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I'm trying to think of a productive, non-confrontational way to address this concern. It's not that ideas of trad play are dismissed or denigrated out of hand. There is nothing wrong with them! As many folks such as Campbell and others have stated, we're playing trad style games right now ---...

In retrospect my tone may have come across as harsh towards both Formalist literature criticism and trad 5e. Formalism does still have a place in literature criticism. Its principles are still used in many ways in other techniques. It continues to have a presence, though it is largely subsumed...

You're not wrong, but at the same time, both Bennies and hit points do serve one similar function --- they act as markers to both the GM and other players that a unilateral fictional state declaration of "Your character is dead" is a degenerate one. But you are correct that there's a...

I suppose there's an argument to be made that the "trad 5e lens" is a highly effective instrument at explaining how Apocalypse World doesn't work. So it's always useful in that sense. But there's a reason why Formalist literature criticism gave way to Historicist criticism in the early 1960s...

* Puts feet up on desk and leans back in chair * So this is where we get into the argument about just what exactly a hit point is and how much of it is a "meta currency" compared to other kinds of meta currencies, right? Because that's one of my favorites! ;) 😇

This gets me too. The switch from PF 1e to Savage Worlds for me back in 2012 didn't change my overall GM approach nearly it all. It just made my usual "trad" approach much easier, as Savage Worlds is 10x easier to improvise on the fly in play. Claiming that Savage Worlds is somehow an entirely...

The flaw in your logic is to assume that "mechanical support" for a particular style is equivalent to "directed play advice, principles, assumed social contract, and overall exercise of the game's play loop." Construct a D&D 5e Dungeon Master's guide that implements Apocalypse World's advice...

It's not that the lens of D&D, or "trad" principles, or narrative style games, or "simulationism", or "story now", or whatever else is privileged, it's a function of perspective. I played D&D 3+3.5 from 2001 through 2008, Star Wars Saga Edition from 2009-2010, and Pathfinder 1e from 2010...

Good question. I know that I personally have long looked for . . . something, a heightened element of drama, perhaps, in my RPG play for a long time, in an effort to at least glimpse the possibility of finding a true aesthetic value in RPG play. As you say --- and perhaps as the article hints...

LOL, don't get me wrong, I'm totally fine with other people liking and playing GURPS. I've only ever played maybe a grand total of 25 sessions of it in my lifetime. I also recognize that there's a very finely tuned, technically impressive design living under the hood. It just happens to produce...

And if that implication is true, it's a profound rejection of the principle of dissociative mechanics. The key argument of dissociative mechanics is that mechanics which do not have a correlative fictional grounding --- that could not be rationally, causally explained by a character within the...

Definitely part of that was in my thoughts. I just think this is a very fertile ground for exploration, and that it's something I think I've long intuited in my own RPG play without being able to articulate it as meaningfully as this author does. I'm fascinated by the idea that there is no true...

This is absolutely true, and one of the things that struck me about the difficulty of doing "deep critique" of RPGs generally, is that most RPG sessions aren't recorded or transcribed for future review. This is an enormous problem in being able to revisit the kind of "viewer critique" that can...

I think what @Hussar is getting at is not that you don't care about the failure--of course you care; your character has been denied a want. The point is that in PbtA, any given success or failure is more important in the context of reframing your character's inner narrative/story approach than...

I just stumbled across this in my Firefox "Pocket Articles" feed . . . and just . . . wow. My mind is now churning at 7,000 RPM. https://www.vulture.com/article/the-last-of-us-is-not-a-video-game-adaptation.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab What a fascinating, engrossing analysis of the true...

By the way, all ---- Disco Elysium is on sale on GOG.com for $10 bucks for the next couple of days, if anyone is of a mind to check it out.

Sorry that this is going back a ways, but I had to bring this up. Before I finally read some of the Forge essays myself and tried (and mostly failed) to successfully run a few sessions of Dungeons World back in 2017, if we consider the "Y talk" to be narrative/non-trad discussions and "X talk"...

To continue, Disco Elysium will challenge your conception of what it means to play an RPG, how to approach an RPG's protagonism, and more. And I say that owning the game, but having not really played it end-to-end, and at times not even particularly caring for some of its procedures, while...

Aside from anything else, this comment here elucidates my interest in RPG theory. I agree with pemerton that there's little use in starting down the path of laying bare the procedural workings of RPGs without being willing --- truly willing --- to revise a notion, understanding, or principle...

@pemerton --- I haven't read the whole thread, so if it's been mentioned forgive me, but if I may, I would highly suggest checking out the computer RPG Disco Elysium to give you an idea of how it might be done. That was literally the first thing that came to mind when I read the OP.