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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7717948" data-attributes="member: 42582">Can you elaborate? My knowledge of debates about DW is pretty poor. Speaking purely for myself, I wouldn't see DW (or Torchbearer, for that matter) as an old-school game, but I'm not really an old-school guy and so my judgement on these things mightn't carry much weight.(Obviously Torchbearer in particular is meant to produce something like an old-school experience, but I don't think that makes it an old-school game. An imperfect analogy: whatever, exactly, Pulp Fiction is, it's not a remake of a film like The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep.)This is plausible to me, although somewhat tricky to affirm in the messageboard context because it is obviously rather invidious to point to any particular poster and suggest that they suffer from this sort of lack of self-knowledge.There's a lot going on here. I'll post some thoughts that were provoked in me.Oversimplifying very much, and drawing only on my own experience/reading of a finite set of games none of which is wildly radical, I would divide mechanics into (roughly) two sorts: mechanics that reflect or express the ingame process, and mechanics that abstractly frame the action and leave the ingame details to be filled in. Games like Classic Traveller, RQ, RM, Burning Wheel; the 3E skill system, at least for "physical" skills; movement in most editions of D&D; etc, are all examples of the former. Games like HeroWars/Quest, Marvel Heroic RP; Tunnels & Trolls melee; 4e attack resolution; the AD&D 1-minute combat round; etc, are instances of the latter.(D&D melee attack actions outside of 4e are an interesting case because, when read on paper they look like an instance of the latter, but many D&D players seem to treat them as an instance of the former. I think this is quite significant in the reception of RQ/RM-ish games and of 4e by the core D&D audience.)I don't see this mechanical divide as itself being particularly significant for whether a game is "predictable" to the players. The first sort of mechanic is highly vulnerable to disputes breaking out over the precise fictional positioning of various characters and the relevance to this of resolution (and it's interesting to look at how a game like BW tries to maintain this sort of approach to resolution while using other incentives - in particular, that for a PC to advance requires not always using the largest possible dice pool - to ameliorate the tendency to fiction-lawyering). The second sort of mechanic is vulnerable to an excess of abstraction which means no one really knows what is going on in the fiction - at it's worst, the game ceases to be an RPG at all and becomes just a board/tactical game.I don't see this mechanical divide as being particularly significant, either, for whether a game supports wargaming/"gamist" play or whether it supports "story"-oriented play. That depends on the techniques and expectations that are set up around the mechanics eg By whom, and according to what principles, and influenced in what way by the mechanical system, is fictional content introduced into the game? How is failure narrated? Who gets to choose what happens next? Etc.I agree with you that "what people are looking for in a story game is one that has a story emerging 'naturally' as an artifact of play, but one that can still surprise them as play progresses." Maybe I'm just more optimistic than you that games - ie combinations of mechanics and techniques - that will support this actually exist. My optimisim is grounded in the fact that I believe I have played in, and am playing in, such games.As to your comment about subject-matter (combat, adventure, etc): this is one context in which I think that mechanics matter as much as broader techniques and expectation. In particular, I'm a strong believer that if you want a game to involve story about stuff other than fighting and jumping, you need mechanics for stuff other than fighting and jumping. For me, this was part of the appeal of RM and is part of the appeal of BW. I played <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?531049-Judgement-calls-vs-quot-railroading-quot/page84#post7131014" target="_blank">a BW session on the weekend</a>. My PC is a holy warrior type, and he has as a companion a fire-mage type. The checks made over the course of the session included social checks (my two characters had an argument about how to proceed on their travels, and then - when exploring a crypt beneath a ruined fortress of my order - we encountered a knight who had ben cursed to guard the crypt even in death, and I debated with him what was the right thing to do in the interests of the order), cooking, lore/knowledge/perception-type checks (to learn stuff about the ruined fortress and the order), ritual and prayer checks (including to life the curse on the knight); but the closet thing to a combat check was a failed attempt by my companion to use her TK-ish spell to pull the knight's axe from his hands.That could happen in 4e, but I think would put more weight on the GM to make the skill challenges work (and skill challenges can't resolve an argument between two player characters), and there isn't the breadth of skills to bring out characterisation in quite the same way as in BW (which distinguishes between skill in Persuasion, Command and Ugly Truth - all of which came up in our session) or RM.It couldn't happen in T&T or Moldvay Basic or Gygax's AD&D, and I don't think 5e makes it all that easy.And a final conjecture about this: even for those who like "story", non-combat/adventure stuff requires being a bit more personal/intimate in revealing one's character - especially in a classic one-character-per-player set up. That can be challenging.</blockquote>

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