To sim or not to sim…

I touched on this a little in the previous post, but I wanted to go a little more in depth.  Now I could write a whole essay, a whole series of essays, about this.  But blog posts are supposed to be easily digestible in a limited period of time, right?  So I should probably just hit the high points for now.

My thought is this: if a game (a roleplaying game, of course, that’s what we are talking about) tries to be realistic via its ruleset then it’s trying to Sim – that is, it’s trying to simulate what would “really” happen if the events in the game played themselves out in real life.  (Or at least the life that matches the context of the story, even if that includes magic, or faster-than-light travel, or whatever.)

There are a couple of signs that a game is a classical “sim” type of RPG.  One starting point is the character sheet.  Are there character attributes encoded on the character sheet, for later application in figuring out whether the character can do something, like dodge a sword blow or break down a door?  If you look at a character sheet and see many attributes like Strength, Dexterity, Toughness, Perception, Mind, and so on, you may be looking at a Sim game.

A better measure is what are the points of uncertainty in the game and what sort of answer do we look for in resolving them?  Every RPG, being story based, has points of uncertainty where we don’t know (for example) if our protagonist will defeat the enemy – or even survive their onslaught.  We need some way to determine the outcome – and that’s what the ruleset is usually for, telling us how we decide (or who gets to decide) that outcome.

The most common method (though obviously not the only one) is to have a formula that adds known quantities to create a probabilistic goal – and then one rolls dice to see if one can make the required target.  A character with a Strength of 10 and a Bash skill of 5 may be trying to break down a door with a Toughness rating of 20, and perhaps the game’s formula says to add Strength plus Bash plus the roll of two six sided dice, and if you beat the Toughness rating of the door, it falls.  In this case, the players would be hoping to roll a 5 or better on 2d6.

This is a Sim style game.  When coming up with rules on how things should be determined, the author decided that they wanted to, to some degree of accuracy or other, model what would really happen in a similar situation in reality.  In a way, most Sim style rpgs (most mainstream ones) are kind of like simple computer programs run manually by the GM (the game’s referee).

When you design a Sim style game, you have a LOT of work cut out for you.  You have to:

1.  Come up with way to model the attributes of the real world.
2.  Come up with rule sets and formulae that create outcomes that are believable.
3.  Keep it all simple enough to be used by normal people.
4.  But at the same time, prevent abusive “holes” in the system from being exploitable.

It can be a huge challenge!  But it occurs to me that perhaps Sim RPGs are answering the wrong question.  Perhaps when Bif the Beneficent tries to break down the door, instead of asking “What would really happen in real life” we could instead ask “What outcome makes a better story?”  And “better” could be defined however you like – a more dramatic story, a more comedic story, a more fulfilling story, etc.

It’s not that we are simply tossing out realism, mind you – because outcomes that are consistently unbelievable past our threshold of acceptance ruin the story, rendering those other goals moot.  But perhaps we can police the realism of our story gaming the same way that writers do – by simply keeping it in mind ourselves as we choose outcomes (and having a GM enforcing the same.)  Perhaps we don’t need rulesets to do that for us.

Maybe all the rules of the game have to do is help us resolve story uncertainties in the most interesting way?  With of course provisions for when players have differing opinions on that score?

Sim games will always have a place – after all, currently they are the majority, and you would not be wrong to say “vast”.  And a good crunchy dungeon romp or by the numbers battle can be as enjoyable as any board game or computer game – more so, in some cases.

But nothing achieves better story gaming than RPGs pointed straight at the target – non Sim, story based resolution rulesets.  Having played Sims for decades, I have found my new home, both as an RPG author and RPG gamer, with Story Gaming.

And that is why I built Dream Factory, why I am writing its second edition, and why I have an utterly new RPG project lined up after that.

Because ultimately whether a character’s actions are perfectly and accurately realistic is far less important, at least to me, then whether the character’s story is compelling and moving.  And rulesets that help the achievement of those goals are the ones that most excite me.