Quote Originally Posted by Rex Brynen View Post
This is undoubtedly a problem--the belief among participants that outcomes were being decided by moderator biases and not by their own actions.

In my experience, most of this can be resolved by a combination of effective moderating (which requires some skill and experience, hence the difficulty of using a RPG format as a generally-disseminated training tool) and good post-simulation debriefing. It is often the case that what participants attribute at first to moderator bias is actually due to their own lack of information ("You didn't realize the police chief was the brother of the school principal? That's why the police were unenthusiastic about guarding the school after the principal had been fired and replaced with an outsider.")

I also wouldn't underestimate similar problems in electronic simulations ("I would have killed that BMP if my mouse hadn't stuck/if the physics modeling was more accurate/if I had been able to hear it like I could in real life").

All this discussion has me wanting to work on one...
Excellent points. As a recon guy in a former life, I used to be greatly frustrated by the lack of ability to be properly "modelled" in any of the computer games.

I was restricted to, at first, maneuvering my Troops as a single icon, and then some computer wank did me the "favor" of "allowing" me, to obviously great inconvenience to himself and the replication, to maneuver Platoon icons.

And then my Division commander chewed butt for the CAV not seeing anything, and getting killed right away....

I think with any kind of simulation, it's more about testing systems and staffs than achieving some kind of net result at the end, anyway, just because all of the variables at play.