The word "simulationism" in the GNS (Gamist/Narrativist/Simulationist) theory of roleplaying games is often taken to mean how closely the game's mechanics try to hew towards reality, though in fact it doesn't specifically mean that.
By definition, A Wilder World's attempts to have the game play out in the sorts of way that high adventure, high fantasy stories go is an example of simulationist impulse. But because of the connotations of "simulationism", I try to avoid describing it in those terms. Instead, I refer to the game as a genre emulation.
What's the difference between simulation and emulation, as I use the terms? Mostly where the focus is. Emulation is a lot looser. Simulation considers that if something is important, it should have mechanics. Emulation takes more things that simulation considers to be mechanical elements and puts them in a box labeled "story stuff" or "roleplay stuff".
That's not to say that emulation does away with mechanics or relies entirely on cooperative storytelling or GM fiat. Emulation can have mechanics that are as strict as simulation does. It just uses them as a skeleton, rather than having skeleton, muscles, and the skin covering it all wrapped up in the rules.
Some examples, regarding weapon use:
Simulation says
daggers weigh x pounds and swords weigh y pounds. If you can carry z pounds easily, so you can easily carry z/x daggers or z/y swords. Emulation says
Daggers are small so let's not worry about how many daggers you can carry. Swords are big and heavy, so don't assume you can carry so many of them. But hey, are you ever going to need to carry twenty swords?The assumption can be made that simulation is more realistic than emulation, but I have to differ. Simulation simplifies things in the direction of hard and fast rules that are easily learnable, and thus easily exploitable. But the reality is that carrying things goes beyond simple calculations of weight and carrying capacity.
To me, the least plausible aspect of someone carrying twenty big swords has nothing to do with weight specifically... it has to do with the fact that someone is carrying twenty big swords.
Does this mean we have a rule that says you can't carry twenty swords? No. It means that if you find yourself in a position where you need to carry an absurd amount of great big weapons, the GM might make a ruling on the present situation.
If it comes up.
If you're trying to carry, say, five or six full-sized swords, you are going to run into some problems regardless of their weight. There are logistic issues that are going to make it unfavorable. And then there's the question of why: why would you carry so many swords? I mean, you could be the equivalent of a knight's squire or soldier's second whose job is to hand them replacement swords as their untempered blades break or blunt... but assuming you're the person doing the fighting, why would you ever have more than two or three at most?
Standard D&D, prior to 4th Edition, does provide you with a reason to be carrying twenty swords: you killed twenty people who were using swords (or ten rangers). Those swords are loot, and collecting loot to sell for gold to enhance your character is an expected part of the game, to the point that sometimes players making the jump to 4E are disappointed or confused to learn that there are no provisions for anyone giving you shiny coins for the leather vests that twenty-six kobolds died in.
The reality is that actually scavenging worthwhile, usable equipment from the battlefield would be way more complicated than the two obvious ways of simplifying it, those being:
- All looted equipment can be sold in major towns for xty percent of list price.
- Selling looted equipment might sometimes be happening as part of the background of how your characters are paying their living expenses on the road, but it's not important enough or worthwhile to track unless you find something special and important.
Both approaches to looting take the complicated reality and simplify it down. One approach creates a situation where it might be important to know how many broadswords you can carry in a bundle on your back. Whether your character is a skulking thief, a heroic exemplar of virtue, a professional treasure hunter (a stack of swords isn't exactly "treasure"), or a dignified scholar of magic or the divine arts, you have the exact same economic (and game power) incentive to loot all the corpses after a battle and carry anything that's an "item", anything that has a coin value listed in a rulebook or is arguably valuable.
The other approach doesn't do that. The other approach gives you no game mechanical incentive to loot and no reason to be transporting large numbers of broadswords, unless you find yourself in a situation where it's actually crucial to transport large numbers of weapons back and forth as quickly as possible. In that case, you don't need hard and fast rules for weight and encumbrance. How much can you carry? One load. Strength Check to carry more. In this model, the scene or adventure should be written in terms of how many trips it will normally take, not
x weight divided by
y.
Which scenario is more realistic?
Well, when you read a fantasy novel (or even a not-fantasy novel), there might be one character or some characters who have the habit of stripping the corpses of enemies of anything of even the least little bit of value. But that's a character trait, isn't it? By the end of the novel, the person who nicked all the boots doesn't have a significant material or power advantage over the rest of the group, which might explain why the whole group doesn't do this, why everyone doesn't do this.
The looting happens in order to tell us something about the looter, in other words... not because it's an important strategic element of the life of a heroic adventurer.
In the absence of a sizable mechanical advantage for stripping every battlefield (and room you pass through) of everything of valuable, it becomes a character trait to do so, something that says something about your character. Your character is a thief not just because you have skills conducive to thieving, but because... unlike everybody else in the party... you actually steal stuff. You take whatever's nailed down. That's characterization.
The other example that touches on weapons was threshed out quite a bit in the comments of
my post on warriors and rogues. Simulation often makes sure that the differences in weapons are mechanically represented at the lowest levels of the system: this one does more damage, that one has more reach, this one is more accurate. This can lead to all kinds of unintended consequences, depending on how complex the system is. At the very least, it's likely to create a very easily sortable hierarchy of weapons, if not as a numerical list then into tiers: these weapons are most worth using, these weapons are worth less. Game theory pretty quickly dispenses of the "worth less" weapons as worthless, as any player who has a vision of a character using one of the sub-optimal weapons is trading away an appreciable chunk of effectiveness in order to bring that vision to life.
Emulation can do away with all that. Emulation allows you to say that all weapons have their good points, so let's roll the dice in a given exchange of blows to see which weapon's good points win out. A broadsword is strong, a rapier is fast... if the broadsword wins this round, then strength won out. Skill might come into play, but then it's not "My weapon is better than yours." It is "I am better with my weapon than you are with yours."
If mechanics creates a strict hierarchy of weapons, then there's no reason to master the flail, if the spear is superior. There's no reason to master the spear if the flail is superior.
Is this how the world works? Did we figure out that spears are 10% better than flails and give up flails? Or vice versa? Do all the people who spend the most time and effort studying weapons agree that one weapon is clearly the superior choice and devote themselves to it?
With this emulative approach, the game might still care if you have a weapon or not. It can care if that weapon is of unusual quality (or possesses unusual qualities). It can are if you know what you're doing with it and if you know how to do any special tricks with it. But instead of saying "The differences between the weapons are so important to mechanically represent that we will do so even if the precision at which we're working is so big and fuzzy that this will exaggerate those differences.", emulation says "The differences between the weapons are slight enough to be abstracted away."
This emulation approach makes any weapon choice--and thus any character concept that relies on a specific weapon choice--equally viable. It makes it so that you're free to make a character whose choice of weapon reflects their concept without suffering mechanically, without feeling penalized for sticking to your vision.
Note that I'm not saying that any game that aims for emulation has to make the same choices as above. I'm not trying to peg out these specific models/approaches as pure emulationism. Every roleplaying game makes the choice to emulate certain things rather than simulate them.
In the context of A Wilder World, because weapons can get bonuses that go beyond a straightforward "+2 to hit", it's still possible that someone could break the system down and say "These weapons are clearly superior to those weapons, because the bonuses that you can get with a flail are tactically superior to the bonuses you can get with a spear."
But because the differences don't enter into the typical straightforward use of attacking and because they are often situational, it's harder to do so and the categories would be less definite.
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