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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...

Apocalypse World is not trying to solve anything. It's a game where the players take on roles of people in a post-apocalyptic community that is under siege by from outside threats, internal strife and scarcity. We play to find out if the community can hold together or if the player characters...

In games like Apocalypse World the closest equivalent of the GM (Master of Ceremonies) is a player of the game. The chapter on how to facilitate the game is even called the playbook for the Master of Ceremonies. The way I see is that the referee role cuts against the scene framer role in a...

I don't think my play is transcendent. I'm not a skilled enough actor /roleplayer for that. But I do approach my play with creative intentions to delve into the personal, emotional lives of the characters I play and I try to bring that out when I run games. I don't think it's wild to say that...

There are plenty of people in these threads (@robertsconley @Lanefan @Micah Sweet) who have said game designers should not design games that change up the normative roles. That do not recognize the legitimacy of different play structures. Who continue to talk in terms of what game designers and...

The other thing explicit constraints in games do is help the whole group understand what is expected of them and also what you will not be getting from an experience. If I know that moments of personal stakes will be fairly rare and not be celebrated at the table I can choose to be invested in...

Constraints are a good thing. It's good that we have different games that have different constraints for players and GMs. Its level set a good thing that Daggerheart and D&D present different GM and player roles so we can have different sorts of experiences, and it becomes easier to select and...

I'll have more in the morning, but I do not endorse the idea that lore/setting is story or that all GMs are storytellers.

@thefutilist When it comes to engaging with a Narrativist agenda in mixed play I do miss transparent resolution somewhat but that's mostly my enjoyment of dice as palpable narrative tension (which is an aesthetic desire). What I find is the biggest stumbling block is usually other players...

So, for me, I like that when I'm the MC of Apocalypse World that I am not in charge of how things go. I like that I'm more of a facilitator and that I get to frame scenes and find out how things go with the other players. I like that I'm still playing a game with the other players, that I'm not...

What matters to me is where the agenda is (and how tightly we are holding on) - are we focusing on exploring the setting or is the setting serving the game as a vehicle for us to engage with the concerns of the characters?

Disregarding what it means to be player driven or not I would say that play where we are spending substantial amounts of time exploring and learning about the setting and engaged with conflicts that are external to the characters' concerns so that we can get to the points where our characters...

From a practical standpoint, I don't really start play not knowing much about the characters. Most of the trad games I play/run tend to fall more into elaborate backgrounds where you need a session just to create characters together. A lot of the Narrativist games I have run in the past do...

The prep you do in Apocalypse World (fronts/threats) is fairly light. As things get established over time defined parts of the setting become a bigger deal, but that's just part of the arc of most low to moderate myth play. You increasingly are dealing with a more locked down setting.