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That all seems fine. The analog would have been including a section introducing historical wargaming and touting why it’s so cool compared to other forms of gaming.

This 10000%. Iteration is very useful for creating non-trivial things. Playing my game for our regular campaign has been incredibly useful for trying out ideas and then quickly discarding them when they suck (even though they sounded on paper theoretically quite nice). I’ll also leave this link...

Does D-Day wax poetic about what board games? That’s the issue. The Pathfinder 2e Core Rulebook spends three pages on it and what Pathfinder is. In comparison, Middara jumps straight into telling you how to set up and play the game. If you’re doing adventure mode, it tells you what that is when...

I’m not actually planning to do this in my game. I plan to explain how to play it, and that should be sufficient. If not, then I shall clarify until it is.

Even a “kind of but not really” is helpful. On the other hand, if I said gringas are like big tacos, that should make sense. Same if I’ve had pork pot pie, and you described a chicken pot pie as similar but with chicken instead. This seems like a reference to other games that actually works...

What I’m trying to do is assess whether either of these structures are similar to kickers — another structure I know. Going back to your OP, I would liken them to story spines in that they provide the structure but don’t lay down specific elements beyond establishing the premise. You’ve been...

I’ve trimmed your response down to these two paragraphs because they get to the heart of why I don’t think Events are analogous to kickers. If there’s something a player wants to explore, your Events system would have them add more detail while a good kicker should invite exploration. If a...

The point of the example was to probe how well Events could function as kickers. Assume for the sake of working through it that it’s on-tone, appropriate for the campaign, etc. In this case, the goal was to find out something about my character. How did I end up in this strange situation? Why...

Wouldn’t saying it’s a prank potentially be a form of blocking? The event was something from which I needed to run (hence the pounding at the door and the bad situation). The prank removes that urgency and turns it into a joke.

I like to look at RP and G as things that belong together. There is a type of game where these are modal: you’re either role-playing, or you’re engaging with mechanics; but I think RPGing is better when they work together. That’s something that has driven the design of the conflict resolution...

That’s fair, but I’m having trouble reconciling this with your later take on FKR. You seem to conclude that you need more structure than just relying on you and your group’s experience with and knowledge of the game’s subject. Is what you seek a middle ground between a game that is laser-focused...

Sorry, I meant to say “affirming the consequent”. It doesn’t follow that games are a storytelling medium just because stories can be produced by games. A trivial counterexample is playing a game to establish who advances in a tournament. It may be possible to turn certain moments into a story...

The stuff on games as story generators reminds me of the Story Machines series of videos. I think the idea of games as story generators is a good idea. Given a set of systems, the resulting play can generate a series of events that can be turned into a story. However, I balk at describing...

Thanks for the clarification about how your Events are structured. One question that comes to mind is how they interact with immersion. I’m not really a deep immersion kind of player—immersion for me is about making decisions as and doing what my character would do; but I know some people are...

The issue I have with this is I don’t really care about the narrative aspect of RPGs. There was a thread a while ago that asked you to rank game, character, and story; and my ranking was something like “game > character >>>>>> story”. My game is structured around the PCs’ pursuing and...

My primary concern is blocking in the context of tabletop RPGs, so I’m not sure I’m getting much out of the comparisons to various forms of improv. Would it be fair to say that blocking constitutes play that causes the forward momentum of the scene to stop? That could be a DM’s abusing the...

Based on the subsequent discussion, I think I have a better understanding of what you mean. Thanks. As an aside, I don’t have a negative perception of “railroading”. I prefer to assess games for what they offer and decide based on whether that sounds fun. Sometimes that would in fact (and has...

Given our past interactions on “improv game”, I’m not sure how fruitful this conversation will be, so if it’s not going to be, let’s let it drop, but I’m having trouble following you on blocking. It seems to me that blocking is necessary to create gameplay. Without it, the GM always ends up...