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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6990638" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes.Yes and no.There are many ways I could get together with some friends and generate a narrative: completely free-form storytelling; a writing-and-editing workshop; conch-passing or chain story telling; etc.A RPG is one particular way of generating a shared fiction. It's different from those other ways.One of the relevant differences is that it is a game, with rules - including resolution mechanics - that govern changes to the content of the shared fiction.Everything else being equal (eg target numbers are being held constant), the bigger a number on your sheet, the greater the likelihood that, when you declare any action for your character that engages that number, you will get your way in respect of the fiction.Eg if you really want it to be the case that your guy is the one whose will prevails in sword fights, you have a reason to have bigger numbers next to the &quot;sword fighting&quot; entry on your PC sheet.That doesn't seem right to me.Eg Imagine two people sitting around, telling a story via a mix of consensus and conch-passing. As the write the story down, they put mechanical commentary and notations in the margin - eg &quot;Aragorn demoralised as every choice made this day goes ill - -2 penalty to next action&quot;. Whether or not that would be fun, it's clearly not RPGing.Which takes me back to the idea of &quot;mere colour&quot;: if someone tells me that, in the fiction, I'm demoralised; but that doesn't feed back in some fashion into the resolution of declared actions; then being demoralised was mere colour.This seems true, but unrelated to the question of whether or not a -2 penalty is not important.Or, to state it a bit more formally: that cubes are important only because of the arrows they generate back into the cloudds doesn't show that cubes aren't important. (If anything, it does the opposite, because it states a condition for their importance which is frequently satisfied.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6990638, member: 42582"] Yes. Yes and no. There are many ways I could get together with some friends and generate a narrative: completely free-form storytelling; a writing-and-editing workshop; conch-passing or chain story telling; etc. A RPG is one particular way of generating a shared fiction. It's different from those other ways. One of the relevant differences is that it is a game, with rules - including resolution mechanics - that govern changes to the content of the shared fiction. Everything else being equal (eg target numbers are being held constant), the bigger a number on your sheet, the greater the likelihood that, when you declare any action for your character that engages that number, you will get your way in respect of the fiction. Eg if you really want it to be the case that [I]your[/I] guy is the one whose will prevails in sword fights, you have a reason to have bigger numbers next to the "sword fighting" entry on your PC sheet. That doesn't seem right to me. Eg Imagine two people sitting around, telling a story via a mix of consensus and conch-passing. As the write the story down, they put mechanical commentary and notations in the margin - eg "Aragorn demoralised as every choice made this day goes ill - -2 penalty to next action". Whether or not that would be fun, it's clearly not RPGing. Which takes me back to the idea of "mere colour": if someone tells me that, in the fiction, I'm demoralised; but that doesn't feed back in some fashion into the resolution of declared actions; then being demoralised was mere colour. This seems true, but unrelated to the question of whether or not a -2 penalty is not important. Or, to state it a bit more formally: that cubes are important only because of the arrows they generate back into the cloudds doesn't show that cubes aren't important. (If anything, it does the opposite, because it states a condition for their importance which is frequently satisfied.) [/QUOTE]

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