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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark CMG" data-source="post: 6437332" data-attributes="member: 10479">For the purposes of this discussion, I have maintained that the original (trad) RPGs had the "players affect the setting through the characters" as the standard during gameplay, by RAW, but that various GMs might certainly do whatever they like at their tables.  Over time, with the recursive nature of the community, some of those storytelling elements circled back to RPG producers and found their ways into later RPGs which eventually were developed by some as storytelling games.Battlesystem / War Machine are a mid to late 80s development.  That doesn't seem to counter any point I have made.Yup, (trad) RPGs have always had GM-approved PC creation and replacement and, no, it does not equate with player setting authorship.  I've been known to allow someone who lost a PC to roll one up quickly or pull out a backup PC and jump right into an ongoing fight in which their other PC had died.  I usually bring plenty of pregens to one-shot gamedays and conventions precisely for that purpose.  I'd prefer not to have a player who joined in a one-shot game be sitting around or sent from the table because of a bad dice result or even foolish gameplay.I ran a game at the Nexus Game Faire last June in Milwaukee where a group of eight players had a wonderful time with one PC Dwarf in full platemail climbing a cliff 20', perching on a thin ledge to fight a giant snake, and repeatedly losing and falling, being healed and encouraged (though not by all) to climb again and give it another try.They eventually found another way into the Dragon's Tooth (one of a span of great tors across the Trackless Moors), but I would have happily allowed the player to put together another PC and keep playing.  It would have been a huge bummer around the table to lose that energy.  I do sometimes play games where character death sidelines the player but warn the players in advance that is the way it is going to be.  But that's just one GM doing what he wants at his own table.The OP is about one kind of meta-gaming, some of which has existed since original (trad) RPGs came into being and the side discussion is about how storytelling elements began to find their way into RPGs, then become a type of gaming all their own.  I think we've mostly kept those discussion separate.</blockquote>

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