From Gamist to Simulationist..

Role-Playing Game Theory
If you are new to Role-Playing Game Theory you might want to read over this great article I found on Exploring Believability first (though I do get into specific examples fairly quickly).

As a GM with intense Gamist roots (console RPGs and AD&D 2nd Ed.) I found out quickly that Simulationism was a dirty word in role-playing circles. On one hand it conjured images of unnecessarily complex rules systems, page after page of charts full of minutia, and on the other, LARPing. I was raised to believe, from reading AD&D manuals and talking to other GMs, that Simulationism is neither an achievable or desirable goal. And that fact was the reason that Gamist systems relied on abstractions.

On My Slow Exodus from Gamism
During an early AD&D game session, while describing the room that the PCs had entered I was asked for some additional description focused on a specific object which the game materials barely mentioned. I complied, feebly, as I had no experience running 'off-the-cuff'. Luckily, my players enjoyed my improvisational description and asked for them more and more often, and I got better at giving them.

The ability to do this seamlessly became very important to me because I didn't want my players avoiding role-playing by "gaming" me (asking about each possibly significant item in the room and waiting for my poker face to crack) to find clues.

This eventually led me to an off-the-cuff game running style. Before each session I prepared a simple overview of what (or, more often where) the PCs planned to adventure (a hastily scribbled map and some notes about the creatures there). Running AD&D this way, a game which required quite a bit of GM preparation, was difficult, but I managed it fairly well. I found that I could 'roll with the punches' my players handed out far better this way.

I'd say, at this point, that 'railroading' became a thing of the past, but it's not true. It never was 'a thing' because my players came from the same extremely Gamist position I did. They played the same linear console RPGs that I did, and never expected to be able to choose the direction their characters went, at least not in any broad sense.

Once my players got a taste of 'true adventure' there was no way I was getting the lid back on that ol' box of Pandora's. My players wanted this kind of open-world adventure everywhere, but with that came a desire for a type of cinematic moments that AD&D's game system had no way to approximate.

"You want chunks of wood flying from your shields, and your armor taking damage from deflected attacks?" Yeah, AD&D can do that with a little GM intervention. The game gets a little more Simulationist, but it's okay. A little house rule here, a little patch of the AC system, and done.

"You want graphic descriptions of wounds?" I think that can be done. I make a dozen critical hit tables and house rule the shit out of Hit Points. But, we try it out and it doesn't work. The tables look good, and there are a lot of interesting variations, but it still feels broken.

The Realization
AD&D kept telling us, each time we modded the game to make it more cinematic, that Simulationism was not achievable. No amount of house rules would turn AD&D into the cinematic high-fantasy game we wanted to play.

My players were sad, but I saw a greater truth. Every edition of every game has its own unique spirit created at the intersection of the rules system and the game setting. To turn AD&D into the cinematic game we wanted to play would have been tantamount to ripping out its soul. So, the problem wasn't AD&D, it was that we were trying to play a Simulationist game using Gamist rules.

But, we didn't even know if it was possible to make a Simulationist game. In fact, we didn't know any game systems aside from AD&D. So, we went to the opposite end of the spectrum. If AD&D wasn't the way to do it then maybe we didn't need dice, or rule-books, or character sheets.

This, of course, didn't work. We were back to Cowboys and Indians.

I played a bit of Vampire: the Masquerade and Shadowrun in high school under different Game Masters. Both experiences were negative and turned me off to systems other than AD&D (the GMs were strictly authoritarian Gamists trying to run what I later learned were Narrativist / Simulationist settings). For years we avoided them, but in our quest to find a Simulationist game system we ended up giving Star Wars d6, World of Darkness, and Shadowrun a shot (I won't mention the hundreds of other games we tried during our "experimental phase").

The Answer
The answer came to us when we realized that we had the wrong definition of Simulationism. It didn't mean 'to simulate reality using dice'. We weren't interested in simulating reality at all. Shadowrun made an excellent stepping stool to get away from Gamism, and World of Darkness allowed us to take a full, unhindered step into Simulationism.

