Realizing Sim: The Right to Dream

So I just realized that I think I was very wrong when I wrote that I didn't see how pure Simulationist play could exist in GNS and the lack of pure Simulationist play. I think that I was taking on a narrow view of what Sim can be. I think, if I'm interpreting the other title, the Right to Dream, correctly, then there is pure Sim play and I've experienced it, more or less. I see this as basically the 'I want to pretend to be' type of play. Before I think that this would require you to be either playing a game or caring about the story, but I don't think that is really necessary. You could just want to do cool stuff. There could be a lot of Star Wars role playing that falls into this, as a lot of people just really like Star Wars and want to pretend to be Jedi or Han Solo, but they don't want to deal with a bunch of rules or have to figure out how to win, and they don't care about story because they don't want to alter the canon. We do this sort of thing naturally as kids, pretending to be characters we know or superheroes. The stuff Calvin comes up with are great examples. It's about nothing more than a good imagination and doing cool stuff. Indiana Jones converted to role playing would be like this. It's all an adventure, just enough plot for buy in, and only enough good ideas to move things along.

I experienced this in a d20 Modern game I played where we were all high school students transformed into our costumes during a mishap at the Halloween dance where one of the teachers was trying to steal everyone's soul. The costume thing was an explicit steal from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode where the same thing happens, we didn't have the memory issues though. I played a dumb jock transformed into an incorporeal ghost, because I thought that it would be hilarious for someone so used to using physical force to be utterly incapable of doing so. While there may have been some in character preparations or planning, there was very little. Most of it came from the fact that one player's character was transformed into Bruce Banner/The Hulk, so he was super smart when not mad and build various contraptions (mostly I think he basically turned my ghost into a golem by building a mech). There were a few encounters before the boss fight, the location of which were basically told to us by a friendly NPC at the beginning of the session. For this game I think that was very good, we didn't have to fumble about. We went around, we kicked but, we did cool stuff, we dealt with lots of weird stuff going on at the school. Possibly because none of us are too familiar with d20 Modern and the GM built all the characters beforehand (with some player input where there were options), but there wasn't a lot of tactical options coming from the system, but it worked for a one shot because we were just trying out our cool powers. This is how I see pure Sim working: the players pretend to be something that's interesting to them, while the GM presents cool stuff and situations.