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In response to me having come with receipts? Your "refresh of my memory" is countered by you claiming that that was a writing prompt. If that's your definition I can accept that- and use Grey Ranks. As this was not an apology for your responses to my entirely correct statements then I see no...

I think that this was one of the improvements Essentials tried to make. Reducing the amount of multi-attack in the game because they really were above the curve. But Essentials flopped to the point that if we consider it a different edition there is only one book post the base ones that was more...

I don't recall claiming they did. They can however contain narrative arcs and other story elements. That said certain rulesets such as Montsegur 1244 and Grey Ranks which blur the line between rules and scenario do contain stories. The story of the Warsaw Uprising is a story, as is the story of...

A narrative arc isn't a story either. Instead it's an element of story structure. A writing prompt isn't a story but a narrative arc can be a writing prompt.

Honestly the problem with the vampire is that it's a striker with basically no double-tap abilities, reactions, or bonus action attacks. And unlike the thief or slayer it's very hard to smuggle them in. So at low optimisation or in a pure Essentials game it's fine and genuinely fun but when the...

Some ways have been discussed but the other part of this is how to become a decent or good DM; the rules and DM procedures model what a good DM actually does rather than some abstracts like Chapter 2: Building a Multiverse. A decent ten year D&D DM is likely to e.g. keep only one eye on the...

Vampire and Call of Cthulhu are textbook trad games (and with 8 stats and 50ish skills CoC isn't even in the neighbourhood of rules light although it certainly isn't heavy - and Vampire not delivering what was wanted was a major driver of The Forge), and OUaT is a one shot storytelling game that...

My question here is why do you consider consistency the biggest virtue rather than at the very least the Scylla to the Charybdis of utter incoherence. When I look at cultures they are inconsistent because they were made by lots of people, many striving against the limitations of their own...

This brought to mind that a whole lot of fights in D&D are "second unit" fights - the sort of fight scene is handed over to the second unit director to shoot with some basic notes to make something interesting and flashy out of, and the story resumes after the fight is done. Yours wasn't one of...

In my experience if the GM has done "a boatload of prep" that tends to move it outside the realms of a collaborative table and into the realms of "The GM's table with some other people". The GM should prep and the GM should normally do more prep than any one other player but if the GM is doing...

Burning Wheel on the other hand is at a minimum Forge-adjacent or possibly actual Forge. It is not a normal baseline. This is a slightly different point. I'm not referring to inventory management here so much as I am to the acquisition and proportion of your power held in random loot

I'm going to partially disagree. Terry Pratchett described humanity as Pan Narrans - the storytelling chimp and story is an inevitable result of humans doing complex human things. It was not the goal but oD&D even had significant mechanics that strongly encouraged the growth of stories and were...

For the record: Daggerheart: rules light D&D meets PbtA. No moves, but success-with-consequences as a possibility on the basic roll; Genesys inspired. (IMO it does just about everything Dungeon World or 13th Age do better). Out of combat it reminds me a lot of 4e - but it's theatre of the mind...

Then possibly you'd care to give your definition? As well as your definition of "story mechanics". Mine considers e.g. most Adventure Paths to be inorganic. Because they involve pre-scripted events rather than are able to respond to the in character actions of the characters in the setting.

Not affecting casting doesn't mean it wouldn't matter at all. Arcana and Search are IME two of the most important skills in the game for the party to possess and History is pretty useful. Now the score I find annoying is Constitution. It's too passive.

Yes - and the trad games (especially D&D) are the most inorganic of the ones I run, with the scenes pre-scripted to a degree. Meanwhile neither the Daggerheart nor the Crash Pandas or Honey Heist games I've run have needed pre-scripting. Instead the players have more agency than they do in more...

I'm not being obtuse here. I can think of games with what I'd call "Story mechanics" (Fiasco springs to mind). But what I would think you mean by them are absent in the games I've mentioned.

What exactly do you call "story mechanics"? And why do you think the games I've listed have them?

No one is saying they don't produce stories. But they produce them far more slowly. Given the amount of GM force involved in trad RPGs (as opposed to old school ones) I'd also say that Apocalypse World and Masks for example produce stories significantly more organically than most trad RPGs.

And there's something we can agree on :)