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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6195752" data-attributes="member: 42582">I wonder if  [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION] will comment on this - given the recent thread on trying to make players more proactive in play?I think The Forge assumed that a lot of player hesitance about doing this sort of thing was due to having had it beaten out of them by Storyteller System and 2nd ed AD&D GMs. But I doubt that that's true.The casual player thing may be part of it - I don't play with "casual" players these days, in the sense that the newest player in my group was introduced by me to RPGs 15 years ago, and so I'm not in a good position to judge. From the start this player took it for granted that the players will play a key role in driving the action and building the fiction. But also what I think is distinctive about my group, compared to "casual" players I used to play with back in the mid-90s, is a strong sense of connection between the mechanics in play and the colour and "vibe" of the resulting fiction.Some of that feel you get by doing - and half my D&D group came out of my earlier Rolemaster group, and RM (despite all its flaws) is a good system for establishing that mechanics/colour connection. And I think The Forge may have felt that this would be the "cure" for "casual" play - once people played systems where the mechanics in play generated colour in a visceral way, they would be hooked on that way of RPing.But I'm now thinking that that tendency to link mechanics-in-play with colour is a minority thing, and that I'm quite fortunate to have found a group of like-minded players. I think a lot of players prefer what I would tend to think of as "mere colour" - eg nice flavour text in a spell or class feature description - because they then rely on GM force and other non-mechanical techniques to bring that colour to life in play, and that is actually more visceral (or, at least, more immersive) for them then seeing it play out through the roll of a die or the declaration of some sort of change of mechanical state in the course of combat resolution.This may not just be about "casual" vs "invested" players, but also basic differences in aesthetic sensibility.</blockquote>

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