Finding El-Dorado in the Zombie Apocalypse

[contracycle]

Of course, this ideal raises all kinds of practical difficulties, and gets even uglier when you toss in the insistence that players must know, and have control over, nothing the characters wouldn't.  Because then the GM has to keep the machinery of an entire universe in their head, and the players have to essentially take it on trust that he or she is some kind of Mentat paragon always capable of maintaining a perfect separation between (A) what would genuinely seem most likely to happen on the basis of pre-established knowledge of the world, and (B) what he or she would personally like to happen as a real human being.  (I would personally contend there is such a distinction, but the temptation to mix the two is perfectly real.  And of course, depending on your overarching goal, may not be a bad thing.  But it ain't Sim.)

Uff.  I dispute that.  First of all, I think the logic of "what would happen" is weak.  All too often that means "what would be the most probable outcome", but reality is more complex than probable outcomes.  What if the odds between two outcomes are 51% and 49%?  To assume that Sim MUST take the former when the two are so close is very limiting.

Second, I don't think that individual preferences are ruled out.  If "what would happen" was all that was inviolved, most FRPG sim play would be reduced to peasants harvesting their fields.  After all, that's where you'd most likely be born, thats the limited world you would most likely encounter, and maybe if you're lucky one day you'll get to go to the town fair 10 miles away.

So, I think there is a lot of personal preference type choices being made in sim, and this is not inherently flawed.  As long as it maintains the integrity of causality and consistency, there is room for a lot of improbably, atypical, and unusual sorts of outcomes, which are frankly necessary for play to also be fun.  At any rate, I don't beat myself up over it.

The issue of holding universe in the head is I think a problem that is potentially mechanical.  We've got all sorts of sim type mechanics for how far someone can jump or how fast they can run under a heavy load but very little that deals with things like sociology and politics.  And I don't mean "persuade" rolls and the like, I mean things like how bodies of people act and react.  One could rather flippantly argue that Jan Huss wasn't burnt at the stake because his Persuade roll failed, but because it succeeded.  Dealing with the probablities of physical things is all very well, but the absence of mechanics for social things means that these are left to the GM by default, not because it is a necessity of the form.

[Caldis]

I cant say I've ever experienced this kind of play but maybe that's because I just tend to see all the dials and knobs being turned and dont worry about it.

Take your post apocalyptic game for an example, there are literally hundreds of choices you have to make in determining what is 'realistic' in the game world and in a whole lot of these choices what may be most realistic would likely end up with a pretty uninteresting world.  How the characters will interact with the game world is a huge question.  Do you want the characters fighting zombies or should they be to dangerous to fight and the characters should run and hide?   Will their be constant masses of zombies moving around hunting for the characters or can the characters settle down and try and grow food and create a new society.  Can animals become zombies?  Do zombies move fast or slow?  How badly injured do you have to be to become infected?  What's the chance of characters becoming infected? 

You talk a lot about once play starts but really the things that are decided before play starts have a huge impact on how the game will turn out.  Embedding those moral/ethical problems in the setting is one, chosing situations that come up in play that emphasize or ignore them and make a choice necessary or treating it as meaningless is another, that includes things like the ramifications of these ethical decisions happening offscreen or outside the scope of play.   Conversely all these decisions made before play begins shape how play will turn out to such a huge fashion that I dont see the difference between the preplay manipulation and the in play manipulation like railroading.  Some people may not accept it, others do, I cant accept that it is anathema to sim play.

[Roger]

...the thing is that- while I agree there needs to be an 'emotional connection' in the sense that the players do care about how the characters feel, that doesn't mean player feelings equate with character feelings.

Oh, absolutely -- you'll notice that I asked exclusively about player feelings.  I don't think character feelings have any relevance here.

So, in that sense, focusing on player responses as opposed to character reponses could be misleading.

This look very interesting, but I'm finding too many ways to parse that to have a good sense of what you're saying.  So far I'm between:

1.  Focusing on a player's emotional response to the fiction, as opposed to a character's emotional response within the fiction, could be misleading.

2.  Focusing on a player's response to a situation, where the response is deciding to leave someone outside to die, could be misleading as opposed to focusing on the character's response to do so.

