On Sat, 3 Jun 2000, Deb Atwood wrote: DA>I agree, I'm curious what the difference is... is that it is designed to DA>more closely model something that isn't genre related? As in, it doesn't do DA>horror or sf or fantasy, but rather models real life? Rather like the DA>difference between basing the plot on a romance novel or a fantasy series? Well, lessee. First of all, sims are (as far as I know) exclusively an online (IRC or PBeM) phenomenon. Sims tend to be based on an existing property... TV show, usually. Sometimes movie. The tendency is for it to be a more mainstream TV show, which in turn tends to make it more likely to be something other than the usual horror/sf/fantasy trope favored by traditional roleplaying games. Come to that, it's likely to be something that traditional roleplayers would say "Huh? What are they going to do with *that* license?" when WEG announces they've picked it up. (Exception: Buffy.) Sims tend to be limited to existing characters from the property. Sims tend to be relatively GM-less... nine times out of ten, the guy/gal "running" the sim is the captain of the ship, main character of the show, whatever. Sims tend to be (probably related to the previous) more slice-of-life than plotted. Sims tend to have fewer NPC's, and more multi-character players, also related to the above. If there *is* an NPC, it's very often written by whoever is interacting with it. In a lot of cases, there's overlap. Trek sims, in particular, live in the middle ground. The Phoenyx' 7th Order game (http://www.7thorder.org/ if anyone's curious) crosses over... it's very slice-of-life, sometimes borders on pure collaborative fiction, but the GMs run the overall plot and NPC's and whatnot. Still, it can (and has) run without intervention for long stretches. DA>To be honest, if it is teaching people to express their creativity, think, DA>solve puzzles, and learn to think like people other than themselves, and DA>teach them to think in ways that may not be a single line, that's good. DA>That's a lot of what I like about RP -- the things it teaches us about DA>ourselves, and about the people around us. Express creativity, yes (though most of the sims tend to be a little more closely circumscribed than a typical non-TV-based game - they're usually based in the modern world, so you can't just pull elves out of your hat, and as mentioned you're often limited to playing one of the characters from the show). Solving puzzles, not usually. Learning to think like people other than themselves... dunno about that (depends on how much these people think like Dawson's Creek characters to begin with, I guess. I've never seen the thing, so I can't speak to that). Ways that may not be a single line... dunno about that, either, or whether that would be more or less than in "conventional" roleplaying. In a lot of ways, it's more a collaborative fanfic than anything else. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- GMAST Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gmast/
