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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8146987" data-attributes="member: 85555">I am not equating them. Advocacy is fine. I have been advocating many positions on this very thread. The issue is taking it to an extreme. Online conversations lend themselves to extremes. And I think you see this on pretty much any forum. It is reasonable for people to come into a thread and promote X style of play, or game Y. But at a certain point it does become point scoring. And you see that in these arguments where people eat at the corners of one another's posts (for instance taking a stray comment and ripping it apart, while ignoring the meat). I think it is particularly the case when people are telling you they are not interested in what you are advocating and you persist in advocating for it (something I am guilty of as much as anyone else in this thread). And you also see this when we lose sight of the original purpose of our advocacy in the first place and just start debating finer and finer details. It is also about intent. It is one thing to advance a position because I think it is true or helpful, but gaming is all about taste. There are very few things to do with RPGs that are universally true and should adopted by all gamers. So I think an important thing to ask yourself is: Are you giving someone something that is genuinely useful for them, or are you just trying to get them to think like you. If you are just trying to get people to think like you as an end unto itself, I would say that is an extreme form of advocacy that isn't really healthy or useful. It also burns bridges. There are plenty of things I could probably find helpful that posters like yourself and Pemerton use in your games. But if we are so focused on defeating the other side (and I would argue that that has been the case in much of these discussions), that just causes people to resent you rather than listen to you. I will give you an example of what I mean. I have no interest in adopting the forge framework for analyzing RPGs. I also don't have much interest in playing Dungeon World at the moment. I also have a style of play I enjoy and when people make points like that style doesn't really exist, or is always actually doing something I don't think it is doing. All that does is irritate me and not want to listen to the person. So when we went down that whole drama and narrative detour, I found that quite frustrating and the longer it went on, the more I really didn't want to hear what advocates of the view were saying. But I am actually in the market for a good mechanic to hand the players narrative-drama powers in limited ways. There is definitely room for us to discuss playstyles and games in that respect. Perhaps I might not want to run a campaign of DW or AW, but it is possible there is a mechanic in one of those games (or one of the many that have come up that would suit my current problem). Presently I am trying to run a series of two shots based on specific wuxia movies. The game will follow pretty traditional RP conventions with the GM having traditional GM authority. But I want to give the players a tool to take some kind of dramatic control briefly when it feels like the game is not advancing towards a conclusion. Because it is a two shot, with the first session used for picking a movie and players vying for roles, and the second session used for playing the adventure, it is pretty important we hit a dramatic endpoint in that second session somehow. So I want the safety valve there, and I want something that gives the players the ability to direct things a bit in key moments. So I am all ears for a mechanic like that which I can kludge to my existing system (provided it doesn't govern all of play or something and can exist in limited moments of the game).</blockquote>

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