NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6777177" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, but it is a very different sort of game.  Eventually, as this idea becomes more and more important to the mechanics of the game, it creates a game experience so at odds with the way RPGs were (mostly) played for the first 20 years or so, that some people don't even recognize it as an RPG.Saelorn is saying that he understands the purpose and design of an RPG is to create stories within a simulated world and not merely to create stories.  The more you move away from that simulated reality, the more you move the RPG away from the war gaming side of its roots and the more you move it toward the theater game side of roleplaying.   The recognition that many sorts of stories aren't created from first principles about the imagined world, but in fact are governed by logic that creates a specific narrative is an important one, but we are still I think grappling as designers with how to incorporate those ideas into an RPG without deprecating the 'game' part of it most people are familiar with.In particular, even in the field of literature, it is jarring for the reader to recognize or believe that what has just happened depended principally on the power of plot and not on the internal logic of the story.   Many readers will regard such moments where the author's hand on the story is obvious as diminishing the story, or popularly 'breaking the suspension of disbelief'.   Within an RPG breaking this suspension of disbelief can be even more jarring and is even harder to hide from the player, because they are themselves an author of the story.  Likewise, most players don't want to have the feeling that something came about in the story merely because they wished it to, but because they overcame some challenge in a way that was believable within the framework of the story.</blockquote>

Verification