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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 9585389" data-attributes="member: 2205">Indeed, that's why it's a hot take. I'm saying that I'm going against a well-established grain that I dislike. I actually think referring to story and narrative is a red herring. It's more about immersion and roleplaying, and ditching (at least to some degree) the tactical dungeon-crawling experience as the main goal of play. In fact, the idea that story; the GM's or anyone else's, is the millstone around trad's neck, and people who try to do that create "bad trad" which doesn't work very well. The over-focus on "telling a story" doesn't work and everyone, even who play in a trad style, are usually very cautious and wary of railroads. That's a feature of "bad trad" while effective "good trad" retains flexibility and improvisation rather than scripted expected outcomes. Another bad habit that comes of out trad played poorly is "my precious character syndrome", which has morphed into neotrad, I guess, but by that point, the goals of play are quite different, so just because it's poor trad doesn't mean that it's bad for neotrad. This is what I mean by paleo-trad, I suppose; trad games played with immersion and RPing as a primary goal, a de-emphasis on classic or OSR like elements, like pawn-based exploration of a dungeon, "beating the dungon" type of tournament-legacy stuff, etc. Characters are still vulnerable and need to be cautious (more like early 80s CoC trad rather than 90s V:tM super-trad) and its run with a healthy skepticism of "the GM's story"; utilizing only broad, high level outlines rather than something as scripted and linear as, say, an Adventure Path or something like that.</blockquote>

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