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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6206605" data-attributes="member: 42582">From what you say, you haven't played MHRP. If you do, I would expect you to find that it involves adopting the perspective of your character, and playing that role. For instance, Bobby Drake (Icemean) has a Distinction "Heroic Prankster". The upshot of this was that the player of Iceman, when I ran MHRP, was always looking for opportunities to prank is opposition - both when arguing in front of a Congressional committee, and when fighting a menageris of B-listers at the Smithsonian. That's playing the role of a prankster, namely, looking for opportunities within the fiction to play pranks. Similarly, the player of War Machine - who has a "Semper Fi" Distinction - repeatedly looked for opportunities, in debating with Congress, to draw upon his military experience and make military analogies.More generally, your comments on acting seem to imply that no actor ever played a role before The Method was invented. Are you meaning to imply that? And what would it mean to perform Waiting for Godot via method acting? I'll concede that Godot is something of a corner-case from the point of view of theatre, but I'm actually less sure that it's a corner case from the point of view of RPGing. Because the characters in an RPG don't come with a script ready-to-hand that the player can draw upon to establish the inner life of the character. It has to be realised at the same time as performance. I'm not sure how that can be done via a "method" approach.I just don't see that as clear. 3E was written not just to carry over 2nd ed AD&D players, but to pick up and reenergise lapsed classic D&D players. The "back to the dungeon" slogan was part of this. And the sort of social contract and division of power you see as so inherent to 3E was in no way a default approach to classic D&D (B/X, 1st ed AD&D, original D&D etc). Presumably some groups played that way, but plenty didn't - as I posted already upthread, I had no trouble at all building a university group consisting of players leaving games based on the sort of social contract and division of power you describe because it didn't fit their expectations and desires for playing an RPG.I think there are key distintions to be drawn here that I don't think you are interested in drawing - for instance, between the GM as final arbiter of who is in what fictional position (which I think has always been a component of D&D, and remains a component of 4e by default, although the DMG to a small extent and the DMG2 to a large extent canvass techniques for moving away from that in some respects) and the GM as final arbiter of outcomes. To me, the distinction between those things is so big that the whole theoretical analysis of my playstyle is based upon it (GM as having authority over scene-framing but not over plot)!I am waiting for [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s close read of the 3.5 DMG. I posted some responses to passages that you posted from the book upthread, calling out the bits that I thought were about authority over fictional positioning, and the bits that seemed to be about authority over outcomes.As to whether D&D is too narrow, as I mentioned upthread I discovered/developing my preferred approach as a GM in the mid-80s with Oriental Adventures. A key part of that supplement was the PC generation embedded the character in the gameworld, and hence gave the player an "in" and a degree of leverage in relation to backstory and direction of the game that is different from the typical "murder hobo".It may be that 3E is too narrow for me - I haven't played enough to really find out - but given that I have happily played a lot of other forms of D&D over the years, and have been happily GMing a D&D game for nearly 5 years, I don't think I have any problem with D&D as such.</blockquote>

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