Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8143281" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I get your point about breaking the rules when it comes to art. Escaping those confines can really inspire great work. I think I remember reading that Quentin Taratino took all the "rules" that a writing instructor gave him....a story must be chronological, your protagonists must be admirable, etc.....and then wrote Pulp Fiction in response, breaking each of the rules. George RR Martin was writing a script for a proposed television series, and was told "you can't have too large a cast, you can't have characters with the same first name, you can't have all this unseen history affecting the current events, you can't kill your protagonist early in the story, you can't portray moral ambiguity, etc" and so he decided to write a novel, where he could do all that. But I think these kind of "rules" for a creative endeavor are guidelines. They are good to help one learn craft, but eventually they are there to be questioned. The trick with breaking these rules is to justify it by doing something creative. But with a game, it's different. Yes, RPGing is a creative endeavor, but it is also a game. It is both things. And the rules of a game are not meant to be broken the same way that rules of writing or art are. Rules in a game give it its structure. Breaking them means you are either undermining the game so that it does not work or you are making it work differently than intended. Making the game work differently than intended is perfectly fine if that's what people want to do. Taking D&D and making a romance game, to use your example, is a perfectly fine thing. If you have clearly defined play procedures and mechanics, then it will make such a conversion far easier. If you want to effectively alter a rule, you have to understand what it's doing and why in the first place. Like with teaching....I'm sure there are foundational things that you teach first and try to get students to understand before you move on to how to subvert or alter those foundational elements.</blockquote>

Verification