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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9146934" data-attributes="member: 7040941">I think you're projecting things I didn't say. When I say its a misuse of the medium, I mean it in the sense that they aren't really using it, and when they do its a fairly shallow use.I believe I mentioned somewhere about these being close to visual novels (i at least thought it anyway), and Id levy the same thought at those.Visual novels use all the same components, but they don't really leverage what the medium is good at doing. And meanwhile your analogy to painting falls short because you're talking about specific styles, when what Im talking about is mediums. Impressionism isn't a different medium from realism or anything else on those lines. Its all painting. For your analogy to work you probably should have pointed at something like digital vs traditional painting, but even that would have still fallen short as an analogy as the underlying principles of painting still apply regardless of medium, and likewise the same holds true for games. Ergo, the analogy if taken to its conclusion would have to insinuate that I, in my argument, am making an argument akin to saying a digital painting is somehow lesser than one of its traditional counterparts. But thats not what Im saying. What Im actually saying is that these particular styles of traditional paintings aren't actually making much use of paint as a medium, and could just as easily have been sketch drawings or doodles, and they'd likely take far less effort to create and enjoy if they did. So translated back into the actual argument, games as an overall medium excel at generating interactivity, particularly in the long term. Its what makes them such a potent artform over many other kinds of art, as games can sustain engagement for a far longer period of time than most others, and even things like serialize novels or television struggle to compete with them on that end. PBTA as games do not, on the whole, do a good job of leveraging that interactivity for sustained engagement. Its no secret these games aren't great for longer form campaigns, and thats because they are closer in structure to improv theater, which is a good game structure for short term, spontaneous and often entertaining storytelling, but not so much for fostering long term engagement with an interactive and ongoing narrative. Ive also said elsewhere that, ultimately, I don't need a game to gamify writing. Writing is already fun on its own, and no game is going to be capable of adding to that experience without fundamentally limiting it, and that is what PBTA does. As much as I like Ironsworn and Starforged, its a problem when I get to a point where the game becomes superfluous, and I get there way faster with other games in this family. Ive also said over in unpopular opinions that, stripping away all of this pomp over narratives and storytelling, there isn't much left to PBTA. Whereas, despite their problems, if I do the same to DND or Pathfinder, or even an OSR game like Black Hack, DCC, and the like, there's actually still quite a lot, enough to still be playable. This is what I get at when I've talked about how PBTA solves the problem of bad mechanics by just deleting them. It works, but the game quickly becomes unplayable if you stop leveraging the promise of great storytelling, and doubly so if the player loses interest in using the game to tell great stories.</blockquote>

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