Or possibly you mean both.  Or neither.  Anyway, I'd really like to hear more from you about this; I think it'll be important.

Again, I would say this is predicated on the assumption that (A) the player-characters are all perfectly rational and (B) that large-scale outcomes are deterministic (which is to say, you can forecast in advance what the 'optimal' outcome would be without, as it were, 'experimenting' with different courses of action.)  I don't think either of those assumptions actually accords with observations of reality.  Which means it is, at best, a rather selective application of Sim principles.

Looking back over what I wrote, I was definitely unclear about how the players and the player characters each relate to the Premise.  Let me take another stab at it:

Players address Premise through the lens of the player character.  However, there's no requirement that they reach similar conclusions about the Premise; indeed, it's quite common for them to reach opposite conclusions.

Considering a Premise like "Is a ruthless selfishness necessary to survive in a crisis?", I might personally be predisposed towards the opinion that No, it's not at all necessary and in fact dooms the ruthless person.  In order to address it within the game, I may very well be inclined to play a character who is of the opposite opinion -- he believes that it is necessary, and quite possibly he'll believe that right up until the moment of his death.  Or if I'm personally predisposed to believe in ruthless selfishness, I might play a character who actively pursues selflessness, and who is likely to do so up until the moment of his death.

I think this approach appeals to me because it makes it a little easier to avoid Anvilicious Aesop play; I mean the characters sitting around and telling each other "You know, I've learned an important lesson.  In such troubled times, we cannot pursue our own ruthless selfishness at all costs, lest we lose our humanity and become little more than the monsters we are fighting."  That's enough to turn anyone off Story Now.

So, yeah, there's no need for the player-characters to be at all rational, or to resolve the dilemma of the Premise in the same way the players do.

That being said, is there any requirement for the Right to Dream player to be rational?  Hmmm.  Deep question, this.  I would suggest that it is a fundamental feature of Right to Dream play.  The enjoyment comes from Exploring the rational cause-and-effect System.  As the Right to Dream essay proposes, "Internal Cause is King".  I can't think of any examples of irrational play that would persist beyond a short-lived superstition, but I'm happy to hear suggestions.

Of course, there's no inherent requirement for a player, having rationally reached an optimal plan, to make his character equally rational.  Indeed, I suspect there's a strong mode of Right to Dream play that I might characterize as Guinea Pigging -- intentionally sending one's character into harm's way as an experimental way to Explore System.  I suspect this may be what's happening in the description of play at Does chance favour a good story? but perhaps extensive discussion about this point belongs in its own thread.

Anyway, that feels like quite a lot already to respond to, so I'll wrap it up there.

[Alfryd]

I think the general understanding of improv is that the GM reacts to the players during play, and the 'plot' arises from that interaction on the fly, as opposed to preconceiving a plot before play and walking the players through it.  (to some degree or other).

Your definition of improv seems to me to be :  introducing a situation into the fiction for reasons other than in-game causality.  Is that a fair understanding?

If so, I would use another term for it.  It seems to me that using 'improv' as I define it is going to help simulation play because you are reacting (with 100% causality) to what the players are doing, rather than trying to direct them back to the pre-conceived plot which may result in you ignoring/lessening causality of player actions  because it would take the game away from the preconceived idea of where it should go.

If you want to phrase 'improvisation' in that way, sure, yeah I can agree with that.  And, yes, being 100% faithful to in-world causality does not have to entail that PC choices are insignificant, because PC choices are an in-world event that should have some repercussions.  The trouble with Sim is that everything else that happens in the world would also, logically, have repercussions, so in order for player choices to be significant, they would have to be expressed through control of characters who are powerful/influential enough to give the environment a run for it's money.  Otherwise, you have to resort to metagame.

In other words, I consider railroading/force to be a misrepresentation of in-world causality to the same extent that, say, heavy use of Director stance would be.  The former completely poisons Nar play, the latter can enhance it, but I would argue that Sim properly rejects both, or occupies some kind of middle ground.

Going further- and I realise that a lot of folks don't really see the difference- I would distinguish between-
*  "Player choices don't always matter because the GM spontaneously invents stuff that negates the consequences of their characters' actions", and-
*  "Player choices don't always matter because the world's internal logic had consequences which cancelled out the effect of PC actions."

