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Absolutely. For me, it's up there with "trade offs" as a completely unhelpful framework for making sense of a voluntary leisure activity driven by a shared interest in game play and genre aesthetics. Yeah, these things too.

I don't think anyone is under an obligation to accept whatever IP holders shovel at them. But I think that endless whinging about new versions of things can get tiring. I think 4e D&D is a better RPG than any other version of the game since the early 1980s, both in mechanics/game play and in...

I remember, in the mid-90s when the internet was still a new thing for grad students in Arts faculties, discovering and enjoying a "Pissed of X-Fan FAQ", which was an extensively documented lament about the state of X-Men comics post-Claremont. My enjoyment came from the fact that I was largely...

I GMed my first session of Mythic Bastionland yesterday: Mythic Bastionland actual play The players knew nothing about the game or the setting except what I explained to them in introducing the game, working through PC build, etc. But they started caring about the setting information straight...

I think the militant saints and the miracle-working knights/kings are all pretty closely tied together, particularly when filtered through the lens of game design many centuries later than the culture that conceived of them. So I agree with you about how they tie into Clerics; but see the...

Right. The archetype that clerics and paladins draw from is the mediaeval idea of the rightful knight/king who can heal with a touch, and perhaps perform other miracles; and is wrathful and warlike against the enemies of the divinity. D&D obviously sources some of the miracles from the Bible...

That was going to be my answer. My understanding (from hearsay - I've never read a Drizzt novel) is that Drizzt fought with two weapons because that was a Drow ability; and had a Figurine of Wondrous Power. But then these got turned into ranger abilities. Although there is a (modest) overlap...

My experience is the opposite of this. I've had no trouble GMing Marvel Heroic RP, and I don't find settings without FR/WoD-style metaplot to be "nicely painted facades".

Can you elaborate a bit more on this? I think that the "no hard failure" idea sometimes gets mixed up with some other things: * Not grinding the adventure to a halt - but this notion only has purchase if there is a "the adventure" which has a pre-determined trajectory, and so shouldn't really...

Cats; peacocks; monks; shepherds; Mountain.

This relates to some of what I posted in the other thread: what determines if there is a risk? Eg in a social situation, what creates a risk that the PC might be embarrassed or disheartened? I tend to default to Burning Wheel norms - if the situation is putting something the PC is invested in...

I think the players enjoyed the session. Certainly enough to agree that our next session (i) should be soon, and (ii) should be Mythic Bastionland. Some of my concerns I posted in my previous thread, about uncertainty around framing, were borne out. There were points where I felt I had to work...

Here is a summary of their travel: Day 1, morning: they entered the first river hex. I rolled a 1 on the Wilderness Roll, and the random Myth was The Troll. They encountered its severed arm in a marshy part of the river bank, crawling north-west (ie towards the lake). The Hive Knight approached...

The players knew that their Knights had been knighted by Seers - though we did not pay any attention to the canonical knighting Seers set out in the rulebook - and that the Seers know secrets of the Myths. So in the tavern, they asked about Seers. Given the game is meant to be procedural, at...

I GMed a session of Mythic Bastionland this afternoon, with my regular group. I introduced it to them as a game of weird questing knights. We started with rolling PCs, young knights-errant. We had 6 players roll PCs, although only 5 actually started play - one of us had to leave before play...

Sure. But it's not as if that book was produced ex nihilo, in a cultural and historical vacuum.

And I would add to this, analysed/explained quite obscurely in many RPG discussions.

I think that D&D clerics and paladins, as originally presented, are two mechanical variants on the one idea: a heavily armed and armoured worker of miracles (heal with a touch, dispel evil spirits, etc). The miracle-working knight (or king) is something that is found in mediaeval legend. D&D...

I think it's clearly framing - I mean, there's no magic in the label, but any RPG needs a process for establishing what is it that we all agree on as the content of the shared fiction, and we may as well call that "framing" and "consequences" as anything else. My concern is with RPGs that don't...

Right. Conan doesn't resort to combat as a last resort. Having fighter PCs begin at 1st level, rather than as Heroes, is already a departure from the source material.