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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SweeneyTodd" data-source="post: 2420527" data-attributes="member: 9391">I mean no offense, mythusmage, but I don't see any overthrowing of old traditions at all here. It sounds a lot like the old "roll-play vs. role-play" argument, which always felt to me to be a vast oversimplification.I've heard people thinking of "rules as physics to simulate an imagined world" for decades. Many, many people on this board agree with you on that front. It's not a new way of playing, nor is heavy immersion a new thing. If we break it down into rules prescribing player options versus describing the game world, there's still a lot left undefined. The former only qualifies as a wargame if played that way, for instance. What does it mean to have prescriptive player rules in a game that's not "played to win"?I've played and run rules-light games where the rules only describe what the player can and cannot do. The player, not the character; that's important. Things like "Who frames scenes" or "Who narrates" or "Who declares conflicts". Take Primetime Adventures, a roleplaying game designed to simulate a TV show. The rules only deal with what the players do -- there's no rules that simulate physics at all. Your character's ability to succeed in a conflict is determined by your Screen Presence for the episode, plus any Fan Mail dice you choose to spend. The players aren't wargaming; play is about addressing and resolving character issues as they interact with the plot. I also question whether distance vs. immersion is such an easy question. I've run games where the players have a lot of fun in scenes where they have no character present. Our games are very "metagamey" by your definition -- if a scene's going on that a player would like to be involved in, they can spend a metagame resource (Drama Points or the like) and just show up. Players often author their characters based on information the character does not happen. (What's interesting is I've never seen them do this to "short circuit" a challenge -- typically they do it to get their character into more trouble.)So I get that you advocate heavy character immersion with rules treated as arbiter of what those characters can do. I get that that's very different from treating your character as a playing piece on a board. But I don't see that those are the only ways to play, and I don't think that prescriptive vs. descriptive rules are the sole difference between those two styles.I don't usually mention The Forge over here, but it seems relevant when we're talking about paradigms of play. mythusmage, you might find this article:<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/" target="_blank">http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/</a>interesting to read. You might also enjoy discussing the prescriptive vs. descriptive concept on the RPG Theory boards over there. Just a thought. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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