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Good points! I haven't played Ironsworn and until I read this thread I had no techniques for allowing anyone but the GM to be Keeper of Secrets; it's the one GM role I saw no way to delegate elsewhere. How does Ironsworn do it?

(A) out of curiosity, would this question be asked during play or before play? I'm trying to understand how the words "like in a PbtA" fit into this otherwise-system-agnostic concept. But basically yes, I think we agree. (B) That's how I initially interpreted it, and my initial impulse was...

"Although, in the fiction, the situation might involve intense physical stress and drama, at the table the challenge is essentially intellectual (like most other table-top games). And intellectual puzzle solving simply doesn't produce that narrative structure." Those words made me stop and go...

I used to think "gotcha" traps that trigger automatically when you enter their space were pointless "wandering damage rolls" that you should never use, and should always prefer OSR-style traps that make players think instead of rolling dice. See Traps Suck for the logic. Then I went back and...

Two comments: (a) is indeed an interesting source of tension, and one way to resolve it is to recognize that the player's goals are not the character's goals and get the players OOC to buy into a scenario. We had some discussion upthread about starting in medias res, but there are other ways to...

Yes, you are more aware of your experiences. Maybe what I said has no bearing on your intended meaning. However, I cannot read minds, and I thought the point was important enough to emphasize just in case. If you really do feel that Microscope and Fortunately/Unfortunately are RPGs, then by all...

Point of order: Saying that a storygame like Microscope or Union or Fortunately/Unfortunately is not a role-playing game != saying that Microscope is not a fun game. Maybe you're talking about some other storygame like Mind of Margaret which arguably is roleplaying. It's not clear what you...

But in practice, a single adventure doesn't confer godlike power, so it's absolutely legitimate to say to the players, hooray, you won! Not only did you repair the hyperdrive and get Princess Amidala safely to Coruscant, but you picked up the bonus mission and actually liberated Naboo months...

Fair enough. "I'm not sure" is always a valid and thoughtful answer.

And there's no way a spellcaster could make an encounter implode without needing to overcome a saving throw, either. Clearly spells like Otto's Irresistible Dance and Telekinesis don't exist, nor does Wall of Force, Major Image, or Planar Binding! It's like WotC built a wall a mile high and ten...

Instead of semantically quibbling, let me propose something specific to illustrate the point: let me be constructively vague: In the real world, an intelligence analyst may spend a lot of effort on establishing inference chains (A -> B; B & C -> D; giving a concrete example is apparently...

If they opt out of every option on the table, ask them to invent their own.

Almost all tropes originate in linear media, most of them without being in any way tied to linearity. To illustrate the point, here's a handy table that you can have players roll on at the start of an adventure (or campaign). If players dislike a given result they may reroll. You All Meet...

There's also the fact that unlike a GM, intelligence organizations never have access to perfect information about the world they live in.

I didn't say it was a dichotomy, but the complete absence of quantifiable goals (challenges) is something I can identify in retrospect as something that was unpleasant. At the time I just knew that the DM kept describing NPCs and places to us, and we would do something logical and boring like...

I'm not sure what you mean by "like", but my takeaway is that RPGs are not gamelike by default, and it's worth investing mental energy into the design of gamelike scenarios that you can embed inside of play for your players. This explains for example why many players like being given "quests"...

They're more explicit than that. "Role-playing games (or RPGs) certainly have the trappings of games. A paper-based, tabletop RPG usually involves dice, rulebooks, statistics, and a fair amount of strategic play. Role-playing games clearly embody every component of our definition of game...

Interesting. My sources say the exact opposite (Kriegspiel is sometimes credited for Prussian success in the Franco-German war of 1870, six years before free Kriegspiel was formulated, see Kriegsspiel – How a 19th Century Table-Top War Game Changed History - MilitaryHistoryNow.com, and that...

Axis and Allies 2nd edition is a pretty good improvement over the original. The new map makes the notorious "shuck-shuck" Atlantic troop ferry pattern significantly more inefficient.

You just answered your own question there, Umbran. The point is to see if it quacks like a duck. Especially in a thread that heavily implicates the theory of game design, it's helpful to know if we're examining something that has the characteristics of games in the first place. For example, do...