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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Corinth" data-source="post: 4312030" data-attributes="member: 497">This is correct.This I disagree with, as I disagree with the idea that there is anything at all to do with storytelling that is required.  Instead, it is closer to history and real life.  The world is treated as if it were real, in the same way that Peter Jackson treated Middle-Earth as if it were history, and the characters therein treated like real people (in all the glory and horror that real people can be; heroism is not something restricted to fiction).  It is inconvenient, anti-climatic, at times cruel or kind without apparent reason, and ambiguous in a way that only this approach can achieve.  Tabletop role-playing is at its best when it focuses upon the wholesale immersion into a secondary world (to borrow Tolkien's label), living there (as it were) and learning from their experiences in the same general principle that the children what visit Narnia learn from their adventures therein.Why?  Because tabletop role-playing games are capable of being more than glorified hackfests on rails, and that which is most excellent (in the proper sense of the word, "arete" in the Greek, from which "hero" and "heroism" properly derive their meanings).  Because the paradigm explicit in 4.0 produces a false sense of achievement, like giving a child an award for finishing a hurdle race when he had to jump a few inches off the ground, and that can't be had in campaigns where everything is matched like its staged that way and set up in places that feel more like Potemkin Villages or pieces of the Hollywood back lot than a living, breathing place that exists on its own and independent of the players' characters- who are not artificially-inflated into precious, unique snowflakes but instead win and earn their place through a combination of player skill and genuine effort in-character against opposition that is not (in rules, at the very least) different from them.  The most excellent that this hobby has to offer cannot be reproduced by any online of console due to it being derived from the unique qualities of the human mind; as it produces an experience superior to Classical Drama (which is the best that other RPG media can hope for) when done right, and to not reach for that greatest quality is (as the kids say) an epic failure.If I want the experience of a different medium, then I will go to that medium and not waste my time (and others) with misusing a tabletop role-playing game for that purpose- use the right tool for the job.  If I want to tell a story, I will write one.  If I want to engage in railroaded hackfests, I will find a suitable console title and go to town.  If I want a lot of theorycrafting, I will log into World of Warcraft and talk shop in Guild Chat with my guild's raid and class leaders.  If I want to see a lot of mindless violence and explosions, then I can find a lame action film to kill the time.  If I want to engage in a secondary world, living out a second life as best I can and making the most of what I've got to work with, then I call up the crew and play some tabletop role-playing game or another.I apologize for the long-winded response.  The unspoken assumption that tabletop role-playing games require any form of story-telling in the mode of most fictional work as a medium is wrong, and at times I must correct that notion.No. I won't play 4.0 at all.  I would sooner play The World of Synnibarr at the creator's table.</blockquote>

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