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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9243133" data-attributes="member: 42582">So, in the quote we have metaphor:If the designer thinks of this agent - ie the dynamics whereby the design loses its static character - as a character, as the antagonist of the player-subject, that perspective allows comprehension of the experience of playing a game as a single narrative.In BitD play, we have literalness:Various faction stood in the way of the crew's success - they were the antagonists to the crew and its members as protagonist and protagonists.The move between the metaphorical and the literal is, in my view, not irrelevant to understanding RPGing. In the metaphorical sense, Baker's cubes provide antagonism. But in the literal sense, antagonism in RPGing is located within Baker's clouds. How these are related is important to RPG design and resultant experience - eg does the dragon have the right sort of stats, given the system's game play, both to "feel like" a dragon (ie to give rise to the correct clouds) while also providing sufficient mechanical antagonism (ie to give rise to the correct cubes). A good discussion of this issue, in my view, is BW's Monster Burner.It's not uncommon to read about RPG experiences where this cloud-cube relationship didn't work. And it's also quite common to read defences of those failures from a sim perspective (eg "occasional or even frequent anti-climax is realistic).We can't understand any of these real features of RPG design and play and experience, if we just glom over everything with a generic all games produce narrative including antagonism.</blockquote>

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