The simplest example of the difference I can give is as follows:  The GM rolls dice and compares the result to a table to determine the weather appropriate to the local climate and current season.  Turns out a Force 10 hurricane is headed the players' way, and wipes out the irrigation system they were working so hard on.  I think it's clear that, however much it sucks for the PCs, this wasn't an arbitrary decision to impose some predecided plotline on events.

Why would you want to include this?  Because it can increase the accuracy of the simulation to incorporate certain forms of random event.  After all, weather happens, and chaos is fair.

Your version of 'improv' is better described as 'agenda' , as everybody has been saying.   If your agenda is causality then you are playing a simulist game, regardless of the situations that arise during play sometimes being the same as what might arise with a narativist agenda.

I still incline toward the view that if it looks like address of premise, walks like address of premise, and quacks like address of premise, it's address of premise.  I'll freely concede that premise-addressing moments-of-decision may arrive with somewhat lower frequency than dark-chocolate-with-cinnamon-sprinkles narrativism, but if stories are about (Moral Choices)X(Consequences), this simply strikes me as a question of tradeoffs between how strictly you model Consequences versus how reliably you hit with Moral Choices.  But how, exactly, do you walk out of this game without player actions producing a theme?  Where is the ostensible boundary condition between Sim and Nar?

[Alfryd]

Uff.  I dispute that.  First of all, I think the logic of "what would happen" is weak.  All too often that means "what would be the most probable outcome", but reality is more complex than probable outcomes.  What if the odds between two outcomes are 51% and 49%?  To assume that Sim MUST take the former when the two are so close is very limiting.

Yup- this is indeed one of the 'practical difficulties' one might mention, and I absolutely agree that this is exacerbated by a lack of well-defined techniques for handling large-scale social outcomes (wars, famines, revolts, etc.)  The result is that the players not only have to trust that the GM is calculating the odds fairly within his/her head, but in some sense rolling internal mental dice to see how those odds translate to specific events, and also without any inclination to 'load' those dice.  Which, again, rather strains belief.

So yes, I would absolutely agree that having express, up-front mechanics for resolving large-scale events in a fair and plausible fashion would greatly benefit Sim play of this type.

Second, I don't think that individual preferences are ruled out.  If "what would happen" was all that was inviolved, most FRPG sim play would be reduced to peasants harvesting their fields.  After all, that's where you'd most likely be born, thats the limited world you would most likely encounter, and maybe if you're lucky one day you'll get to go to the town fair 10 miles away.

I would argue that this is a question of the 'initial assumptions'- namely, it's fine to assume that the PCs will be characters who will, in likelihood, get up to 'interesting' stuff (in this case, powerful nobility.)  I mean, just from the perspective of a Simulation's purpose being to determine 'how events could really turn out', there's justification for focusing on those individuals whose actions would have the largest impact on events.  It's the most efficient allocation of 'processing power' when it comes to computing final results, because it gives each player responsibility for modelling aspects of the world that are likely to be roughly equally influential.  From that perspective, it's fine and dandy not to dwell too much on the hapless peasantry, precisely because they have almost no voice in the proceedings.  (Again, shitty system of government.)

You talk a lot about once play starts but really the things that are decided before play starts have a huge impact on how the game will turn out.  Embedding those moral/ethical problems in the setting is one, chosing situations that come up in play that emphasize or ignore them and make a choice necessary or treating it as meaningless is another, that includes things like the ramifications of these ethical decisions happening offscreen or outside the scope of play.   Conversely all these decisions made before play begins shape how play will turn out to such a huge fashion that I dont see the difference between the preplay manipulation and the in play manipulation like railroading....

I understand your point, but one of the points I'm making is that, by ensuring the PCs genuinely have a level of mechanical power/influence/information that's commensurate to the scale of the setting/situation, it's possible for their choices to have a dramatic impact on final outcomes without having to distort the strict modelling of in-world causality.  An example I gave was influential nobility within a feudal setting- the idea that their decisions could have major historical ramifications doesn't hinge on some fluke perturbation of the odds, but is entirely expectable.  (With that said, the result would quite possibly be a form of Blood Opera.)

