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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7188686" data-attributes="member: 6775031">I can hardly think of more esteemed masters of the genre. It seems you prefer a different genre, though, which does explain a lot. Likewise, Stephanie Meyer has her fans, and her genre of choice features little shared audience with either of ours. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it bad, though. (Stephanie Meyer may be considered a poor writer for other reasons, but it's nothing to do with her popularity.)The quality of an RPG is the integrity of its underlying model. Whether or not it's popular is irrelevant, unless you want to suggest that Stephanie Meyer produces books of higher quality than either Eddings or Leiber.To use the common parlance, my complaints are when they promote Gamist objectives too strongly above Simulationist ones. The Simulationist ideal is a strong correlation between what is happening within the narrative and the game mechanics which reflect that narrative. Narrativism, to contrast, is when things happen within the game mechanics in order to actively direct the narrative - the game mechanics make something happen because it would be more dramatic or scary or funny, rather than because it is the logical course of events given the causal nature of reality.To be certain, there is a definite need within any RPG to sacrifice some of the integrity of the model in order to make the game playable. A pure Simulation doesn't lend itself toward Games that are interesting to play. It is easily possible to go too far with Gamist concessions, such that you sacrifice too much integrity of the model, and the remaining model no longer has useful meaning within the narrative. Taken to an extreme, that's how you end up with 4E, with its policy of infinitely mutable narrative. It is unclear whether or not 5E has sacrificed so much that it cannot be salvaged, but its theoretical openness to house ruling means that it may yet be redeemed.</blockquote>

Verification