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PCs just being major characters who we spend a lot screentime with, and preferably with conflicting interests, that's pretty much it. Like, say, Walter, Jesse, Skyler, Mike and Gus rather than Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli. It works spectacularly well in Apocalypse World and Urban Shadows.

Parties. Everybody and their mother tries to shoehorn PCs working (and often even travelling) together for exactly zero reasons.

All the people in the world didn't magically learn about TTRPGs that were invented by wargamers in the '70s. Some invented them separately, untouched and undisturbed by Kriegsspiel, Chainmail, or D&D, so it's a good example of an alternative evolution path of TTRPGs. It could've happened 50...

Text-based roleplaying games, in essence, are very close to TTRPGs and when instant messaging became a thing, the line effectively disappeared altogether. Both use words and only words to, well, roleplay, and whether they're (normally -- there are people who play play-by-post D&D, and it's not...

...should I mention for the third time that TTRPGs were already invented separately with no connection to D&D nor wargames?

Well... No. If that was the case, all the roleplaying games (as in, not only tabletop ones) would evolve to have detailed rules on combat. Forum roleplaying games (that are often played by people who never even heard of D&D) don't. In many cases fighting another character boils down to "agree...

I mean, forum games and Tumblr roleplaying after that evolved pretty much separately from D&D. They tend to have rules concerning what kind of fiction you can create, but dice, detailed combat and all other D&D-esque things are quite uncommon.

More like post-Soviet. I'm totally not Slavic myself.

I think it's a useful framework to think, talk, and analyse games, so I don't see why not share it with westerners. You know the drill already, I hope: not prescriptive, rpgs are complex, all that jazz. And, yes, labels like "old" and "new" suck, as, say, Dogs in the Vineyard is almost twenty...

Celerity is basically several extra turns. And with how VtM works, it's a real big time sink.

Funnily, I've spotted this thread as I was typing out "The Eastern taxonomy" in another tab. Huh.

What character (any character, PC, NPC, or whatever else) can or cannot do is absolutely influenced by things outside of the character and outside of the player because, well, there are other participants. Unless it's a solo game, but then this whole discussion doesn't apply anyway. In most...

Agency-huyagency. All this stuff feels very silly to me. My opinion on this is dead simple: "your" character isn't your character. It's our character. Like everything else in life, it doesn't, (or, at least, shouldn't) belong to one individual, but to the collective.

Hm, I like the reliability angle. Gonna steal it, it pretty much sums up my requirements.

I've been busy the last few days, sorry if I missed something directed at me. To put it simple: I screwed up. It shoulda been in TTRPG general.

But how does disruptive look like? Like, at which point you could point at the system and say "yup, this naughty word is disruptive and doesn't work"?

Of course the second one.

...especially if the group invokes rule zero left and right.

I don't think that "fun" is a useful metric. I mean, if the game wasn't fun it basically means that it just plain sucked, and "not sucking" is the lowest possible bar to clear.

So, yeah, the question is exactly what it says on the tin: what exactly the rules should be doing to be considered working? Since I always have an opinion on everything, I'll start. The system works when it prevents bad stuff from happening and allows the table to focus on the good stuff...