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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7315212" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, and in fact there were contemporary games which did exactly that. None of them really went far, mostly being little amateur publications (fanzine stuff, or even just ambitious GMs and club members who managed to mimeograph a copy of their house rules) and whatnot. Arduin Grimoire IIRC contains a few bits like that, and it was pretty much the most successful of that ilk. You can see hints of it in Judges Guild stuff sometimes too.Well, Gygax certainly seems to have been adamantly in the "The DM is absolutely in charge of the fiction" camp. That naturally went well with a "the rules are a map of the fiction" at least to whatever degree was convenient to him. I think by the PHB time period Gygax himself was also pretty much beyond the "running a personal campaign" phase of his gaming. Instead he was organizing and running large tournaments at cons and doing gaming evangelism. He wanted and needed a hardened set of play expectations, and one easy way to get it was to double down on the 'wargame' aspect of D&D, its a set of rules that you follow in a standard fashion that produces results. Obviously open-ended, but if he could go to a tourney and run 'Tsojconth' and point to the rule book and say "This tells you how to do it" that was way superior from his perspective than a totally free-form game where its practically impossible to 'stick to the rails' and compare the performance of one group vs another.When 2e came along TSR was already starting to feel the heat. D&D was looking more and more antiquated. A number of titles had been produced by the mid-to-late 80's that presaged the Storyteller System 'Vampire' game of 1991, which marked the mainstream coming out of a more narratively focused kind of play. By 2e's arrival LARP was already a big thing (always was in a sense, but it started to become more a way of organized RPG play, before it was more an adjunct, basically SCA and such with some people having an interest in fantasy/wargaming/RPGs). So TSR gave lip-service to 'storytelling' as a strong element of play, but no actual mechanical support for it. Quite the contrary 2e further codifies and structures the rules, going so far as to provide structure by which the GM can make up setting-specific classes and etc. Kits kind of straddle the line, they have a lot of purely RP significance, but also provide a mechanism for attaching additional mechanical choices onto characters, presaging 3e.Well, yes, there is a shared fiction. Gygax himself seems to have simply believed that the sharing should go one-way, from GM to players. He was still really playing a sort of open-ended wargame himself. It probably got VERY open-ended with his personal crew of players, the ones that reached 'level 20' or whatever and became basically co-DMs. Still, he never had the slightest truck with some level 1 guy coming in and inventing some fiction beyond "my character does this thing, which is supported by rule X", or at least comported with established in-game 'realism'). So, the furthest that Gygax himself could go was 1e, basically. In later life he seems to have played in a somewhat looser way, but I haven't actually ever read his post-D&D RPG system work, so I can't tell what he was thinking by then, years later. I don't recall much noise from him at all during most of the 90's while TSR was slowly disintegrating.RQ and Traveller certainly evoke different genre/milieu than D&D, but they don't really move any significant distance beyond the 'rules match reality, the GM generates the fiction' model that Gygax espoused. RQ is a very mechanically defined game, I don't recall anything much in it that wasn't nailed to some sort of % roll. Call of Cthulhu (though the latest edition has leaned a bit in a different direction) exemplifies that perfectly, as it uses basically the same system. Everything is decided by checks against one of an infinite list of skills, or against a stat directly, or possibly using the 'Luck' stat (but even that has a precisely defined mechanic to it, there's no player input or use of it as a plot device even hinted at in the rules). Traveller is a bit different mechanically from D&D. It is obviously heavily influenced BY D&D, having an equivalent but very slightly different, 6 stats, and the minor simplification of throwing 2d6, which made its skill system work better than with 3d6 (I presume this and maybe just 'cause its different than D&D, accounted for that). Yes, EDU and SS are EXTRINSIC vs INTRINSIC attributes of a character, which is an interesting difference, but Marc Miller left any potential to leverage that strictly on the table. There isn't so much as a hint that one should 'invoke' one's social standing to say commandeer a vessel, or exercise authority over some sort of group of retainers that presumably a title like 'Duke' of an Empire of 1000 trillion souls would inevitably imply must exist. Fundamentally I think Gygax and D&D in general simply followed the easiest path. Its really much easier to GM when you are 'in charge' and it is a model that works with most random collections of people at a table, assuming the GM is reasonably competent, like you find at a con or similar event. It works OK for most casual groups of gamers, and it worked fairly well for teenagers, who (if I'm any indication) didn't really care or bother too much with what the rules seemed to be saying anyway. We played in a more free-form way, but for the game and TSR it was easier to focus on the singular omnipotent GM and just produce rules and material for that one guy. Its hard to argue this model wasn't the best road to success. Story Teller has largely faded, 'indy' RPGs all rolled together are 1/10th of 5e, and D&D carries on, sticking almost entirely to its guns, one or two odd bits aside (like 5e's Inspiration, which seems largely ignored IME).</blockquote>

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