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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6354209" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm pretty sure that when [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] talks about sim he means what The Forge calls purist-for-system sim, and what some around here call "process sim". Whereas the sort of sim that I was "profiling" upthread (and apparently inadvertantly profiled you too!) is "high concept sim" or "genre emulation". I think a lot of ENworldes wouldn't describe it as sim at all, but perhaps more along the lines of terms like "immersion", "actor stance", "no metagaming" etc.The reason that GNS puts the two sorts of sim together, when ENworld would normally treat them as quite different, is because GNS is really focused on the roles of the different game participants in building up the shared fiction. What both sorts of sim have in common is that the players don't contribute to the fiction except by playing their PCs from within the parameters of the character. In process sim, the mechanics do the rest (of actually resolving the consequences of action declaration); in genre emulation, the mechanics and/or the GM enforce genre considerations and keep the world and the story ticking along in the right way.Process-sim players will complain about 4e, Come and Get It etc because the power violates ingame causality. Genre emulation/high concept players will complain about CaGI because it "pulls them out of character", and makes them do a job (deciding what the NPCs do) which they want the GM to be doing. The Forge thinks that, even though the reason the two players complain is a bit different, the fact that they complain about the same things shows they have something in common - which is why The Forge gives them the same label (sim).As to the "fixation" on GNS: I personally find it a very helpful analysis. It has helped me improve my game, understand a whole lot of RPGs better, make sense of people I read on these boards, etc. But other people probably would find other approaches useful. By way of a (slightly left field) analogy, I'm a huge admirer and advocate of Max Weber's historical sociology, and both in my professional life and my daily life listening to the news etc I use Weber's interpretive framework to make sense of things. But I wouldn't necessarily expect everyone else in the world to find Weber's analysis appealing. (Even I have to admit he isn't as helpful as modern economics for understanding, say, interest rate fluctuations. But for me those aren't as important as other features of politics and the economy. A different person, though, with different interests, might find modern economics much more insightful than Weber. Mutatis mutandis for GNS theory.)</blockquote>

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