You want the world to work like a real place, and you want the rules to tell you how. You track ammo and plan around a wound that won't heal by morning. Working the procedure is how you get inside the character. A reckless move should hurt, and you'd hate it if it didn't.
Your best-fit GMs: The Systemic Architect. Both want a world whose rules hold, so skill and preparation matter and consequences stick.
World simulation wants the setting to behave like a real place, with the rules as its physics. Good players plan from those rules and live with the consequences they hand back.
What you do well
- You know the rules, so your plans hold up when the dice come out.
- You track the wounds and travel days everyone else forgets.
- You raise rules points as questions, then accept the GM's call.
Where your style trips
The stickler. You stop play over a rules difference that changes nothing, and the scene dies while everyone flips pages.
The fix: Before you correct anything, ask whether it changes the outcome. If it doesn't, note it and bring it up after the session.
Things to practice
- Offer to be the table's rules reference, so the GM can run the scene.
- Play a rules-light game for one night and see which instincts still work.
- Give your character one goal beyond survival, and write it on the sheet.
Who you play like
You'll probably recognize yourself in Tactician, Specialist, from Robin D. Laws's player types. Most players span several.
GMs who'll love you at their table
- Best match
- The Systemic Architect
- Talk it through first
- The Catalyst Co-Author. Decide which parts of the world are fixed facts and which the players invent at the table.
How to prep
Notes by category, starting with an NPC page: name, where you met, what they wanted.
Pitch your table with these
- On screen
- Interstellar, Gravity, The Revenant, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Chernobyl
- Actual play
- Long campaigns in a heavily documented setting, played rules as written, where players keep the lore wiki and the travel log.
- Games
- Traveller, GURPS, RuneQuest, Rolemaster, Twilight: 2000, HackMaster
A culture of play describes a table, so one 5e group could sit in two cultures on two Tuesdays. From John Bell's "Six Cultures of Play". World simulation isn't on his list, and sits beside it here.