Jay writes:
I hold that fantasy role playing in essence is "reality simulation"
Not everyone would agree with this. Most GMs have some idea of an intended story, and they'll nudge the game as it proceeds. That might be to push it onto a preferred track, to promote an arc plot or character development, to keep it interesting, to avoid rendering moot long sessions of play or (by character mortality) long periods of character generation (whether PC or villain). (A common rule of thumb is only to cheat in the players' favour.) So the GM effectively controls the output of the simulator as well as the inputs. To some extent this can be justified by selection effects - "Of course there were many other groups of adventurers we could have followed, and many of those had boring games or died in the first stage of the campaign, but we've chosen to make our story follow one of the more successful groups." This can easily go too far, but most good roleplay lies on a spectrum between the controlled input model (akin to a novel) and the controlled output model (akin to a pure sandbox computer game).
On the other hand: Rick Smith, who started the thread, has a background in computer games and is a proponent of arcless sandbox play. So he may have nodded approvingly.
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David