You're reacting to the end of a chain of posts that centered around people making wildly contrarian claims that PBTA isn't what it is, for no other logical reason other than the fact that I was the one that defined them that way, and you're going to suggest Im the one thats emotionally invested...
I can pull dozens of threads all over the internet describing these games in the exact same way. This is the only time anyone anywhere on the internet has ever tried to argue against those definitions and I can only understand this to be because I used them as negatives rather than positives, like it is most elsewhere.
And mind you, Ive given plenty of explanation and support to my thoughts, and they've largely gone unengaged and unresponded to outside of blunt denials of cherry picked lines. You aren't contributing here by following in those twos footsteps trying to tone police me.
Mechanically they are not bad at this at all. They can require too much prep to run, which is often made up by the fact that most people just run oneshots woth characters they already have, but once the prep is done, it works just fine for short term commitments.
Then you would be an outlier. These games are very reliant on its partial success design to keep the story going, so unless a table is either deliberately slowing character advancement or injecting what would effectively be homebrew story hooks, the game is going to push the overall story to a conclusion. The only other way I see, both in my own experience and in those of others, for these games to last very long is if you're not actually accomplishing all that much session to session, which also goes beyond the system.
Most likely, your tables had one of these or some mix.
Ive explained what is meant by misuse. You're not really engaging those points by asserting something I wasn't disputing or disagreeing with.
The thing about trad games is that they aren't actually about following the guide rails on a written adventure. Thats how a lot of people run them, particularly because the biggest trad games have effectively abandoned properly supporting any other way to play, but its not actually a part of that game style, and in fact in those big games, they don't actually emphasize authored adventures as part of their core rulesets; they still present as sandboxes even if they don't support that style well.
And keep in mind, authored stories aren't incompatible with sandboxes. Non-linear storytelling is a real thing and it suits these games very well. But they take more effort to write, and so you seldom see them. Thats a problem thats also very interrelated with the problem of just deleting bad parts rather than fixing them.
You won't get the play experience of Pathfinder from DND either. You won't get the play experience of 4e from 5e, for that matter.
This isn't much of a point; games have bespoke experiences that are the totality of their mechanics and dynamics mixing with player perceptions. You won't get identical experiences unless the games actually are identifical.
That has nothing to do with what I said, however.
Not at all, given thats a distortion of what I said. Words matter.
Misuse implies that the medium was simply not used to its best capabilities.
Validity however implies the problem being that the actual piece of art was wholly inappropriate for the medium, which isn't at all what I've said.
I clearly and obviously believe games are an appropriate way to explore the various kinds of stories that all of these games cover, and as should be apparent, I have very specific thoughts on how best that can be achieved which are rooted in game design principles, given Im in the long effort of developing my own system and so have these principles on my mind constantly.
Now, I won't claim to be some all-knowing expert, and people who misread my confidence for doing so should check themselves, but I have been giving these concerns a great deal of thought, as I have to understand them so I can make my own the game the best version of itself, and in practice, they have consistently checked out, and are why I not only do not consider PBTA type games to be that great for what they try to do (nevermind what they do compared to other types of games), but also don't consider most RPGs period to be all that great for what they're trying to do.
People have gotten really upset at my short opinions on PBTA, but its not because Im participating in some turf war on behalf of DND or other trad games. Learning about game design and applying what Ive learned has broken a lot of assumptions I've had about the state of these games and how they're developed, and its as a consequence actually made a great deal of games completely dead to me. Only a very relative few (namely Ironsworn, Black Hack, and DCC) have managed to not be completely abrasive to my sensibilities over the past year. (And its no surprise that in their various days all three games were considered fairly innovative)
I've said elsewhere I think the entire hobby is in a massive rut. Not just specific kinds of games, the entire hobby. A lot of conservative (not in the political sense) thinking is holding all of these games back from being greater than they are.
And to just further clarify my stance here: my own game has been incorporating mechanics that wouldn't be out of place in a PBTA game. Don't think I'd be doing that if PBTA wasn't doing something right; but I don't consider them, as game systems, to be good on the whole.
