The Firebird's latest activity

I disagree. It's not that we sat down to tell a story, and then decided it would be more fun with rules. We sat down to play a game, and...

Yes. That's the point, at least for me, in using that phrase.

Learning about the world in order to make intelligent choices is playing the game.

I want to highlight this, because it appears to me to be one of the crucial observations from the discussion. I alluded to it before in...

Player agency within the setting is the main antidote to railroading, so it seems odd that some of the most strident anti-railroaders...

Look, if you dislike it. That is you. But I think this sort of ability by the GM to do strong characterization of NPCs is vital for the...

Is the activity "make moves within the fiction; when necessary, use rules"? Or is it "play the game by the rules; when necessary, the...

Interacting with NPCs is part of the game

So, player agency gets sacrificed on the altar of efficiency. Bleah. Whenever I hear talk of "move play along" or the like, I imagine...

Hmm, maybe the term 'railroading' wasn't used for that, but the idea of a guard being unbribable at all has been criticized extensively.

But people weren't advocating the GM bring all forces to bear against the party from getting past the guard. People were advocating for...

Which, absent any other information, on a failed roll comes across as the game stone-cold telling me how to play my character. As the...

This to me is the key. Yes some of these moments, and I wouldn't use the term scene myself in this style of play, the stakes could be...

I've been saying this for ages and have got flayed for it every time. Having not yet read further in the thread, I hope your statement...

This gets back to why I don't like the term color. It artificially divides gameplay into "important" and "unimportant" prior to it...