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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7572359" data-attributes="member: 82106">It definitely has been, at times, because the posit was something like "I wouldn't like this kind of game because I want a feel of a plausible realistic world..." which certainly implies that a 'story now' and/or 'zero myth' kind of system with SYORTD or some analogous mechanics cannot provide that. In other words, when you argue that a procedure of play is your preference because it is the one which produces the results you want, and another procedure is disfavored, you are pretty much saying that other procedure lacks the characteristic of producing the desired results! Anyway, it has been more explicitly stated than that by many posters at times, though not usually consistently. Often it comes in the form of questions about how to deal with 'non-realistic' types of results. I can recall several instances in this thread of "but then the players just declare they found the solution to the problem..." which is a kind of way of saying the whole procedure in which players can interject pieces into the setting is fundamentally bound to lead to degenerate unrealistic results. Right, so the question then is, would the later type of player explicated fiction, or at least player empowerment to receive a chance to lay stakes on achieving their goal not benefit from being more of a mechanically enabled thing vs simply being something you do in an ad-hoc way? What I found is that a huge advantage is the lack of a need to try to be laboriously systematic in considering every possible eventuality in the design of the campaign and associated adventures. I remember the ultimate end of my thinking that doing so would somehow lead to emergent dramatic elements of play. I created a VERY VERY thoroughly documented scenario for a campaign. One in which the existence of every hamlet, the recruiting of every bad guy, the expenses of every lord, the nature, location, aims, and capabilities of every monster, etc. was all to be documented and tied together in terms of a whole series of contingent timelines and cause-effect networks. This was silly. Not only was it impossible to really complete, no amount of trying lead to a situation in which the players in that campaign didn't crash it all to bits within a few sessions!I took a pretty long hiatus from D&D after that, and came back to run a follow up game taking up the basic state of that world at a slightly later date, but using 4e and simply not worrying about the previous fiction, except where the players simply wandered into it and it could form the default background to what they were doing. Quickly the world went in a new direction, the players made up a whole bunch of background material and took up an agenda which entirely changed the context of the stuff happening in the previous campaign. I worked 50x less hard and the result was infinitely more interesting.</blockquote>

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