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This gets me too. The switch from PF 1e to Savage Worlds for me back in 2012 didn't change my overall GM approach nearly it all. It just made my usual "trad" approach much easier, as Savage Worlds is 10x easier to improvise on the fly in play. Claiming that Savage Worlds is somehow an entirely...

The flaw in your logic is to assume that "mechanical support" for a particular style is equivalent to "directed play advice, principles, assumed social contract, and overall exercise of the game's play loop." Construct a D&D 5e Dungeon Master's guide that implements Apocalypse World's advice...

It's not that the lens of D&D, or "trad" principles, or narrative style games, or "simulationism", or "story now", or whatever else is privileged, it's a function of perspective. I played D&D 3+3.5 from 2001 through 2008, Star Wars Saga Edition from 2009-2010, and Pathfinder 1e from 2010...

Good question. I know that I personally have long looked for . . . something, a heightened element of drama, perhaps, in my RPG play for a long time, in an effort to at least glimpse the possibility of finding a true aesthetic value in RPG play. As you say --- and perhaps as the article hints...

LOL, don't get me wrong, I'm totally fine with other people liking and playing GURPS. I've only ever played maybe a grand total of 25 sessions of it in my lifetime. I also recognize that there's a very finely tuned, technically impressive design living under the hood. It just happens to produce...

And if that implication is true, it's a profound rejection of the principle of dissociative mechanics. The key argument of dissociative mechanics is that mechanics which do not have a correlative fictional grounding --- that could not be rationally, causally explained by a character within the...

Definitely part of that was in my thoughts. I just think this is a very fertile ground for exploration, and that it's something I think I've long intuited in my own RPG play without being able to articulate it as meaningfully as this author does. I'm fascinated by the idea that there is no true...

This is absolutely true, and one of the things that struck me about the difficulty of doing "deep critique" of RPGs generally, is that most RPG sessions aren't recorded or transcribed for future review. This is an enormous problem in being able to revisit the kind of "viewer critique" that can...

I think what @Hussar is getting at is not that you don't care about the failure--of course you care; your character has been denied a want. The point is that in PbtA, any given success or failure is more important in the context of reframing your character's inner narrative/story approach than...

I just stumbled across this in my Firefox "Pocket Articles" feed . . . and just . . . wow. My mind is now churning at 7,000 RPM. https://www.vulture.com/article/the-last-of-us-is-not-a-video-game-adaptation.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab What a fascinating, engrossing analysis of the true...

By the way, all ---- Disco Elysium is on sale on GOG.com for $10 bucks for the next couple of days, if anyone is of a mind to check it out.

Sorry that this is going back a ways, but I had to bring this up. Before I finally read some of the Forge essays myself and tried (and mostly failed) to successfully run a few sessions of Dungeons World back in 2017, if we consider the "Y talk" to be narrative/non-trad discussions and "X talk"...

To continue, Disco Elysium will challenge your conception of what it means to play an RPG, how to approach an RPG's protagonism, and more. And I say that owning the game, but having not really played it end-to-end, and at times not even particularly caring for some of its procedures, while...

Aside from anything else, this comment here elucidates my interest in RPG theory. I agree with pemerton that there's little use in starting down the path of laying bare the procedural workings of RPGs without being willing --- truly willing --- to revise a notion, understanding, or principle...

@pemerton --- I haven't read the whole thread, so if it's been mentioned forgive me, but if I may, I would highly suggest checking out the computer RPG Disco Elysium to give you an idea of how it might be done. That was literally the first thing that came to mind when I read the OP.

Another problem --- the Venn diagram of humans who have played enough variety of RPGs, for a long enough time to meaningfully digest the scope of intent and realization of intent of each creative work; who also have enough background in doing academically rigorous and meaningful analysis of...

I'm going to pipe in on one thing here, having had quite a bit of success getting my group to try stuff over the years. Our group has played at least 5 sessions of all of the following since 2012: Savage Worlds GURPS Tiny D6 Dungeon World Ironsworn Starforged Star Wars: Edge of the Empire...

The problem GURPS has is that it's now too much beholden to its own design paradigm (much like D&D) to really go anywhere different without spurning its (miniscule) existing market. The people who like GURPS are the kind of people who are married to the core system at a near-metaphysical level...

Tiny D6 is an ultra-lightweight attempt at creating a level 2 through level 6 BECMI-ish sort of game experience. It's probably about as close as you can come to "Free Kriegsspiel" without actually doing away with player-facing rules completely. Its entire ethos is "trad" to the Nth degree -- GM...

I honestly thought I would hate using a critical hit chart in FFG Star Wars. The way the weapon crit ratings worked made me think they'd never get used. Boy was I ever wrong. Our group loves it. It's exciting to roll the chart, and the narrative effects are fun and flavorful. Also, the hit...