Why do RPGs have rules?

[Thomas Shey]

While I don't know the context of what Micah was experiencing, I will note that suggestions to play another game have a place and time, and expressing some dissatisifaction with what 5e or some other game does with some part of itself is not really that place or time.

Recommending Pathfinder as an alternative is most appropriate when someones trying to homebrew 5e to death because it doesn't do anything they want it to do.

It is at is most inappropriate when someone just wishes 5e didn't have crummy class balance.

I dunno here. It seems like, if someone has an element of a game that is persistently annoying them and seems intractable to fix, suggesting something else is not entirely inappropriate. If they obviously respond negatively, its just time to shut up about it.

 

[Autumnal]

Because the fact they got abused for taking their roleplaying seriously did not justify the contempt they had for people who were taking an older approach than they were. It explains it in some cases, but that's not the same thing.

One of the least favorite things a bunch of White Wolf freelancers active online felt an obligation to do was hiding down those sorts. While they were hating on D&D and wrestling fans, the developers of the games they idolized were…grooving on wrestling and playing D&D. It was even worse in some ways with Adventure, where I had co-developer’s responsibility. Some of our fans were aghast that I had good words for so many other ways of gaming. Then they’d find out some of the folks making those other games were my friends and it would look like the opening head-exploding scene in Scanners. Bleah.

Meanwhile, others had to deal with their counterparts busy hating on us. Favorite comeback from a friend: “Oh please. They’re not all artf__s. Some of them are craftf__s.”

For me immersion is when I inhabit the character to such a point that I start thinking and being that character. I am so immersed in the character and the world that the real world seems less. You can never leave the real world behind completely, but you can get pretty close if you don't have to constantly stop to roll things.

This is no fooling the #1 reason I found Fate immersion-enhancing. There’s a simple roll for modifying the environment in accord with a suggestion, it doesn’t involve a roll at all in many cases, and then it’s done. Cut down on time spent negotiating by quite a lot.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So whenever you post about your own preferred playstyle you're going to throw in some nice comments about storygame RPGs, right?

I'm definitely not going to suggest that my way should be followed by anyone who wants better gaming. For the record, if you want a game that codifies effects that support emotional and narrative growth for the PCs, storygames are probably a good option. Just because I don't want that doesn't mean it's objectively bad.

 

[pemerton]

Here's a story fragment:

Once upon a time there lived a bear. One morning it woke up and, feeling thirsty, picked up its bucket and walked off to the well, to collect some water.​

Is someone really going to tell me that that's a simulation of Goldilocks?

 

[Maxperson]

To be fair, they said they think that it's a recipe for railroading, not that it objectively is such.

I know, and I disagree that 1 ingredient is the recipe for railroading. It takes several such ingredients AND cooking them together.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Here's a story fragment:

Once upon a time there lived a bear. One morning it woke up and, feeling thirsty, picked up its bucket and walked off to the well, to collect some water.​

Is someone really going to tell me that that's a simulation of Goldilocks?

I'm just excited about the sentient bear.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I know, and I disagree that 1 ingredient is the recipe for railroading. It takes several such ingredients AND cooking them together.

Oh, I also disagree, but everyone's entitled to their opinions and preferences.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One of the least favorite things a bunch of White Wolf freelancers active online felt an obligation to do was hiding down those sorts. While they were hating on D&D and wrestling fans, the developers of the games they idolized were…grooving on wrestling and playing D&D. It was even worse in some ways with Adventure, where I had co-developer’s responsibility. Some of our fans were aghast that I had good words for so many other ways of gaming. Then they’d find out some of the folks making those other games were my friends and it would look like the opening head-exploding scene in Scanners. Bleah.

Yeah, it was a particularly dumb period for this sort of thing. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more hardcore WoD had disdain for those of you working on the Aeonverse because, while it wasn't exactly cheery and chipper (and if anything the deconstruction level on Aberrant got, I think, out of hand) it just wasn't "serious" by their standards.

But then, I saw enough really dumb internecine fighting between fans of one of the WoD lines and others I shouldn't have been surprised it was much worse outside of the system at all, but I was younger at the time and even though I'd seen inter-system wars before, that took it to (for me) a new and unwelcome level.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The principal words used after the phrase you quote are:

"fiction"; "situation"; "intensse physical stress and drama"; "table"; "challenge"; "intellectual"; "puzzle solving"; "narrative sructure"; "thril"; "dice roll"; "skilled play"; "dependence"; "lucky rolls".

To me, they all seem to be ordinary words of English. Which bits do you think are "Forge jargon"?

"Although, in the fiction, the situation might involve intense physical stress and drama, at the table the challenge is essentially intellectual (like most other table-top games). And intellectual puzzle solving simply doesn't produce that narrative structure."

Those words made me stop and go, "What narrative structure? You get climaxes naturally any time just by plopping a good challenge in front of players, and surely pemerton knows that, so maybe 'that narrative structure' is something more specific? That would explain why he seems to think that overcoming a challenge via 'essentially intellectual' means isn't a climax--because he's using some specialized definition of climax apparently."

In other words, I didn't want to jump straight to "that's obviously wrong" without trying my best first to understand what you might actually be trying to say.

 

[aramis erak]

Players in case (1) have an incentive to minimize the risks to their characters, as part of the process of beating the challenge. This means that case (1) play is unlikely to produce a story in the literary/aesthetic sense, for two reasons:

(a) The characters risk being somewhat incoherent, being risk-minimisers locally (always poking with their 10' poles, etc) but ludicrous risk takers in their overarching goals (always taking on these puzzles/gauntlets/challenges with insane kill rates). We can lampshade this by imagining that all our 1st level wizards also have the personalities of extreme sports enthusiasts, but I think the characters remain a bit weird.​

There's a nearly century old aphorism on a particular population that on a large scale are seriously risk taking, but are, in many cases, extremely cautious, because they know the risks they are taking.

There are Old Pilots, and there are Bold Pilots, but there are no Old Bold Pilots.​

Note that this is cited often by CFI's and CFII's in Alaska, where most of their Commercial Pilot Students are going into the bush plane market...

As a clade, Alaskan Bush Pilots are maintenance sticklers. They memorize their checklists but still mark the physical one. Many will double check their fuel tanks and oil sumps for water not only upon first startup for taxiing to the pumps, but upon arrival at the pumps, and after loading fuel. They're double check the pitot tubes at the pump, despite having checked them before startup. They know their job is one of the more risky - Jumbos may be safer than busses, but flying into a village and landing on a grass field that may not have been mowed this year, or putting down on a river on floats, or short-field landings on riverine sandbars are inherently risky. And the pilots do their damnedest to minimize the actual risks at takeoff and landing. (Flying a plane is easy. Taking off is almost easy. taking off from a river with a crosswind is tricky. Landing is dead simple if you don't care about surviving it... landing so you and the plane remain functional isn't.)

Likewise, a similar aphorism has been used by several police officers. Yes, the job is a HUGE risk of injury. Body armor, training, and procedures are there to minimize those risks to the officers. And, when practical, to also reduce the risks to the individual the officer is interacting with.

What I've seen of cavers is similar.
The Divers I know have made comments of "bold divers get bent, cautious make rent." (The two in question were an underwater weld inspector and a USN SEAL)

Fundamentally, that same can be said of Firefighters, EMTs, Linesmen, soldiers and sailors in general, and astronauts.

So the micro-scale cautious with macro-skill riskiness is actually not uncommon in the real world.