1) That's bullshit. How is it hard to discuss Chess just because it doesn't do a very good job of emulating a battlefield? In fact, isn't Chess praised from a non-gameplay viewpoint for having a huge level of abstraction yet still maintaining a core of something people can identify with?
2) Obviously yes. Which part of Sawyer's design do you think fail here? This point:
is exactly the fucking point I'm trying to make. Though I will say that for some users (see DraQ) the appeal is very genuine: attempt less abstraction and more realism or gtfo.
EDIT: Take Blood Bowl, man! How the fuck does its mechanics emulate reality? They don't. At all. They're completely abstract. They just stick some familiar names onto stuff (passing, blocking etc.) and call it a day. And it works GREAT. You feel the thrill of the long pass even as your player sets it up. On the surface, everything is simulated (player throwing an actual ball to another player), but mechanically it's all "WAAAAH?" of arbitrary dice rolls and a huge part of random chance.
It's a question of this: you can have good RPGs that play like advanced board games (tactical gameplay takes precedence) or you can approach it like Morrowind or GURPS simulationism or whatever. Both are valid, but both require you to put "how does this stuff actually play?" above "how real is this?" GURPS doesn't emulate reality so well because that's it's crowning goal; it does so because they spent so much fucking time thinking about how they could create a basic set of mechanics to expand and blow up to a huge system that would always - every step of the way - allow them to customize those mechanics for simulationist purposes. The mechanics came before the simulation.
Last edited:
