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Who's that lich, running around with you-ou?

I find it to be incomprehensible. I don't know what you think I said, or what I'm supposed to think you think I said. But maybe just respond to something I said.

Sure, if you have some way of defining the scope of one resolution.

The difference between playing pretend and an RPG is "the system decides." The system can be literally anything, but there is some formal method whereby potentially conflicting events in the narrative are resolved. It has to be something more formal than social clout; bullying is not a...

Well, I'm not saying that. Your hot air balloon/jet fighter comparison makes a lot of sense to me as a metaphor. What I am saying about PbtA games is that they admirably meet their aims, but not by being "narrative." They have some goals, but the most distinctive thing about a PbtA game is that...

If the party can either attack or not attack the bone naga ambassador, in what way are their actions constrained? The book gives you lots of options to use the material, but there is still no requirement that any particular thing happen. As I said before, if the party behavior is quite different...

Yes, obviously. If it helps I have a published Paizo credit, albeit not in an AP book per se. Continue?

What does "sticking to the module" mean?

The Braunstein is the concept underlying all RPGs. Just take a system, any system, that lets someone play a role, and tell them they can try to do anything they want.

Your body would separate into atoms.

What if they do? What if they don't even anticipate the direction they're "supposed" to go? What if they try rigorously to follow the "plot" and all the bright glowing question marks they find, but they break something? What if one of PCs absolutely won't do something the PCs are presumed to do...

At the risk of oversimplifying a long, complicated discussion that spans three different models of RPGs, and the post-model world we live in: "Narrativist" games are games that fulfill a specific kind of gaming experience Edwards thought was under-supported. His response was to envision a...

Really? How?

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.