Recent content by Thomas Shey

Since I've seen people when the TORG example come up assure everyone that the connected parts either had to be connected or had no reason to be connected, both?

I agree with you in principal, but its complicated because "making decisions only the character would make" and "forget I'm playing a game" are sequential requirements for some people. They're incapable fo the second without the first. The problem is when they assume that's a prerequisite for...

You responded to my post, I responded to yours. That's how that works.

As I said, it doesn't require much to discuss some of it in terms of how much attention it requires though. Spending a metacurrency is quick and low-effort unless you're prone to decision paralysis; deciding how and when to play a card hand that has a bunch of cost-to-benefit stuff in it is a...

Yes, Micah, but you're not everyone. My point was the woman I was referring to didn't care whether it was metamechanical per se or not. She played, and plays all kinds of games with metamechanics. It was a question of how much additional cognitive overhead they added.

One also has to account for why a given player is averse to such things, too. Back in our TORG days, one of my players had no real problem with using Possibilities (which while clearly serving the function of a metacurrency, actually represent something that exists in setting and is known by...

I'm not entirely sure; lot of systems have some fairly subjective bits in things like experience awards and at least some sorts of currency (though admittedly in the latter case, its the ones that are more narrative forms that have some non-quantitative options).

That's why I said "somewhat uncommon". As I've noted, I've seen it in superhero games for almost as long as there have been superhero games (in part because ones trying to emulate the Big Two are so large in scope they often exceed how much work a lot of GMs want to put in all on their own)...

Things that are separated can still be separated internally, too.

I don't think moving some authority to the players makes a game intrinsically narrative in focus. It may have been somewhat uncommon in old-school games, but it can be done for reasons and with constraints that are about group setting development, not aiming at specific outcomes. This is very...

The problem is, this excludeds chocolate-and-peanut-butter people like myself. I'm very much a pretty a trad player and GM, but at the same time I find when I'm playing or running a trad game without certain narrative tools I very much miss them. Yet a lot of hardcore narrative games drop some...

Yeah. To your point, I think just broadly tarring PbtA games and Storypath (the system used in all the recent Onyx Path games) as "narrative" and figuring that will do the job for you is probably not helpful to any discussion. And that's not even getting to where it puts things like Savage Worlds.

Players and their characters coasting to a halt hasn't been an uncommon event for me; I ran into it bigtime with an Alternity campaign I ran years ago where the PCs where mercenary astroarcheologists. Its one reason I tolerated one group I was having ongoing problems with for literally years...

I'm a massive fan of 50's SF films, but I'm very cautious about which ones I recommed, and knowing the specific person is usually a factor in it. A lot of it is going to look dated because of film style and SFX technology, but some of it can overcome that, and some of it can't.

Not really. 4e had the virtue that you had to make some effort to fall into a genuinely incompetent character design, even without knowing the system well (this was a notable change from 3e) but there were still ways to get better or worse characters. They just weren't forced on you by dice in...