In the case of the zombie scenario- sure, the PCs are only a handful of guys/gals, but there's only a relatively small number of other guys/gals left in the locale regardless, so again, it's entirely reasonable that a handful of survivors could tip the balance of whatever conflicts are underway in the setting/situation.  And the various questions you raise as to how the zombies react/behave, how vulnerable, persistent, contagious and numerous they are, etc., would all be part of that initial calibration with respect to PC influence/ability.

[Caldis]

I understand your point, but one of the points I'm making is that, by ensuring the PCs genuinely have a level of mechanical power/influence/information that's commensurate to the scale of the setting/situation, it's possible for their choices to have a dramatic impact on final outcomes without having to distort the strict modelling of in-world causality.  An example I gave was influential nobility within a feudal setting- the idea that their decisions could have major historical ramifications doesn't hinge on some fluke perturbation of the odds, but is entirely expectable.  (With that said, the result would quite possibly be a form of Blood Opera.)

This is exactly the point though.  By setting the game up in such a manner and then following through on those expectations in play and also allowing the players to freely choose how to respond to those situations you are engaging in a narrativist creative agenda and not a simulationist one.   I dont have a link handy but there was a fair bit of talk about technical agenda in play which would refer to preferences as to the techniques used in play. They differed from creative agenda because creative agenda extends beyond play, it's the reason for the game and what you hope to achieve with the game.

I think this reflects back on what you were talking about above with contra.  You 'initial assumptions' are chosen to find characters who will get involved in 'interesting stuff' but not everyone is going to find the same stuff interesting.  Feudal nobles could have a lot of influence in political situations but I dont find many games about feudal nobles.  In my experience with fantasy games characters tend to be sword swingers or spell slingers, trouble shooters capable of certain actions but with little political power.  Usually those political characters are npc's and they provide opportunities to the characters, engage them in activities where they can show off their abilities.  What the players find to be 'interesting stuff' tends to be mission based play and gaining powers and abilities over time while a bigger plot plays out in the background that they slowly uncover.  This is simulationist play, certainly not the only kind of such play but a definite valid form, it may have the appearance of gamist play at times but there is never a question of step on up, no challenges to face simply a question of how the characters will succeed.  A strength of this form of play is that you keep your group united, working together and they can all be present and involved in most scenarios.

[stefoid]

If you want to phrase 'improvisation' in that way, sure, yeah I can agree with that.  And, yes, being 100% faithful to in-world causality does not have to entail that PC choices are insignificant, because PC choices are an in-world event that should have some repercussions.  The trouble with Sim is that everything else that happens in the world would also, logically, have repercussions, so in order for player choices to be significant, they would have to be expressed through control of characters who are powerful/influential enough to give the environment a run for it's money.  Otherwise, you have to resort to metagame.

Players choices are significant if you focus on, and play out the consequences of those decisions to their full extent.  the magnitude of those consequences doesn't really come into it.  they could be earth shattering or purely personal for the character involved, depending on the game.  If you rob the players of a chance to make a decision or modify the natural consequences of the decision, in order to drive the plot, then thats where player decisions become less significant.

Your version of 'improv' is better described as 'agenda' , as everybody has been saying.   If your agenda is causality then you are playing a simulist game, regardless of the situations that arise during play sometimes being the same as what might arise with a narativist agenda.

I still incline toward the view that if it looks like address of premise, walks like address of premise, and quacks like address of premise, it's address of premise.  I'll freely concede that premise-addressing moments-of-decision may arrive with somewhat lower frequency than dark-chocolate-with-cinnamon-sprinkles narrativism, but if stories are about (Moral Choices)X(Consequences), this simply strikes me as a question of tradeoffs between how strictly you model Consequences versus how reliably you hit with Moral Choices.  But how, exactly, do you walk out of this game without player actions producing a theme? 

Where is the ostensible boundary condition between Sim and Nar

In the agenda of the people at the table.  If your agenda is causality, you arent addressing a premise or producing a theme, you are addressing causality which might have a few themey moments.  and it doesnt matter!   Is it the right agenda for you and the rest of the people at the table?  thats all that matters.  Or do you want the chocolate and cinnamon sprinkle badge of narrativist superiority that is awarded to sim players of exceptional merit? 

