had to try to inject the drama or whatever it was that would make the story go. Either that was some sort of system that used not-in-world logic (or attempted to describe something that drove play AS an in-world element) OR it drew from some sort of conceit/concept and incorporated rules/process which would become the focus. This is all very handily described using a structure along the lines of GNS. It makes NO SENSE AT ALL, isn't even addressed in GDS terms. So we see that what you call 'process sim' actually devolves into 2 closely related patterns which GDS doesn't recognize the relatedness of.So, phylogenetic cladistics is useless. Huh, I'm sure that's news to many 1,000s of PhD level biologists and paleontologists, lol. Clearly there are all sorts of useful theses which can be drawn from the degree of relatedness of different organisms. I understand that you may not recognize the criteria for the ontology being used in GNS, for whatever reason. I'm perfectly willing to accept that GDS, as a different ontology, might also have value. I mean, in biology there are many ontologies as well (such as the division of animals into groups like fish, fowl, domestic, and game animals for instance) that use different criteria and can have different utilities.Sure, we will just have to differ on that.But the similarity still exists, lol. I have pointed them out, so I think it is better to just table the whole discussion.It was merely an example. We can view what any RPG is doing in terms of agenda and analyze it. I'd be more interested in contrasting Forge-era GNS with more modern formulations (I don't think any of them label themselves as GNS).Well, as I said before, I don't even believe that the idea of 'process sim' is a viable concept. Nobody can accomplish it, so it doesn't actually exist in the real world as an actualized agenda. One way to view 3e is sort of as a result of competing philosophies which attempt to deal with that fact, though apparently without much deep understanding of the issue...See, from my perspective there's very little left in D&D that is gamist. I mean, its a game, and it certainly has some general success and failure criteria (and still contains the original leveling concept, which is fundamentally gamist). So, OK, there's a part of it that is kind of a gamist core, but I think the game is almost pure HCS in that it has effectively become a game ABOUT the D&D subgenre of fantasy. So, maybe we actually are pretty close to agreeing on 5e <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I don't have a strong view on V:tM. It too seems to me to be pretty much HCS. It has mechanics which make your character "play like a vampire" and its purpose seems to be to provide a game where the action and concerns of the PCs are centered on vampire tropes, largely drawn from the Ann Rice vampire milieu, with some elaborations and adding in some elements from late '80s Urban Fantasy. In GNS terms it isn't really Narrativist at all, though I suspect there were people who spun it more in that direction, perhaps. I don't have a really good understanding of the details of the RP mechanics though, so I'm not sure exactly all of what you could do there.</blockquote>

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