Hi, my name is Gavin and I'm a Storyteller...

I started role-playing at the age of five without firm rules, any way to determine the success or failure of our stated actions, and little framework for a story. We called it Cowboys and Indians, and while it wasn't the most rewarding role-playing experience I've ever had, it did have a significant impact on me.

At the age of fourteen I discovered console-based RPGs. I loved the hell out of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy I, and played them for hundreds of hours teasing out every last spell, treasure, and secret. But, eventually my friends and I ran out of console RPGs (little did we know that computer RPGs were at the height of their popularity).

My best friend and I decided to draft a story for a blockbuster console RPG. We set to work at it at once, and spent months brainstorming story events, creating monsters, magical items, plot hooks, and fully fleshed-out three-dimensional playable characters and NPCs.

All of that out of the way we realized that we didn't have the other skills needed to make a console RPG (art, programming, or money). We languished for months trying to figure out how to make use of literally hundreds of pages of dialogue, monsters, and character stats before finally realizing that we could play out the scripted dialogue and combats without the use of a computer.

I programmed a TI-84 with attack and defense macros and we dusted off an old chess board to use as a battlefield. We enlisted the help of a third friend and started reading lines of dialogue and diving into the slow, mechanical combat of a table-top console RPG.

Soon we became aware of what was missing, spells lacked important attributes like range or area of effect (which were unnecessary in a console game) and we had to scramble to revise them. We noticed that our characters were stationary on one side of the board "attacking" monsters on the other side of the board so we added movement rules and restrictions. Later, we added collateral damage rules when we realized we were repeatedly blasting certain areas with fireballs. Our table-top console RPG was turning into something very different from what we envisioned.

We finished the main story and made new peripheral characters, but soon the game went stale.

In the summer of the year I turned sixteen I was walking through Toys-R-Us when I found a D&D board game. I carried it around the store reading the box, back and front, over and over for more than an hour before I decided to buy it. I took it home and hunkered down over the manuals for a few days.

I had a hard time with combat rules like THAC0, got confused about saving throws (I thought you needed to roll low to pass them), and nothing enraged me more than the idea of hitting a monster then rolling a one for damage. Regardless, I asked my closest friends to play. We agreed that it would probably suck, but gave it a shot anyway.

After the first combat we realized how similar it was to what we were doing a few months earlier.

I ran them through the first dungeon giving them far too much treasure and so many magical items that the old +1s and +2 daggers were barely worth using as toothpicks. My players and I learned quickly from our mistakes, though it still took several years for me to go from being the kind of DM that runs a series of dungeons to the kind of Storyteller that runs a game world (no thanks to the D&D manual which stated unequivocally, "The world outside of dungeons is unimportant aside from the towns which the characters use to resupply for their next dungeon adventure.").

Later that year we met a group of AD&D Second Edition players. They seemed to be breaking every rule in the book, but it was so much more interesting that way. They introduced me to Shadowrun, a high fantasy, post apocalyptic, dark future game, which helped me break away from the D&D mindset (please hold the flames, I have come to respect D&D for what it is).

After running Shadowrun myself I became ravenous. I looked in every darkened corner of any gaming shop within driving distance for the oldest and most obscure games imaginable. I read (and sometimes ran) Star Wars d6, Star Trek, Battlelords of the 23rd Century, GURPS, Rifts, Toon, Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, and a hundred others.

After I graduated from high school I was introduced to Vampire: The Masquerade. This was another massive sea change for my running style. My players had far more cinematic control over the game, and even carried some of the responsibility for creating the story themselves (especially once we got ahold of Mage).

During these twenty years of game design, playing hundreds of sessions, and running thousands I've learned out a trick or two that have made my games more enjoyable for me and my players. I plan on sharing many of them here, and I hope you'll share some of yours with me as well.