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Here's a brief episode of RPG play: My PC arrived at the dungeon entrance, and went down the stairs. There were two Orc guards waiting at the bottom, and they attacked me! They drove me off, and I had to run back to the village to look for help. But all that happened was that the villagers...

It's certainly possible! The players in my game feel that it is absolutely brutal. Because of the way things have played out, they've had no loot for ages (a couple of 2D or so hauls in the past 6 or so sessions), so they're paying for everything on their raw Resources. The two Elves have no...

Shopping; healing; nandies; levitating; climbing.

We played a session of Torchbearer 2e yesterday afternoon. In attendance were 3 players, and so we had 3 PCs: Telemere the Elven Ranger, Fea-bella the Elven Dreamwalker, and Golin the Dwaren Outcast. Fea-bella's player gave us a prologue, and so Fea-bella recovered from Exhaustion. Golin's...

Gygax has an example of it in his DMG (in the discussion of PCs constructing strongholds). So I would say not all that radical.

"Mechanic" is cognate with "machine". Something being mechanical means it happens via a process that doesn't require discretion or intermediating decision-making. So when I think of a mechanic, in a RPG, I think of a process for making decisions in the game that is machine like, or is mediated...

This is the "vanilla narrativist" hypothesis. I am (or at least have been) an instance of the type, as I've often posted about including earlier this morning in another thread: Based on my own experience, and on the assumption that I'm probably not unique, I used to assume that there must be a...

No worries, and thanks! Well, what you described was more specific than "adding to the setting" - you said " the GM said: 'It is a two-day trip underground to the petrified forest. Describe to me what the journey is like and what you encounter.'" This is the players describing setting, and...

Yes, exactly this.

I'm not sure if by "older D&D" you mean AD&D 2nd ed, or classic D&D of the KotB/WPM/beat-the-dungeon type play. The reason that I ask is because I often see AD&D 2nd ed (and all the other RPGs that are played in more-or-less the same sort of way, which includes a lot of 5e D&D as best I can...

Burning Wheel assumes that the players and GM will work together establishing setting context, starting situation and unfolding situation. The players have a number of tools for doing this - as part of PC build they have Beliefs, Relationships, Affiliations, their actual lifepath choices, etc...

This is why, upthread, I posted that "I find the use of "PbtA" as if it were an informative label pretty hopeless too. . . . I don't know why "PbtA" gets treated as if it's a meaningful umbrella." If someone tells me that a system is PbtA, I don't know if it supports player-driven or GM-driven...

Unless "the conversation" means simply working within a shared fiction, then I don't think I agree with this. The last time I played classic-esque D&D, it was a session of White Plume Mountain, using my own AD&D variant for the PC building rules. This wasn't a game in which the setting was...

Chess and backgammon have in common the movement of pieces on a board, by two players, with rules for capture, and an attempt to win by reaching an end-state that is pretty tightly defined by the rules. They're different boardgames, but have more in common with one another than with, say, Seven...

I know that this sort of thing is very popular, but isn't a feature of my play. I personally don't think that it has much to do with player-driven play. I don't understand how this is supposed to be less "canned", and more "spontaneous", than what I described, or what @Capmbell described, that...

Personally, I think it's a hopeless notion. It's like saying that chess has a different "play style" from backgammon - no, they're just different games with different rules. I find the use of "PbtA" as if it were an informative label pretty hopeless too. Murderous Ghosts is a PbtA game, but as...

In the abstract, I might respond maybe it's no different. But to me it seems that whenever this topic come up, a lot of people who regard themselves as good GMs of reasonably conventional D&D find example of play from (say) Apocalypse World or Burning Wheel pretty outrageous. Which therefore...

I don't think so. And I know this isn't true. Upthread I linked to five examples of actual play. At least one of them actually provides examples of significant character change. "Canned" just seems like a synonym for "prepared", which is true. Like, if I decide - as per one of the examples I...

Don't worry about that! I don't think you are. And I always find your posts pretty interesting, although I don't know if always grasp them right away - sometimes it takes a little bit of back-and-forth. OK, I see what you mean here and I agree that the book doesn't give advice on this sort of...

I think this might be related to your problem in the OP. What I mean by that is that, if the GM does their setting and situation work on their own, and then the players come up with motivations on their own, you're basically relying on good luck/coincidence for things to actually work out...