NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4288811" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's always hard to work these things out from messageboard posts, but I do get a sense of what Sinecure is looking for.S/he doesn't like RM or RQ - two classic, mechanics-heavy simulationist systems.S/he hasn't heard of HeroWars or The Dying Eath - two more-or-less contemporary, mechanics-heavy narrativist systems (both Robin Laws designed, the former with Greg Stafford also).S/he equates an interest in combat mechanics with roleplaying shallowness, and he thinks that 2nd ed AD&D supports non-combat scenarios in part because the game lacks non-combat skill mechanics.S/he thinks that the game works best when the players don't have to interact with the mechanics at all (which are simply there to facilitate the GM's narration of a consistent world).And s/he thinks that Tomb of Horrors is a great module.From all this, I get a picture of Sinecure as a classic AD&D player. The purpose of play is (roughly) operational success in the adventure ("beating the module"). Action resolution is handled primarily by direct player-GM negotiation: players, speaking as their PCs, say "I do X", and the GM works out, based on the current state of the gameworld as narrated by him or her, whether or not X is likely to succeed. In this playstyle, "good play" does not mean mechanical mastery (there are virtually no mechanics to master, after all) but rather a good ability to grasp the GM's narrated gameworld, and to come up with ingame solutions to the operational challenges posed by the gameworld.Some classic AD&D modules that are good for this sort of play are Expdeition to the Barrier Peaks, White Plume Mountain and Ghost Tower of Inverness. They suffer quite a bit from inane plot lines, however. Modules that are really intended to support the same approach to play, I think, but that do have more of a plot line include the Desert of Desolation series. (As far as classic D&D modules are concerned, I feel that Dragonlance really marks a turning point in the sort of play that modules are intended to support.)Other ENworlders who play the game in a similar fashion, as best as I can tell from their posts and their online musings, include Philotomy Jurament (OD&D), Celebrim (I think he plays 3E in something like this way), Reynard, HowandWhy99 (who has expressly advocated the notion that in a good RPG the players should not need to know the rules in order to play, because they can just rely on the GM's narration of the gameworld), Robert Fisher (he plays Moldvay/Cook), Lanefan and (I suspect) Raven Crowking.If I wanted to classify this style using Forge terminology, I'd say it's gamism with a very strong simulationist chassis supporting it. The gamism is not focused on a win at the encounter level, but at the adventure or even campaign level (hence the emphasis on "operational" rather than "tactical" play). The simulationism is purist-for-system, but the "system" is not really a game mechanical system (of the RM or RQ sort) but rather the presupposed constraints upon the GM's narration, which are delivered by a combination of (sparse) game mechanics and the inner logic of the gameworld.The main action-resolution mechanic outside combat is very loosely-structured drama (ie the players and GM talk to one another) with the very occasional introduction of fortune (which, when used, is fortune at the end, not fortune in the middle). Even within combat drama is an important form of action resolution (eg what does it do to the Orc warrior when I start to gnaw on his skull? there is no dice roll to give the answer).The most common problem with such play, in my experience, arises from the absence of any mediation or buffering by action resolution mechanics. This means that if the GM decides that what the players want their PCs to do can't work, the players have no recourse to the game rules to help them out. If they can't grasp the inner logic of the gameworld, they are in trouble. Indeed, this playstyle can easily fall victim to adversarial GMing.Sinecure, I hope I haven't slandered you with the above characterisation. It is my best effort to make sense of your posts and thus to answer Mustrum Ridcully's question.</blockquote>

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