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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6681616" data-attributes="member: 42582">You can find different styles among players, yes. But it's hard to have a very diverse mix of agendas successfully pursued, because so much depends on GMing techniques.If you have a GM running a pre-authored adventure path, then not much story now play is going to be taking place at that table, however much a given player tries to play his/her PC as a protagonist.And you only have to look at the number of ENworld threads complaining about "power gamers", "player entitlement" etc to see that various sorts of player approaches (eg forthright gamism in PC building and/or play, players trying to participate in authorship, etc) don't sit well with many GMs' approaches.I guess I don't see the problem with that. T&T won't support simulationist play. The rulebook more-or-less comes out and says so! (Using the terminology that was standard in the late 1970s.)People use the terminology of criticism and analysis to understand the features of books and films, and why they do or don't like them. I don't see why RPGs should be different in this respect.I don't think so. The whole point of The Forge analysis, which comes through crystal-clear in Ron Edwards's essays, is to explore and explain the breadth of RPGing approaches, and to contest what it regards as a false consensus of the late 80s through mid-to-late-90s that the only true RPGing is the GM-force-heavy, player-doing-nothing-but-immersing-in-character style that was at the heart of 2nd ed AD&D and White Wolf "storytelling".My own impression is that if you engage with ENworld posters who have a passing familiarity with The Forge, and the breadth of approaches The Forge talks about, you'll find posters who are aware of and have interesting things to say about a wide range of RPGing styles and techniques. They're also often able to articulate their preferences as preferences. I tend to find that it's those with exposure to only a very narrow range of games (eg 2nd ed AD&D, 3E/PF and perhaps GURPS or HERO or some comparable "universal", sim-oriented engine) that tend to speak very dogmatically about what RPGing must be like, and (for instance) why player authorship is incompatible with RPGing and belongs to some other category of pursuit.I tend to write online the same as I write for my work. I'm an academic lawyer and philosopher. I'm sorry if it puts you off - it's not intentional.</blockquote>

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