[Alfryd]

This look very interesting, but I'm finding too many ways to parse that to have a good sense of what you're saying.  So far I'm between:

1.  Focusing on a player's emotional response to the fiction, as opposed to a character's emotional response within the fiction, could be misleading.

2.  Focusing on a player's response to a situation, where the response is deciding to leave someone outside to die, could be misleading as opposed to focusing on the character's response to do so.

Roger, I'll probably have to think about this and get back to you.  For now, I'll just say that, to me, direct player input to characters' decision-making isn't so much the overall goal as an incidental (though strong) requirement of getting character responses that are actually convincing.

I still think that there is an expectation on the player to maintain a healthy respect for the character's internal motivations, whether established before or altered during play, but there also needs to be a kernel of choice in the equation if you're going to reproduce human behaviour.

However, I don't really think that bringing your personal, real-world beliefs to the characters you play, all of the time, or other fairly obvious breaches of IC/OOC motivation, is particularly healthy for Sim play.  I think it's possible to play characters that hold beliefs that are radically different from your own as a real person and still get perfectly valid input to theme.

That being said, is there any requirement for the Right to Dream player to be rational?  Hmmm.  Deep question, this.  I would suggest that it is a fundamental feature of Right to Dream play.  The enjoyment comes from Exploring the rational cause-and-effect System.  As the Right to Dream essay proposes, "Internal Cause is King".  I can't think of any examples of irrational play that would persist beyond a short-lived superstition, but I'm happy to hear suggestions.

That is an interesting question, but I don't think the subject is all that complex.  I absolutely agree that Simulationist play has a deep emphasis on the rational analysis and modelling of internal cause-and-effect.  But at the same time, the imagined world can contain not-perfectly-rational characters, and some or all of those might be PCs.  And in order to rationally model their behaviour, you need to have them behave irrationally, at least on occasion.  1 times 0 == 0.  (This is assuming you can even define perfectly rational behaviour under all circumstances, which, as I went over, I would contend is not always possible.)

All I'm sayin' is, in the real world, folks don't always see eye to eye.  It seems out-of-character to insist that never happen in Sim, if you want to get outcomes that resemble reality.

In the agenda of the people at the table.  If your agenda is causality, you arent addressing a premise or producing a theme, you are addressing causality which might have a few themey moments.

This is exactly the point though.  By setting the game up in such a manner and then following through on those expectations in play and also allowing the players to freely choose how to respond to those situations you are engaging in a narrativist creative agenda and not a simulationist one.

Again, I would venture that this is defining Simulationism as "Internal Cause is King, except when that also produces Theme, in which case it is only Narrativist."  There's nothing inconsistent about the definition, but it possibly sells Sim short, and leads to a fractured understanding of what it's really 'about'.

I entirely agree with your characterisation of PC roles in most FRPGs, but I would also point out that the great bulk of such systems are not especially Narrativist in emphasis.  And I agree that combat-physics and skill-advancement is a perfectly valid and interesting aspect of in-world cause-and-consequence to explore, but so is exploring the ways in which PC choices can affect large-scale events, and any potential to create Theme as a side-effect would not, in my opinion, cause it's Sim qualities to suddenly evaporate.

Players choices are significant if you focus on, and play out the consequences of those decisions to their full extent.  the magnitude of those consequences doesn't really come into it.  they could be earth shattering or purely personal for the character involved, depending on the game.  If you rob the players of a chance to make a decision or modify the natural consequences of the decision, in order to drive the plot, then thats where player decisions become less significant.

Well, strictly speaking, if the local environment consists of a ten-by-ten foot padded cell, then you can focus on and play out the consequences of the players' choices to their full extent and none of it will matter a damn.  Because the full extent of your choices is ten feet.

Now, I entirely agree that choices with small-scale consequences can be very meaningful and potent when the 'arena of resolution' is similarly small.  For example, a small-town drama, or heck, just a bunch of people in the same room with a lot of emotional baggage.  But the harsh fact is that the bold company of plucky adventurers is actually hugely unlikely to topple the grave threat which besets all the realm unless you bend over backwards to rig the odds in their favour.  Which has nothing to do with Sim.

