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Did you miss the part where this whole situation was about the GM trying to help the player set up a scene that accomplished something they wanted to do (retire the character and bring in a new one)? Besides, this is an oversimplification. Everybody at the table should have creative input. I...

Interesting, isn't it? I can't figure it out either. You were trying to set up a particular situation, yes, but I don't think that's railroading any more than dangling any plot hook is. I think a lot of people cry railroad any time the GM's hand is visible, which I don't get -- it's kinda...

Okay, rather than use examples, I'm going to go theoretical. There's something I'll call "GM Force" that's basically the GM's ability to influence events in the game. In traditional games, this power is very broad; often it's defined as "anything outside the PC's skin". I'm using Force as a...

Sign me up with woodelf; I'm in total agreement with his last post. What's frustrating to me is that I think the stuff he just said should have been the ground rules for this whole conversation! :) How You Play does matter to your gaming experience. How You Play = Rules + Social Contract. Using...

I'm hoping that the rhetoric can get toned down a bit, too. mythusmage, see if this is basically what you're saying, in simple words: 1) immersion is good and fun 2) following (1), rules should act in the service of immersion 3) following (3), rules should describe the physical laws of the game...

Hey, that's not insulting at all. My group finds authoring plots for our characters and exploring moral issues fun and diverting. Yours doesn't. (Then again, my fiancee and I watched 28 Days Later last night, and had a half-hour conversation about the movie being about how family connections...

Heh, one thing I've learned to do is never have a confrontational gate guard, because every time it's happened (whether I was player or GM) we had a character wait outside and a player who twiddled their thumbs for the rest of the session. :) As for your main problem, now you may look at me...

I mean no offense, mythusmage, but I don't see any overthrowing of old traditions at all here. It sounds a lot like the old "roll-play vs. role-play" argument, which always felt to me to be a vast oversimplification. I've heard people thinking of "rules as physics to simulate an imagined world"...

The positive by itself sounds like a pretty good game to me. Maybe the negatives are things that just aren't important in your game? Lots of people play D&D as a carefully balanced strategic and tactical challenge. The rules get referenced heavily, advancement is weighed against risk, careful...

That was my experience too, Akrasia. Last year I was running a campaign with D20 Modern, and we got to a point where I realized that almost nothing on the character sheets or in the rules was relevant to our game. Play was about the characters dealing with their issues and relationships, the...

mythusmage, you have a couple of these one-line threadstarters floating around. They're certainly provocative, but I think sometimes they "zoom in" a bit too much. I mean it's good to separate out one variable to discuss in a thread, but the rest of the variables still exist. I don't want to...

That is a valid approach to take. I actually take the exact opposite approach, which is why I go *really* rules light. In the games we play, the rules apportion power for things like "Who frames a scene" and "Who wins a conflict" to players and GM, but don't really deal with trying to simulate...

And that's one valid style of play. Continuing campaign, split into different "seasons" where you fight a particular evil, then go on to the next. That's what the game's about. The GM's role is to provide evil to fight, the players' role is to play characters fighting evil. If an NPC kills the...

I think this discussion is very helpful. I think the core issue kind of comes out in what you said above, as far as what we were talking about in rules-light games was so different from your understanding. What we're really talking about, I think, is style of play. I don't mean that as high...

That's a good point, and I was referencing something like that in a post that got eaten. One way people sometimes declare their ability and augments in HQ is through including them in the description of their action. You're using abilities simultaneously as flavor and for a mechanical boost...

I think you're thinking of Riddle of Steel. And yes, the system both allows and expects players to declare conflicts when they think they are appropriate. (Now I see where your points about not being offered the chance to learn-by-doing are coming from; I forgot this hadn't been mentioned.)...

We're just talking about our opinions, so I won't try to dissuade you. :) I talked to my fiancee about Drama Points, and she went, "Well, yeah, obviously characters should succeed when it's dramatically appropriate." Before she started playing in our group, she'd never touched a roleplaying...

Ack, I lost a post because the boards are flaking out. That'll teach me to be so wordy. I went into conflict resolution vs. task resolution, and how I think conflict resolution mechanics make social conflict being part of system vs. "roleplaying" a lot more palatable, but I'm not going into all...

The argument at the core of the thread is that rules-light systems aren't quicker or easier to use than rules-heavy systems. All I'm trying to say is I grant that's true, if you use them both the same way. If your group plays a certain way, adopting a system that has different priorities is...

Well, that's why all these threads started. People went, "Wait a minute, that doesn't match our experiences at all." As we got more information, it was determined that this was done before the release of D&D 3.0, which is before most of the rules-light systems any of us could think of were...