Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Like it or not, it's how everyone plays. You're just refusing to see it for what it is.Yes. This is how you play. But it's not true of how I play.
This is exactly my point - making things up is part and parcel of prepping, not playing. The playing part is what then gets done at the table with the made-up stuff.What do you mean "come from somewhere"? Yes, it has to be made up. But making things up is part-and-parcel of playing a RPG.
As you keep saying. My point here is simply that you're incorrectly calling it all "play" where part of what you're doing is in fact what counts as prep. Very (very!) loosely put: generating = prep, engaging = play.They are games which are about generating and engaging shared fiction.
Determining whether a PC is married or widowed is completely prep, just like everything else to do with determining a PC's background. Just because in this case it's done after play has started rather than before doesn't change this.This is bollocks. A player declaring an attack for his/her PC is not prep - it's playing the game. Yesterday, in the session that I ran, at one point we had to work out whether or not one of the PCs was married or widowed. That became relevant because of events that had happened in play - namely, the emergence of an opportunity to woo a recently widowed noblewoman. That is not preparing to play, it's playing the game. It's not "pseudo-preparation" either - if the game is not on rails, then no one knows what might happen during play, and hence what fiction might need to be established as part of play.
Not at all, for my part. You're playing RPGs.What's your point here? That I'm not playing RPGs?
For once, I'm not in fact advocating this particular definition that you seem to think I am.That the definition of RPGs that you and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] are advocating doesn't capture the way I play RPGs (which is not terribly radical as soon as you look beyond the parameters of traditional D&D RPGing)? If the former, I disagree - what do you think I'm doing, then, when I think I'm playing a RPG? If the latter, well that's my point - the two of you are advocating a definition that only fits a limited range of approaches to RPGing, namely, those in which the GM designs a scenario or dungeon in advance and then runs the players through it.
In a traditional game, yes, the prep-v-play parts are often much more obvious. But in a non-traditional game, or in a traditional game that's taken a big left turn such that the DM is completely winging it, even though prep and play kinda run together they are still separate things when you break each element down.
Let's take your recently-widowed noblewoman as an example. The determinations that she's a) a noblewoman and b) recently-widowed - those both come under prep regardless of when or how they are done.
No, it's still set-up; only being done on the fly rather than in advance. You're getting hung up on equating set-up with things done in advance, which isn't always true: set-up can be (and in RPGs sometimes is) an ongoing process that can and often does happen even during moments of play.Maxperson said:When you set-up for an event, you do so in advance of the event. For a party, you'd set up the location, decorate it, set-up catering, etc. If you run out of food and have to go out and get more(the equivalent of pulling out more cards, scenario creation on the spot), that's not party set-up. It's damage control or some other term.
Lan-"if it starts raining halfway through the backyard party and in response you put up a few patio umbrellas, that's set-up"-efan