[contracycle]

If "internal cause is king" more or less accidentally goes ahead and creates theme, thats fine.  It just won't do it consistently.  So if you play according to "internal cause is king" consistently, MOST of your play won't produce theme.

See, this is what I was trying to get at by pointing to situational selection.  I don't think it'sd limited to initial setup at all.  Although the fundamental draw is exploration of causality in the imaginary world, you still need to contrive situaitons in which that is brought about, in which Interesting Stuff Happens.  And when Interesting Stuff Happens, you have reasonable odds of stumbling into the same sort of fictional situations that might potentially produce address of premise and thence theme.  But that is a side effect, and if the players at the table aren't actively trying to pursue that, it may well flop or just be incidental.  But more often, you're going to find they more or less contradict each other.  The thing that would be most thematically satisfying would require causality be rejected or vice versa.

And the only reason that this is worth mentioning, worth attaching a label to, is because you might have one player who lives for the thematic moments and another player who enjoys the exploration of causality, and one or the other is not going to be fully satisfied.  I think you have overextended the definitions; the description of RTD does not say "and it never ever produces any kind of thematic play whatsoever", just as the Narr definition does not claim "and it never ever includes any kind of causality exploration".  They are PRIORITIES, not absolute limits.

[stefoid]

I guess I really just dont understand the point of what you are trying to resolve here?  When you sit down to play a game, you prioritise the elements of play that are important to you and your group and you play that way.  The resulting game might have gamist moments, it might have themey moments, it might have simmy moments.  It doesnt matter what you label the resulting mishmash - what matters is a) are you getting what you expect and b) is that satisfying for everyone playing?

Are you engaging in a theoretical play-labelling discussion here, trying to understand the convolutions of forge theory, or are you having problems with a) and/or b) at the table?

[Alfryd]

Look, it's possible that I'm reading too much into this, or that I'm just fussing excessively over arbitrary labels.  And I apologise if I've pored over some article from years ago and seized upon some isolated remarks out of context.

I would add that I have an immense respect for the body of practical observations that folks on the forge have built up over time, and that I have found the various on-site articles and discussion threads to be enormously informative and full of useful insights- Ron's in particular.  I absolutely do not dispute that various techniques associated with the different modes can severely undermine and contradict eachother in non-obvious ways, and I entirely agree that analysis of player motivations is hugely important.  There is, in my mind, absolutely no question that discussion of The Threefold Model, GNS, and The Big Model has had a huge and overwhelmingly positive impact on system design and promoted healthier habits within the hobby as a whole.

However.

I don't understand how Premise-expressing elements can be included and players not be considered addressing a Premise when they can't resolve the Situation without doing so.

I don't understand how a heavy focus on in-world causality that incorporates observations of how people behave in the real world cannot be considered Simulationist.


Because apparently, you can have High-Concept Sim with a strong focus on drama and player autonomy, and that'll be just Simulationist, and you can have Vanilla Narrativism with a strong focus on Exploration, and that'll be just Narrativist (even when the group itself had no conscious notion they were playing that way or the other, and if you asked them, might give totally different answers.)  But hey- these are, evidently, both potentially totally functional creative agendas that the whole group can groove to.  And apparently, very very difficult to functionally distinguish from eachother, in terms of how much time and attention is paid to which bits and pieces during play.

If it's a question of 'no artificial additives, flavourings or preservatives means Sim', and 'inescapable moral questions with consequences equals Nar', to whatever degree, then I contend it is possible to accomodate both.  Or, if it's a question of procedural tradeoffs being involved between promoting one or the other, then it seems there are viable positions all along the spectrum between that can be totally functional creative agendas for particular groups.  I have absolutely have no problem with that idea.  But either way, that invalidates one of the key predictions of GNS theory, which is that groups that 'muddy' their agendas should experience at best mediocre and at worst dysfunctional play.

I'm just getting a distinct sense of 'oh, it's a particle', or 'oh, it's a wave' depending on how on how you interpret the results, with the implication that never the twain shall meet.

