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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 8992883" data-attributes="member: 7035894">First, thank you to everyone who has and continues to contribute to this thread. I know that everyone does so for their own reasons, and am not so narcissistic as to think that I, a stranger on the internet, have much if anything to do with why you made that choice. Still, I feel like I have been given a gift of your knowledge and ideas, and I am grateful.[USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER] and [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER], you have been very patient in explaining your thoughts and I fear that I have been a bit thick at times. I do now think that I have wrapped my head sufficiently around your ideas to have more useful points to add. In particular, this has become a discussion about authorship. It seems to me that a game such as Monsterhearts reserves significant authorship to the designer, even if the execution is in the hands of the GM and players. A game such as D&D or even Dread gives much more authorial agency to the GM. A game such as Warhammer gives all authorship to the designer, really (you can make up whatever story about why you are fighting that you want, but it has no effect on the game).This leads me to a couple of observations: first, that this might explain some of the popularity of D&D-style RPGs (another big part I think comes from hard-wired mechanisms that [USER=7023840]@Snarf Zagyg[/USER] has been exploring). D&D quite literally intended for the DM to take the role of a benevolent God. It, in effect, reenacts the central patriarchal assumption at the heart of Western culture (I write this not as a criticism, but as an observation). This makes sense, considering its origins with a bunch of mid-Western dudes, and with its chief codifier, Gygax, being a practicing, proselytizing Jehovah's Witness at the time that he was writing the game. These were folks very comfortable with the notion of the hand of a benevolent God in all things.So when we become the Dungeon Master, we are in effect taking on a role that we have been culturally trained to understand and to covet. I would go further and state that storytelling is a defining trait of humanity, so we want to do it anyway, but the Judeo-Christian model gives us a particular formula for how to execute the job. Gygax himself starts the introduction to the AD&D DM's Guide by speculating on whether the job is art or science (he correctly leans towards art), and he often uses religious language to describe the job (i.e. the DM is the "creator and ultimate authority" of their world, even if somewhat limited by the "mutable" rules of the game). So these sorts of games lean into a worldview that, I argue, we are heavily conditioned to accept, and offer DM's a taste of godlike power. That seems pretty attractive; I get why people keep doing it, despite the "countless hours" (Gygax again) that DMs are expected to put into doing their own design work.RPGs where the hand of the designer is heavy offer less of this heady attraction - to play you have to buy in pretty heavily to someone else's original design intent, and then work with the players to find your own voices while exploring within those parameters. The Yoko Ono performance art piece is a fascinating example of this approach. Indeed, it seems to me that these games can more properly be considered art in themselves, whereas a D&D-style game is more like loose rules to apply to your own art. As [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER] observes, this does not necessarily make one approach better than the other; as [USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER] points out, this means that if your PbtA-style game is great you can largely thank the designer, while if your D&D game is great you should thank your DM.I think Warhammer is really a distinct style of game that is basically just a complicated boardgame; the attraction there is in taking fixed rules and pitting your problem-solving skills against those of another human being - essentially more complicated chess.[USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER] I get it, and in addition to expressing my gratitude to everyone who has contributed, including you, I express my apologies to those who find this kind of discussion a bit off the deep end, and I am sorry that you have found yourself misrepresented. I heartily agree with your core premise: that ultimately, these are subjective questions of taste. My brain is such that I am quite fascinated by trying to figure out how things work, but in the end, the fact that they do is what matters.</blockquote>

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