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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4042609" data-attributes="member: 42582">Are you really asserting that no-one plays HeroQuest, The Dying Earth, TRoS, Burning Wheel, etc? Or that of those who do, few enjoy it?Did you ask them all? If not, how do you know? Are you familiar with the mechanics of The Dying Earth? Or TRoS? If so, please explain how any player of those games would believe that the fluff flows from the crunch? The crunch of The Dying Earth tells us nothing about the fluff of the world. TRoS does to a greater extent, but Spiritual Attributes are obviously a purely metagame device.You keep saying this. It's not true. There is nothing inconstant about the following rules: (i) use action resolutoin mechanics when player protagonism is at stake via the PCs; (ii) use player-GM negotiated drama when player protagonism is at stake in some other fashion; (iii) use GM drama when no protagonism is at stake.If you have no capacity to distinguish between the players (who really exist in this world) and the PCs (whom we all pretend exist in the gameworld) then you will be unable to articulate the premises, benefits of and disadvantages of narrativist play.That has not been declared. What has been declared is that the action resolution mechanics are used to resolve the PCs' actions. This would include their fights with NPCs. It wouldn't include NPCs' fights with one another (the vast bulk of fights in a typical gameworld, assuming that the PCs are only a tiny fraction of its population).Well, playing RM is one way to play RPGs. It's not the ony way. Because one need not assume that the mechanics are the physics of the gameworld. Once that assumption is abandoned, we can find other ways to do it, such as the following: when PCs are involved, they enjoy plot protection, which means that they could die, but they don't. And when only NPC heroes are involved, they don't enjoy such plot protection, and we know thaty they could die, and sometimes they do. And when PCs battle NPC heroes, we let the dice and action resolution mechanics decide, because that is our agreed way of resolving conflicts involving the PCs.Of course the players will notice! That's the point of the rules. Will the PCs notice? Batman hasn't yet, because he's plausibly scripted. If the players want to play a narrativist game of fantasy adventure, why would they script their PCs any less plausibly?I don't even need to go to funky narrativist interpretations of D&D's rules to rebut your rhetorical point - I can do it within the confines of d20. When you run Conan OGL do you not give the playes Fate Points (as per the rules)? Or if you do, do your players ask "Why do we recover on the battlefield, but NPCs don't?" as if it were a great mystery? Everyone knows the answer: the PCs have plot protection, NPCs don't. It's a feature, not a bug!If your point is only that players who don't want to play an RPG a certain way will not, fine. No one is denying this. But if you are claiming that no one can consistently play a narrativist RPG (in which the mechanics are not the physics of the gameworld), you are obviously wrong, because it's being done every day.If you are saying the D&D rules can't be used for narrativist play, that's a bit more interesting. But you are going to have to actually provide some arguments for that conclusion which are specific to D&D and its rules, and don't just consist in asserting either tautologies or obvious falsehoods, or asserting, without argument (other than generalities that are easily refuted), that to do so is not to play D&D.</blockquote>

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