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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9472680" data-attributes="member: 4937">Oh good grief.  Let me explain Hillfolk by way of illustration.  Back in high school me and some art nerd friends set up a creative exercise where we would write a few pages of a story in a notebook, and then pass the notebook to another member of the group and have them add to the story.  We were all initially excited at first, but the game didn't even manage to make it a second time around because everyone hated how at least someone else was taking the story.Robin Laws thinks that experience is the actual heart of roleplaying, and in his typical insulting manner (which I note you've successfully copied) explains how everyone else is doing it wrong and how the problem can be solved by giving each participant some tokens that allow them to compel other participants to write the story that they want.  The idea being I guess that if everyone can compel the other creators at least some of the time then no one will be upset about the resulting story.And the problem with that is that the resulting gameplay ends up not being like the process of being in a story, but like being the process of being a team of writers working on a script together.  The other problem, and maybe the more salient one, is that to play such a game successfully you really have to be the sort of group that could thrive playing "Whose Line is It Anyway?" or another sort of theater game.  And honestly, it's not clear to me that the sort of group that can do that needs a Drama System with compels and tokens and such, and instead just lets happen what's best for the scene.And incidentally, that's what these scene-based systems to me always seem to be best at - not creating story, as they claim, but creating scenes.  That the scenes don't amount to anything seems irrelevant.Thus, my disinterest in Hillfolk has nothing to do with my love of violence, but based on having read it and imagining how this is going to play out.The level of not understanding in that is so bad.  The definition I have in mind is how are challenges resolved, and in particular, how are challenges resolved in the climaxes of the story.  For example, the classic movie "Lilies of the Field" with Sidney Portier has a series of challenges that don't revolve around combat.   But the TV series the "A-Team" features stories that always are resolved by combat in the climax.  The fact that only one scene of a typical "A-Team" episode involved combat and maybe 5 minutes of a 45 minute story arc is combat, doesn't make A-Team less focused on combat.  From an RPG perspective, what's interesting about the "A-Team" story arc is that at the climax, and generally only at the climax, do we see all the characters working together to solve a problem.  The scenes before that are either exposition and drama setting up the conflict, which doesn't really need a system, or else a montage challenges that are resolved individually by each team members particular non-combat skills - spot lighting that character but often having relatively low interplay and often with characters off stage.  In a social RPG, extended periods "off stage" can be boring for the player in a way that you don't have to worry about in a TV show when the participant and the audience are different.</blockquote>

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