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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8276658" data-attributes="member: 16586">Here's a little story about me.I started with freeform online play, deeply emotive character oriented stuff. I pretty much spent the first half of my gaming career on both sides of the screen chafing against the restrictions of traditional play broadly, and AD&D Second Edition in particular. The whole group oriented heroic fantasy bit where we were all supposed to work together to solve the adventure of the week stuff was deeply frustrating to me. I missed the character oriented stuff. Sure there were some emotive moments, but it was like always with some emotional distance or behind the scenes plotting going on. None of it ever felt real. There was always some sort of spotlight balancing or getting back to the adventure to be done.I don't particularly like heroic fantasy. Fantasy sure. I loved Conan, The Black Company, The Amber Chronicles, The Dying Earth, anything by Tanith Lee. D&D has never felt like that kind of fantasy to me. It always has felt a lot more specific than a general fantasy game. You have characters that intricately connected to one another who go on random adventures together, each with a very narrow set of skills. You have a very particular fantasy setting. You have this whole culture of adventurers who have very minimal ties to the setting. I find the whole thing a little bizarre personally. I have learned to embrace it for what it is over time, but while playing it I definitely have never felt even a smidge of the sort of fantasy I grew up loving.In contrast I personally do not find crime fiction any more limited as a genre than the sort of group focused heroic fantasy action adventure with a very specific setting you see in most D&D games.It feels like any game that features nonstandard genres or dares to represent psychosocial elements in the rules (rather than elaborate physical details) immediately gets labeled as hyper focused. A game like Burning Wheel is certainly no more specific than D&D genre wise, but because it is a game of emotive rather than procedural storytelling it becomes focused while D&D gets to be flexible, despite there being no rhyme or reason for the label.</blockquote>

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