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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4045609" data-attributes="member: 42582">Celebrim, thanks for the reply. I found it clarified quite a few of your points. I'm still pretty sure we disagree, but I think I'm clearer as to what we disagree about.In this discussion I'm certainly trying to draw the distinctions starkly (sort of like Weberian ideal types). I'm not sure that they are as stark in play as the Forge would have it, but I have to confess threads like this make me think that the Forge might be right. For example, and hoping it's not rude to say so, I think that your approach to what I am calling metagame rules (which you deny are purely or strictly metagame) suggests that simulationist thinking is winning out. Which does suggest a degree of incompatibility. I don't expect you to agree with that comment (hence my hope that you nevertheless won't take it as rude) but I'll try to explain why I make it.Fair enough. I guess my view is this: narrativism can be facilitated by the presence of certain action resolution mechanics. But (and more importantly) it can be hindered by the presence of certain rules, or by a certain approach to the rules and mechanics. If you get rid of the latter (the hindering ones) but don't add in the former (the facilitating ones) then you can play vanilla narrativist.In the context of D&D, the main rule that I believe hinders narrativist play is the alignment system, which (in play, and I believe also in description, although the latter is more debatable) deprotagonises players frequently and unpleasantly. But other assumptions about play do also, such as the common assumption that the GM is free to introduce adversity at any point of the gameworld. My reading of W&M is that 4e is changing much of this, either expressly or by implication (via PoL).I also think that an "rules as physics" approach can hinder narrativism, because it can deprotagonise players in certain unhappy ways (RM is notorious for this, I think, despite the fact that many features of its character build rules are very friendly to a vanilla narrativism). Hence my linking of narrativist play to Fate Points, "saying yes" rules, hit points as plot protection rather than ingame physics, etc.I believe I am following the Forge notion of FiTM. So yes, D&D would count as a type of FiTM if played in a certain way. But I think playing it in this way would already take us away from the "rules as physics" approach. For example: the "rules as physics approach" (and here I've especially got in mind KM and robertliguori - I'm less sure about where you stand) treats 50 hp damage as 50 hp damage. So, when a high level hero falls over a cliff and suffers 50 hp damage they have taken a mighty tumble and survived - whereas a lesser mortal would have perished. But in a FiTM approach, we don't know what the 50 hp means until the action is resolved and the damage applied - and in that context, it becomes highly plausible to narrate it differently: "The hero falls over the cliff, but the God of Winds - whose Djinn she rescued from entrapment last session - smiles on her and the breeze slows her fall at the last moment." And once you are playing D&D like that I think that the notion of "rules as physics" has started to take a back seat - for example, under this approach I don't see that any damage to the integrity of the gameworld, or to the integrity of the real world play experience, would be had by having a high level fighter NPC die falling over a cliff. His luck ran out, that's all.I think this is the real crux of our disagreement. The rules you mention - about pizza and coin tosses - are not the rules I'm interested in, as you note. What I'm calling metagame rules (perhaps unhelpfully, but I don't know a better phrase) do govern the interactions of things in the game universe. But (and this is crucial, contentious, and will be taken up again below) not from the perspective of the game universe.Consider a rule (what I am calling a metagame rule, but I don't think it is a metarule in your sense) which distributes narrative control. Suppose, for example, that we are playing D&D as FiTM, so that when my PC survives a 50' fall I am allowed (within certain parameters expressly or implicitly understood) to narrate how that happened. This is a rule that combines action resolution mechanics - the dice are rolled, the damage applied to my character - with non-mechanical matters, namely, those which tell us who can narrate and what is permitted in that narration.Under this rule, the action resolution mechanics are, I assert (and I'm pretty sure you deny, but I may be wrong) not modelling, giving voice to or otherwise representing or expressing the physics of the gameworld. The rule about what is permitted in narration is doing that - but the relationship between that rule and the actual mechanics may differ a great deal from game to game.I hope all the above makes it clearer why I think that rules (be they express, or - as is more common in mainstream RPGing - implied) about context, adversity introduction etc matter. These shape the play experience. Thus, if there is no "Lois Lane" rule by which the players can declare sidekicks or lovers off-limits to the GM, at least in certain respects, then a certain sort of play - one which makes thematic points using those NPCs as part of the expressive material - becomes more difficult. Now, the absence of a "Lois Lane" rule is simply the presence of a different rule (again, it may be an express rule or (as in much D&D) an implicit rule): the GM may use any NPC as a site of adversity no matter the relationship between that NPC and the PCs, and no matter the attitude of the player towards that NPC.Likewise, rules about parameters of narration (eg when playing d2 revised edition as a FiTM game, can I explain my success in jetting to Mars by declaring that I had rocket fuel in my backpack?) help settle the physics of the gameworld (among other things).I think what you say about implied setting constraints is right. This is what I am trying to get at with references to "the parameters of permitted narration".As to the issue about abstract action resolution - I think that is also right, and feeds into the flexibility of FiTM resolution. D&D is not as abstract as that.Well, that's true if it's a fight being resolved using the action resolution rules. But whether all fights have to be understood as implicitly falling under those rules is what we're debating. I prefer to think of it like this: the physics implied by the setting make it perfectly clear that two fighters sometimes stab one another at the same time. Our action resolution mechanics, however, make this impossible for PCs (and NPCs, when those mechanics are in use). This degree of non-abstraction in our action resolution mechanics puts a limit on the flexibility of FiTM but we may have other reasons for wanting a less abstract set of mechanics (as per your even earlier remark about GNS in/compatibility, maybe we want a little bit of gamism mixed in with our narrativism). But I don't think we're obliged to read this funny "glitch" of our mechanics into the gameworld per se.This point about "genre blindness" is crucial. It underlies my claim that certain rules and mechanics which determine how things are in the gameworld do not do so from the perspective of the gameworld. I actually think it goes beyond genre blindness, however. For example, the ingame characters are blind to the fact that the PCs never perform simultaneous strikes.There are other ways in which this sort of blindness operates, too. Suppose, for example (as may well be true - I've never checked) that in a Raymond Chandler novel no character ever utters more than a 3-syllable word. Does it follow that no one in Phillip Marlowe's universe has a full vocabulary? I don't think so. There is a "metagame" explanation - Chandler is trying to write punchy crime fiction - which does not have to be taken to model the linguistic physics of his world. Or, to give another example, the effect on nineteeth century novels of their prior serialisation (Dickens, Wilkie Collins) which contributes to their meandering, episodic and surprise plot-twists style: do we infer that the characters all live in bizarre plot-twist world? Or do we treat it as purely a "metagame" feature of the writing, which is not indicative of the "gameworld" reality.I think the latter. I think by wanting to read these (as I call them) metagame constraints back into the gameworld, you are evincing a systematic simulationist reading of the game rules and mechanics which (IMO) would get in the way of vanilla narrativist play. As this is an attribution of personal preferences, inclinations and obstacles, feel very free to contradict and/or refute it! But to me it seems to be the crux of our disagreement about the relationship between game rules and gameworld physics.</blockquote>

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