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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7555797" data-attributes="member: 5142">My apologies then. However, I only agree with you to an extent, and this time I find your thoughts unhelpful, if not counterproductive. And one reason may be you latching a little too hard on one sentence regarding hearth fantasy, namely where I myself overly simplistically described it as being somewhat anti-murderhobo fantasy. It's kinda missing the bigger description of hearth fantasy while fixating on something that I could have easily removed (and, in retrospect, probably should have) from my overview. But this is an issue of emphasis. The point of hearth fantasy is not to avoid being a murderhobo. The greater point of hearth fantasy is the localization and community engagement. The anti-murderhobo-ness is generally a by-product of play incentives. That said, (1) saying that players can break the game can virtually come across as a meaningless platitude. Of course they can. Sheiße happens. Points #1-3 above could happen in any given game. So saying that a "hedge [sic] fantasy campaign/RPG...may simply be complicit in causing a train wreck" seems unwarranted. Also, (2) blaming the players is too reductionistic, as it fails to take other agents and factors into account. This also rests on the GM and the ability of the system to support the play experience, especially in terms of incentives. This topic often arises in conversations regarding how various XP systems engender different playstyles. What sorts of play arises from XP rewarded from gold recovered versus XP rewarded from monster kills? Or XP generated from players making 'discoveries,' as per Numenera? That is more system-oriented, but it will influence how players engage the game. Let's take a look at Blades in the Dark. Your characters have playbooks that connect them to people in the city. They have friends and foes here. Nothing inherently stops players from playing like murderhobos. They can even choose to be a crew of assassins or thugs. But there are several problems with playing this game play like your typical group of murderhobos. Your crew has a base in the city, and you are trying to expand your crew's influence and turf. If you "murderhobo" too brazenly, you will accumulate heat (and countdown clocks) from law enforcement, rival or even allied gangs (you're too dangerous!), and other groups within the city. And then your crew will mostly certainly be in a Sisyphean battle for survival. But this is obviously not catering to a hearth fantasy experience. It's an urban Regent-Victorian crime fantasy. But the point is that the system itself has tools that incentivze some forms of play while providing decentivizes for other forms. It most definitely could work. But it also veers too closely with a game run previously by another GM, which was a D&D game which centered on the party being dumped onto a fairly recent colony on a "new continent" that also served as a prisoner's colony. But it wasn't much of a hearth fantasy at all. As I introduced before, my idea for a hearth fantasy game would be more akin to a "proto-Celtic" tribe of people living in a small hillfort village. It likely has some overlap in issues that a colonization-themed hearth fantasy would deal with. There is a similar "frontier spirit," though that term would be somewhat anachronistic. There is player/settlement vs. environment, player/settlement vs. supernatural, but also player/settlement vs. other settlements, cultures, etc.</blockquote>

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