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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6437039" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't understand how these remarks are relevant, unless you're meaning to suggest that I'm confused about my own course of develoment as a GM.That's not impossible - the mind is far from transparent, and there is also the risk of self-delusion - but frankly I don't think you're in a position to know my own hstory better than I am, even to the extent of casting genuine doubt on my own testimony.My grandmother never invented an electrical or electronic device in her life. Nevertheless, her own personal experience with radios, telephones, televisions and video players was much the same as the general line of development of those things. As was the experience of tens, probably hundreds, of millions of other people across the planet.All that is required for my experience to correspond more-or-less to the line of development is that my experience not be atypical. And given the number of people I encounter on these forums, and others, plus the blogs/essays etc I read that all indicate comparable experiences, I am confident that my experiences are not atypical. The Forge didn't arise ex nihilo, or like Athena from the Head of Zeus. They, and the designs and designers that influenced them (eg Tweet's Over the Edge, Laws's HeroWars), were reacting to the same problems and challenges in RPGing that many of the rest of us were confronting.Luke Crane is an inestimably better game designer than I am. I could not have come up with Burning Wheel, or even an approximation to it, on my own. But he's not an alien from another planet, either. Nor is Ron Edwards. They are not the only people to have noticed that one way to solve the railroading problem for story-heavy games is to shift the balance of authorship from GM to players, and in making the players more active to thereby make the GM's role correspondingly more reactive.Mechanics like Beliefs, Instincts and Relationships in Burning Wheels are obviously descended from the use of using upon class, alignment, warhorse-calling etc to shift the balance from GM to players in the play of D&D and other "trad" RPGs. (2nd ed AD&D is even listed as one of the influence on Burning Wheel in Luke Crane's answer to Appendix N.) The techiques are more sophisticated and the player flag-flying thereby more nuanced, but the basic idea is the same.(Robin Laws even gave a talk, once, I think under WotC's auspices, where he explained the flag-flying that is frequently involved in a player's choice to play a paladin PC. I would have read about it on this site, which is my main source of D&D news, but I can't remember now when it was, other than some time in the last 10 or so years but probably not in the last two or three.)</blockquote>

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