[stefoid]

Im the wrong person to talk forge theory with --  I find the way it is defined by "story now" where players  collectively agree to address an ethical theme as a bit freaky in some contexts.  However I can see how playing nar games where the entire ruleset revolves around a specific premise means you cant possibly avoid it if you play that game.  So perhaps thats all the 'agreement' amounts to -- lets play this specific game that is about this premise.  Agenda.  But I havent played any of those games.

I just know what elements of role playing I prioritize - drama over 'realism', cinematic style conflict resolution, conflict res over task res, improv over predefined plot, etc...    What classification that falls under doesnt matter.

[contracycle]

Things is that, back in the day, when the internet put large numbers of gamers into direct contact with each other for the first time, it rapidly became clear that there were massively conflicting ideas about people in games should be doing.  This collapsed into a whole bunch of you're-doing-it-wrong type arguments, and worse, you're-a-pervert-dteroying-the-hobby type stuff.  And to cool this down somewhat, a model was devekloped that recognised that not everyone was after exactly the same experience of play.

So the one thing we know is that there are a bunch of people out there who would have liked to address premise, but the rest of the group compromised that goal becuase they were more interested in The Dream, and vice versa, and that there are whole groups who would look at other groups play style and say it's sucky and boring. The GNS categorisation is an attempt to explain that phenmonon, not to assert or impose it.

I'd agree that if players really CAN'T resolve a situation except by addressing premise, and if this is a CONSISTENT feature of play, then that is Narr.  But I'd bet real money that in a sim game most of the time players COULD resolve the situation without addressing premise, and that even when it does occur it's NOTa consistent feature of play.

Now at the risk of making gross and unfair assumptions, I think the example you gave is one of an essentially accidental occurrence.  It looks to me rather like the following happened: the GM wanted to intoriduce a pet character, or a source of plot or setting information, into the group; and chose a female character in the hopes this would arouse greater sympathy, and gave her a lot of weapons so she would appear useful and competent.  When you rejected her, she was disposed of, because the GM is either going to abandon the attempt or try another device to introduce whatever function that character was supposed to fulfill.  It's probably caused some sort of prep rewrite.

That doesn't seem to me like the GM pushed a situation that was intended to invoke a premise addressing response, not least because ther decision was so sharp and binary, without buildup.  Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe you will find that the GM is indeed doing precisely that, and similar situations continue to arise, and are in fact the important part of play, both to the GM and to the players - rather than the exploration of the dream world that you're inhabiting.  From the rest of what you've said about the game, the strong interest seems to lie in the pseudo-reality of the game world; it doesn't seem to me that the players or GM are actively seeking out opportunities to address premise.  So I see no reason not to describe this as sim.

[Caldis]

One of the things to remember about premise and addressing premise is that it's something that remains constant throughout the game.  You dont just do it in one instant of play its something that affects play throughout the game.  The idea comes from Lagos Egri's work on stage plays and it referred to the whole play being focused on addressing the premise of the play.   Now there are differences between a stage play and a roleplaying game so it's not a direct translation but the idea holds true.  Your one moment of ethical choice doesnt necessarily express premise, if it doesnt have any further impact on the game.  I'd suggest that setting up a post-apocalyptic game world where your characters will constantly be challenged to survive and they have to make ethical choices based on that challenge to survive is predisposing the game towards narrativism, it could go towards gamism if it's a test of the players ability to see if they can get the characters to survive or sim if it's not so much about what ethical choices the characters make but how there physical abilities and possesions change over time as they live through the apocalypse.

I think another problem is you've set out that you think certain elements are essential sim elements but you havent really been outlined what those are.  I notice in the one thread you linked to Eero started to talk about how your assumptions fell in line with nar thought, character integrity being essential to nar whereas you had claimed it for sim territory.  So it might be more fruitful to discuss what are the baseline assumptions for sim play and see if we can come to agreement on those rather than just continue what looks to be talking past each other here.  That might warrant another thread or maybe we can just discuss your bullet points I see problems with associating several of them with sim play and not play in general.

