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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 7718082" data-attributes="member: 6688937">I might slice and dice your post here a bit, because you kinda came at one thing through the back door talking about another.No accusation intended. I agree that there is a power there, but also a weakness WRT telling a story. Often, making a good/interesting story involves loss on the part of the protagonist. Most traditional rpgs have no mechanism rewarding a player for a substantive loss by their character. Reward mechanisms, like XP/leveling, are based solely on "winning" whatever goals the character has, and apply to the character and player as well. Contrast this with Fiasco, in which you the player can "win" by having your character suffer the most during the course of the game. (Although if you do win in this fashion, your character walks away winning as well.) This puts a player's immediate interests at odds with the character's immediate interests in a way that allows for plotlines that D&D would have great difficulty creating. That's a good question. Personally, I don't think so. Almost everything that I can think of in MHRP is tied directly to fiction. If you have an Asset, it has a fictional meaning/purpose/representation. I really like that about MHRP, and I feel like it shares a lot of DNA with FATE in this regard. However, they both also share one in-game "currency" that is potentially problematic this way. I have watched a very few Old-Schoolers have great difficulty utilizing a "generic" currency like Fate Points or Hero(?) Points. However, I consider that an outlier case possibly driven by obstinancy. I have never observed any young or new players having difficulty with the idea.One example that comes to mind is Fiasco. So...on my turn, I'm going to get a black or white die, depending on if things went badly or well for my character, but otherwise me and some other guys are just gonna improv this out. Yes. This is exactly what I was getting at, although I was struggling to find the correct words. Did a character actually address his belief? Who judges? How do you decide? Basically, a lot of narrative "adjudication" work gets off-loaded onto the participants. (Not that that can't be successful.) I agree with you that it puts players at more emotional risk, which, I feel might be another barrier to participation. Conversely, I suspect that some of the reason some people enjoy playing racially aggressive Dwarves or Elves, or pedantic and zealous paladins is that the existing material provides expectations that give them cover to explore their own feelings about these (or similar) odious personality traits. If you bring something similar to a Fate game as a list of aspects then that's all on you, good or ill. You don't get to pass it off on some other author. (Unless, of course, you're playing in an established setting.)IME, non-sim/narrative supers games all seem to have this problem to some degree. I dunno why. Capes has an almost irresistible tendency to silly with the supers. Yet when I switched to Fantasy...we went hours without whacky. I haven't noticed any particular tendency of the systems themselves to create this kind of atmosphere. Obviously, YMMV quite a bit.Correct. I've seen several Apocalypse Engine games do this with marginal-but-substantive success, although they tend to be even more successful at recreating the atmosphere of a particular genre. One of the things I like about Blades in the Dark is that it frames all that resolution in a way that repeatedly "brings the story home". That is, sessions narratives are structured around a "score" for you and your band of miscreants. You start by choosing an opportunity, you work through it, then you recover/advance your position, etc. Want a longer session, do two scores. You can certainly have larger/longer plotlines (especially for your crew as a group), but even their operations are codified in what appears to me to be a substantial mannerI have a decent collection of story/fiction-first games, some from the Forge, some not. As I think you hit upon elsewhere, control of narrative power is often the actual crux of play. ("Sure, the Death Star is gonna get blown up, but how, and who gets to decide?") Many of the games rely on currencies of one type or another, and a few are AFAICT completely playable as token&dice games that you could ignore the fiction with. I think that's when you've got a problem. Mechanics being so divorced from the fiction as to make any connection spurious and only an artifact of direct effort put forth by the participants.* It can turn a game into some kind of weird improv session. I think they've shifted away from that, but often not entirely. *To be fair, I don't think it was totally unjustified, from a design point of view. Faced with the problem of supporting any sort of story the players might want...naturally you try to create a universal adapter. However, that offload is (I believe) what makes it difficult to create that sort surprise or resolution tension we expect from entertainment. If the mechanics generate such results, then then can come at something more of a surprise.anyway, that's probably enough for now.</blockquote>

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