Let's talk about "plot", "story", and "play to find out."


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There is a meaningful difference between excluding dragonborn from play because you do not like them and having an issue with the actual engine of a game. If you perceive the game not to cater to your preferred playstyle then you effectively are excluded.
My father is a Monopoly purist. He doesn’t like the changes that have been made to more recent editions of the game to make the playtime shorter.

Were the changes excluding him? Of course not!
 

No, not really.

These days it might matter for online tools, but old editions didn’t have those in the first place.
I am a fan of older editions of D&D. These are definitively more difficult to find players for the further they recede into the past. A lot of folks follow whatever's current. Do you deny any of this, or does it just not matter to you? If it doesn't, fine, but it matters to others.
 

My father is a Monopoly purist. He doesn’t like the changes that have been made to more recent editions of the game to make the playtime shorter.

Were the changes excluding him? Of course not!
Sure they were. Now the rules are less in line with his preferred play than they used to be. Popularity has nothing to do with it.
 

No, it's like if McDonald's decided not to sell Big Macs anymore, but some of their old restaurants were technically still open. And you could go there, but all the advertising is pushing the new stores, and most people are going there, and the culture is telling you the new store is where everyone should be eating, and that it's really the same as the old store, and no one really liked Big Macs anyway. But you did, and you feel excluded.
Don't McDonalds rotate things in and out of their menu all the time? Is that exclusionary of people who like those items?
 

Don't McDonalds rotate things in and out of their menu all the time? Is that exclusionary of people who like those items?

To some extent, but I think its a little off to compare to things where networking factors don't have the huge impact they do on RPGs. I tend to find it a little tiresome when people get all soggy because their prefered version of a game is no longer supported, but that doesn't mean their concerns and problems are irrational; its just because that's how things work, and how they're always going to work to a large extent.
 


I think the aim should be to make it like real life at least in way any good fiction feels real and evokes real emotions. Now if rules can help with that, great, but often they cannot.
That's the thing though, "good" arguments rarely evolve organically from spurious conversation. They need to be crafted. Speeches are written, compelling dialogue in a book or movie or TV show are worked and reworked and polished till they shine. Gameified processes built off frameworks of "this is how television show writers write good scenes" are for more likely to produce a good result than expecting a pair of untrained actors to reproduce Shakespeare on command.
 

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