Ilbranteloth
Explorer
You've got so many things in your posts I don't even know where to start...so I'll start here. They really make me think! I don't have time to think!
But I agree with this, and it's the sort of thing that I work hard to combat in my campaigns. I tend to do it in session zero and as reminders in my rules, rather than trying to build it into the rule system itself. For example, I point out that a turn-based/round-based combat system encourages a focus on the mechanics and "not missing a turn" and things like that. The tweaks we've been making try to encourage people to think of their total action, instead of breaking it into small parts, and using the rules to adjudicate those actions.
But in reading through your posts, it struck me that the alternate game systems were, in many cases, an attempt to focus on a particular game style. On the surface, they might be trying to accomplish the same thing, but the reality is that they are addressing or focusing on a different aspect of RPGs. Some are written for players who are good actors, or like the idea of acting a part, others are tactical, with lots of rules to help you outmaneuver your opponent via game rules, others are built around a very specific setting, where the rules pull you further into the setting, like Cthulhu.
To put it a different way, D&D was invented. It took what previously would have been something a writer would do, or a group of kids playing make-believe would do, and made it into a shared experience, with a framework of rules so you could adjudicate the results of complex (and seemingly random) situations.
So we're done, right? Except that other people thought there would be better ways to do this, and we need to fix that, and I prefer to play this way, or focus on that element, etc. So either rules modifications were introduced, or new games were produced. Now I understand that historically, TSR was a game company, and part of what they did as a game company was design games. Early on it didn't occur to them that one system could be used for multiple genres of games, etc. And of course, as we've seen through later design games, sometimes one system is better than others at solving a particular gaming problem.
For me and the players that I've had through the years, we like the make-believe part. We like the idea of writing the story as this character (if we're a player), and as the DM I've come to love the idea of writing the history of this world. The shared goal being that we address the characters as if they are real people, in a real world, and have to deal with things like being stuck in the rain on a cold day in the wilderness. That the little things, the boring things, the mundane every day things, all have an impact on us as people. Those in-between things create dynamics that make the exciting things exciting. It's a TV series approach, rather than a movie, or even more, a play. We're not only interested in the meat of here, or there, but what's in between. More importantly, those in-between times are typically more focused on the important things that you mention - personal world-view, social obligations, people we care about, culture, etc. The mundane things tend to give our life the why.
Even with that type of focus of our games, it's been pretty rare that PCs have developed romantic relationships, or gotten married, or retired to start a business or own a farm, for example. A great many PCs have become NPCs after the player has left, or when they've decided to focus on other characters and things like that. But it has only rarely come up in play.
But your posts make me think about those other elements in a different way. I think a part of what turns me off about shared-author approaches is that it does take some of the ownership or agency regarding the character away from the player. In return, they are trying to turn the focus of the game onto something else, to encourage, perhaps, a focus not on conflict, but on what makes it a conflict.
One of the biggest problems I've had with attempting to play those types of game, though, is that the players approach it from their own expectations and experience - that is, a D&D-like RPG experience. So the conflicts tend to be superficial, fight-the-monster type conflicts, except that instead of the DM instigating the conflict, it's one of the other players. Then, instead of letting the simply conflict play out, they are encouraged (or required) to add complications. Except they too tend to be superficial - you drop your sword, you trip, etc. So we'd end up with not only a less interesting game, but would get there with mechanics that feel contrived and "gamey," rather than reinforcing the fiction.
The reality is, we, for the most part, were trying to play D&D with DW rules. Instead, I guess, if we are going to make a point of playing DW, then we need to have a different overall goal or concept of the game. Or to put it a better way, we have to better understand the goal of the game design.
It's going to make me go back and rethink not so much how the mechanics of many of these other games work, but why. What was the "problem" they were trying to "fix" that made them write a new system, rather than use an existing one? Even if the designer didn't realize that's what they were doing. But looking at it from that perspective, I think, will help identify potential "problems" in my rules or campaign. Maybe the solution they came up with works for us. Maybe we find a different solution.
What I find exciting, though, is that I hadn't really thought about looking to other games for better solutions for the internal process of a player interacting with their character. It's easy for the rules to address mechanical things - did you hit them with your sword? Did the armor protect them? It's harder to write rules about more nebulous things, like knowledge or social encounters. But going deeper, into the relationship between the player and their character? It has been addressed, even in 5e there's the background system, with the trait/ideal/bond/flaw approach. And alignment has been around for a long time. But we've tended to discard many of these rules, at least in part, instead of digging into them to see how we could make them better. Or perhaps replace them with something else altogether.