[Alfryd]

Now at the risk of making gross and unfair assumptions, I think the example you gave is one of an essentially accidental occurrence.  It looks to me rather like the following happened: the GM wanted to intoriduce a pet character, or a source of plot or setting information, into the group; and chose a female character in the hopes this would arouse greater sympathy, and gave her a lot of weapons so she would appear useful and competent.  When you rejected her, she was disposed of, because the GM is either going to abandon the attempt or try another device to introduce whatever function that character was supposed to fulfill.  It's probably caused some sort of prep rewrite.

I'm not holding up the zombie campaign as an ideal example, and I totally agree that might well be what was going on (I definitely suspected the GM of lapsing into illusionism on occasion.)  But again I don't consider illusionist techniques to have anything to do with simulation.  Spontaneously inventing an NPC for Plot Reason X, with a basis in prior events, is not internal cause being king.  However, anything like a fair assessment of the larger situation would essentially mandate bumping into other ragged survivors sooner or later- sooner, to be honest.

To give a different example, in a Traveller game I took part in recently, one of the other PCs was arrested for lingering around the scene of a murder (that my character had, incidentally, instigated by cheating at a gambling game and flubbing deception rolls.)  The GM clearly didn't want the PC to be dragged off into custody, since that would interfere with the central plotline he had in mind, so he had an angry mob coincidentally storm the plaza at the precise moment that they were reading the PC his rights.  Even when the PC chose to go along quietly, the GM had the mob pursue and knock out the windows at the interrogation chamber when they sat down.  Now, this is railroading with 'positive' pressure rather than 'negative' pressure, but it's still a concatenation of miracles that had nothing to do with the impartial assessment of in-world causality.  That is not Sim, and it strikes me as unfair to make this mode the collective GNS scapegoat for that kind of nonsense.

Conversely, if the other PC had been arrested, the other group members would be confronted with a choice of whether and how to rescue him, and/or the arrested PC might have been offered terms of release if he agreed to spill information on his comrades' likely whereabouts- both totally logical developments which raise valid ethical questions about loyalty, and don't require systemic distortion of in-world causality.

I think another problem is you've set out that you think certain elements are essential sim elements but you havent really been outlined what those are.

I thought I outlined this in the OP, but my understanding is largely as follows:
*  You have certain starting 'seed' assumptions that, ideally, resemble those of particular source materials.
*  Beyond that, events ideally unfold based on in-world causality and ONLY in-world causality.  Internal Cause Is King.  (This is subject to the understanding that player input as expressed through character decisions, along with certain random outcomes, are valid forms of in-world causality.)
*  The events that unfold should, in turn, ideally exhibit properties that resemble the source materials.  (However, 'unpredictability' may well be one of those properties.)

This applies on the level of physics/system, politics/setting, psychology/character, and everything in-between, though I acknowledge this doesn't mean that every Sim-inclined group is going to enjoy every aspect of Sim equally.  One group might go bananas for physics and care nothing for psychology, another group might be bowled over by politics and psychology and care nothing for physics, and might not care if certain aspects of Sim are heavily enforced and others are played very fast-and-loose.

But this basic idea that's present in so many Sim-oriented RPGs- namely the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast- has absolutely nothing to do with allowing in-world causality to reign supreme.  Nothing.  Not a damn thing.  Zip.  Nadda.  Nil.  Zilch.  It doesn't make inherent sense in terms of politics, it doesn't make inherent sense in terms of psychology, and it doesn't make inherent sense in terms of physics- particularly not when you take reality as your 'source material'.  In reality, we are not just puppets dancing on the strings of some magical force that predecides our fate, or rigid automatons with fixed patterns of stimulus/response.  If the world were a character, a railroad plot would be Pawn stance, not Actor.

Now, sure, there are certain kinds of Simulationist play where foregone conclusions might be justified to a fair degree- anything based on the Cthulhu Mythos, for example.  There's definitely a strong 'trend' within the original H.P. Lovecraft stories that the protagonists wind up insane, dead, or corrupted by the end of the proceedings, so if you want the system-expressed theory to make predictions that accord with observations, you'd want to reproduce that.  But there are ways to model this using explicit, above-board mechanics, precisely as From Beyond is currently attempting to do, in a way that isn't wholly dependant on illusionism, and allows for much more improvisational play (at least as I understand it.)  Hell, Arkham Horror's 'doom track' is more honest about it, and that's for pure Gamism.