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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9548708" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I was not saying that D&D is a supers game.I was saying that the existence of superhero RPGs proves that story is perfectly achievable as part and parcel of gaming.This then implies that, unless Micah can show that there's something special about D&D-alike gaming, which excludes it from this effect, or something special about supers which makes it uniquely different from all other TTRPGs, the argument that TTRPG story-ing cannot be gaming is inadequate. I have given a counterexample; that counterexample must either be shown unrepresentative (the latter path mentioned), or must be shown to be inapplicable to this case (the former path). As noted elsewhere, there are multiple other TTRPGs that clearly make story part of the gameplay experience (I didn't even mention the White Wolf games, where dealing with the monstrous force eating your soul is a common gameplay thing that specifically is telling some kind of story), so I'm extremely skeptical that the "supers is utterly unique in that, no other games work that way" argument holds any water. Hence, it would be more productive in my eyes to try to show that D&D is the unique one, where some quirk of what it is or what it does somehow excludes the possibility of story-as-gameplay.A degenerate triangle is still degenerate even if it shows up in real physical situations. 0 and 1 are frequently degenerate solutions to math stuff. As an example, most mathematics teachers will lie to you and say that f(x)=e^x is the only function that equals its own derivative at every point. This is false. It is the only nontrivial function with this property. There is one other function that has this property: the zero function, the degenerate case of f(x)=0. The zero function appears all over the place in nature. That doesn't make it any less a degenerate case of "a function that equals its own derivative."So? We tell the story about him and not about a bazillion other Greeks with divine parentage. The point remains that "hero" in the classical sense meant anyone who was capable of incredible feats and changing the world, for good or for ill, and you absolutely did not need to be a divine nepo baby to be a hero. And even if you were a divine nepo baby, your inheritance could be absolute crap, e.g. Bellerophon was a son of Poseidon who...was a really good horseman. Not immortal, not massively strong, not superspeed. Just a mortal who could horse real real good. But I brought up Atalanta and Odysseus because they really were understood as ordinary mortal people who were still classical Heroes who did amazing, sometimes even "impossible" things (note quotes).</blockquote>

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