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That is the intended mentality for the playstyles Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel were designed to support. To stay present, focus on what is on-screen. Don't commit to anything off-screen. Think of possibilities, sure, but do not get attached to them. Because as a GM the job is maintaining...

I do agree that rules will not resolve social issues and that a functional set of creative relationships should basically be assumed. That's what I would call basic stuff. The fun bit to me is what happens once we have those functional relationships. How can we get to diverse and compelling...

It's not about legislating good behavior. It's about establishing shared creative goals (that we all agree to take on). This is no different than deciding to play Resistance, Uno or Battle For Rokugan (all board games). Part of playing any game is taking on the roles it defines and the...

In game texts I have really only seen bypassing encounters addressed in regard to games where you specifically receive XP for overcoming combat challenges. There is a bit of combat being the assumed form of conflict in some more conventional games (D&D 3e to 5e, Pathfinder, Iron Kingdoms, etc.)...

Absolutely. There are all sorts of possible arrangements for this stuff. Like Chronicles of Darkness and the Legend of the Five Rings, Fifth Edition both have strong character and game premises reflected in the rules of the game but often include a lot of low stakes exploration, but players are...

I mean that D&D (the 5e texts) does not contemplate non-exploratory play or play that is not structured around discrete adventures. This is a good thing by the way. It's part of what makes the design so polished. As for Apocalypse World it's not a single path to proper play. It's a different...

I am speaking to exploration as an activity of play here (akin to the exploration pillar and the described 5e play loop). Exploring your environment in a conflict neutral way in order to find out more about the world and its inhabitants. This free exploration comes from two places - players are...

I think Narrativist game assumes Narrativist play is not any more One True Way than the described D&D play loop and description of the GM as Master of Worlds, Master of Adventures and Master of Rules. Especially when it goes out of its way to say this is how you play this game, not all...

Games like Monsterhearts, Sorcerer, Burning Wheel, et al are not adventure games in the same way that D&D is an adventure game though. You do not have the freedom to "go anywhere and do anything". These are games with premises, with characters who have their own premises we are expected to...

On the players make a premise-breaking but still fictionally reasonable move thing I would have an out of character conversation with the players about what sort of game they want to play and see if it might be a game I would want to run. I do not consider it my obligation to keep running a game...

Pretty much all of the Spider clan events, them getting amnesty, becoming Great Clan, etc. A lot of the conceptual space the various clans became confused by metaplot events, largely driven by dumb card game tournaments. I was so happy to see a return to the original form of the setting and a...

Legend of the Five Rings, Fifth Edition is one of my favorite roleplaying games ever made (right up there with my group's Vampire hack, Apocalypse Keys and Dune 2d20). From my perspective, much like how Vampire - The Requiem, Second Edition finally makes good on promise of a game of personal...

Mostly on stage, some backstage. High school drama club and community theater. My experience was very collaborative. Everyone taking notes from the director, giving each other notes, etc. A lot of problem solving when it comes to props, etc.

My groups have been quite unusual outliers here, but our trad games tend to be extraordinarily light on violent conflict and tend to have several days in the fiction between significant events quite often. I think our Classic Deadlands game that ran for 6 months might have had 6 fights with at...

Opinions on flexibility of games that utilize daily resource refresh or other time-based resource refreshes are going to very much depend on how comfortable you are with long stretches of play where we are tracking resources, but they are not close to being challenged. There's nothing I hate...

When I talk about normative standards of discussion I'm not talking about judgement. I'm talking about erasure when it comes to broad discussion of roleplaying games (on this site). It's about the normative standards of play being assumed to be worthy of respect while other ways of playing...

@SableWyvern I think where many of us bristle is with the idea that the GM having exclusive ownership of the setting and players having exclusive ownership of their individual characters is foundational to roleplaying games rather than just a subset of them and that it's an inherently more...

Don't want to play them? Cool. Don't want them to exist when so many games require a set of play-style that is similar to yours? Not so cool. That's basically asking people like me to be permanent second-class citizens in this space? When 5th Edition D&D leaves no room for people like me to...

So here is how the 2014 DMG defines the DM's role: When I read this, I see constraints and duties. Ones I am occasionally willing to perform but consider phenomenally stressful. The game calls the DM the master of worlds, adventures and rules. To me these are not freedoms - these are duties...

So, I do not think D&D would benefit from additional constraints on the DM, but it already has some - they are just constraints that most of us are used to. Take for example the play loop described on p. 5 of the 2014 Player's Handbook This sets out that it is the DM's responsibility to...