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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 6354818" data-attributes="member: 1879">That is NOT sim vs narrative. It is a sim at a different level of granularity. In any meaningful sense GURPS gives me exactly as much nothing as D&D.Fantastic I used my foot and so I did statistically .7 more damage then the shoulder bash, I opened the door! Yay. Now I turn and look at the door. Which component failed? Was it the hinges, the latch, the frame, the structure of the door? If it was the latch did I break the bolt or did the strike plate fail? If it was the hinges does the break reveal crystalline fracturing or perhaps a void left as a manufacturing flaw? If the door suffered a structural failure what is the fracture pattern? Did you take into account the differing grain structures of Sitka spruce vs Yellow pine? If it was a solid door, what it the salvage value of the remaining wood?At any level of sim, I can utterly break your pretense of system based verisimilitude by insisting on asking a question the rules don't cover and forcing the GM to invent a narrative. The whole point of a rules system is to provide a resolution mechanic which is more rigid than "Because I said so." and less effortful than calculating it out using hard physics right down to the Higgs field and Planck time. And therefore any level of sim, short of that will have some point where the system uses shorthand and the GM must wing it if you peer closer. GURPS vs HERO vs RQ vs D&D (except for 4e) is not sim vs narrative, it's just different levels of granularity. Runequest vs HeroQuest? Now THAT is sim vs narrative. Because in HQ when you beat the badguy you do not know how you beat him until after the fact. Once the resolution system is finished you have to go back and fill in the narrative because you have no clue whether he fell to your swordblade or to your relentless logic the system draws no distinction between them. RQ and HQ by the way are both explicitly designed to portray the same world, and given that it's a mythic reality it's an open question which system portrays it more accurately.</blockquote>

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