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Eg. You step into the dragon's lair. It roars and breathes fire. Make a Move to avoid becoming a marshmallow.

Edwards basically said "Story Now" is a specific agenda. But I slice the pie quite differently. For me, "story now" pretty much underlies ALL RPGs from the mid 1980s on that cleave to the soul of what an RPG is. That's one reason I object to the trad/neotrad terminology because IME, "trad" in...

It was written to be a narrativist game, which is not the same thing.

I don't consider PbtA games very narrative. Like on a scale from one to 10, with Rolemaster being a 2 on the mechanistic side, and "freeform but playing with a a net, and ostensibly using some published system" being like a 9, I would place most PbtA games at about a 6 or a 7. I consider them...

First of all, just because a game is more narrative in focus, or not, does not remove other elements. All RPGs involve narration, and all involve mechanistic systems, or the wouldn't be RPGs. "You have influenced your audience," is pretty concrete. Whatever might be reasonably accomplished by...

Okay. I'm glad you got that off your chest Most RPGs rate things in terms of success, or failure, possibly with degrees. Some have complications attached to certain actions. In PbtA games, the best games, and the best rules in those games, have a pretty specific result when certain conditions...

In a mechanistic game, a test or challenge gives you a result. In a narrative game, the game asks you to provide one.

Slightly. I haven't read them, except at the store.

Well, as soon as I get my tax return I'm getting Hunter: The Vigil second edition and the new Requiem. Those are really the only _of Darkness books I care about.

Narrative does not necessarily mean "narrativist" in some strict technical sense by someone, and distributing GM and world building does not have a direct relationship with being narrative. If something has sort of general methods of resolution, that's enough to make it narrative to me. If I try...

I think "seer" fits. What were you thinking mechanically? In 5e I could see fighter 2/wiz, and just play as a "tough enchanter." Action surge is great.

Roll 3d6 down the line, allow the player to swap one score with a 15. Basically the method used in WWN and some versions of Rolemaster.

I've been thinking about this further, and how is AD&D's ridiculously exhaustive equipment lists any different than the same procedures in a "Narrativist" lane that end up specifying what streets characters live on, or how they feel about characters that never turn out to be that important?

Well, it has its uses. But it's not as useful as a lot of people think it is. When combined with demographic information, it's fairly predictive of college success; in conjunction with other collateral information, it can give an idea of someone's vocational potential. But all of us have met and...

Intelligence in a game like D&D has only a tenuous relationship with IQ. One thing to realize is that stats in the game, in the end, tell you only how stats behave in the game. If you wanted to give the Scooby-Doo gang stats in a D&D-like game, they would all have massive Intelligence and Wisdom...

Silver weapons do exist to be used. You don't have gold weapons, copper arrows, etc. just to have them. And the prices for animals are in there, because players sometimes want to buy animals. There are a lot of other things someone could buy, that don't have price lists in AD&D. But it's strange...

I've played an assassin and I never felt the 3rd level ability was particularly weak. Some people seem to want it to end an encounter, which is not on par with other 5e class features. You can take out a guard. If you get the drop on a group, you can often make sure there is one less of them...

Part of Hero's historical culture is "bluebooking" which is mostly OC/freeform play conducted in parallel with the group sessions.

Which is exactly what I was talking about. So presuming the mechanics for silver weapons aren't simply superfluous, they signal that in play, one thing you might use is a silver dagger to fight certain foes.

It's implicit in every game system, from OD&D to the latest craze. Is there ANY reason a player new to D&D and its conventions would buy a silver dagger, if it weren't on the equipment list, suggesting its utility? Does the presentation of lyncanthropes in D&D make any sense, if there isn't a...