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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6202063" data-attributes="member: 42582">Which game are you talking about?1st ed AD&D was made to be played as a wargame. But people played it differently. The way you play the game - which seems to me to be heavily shaped by 2nd ed AD&D sensibilities transplanted into the 3E context - only came about because some people played classic D&D in a style it wasn't intended by its author to be played. Were they doing it wrong. Is your D&D play fundamentally contrary to the norms of the game? (You can loook at the current Wandering Monsters threat to see one poster arguing that you are misplaying D&D, precisely because you're not playing in Gygaxian style.)The players in my 4e game don't self-GM - they don't frame their own challenges. They play their PCs. The fact that you judge them to be GMing is simply because you have a particular conception of what the GM does, including thoroughly vetting all action delcarations before they are permitted to enter the fiction; and a certain conception of what a player doesn't do, which exlcudes from the players' remit any metagame authority of any sort; which does not itself have any special privileged status in the game of D&D taken as a whole. I'm sure there are hundreds - thousands - of 3E/PF tables where the players are taken to be entitled to introduce declarations of actions for their PCs without needing the GM's permission to do so, and in which barbarians having rages-per-day is not regarded as a mechanical flaw. Those tables are not aberrant or deviant.The game is diverse. There's no particular reason to think that your preferred style will retain its predominant status (if it even enjoys that) for any longer than Gygaxian D&D did (if it even did enjoy such a status).When 3E came out I was a little more than halfway through my 19-year career as a Rolemaster GM. There was nothing in 3E to lure me over from RM, but I suspect that narrativist 3E would have some resemblance to narrativist RM: you rely heavily on the intricate PC build rules for the players to send their signals to the GM, and you do your best to achieve scene-closure in the context of using task- rather than conflict-resolution mechanics for action resolution. Not a perfect fit (!) but not hopeless; Rolemaster generates quite a bit of colour, quite a bit of which the players can leverage via their PCs, and I can imagine that 3E might be similar.A big pitfall in both systems, I think - and it relates back to the thread topic - is their tendency to produce sudden death in conflict resolution (either via SoD, crits (in RM), or single-roll out-of-combat resolution). So too much of play is spent in the anticipation and preparation phase, and not enough in the actual dramatic resolution phase.I am not talking about "abuses" of other styles. GM force isn't an abuse of storyteller style; it's inherent to it.When have I said that the GM is a blackhearted villain?The notion of enjoyment is a red herring. You've already said that you enjoy a game in which the GM leads through what is essentially a colour scene, and an opportunity to reveal backstory, and that you would prefer that to hard scene-framing plus downloaded backstory. And I've said that I tend to enjoy the opposite. So no GM who sticks to one style is going to provide enjoyment for both of us, however well-meaning and sincere s/he might be.I'm not trying to sell you on "indie" play. I introduced the notion initially to explain why, for those who like that playstyle, fighter/caster balance problems can't be solved in the sort of way that the OP, or you, or [MENTION=221]Wicht[/MENTION], or [MENTION=4826]Ranes[/MENTION] are taking about.For all I know, you think that that very fact on its own is sufficient to show that indie play is hopeless.I set out some of those reasons in a reply to Wicht a post or three above: the basic idea is that your approach relies upon either over GM force (in certain limiting cases); or relies upon the GM shaping the backstory and thereby the fictional positioning that contributes to action resolution (such as the presence of Louie the lizardman ready to relieve the guard; or the presence of an uncooperative chamberlain who won't listen to the PCs for a minute) in such a way that the players aren't aware of and cannot take steps to control the main determinants of the outcome of action resolution.That sort of approach, whatever its merits for you (eg preservation of verisimilitude, contribution to world-building, making sure the PCs don't meet the king "too soon"), is basically toxic for "indie" play, because the core of indie play is that the GM will frame scenes that the players are capable of affecting via the deployment of their resources in conjunction with their known fictional positioning. That's what "indie" players mean by "player-driven" or "protagonist" play. (And see how it's different from what sandboxers mean by "player-driven" play.)Agreed.</blockquote>

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