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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8935447" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think its just plain a very obvious concept. MANY games reflect elements of reality, albeit usually with low fidelity. Monopoly has banks, money, property, improvements, etc. You model the things and interactions of the real world in a fairly one-to-one way, and you get traditional RPGs, basically. Once people have latched onto that concept, its not necessarily easy to move on to other ways of thinking about it. I mean, I was very aware of the limitations of existing RPGs, even back as early as 1980. I can remember we would sometimes talk about it and you could find plenty of discussion, some even in places like Dragon Magazine. Certainly we all understood that, conceptually it wasn't possible to do simulation of the real world in a convincing way. Yet, the sorts of approaches, which can avoid these problems, didn't REALLY occur to us at all! Fundamentally the "model things and interactions of the real world one-for-one" conceptual framework was so omnipresent in gaming of that era that even when things like 'plot coupons' or resources that were awarded based on goals or in accordance with conforming to genre or whatever were developed, nobody ever thought to rebuild the WHOLE PROCESS OF PLAY around that.I can remember wanting EXACTLY WHAT PbtA or other similar games can deliver, but with absolutely no idea how to get there whatsoever. We tried all sorts of things, 'better' simulation, super detailed settings with special embedded rules to make things happen in a 'natural way', etc. etc. etc. and yet we never ever once thought of basing the fundamental 'unit of action' of play, the move, on the character's/players intent, or making a check mechanism reflect a choice of possible variations of plot instead of reflecting something inside the fiction (IE whether you hit someone or not).I cannot entirely answer the WHY, but I have 25 years of having learned the hard way how tough it is to move beyond that paradigm. Now, maybe if I'd been lucky and had been tapped into the right part of the RPG community in the early-to-mid '90s I might have gotten in on the solution then. Instead it was maybe more like 2009 after I was doing a lot of reading posts about playing 4e that it really clicked.</blockquote>

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