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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8264580" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, the more we have this whole discussion, and I don't disagree with you particularly on any of your points, the more I see that this entire thing is predicated on a more fundamental division of approaches to play, which is to say 'overall play progress'. The exploration/directed and CaW type of style are fundamentally predicated on a play process which is GM-directed play where a Game Master is the sole arbiter of the content and direction (at least in a formal sense). Players never contribute in anything except PC action descriptions, or maybe queries as to the perceptions/memory of their character (though often these kinds of games yield a bit to players on PC backstory). So, I developed a much more story-now, player-directed kind of process when we started playing 4e. In this process the whole concept of 'CaW vs CaS' isn't even relevant. Actually it is possible that the players could effectively signal that they want a 'warlike narrative', which would have a 'CaW tone' to it as a consequence. There would not even be the fiction of it being some kind of actual "wargame like" setup where each side is pitting its situation and resources against the other in a genuine all-out contest (albeit fictional). Instead it would be more like "how can we create a fun story?" and (in a PbtA-like spirit) "How can I, as GM, crank up the pressure on the PCs to generate excitement and tension?"I guess that sort of game can certainly have a concept of 'dangerousness' where the GM can construct specific challenges to the PCs which, if the players don't overcome them, produces fiction of "the character died." This is more dramatic than having a wargame-like texture of losing a combat and thus some of your units/resources. For one thing, a principle of this sort of play is that "nothing is lost once gained, unless it is volunteered as stakes or spent as resources." In other words, you won't save the village from orcs one week only to have orcs burn it to the ground next week. Not unless the scenario is "You can risk your village's destruction by striking out for goal X, but the orcs might come and burn it!" Then of course there would need to be some fiction in the quest for X that signified a failure of enough magnitude to make that happen, possibly with a chance of fixing it, probably by taking some even bigger risk.This is also not like directed play, nor like classic exploratory play in that the world is usually either zero-myth or at least low-myth with the players having a direct role in fleshing it out, so exploration is more 'authoring' than discovering what the GM wrote down before the session/campaign started. Both of those modes presuppose there is an existing world to be directed across or explore.This is ultimately why I steer clear of descriptions of things like CaW or CaS, or exploration, that are too process-dependent. I can have a definition of a narrative-focus game that has a 'CaW tone' to it, or a 'CaS tone' to it, and may focus on the PCs exploring, or not. It just doesn't describe anything OUTSIDE of the style of fiction being generated by the participants.</blockquote>

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