No horse in this race, but, it's kinda interesting anyway.
I think the horse I have in it is still hitched to a plow.
Matters in the sense that there will be mechanics in place to deal with this element. Thus, broken builds matter in a gamist game because they violate the win conditions - the same way that using a cheat code or an exploit in a video game violates the nature of the game.
Yet, rewards for system mastery seem like they'd be aligned with that agenda. .
In non-gamist games, broken builds don't matter because the "win" conditions don't exist.
Win conditions might be set in any scenario, and could be cooperative. But I'm not so sure broken characters aren't still an issue without them - dominating play is dominating play, regardless.
Physicists call the heat given of by a burning match "work". Even though no one is doing any work.
Even in physics sense, work involves moving objects. If the system under consideration is just a burning match, no work is being done.
There are plenty of examples of physics jargon that are just a matter of being named after someone or just completely arbitrary. Few, though are intentionally deceptive...
Immersion is often used to describe a mental state. A person can play a Paizo AP and be engaged in the world of the story without entering that mental state, I think.
It seems as or more suggestive of the concept than simulation.
It's not ironic. As [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] already posted, a significant, perhaps primary, driver of The Forge was to try and understand why Storyteller - especially V:tM - sucks if your goal in RPGing is to create story via play in the way I described.
I have an impression that the Forge banged out GNS as a refinement of three-fold theory, which itself, came from the false dichotomy of the Roll v Role debate.
Also, the Forge always struck me as a coterie of unsuccessful,* aspiring, & armchair game designers, trying to understand, in terms of game design, why the RPG hobby got so niche in the 90s, how Storyteller led the hobby, only to return to D&D dominance with d20, in spite of spits of D&D and ST both being execrably-designed systems.
A problem with that being that they were marketing & sociology questions, not game-design questions.
Someone might classify both basketball and croquet as ball sports, but I'm not sure that's going to take us very far
It's at least using both terms intuitively. Both can be played competatively, both use balls. They're distinct from, say, Track & field or Olympic swimming or fencing.
A comparably broad term might be TTRPG.
Because RPGing invovles multiple participants, most of whom are in the "player"/"protagonist" role, it turns out that the difference between playing through a pre-established story and generating a story via play is pretty fundamental.
I can't agree. A skillful GM could deliver a player experience while running the players through a pre-established story that would be industinguishable from one generated organically from play.
If you're into the latter, the former is something you need to learn identify and avoid even if has the label "storyteller" on it.
Not that storyteller is a great, or even functional system, nor that it would be some great injustice to shun it...
...But that sure sounds like sorting games into monolithic categories and judging them.
Much as most cooks don't set out to anything in particular from the point of view of chemistry - they just try and make nice food. Chemistry might still help us understand what it is they're doing.
Chemistry has a couple centuries of scientific rigour behind it. The Forge was a few years of opinionated word-wrangling in a veritable echo-chamber.
It's possible to talk about the sort of play that (say) 5e supports well or poorly whether or not its designers were thinking about that at the time they designed it.
It should be, but the Forge and GNS have not facilitated that sort of analysis.
For instance, 5e is not great for PvP, but with a sufficiently fair & impartial DM, its doable. 5e is not great for telling a collaborative story, but with a wise & open enough DM, it's doable. 5e is not great for creating an immersive 1st-person experience, but an expressive DM with high social intelligence could pull it off.
It's not the GNS segregation of preferences that helpfully characterizes or describes it, it's qualities of the system that empower the DM that're defining.
Why would a DM ever say “you lose 50 HP for no reason muhuhahahah!”?
.
I think the villain laugh is your answer.
Seriously though, hp loss can be used, arbitrarily, by the DM as a stick to shove a misbehaving player back in line, or punish inappropriate RP. It's crude code for "I'll throw you out of the game," but I've seen it done - back in the day - and even seen it work. By the same token there are RP carrots DMs can arbitrarily give out as rewards. There are even formal systems for them, like 5e inspiration.
Besides, hps can include factors like luck, fate, divine favor or the like that the DM could claim control over.
* relative to the success of D&D in the fad years - or today - or Storyteller in the 90s.
