Some thoughts about how rpg game systems interact with reality

Had an experience last night reading Fight On where again I experienced that thrilling sensation where game mechanics mimic mechanics taken right from actual reality. These inklings suggest to me that one of the aspects (at least that I find so pleasing) about RPG design is when mechanics mimic or capture exactly how something works in real life.  Indeed, good RPG is about simulation. It is about a system that provides guides that you can use to simulate an imagined scenario.  The dice and tables in effect act as reality: the quantum statistical fluctuations which make up the decisions of the universe. There is a little quantum uncertainty; the dice are the portal which let this fuzzy aspect in to permeate the story telling.

To gamers, RPG books function essentially as religion. It is a worldview that accepts that the true god is statistical fluctuation as born from the quantum mechanical interactions of molecules.  That is--we and everything we interact with is composed of matter which is in turn is an expression of energy and vibration and quantum wave functions. When a group of players walk into a cave and do battle with a red dragon, that is a bunch of succinct expressions of universal energy, and the ensuing dice rolling and procedural combat actions are a giant statistical and procedural system where the outcome is not assured until it has come to pass.

RPG'ers know this is simulation. There is never any doubt about that. Ever. But what is implicit in this understanding is that we are all sensing that the universe at large, the real world on its grandest scale, is actually following a similar set of rules, just that there are infinitely more variables and interactions, but that the core mechanic is essentially the same. We are entities at play in a large quantum mechanical field equation. Anything can happen, but the events that actually do happen in our lives tend to be those that are most likely. (Occam's Razor)

What is happening in the OSR movement is interesting. Because the gate-keeping on the systems themselves has opened up. Anyone can specify any system now, and many do.  Some systems, I admit, appear far more appealing to me than others, but all systems are exercises in this kind of thinking about the modeling of something.

I believe at the core of it we crave a complete system. A really really good one for specifying an imagined world. A system so good that it is able to replace this system (the real one), at least temporarily. This would mean, that like Chalker's Markovian Well World, we could pencil in our deepest fantasies and wishes. We could allow ourselves to fly, to explore the far reaches of space, etc. But in order to do that, first we must triumph over the systems that govern the confines of how we think about the world, which binds us here.  That is why we keep churning out new game systems, continuously play-test them and explore new options.