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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4465872" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks.I'm inclined to agree with Ron Edwards, that some mechanics are apt to suit either gamist or narrativist play, because they give the players a degree of metagame control which can be used either to display skill (by gamists) or to control the story (by narrativists).RQ and Classic Traveller are the purist simulationist systems that I know - even character build is determined entirely by dice which model in-world likelihoods of various career paths - and I can't imagine getting much gamist satisisfaction out of either of them. And any narrativism with them would have to be very vanilla, I think.But are the Fate Points a gamist system? Or a narrativist one? Or neither? It depends on what the players want to do with them and how the reward system works. If you have gamist players, however, then there is a good chance that they will become a desirable currency, and that will certainly put the robustness of the system to the test!In HARP, Fate Points are earned in a metagame fashion, for clever ideas, good roleplaying and spectacular stunts. This is a hard system to play in a gamist fashion, and in fact probably best-suited to a sort of high-concept simulationism - if you play your PC in a genre-appropriate fashion, you get Fate Points. In this <a href="http://www.guildcompanion.com/scrolls/2007/mar/fatepointdevelopment.html" target="_blank">rules variant for HARP in the Guild Companion</a>, I suggested a way of making Fate Points the primary reward currency in HARP, which would make them more of a narrativist device - being earned for achieveing player-defined PC goals, and being able to be spent in the pursuit of such goals. Still hard to play (and break) in a gamist fashion, I think.Your "narrative powers" sounds like my "fortune in the middle". This is not unique to narrativist play - as I've repeatedly noted, 1st ed AD&D uses this approach for saving throws - but it is particularly well-suited for narrativist play. In hardcore gamist play players are likely to drop the narration, at which point the game may come close to morphing out of an RPG and into a tabletop wargame/boardgame with a bit of fantasy flavour.The answer is - perhaps, if the players and GM want the mechanics to set parameters while leaving them freedom. See my remarks above about RQ or Classic Traveller as an example of games in which the mechanics do a lot of the work, in a way that some players may not like.To an extent this is true of any edition of D&D in which a PC has never died, as in any such game the PC became conscious reasonably quickly and had no serious performancepenalties (even in 1st ed AD&D a week's rest was enough to get back to full performance). Certainly in AD&D the action resolution mechanics will never lead to a weapon permanently maiming or severing a limb unless a sword of sharpness is wielded.How to handle this? I think it's best written off as a genre convention. If you want satisfactory genre play, it's helpful for the PCs to not "break the 4th wall" and comment on these conventions (which, for example, superheroes don't do in comics). Conversely, if you don't want these conventions then play RQ or RM or C&S or . . .  D&D has never been for grim and gritty play of that particular sort.</blockquote>

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