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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6731620" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sure.I'm not sure who this is aimed at. If there are Rolemaster players out there who thinks that Edwards doesn't get them, no one is stopping them posting. But here is one relevant bit of data. Edwards <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">says</a> saysThe causal sequence of task resolution in Simulationist play must be linear in time. . . . The few exceptions have always been accompanied by explanatory text, sometimes apologetic and sometimes blase. . . . [An] example is rolling for initiative, which has generated hours of painful argument about what in the world it represents in-game, at the moment of the roll relative to in-game time.A quick mental count tells me that RM has half-a-dozen published initiative systems, mabye more. All trying to deal with the relationship between mechanical action economy and ingame causal processes. And GMing Rolemaster (where I used my own homebrew initiative variant!), one of the recurring issues that causes breakdown in the correlation between mechanical outcomes and fictional positioning is the initiative and action economy system. (Burning Wheel is very process sim in its detailed melee mechanics, and it uses an interesting technique of simultaneous declaration plus second-by-second time-tracking to handle the initiative issue. There are some similar systems in print for Rolemaster, but BW via its declaration rules and its armour rules solves some issues that confront the RM version.)I also think that Edwards is very clear about the key features of action resolution systems that depart from sim. He <a href="http://" target="_blank">writes</a>:Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things: * Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. .  . . * Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion. * More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.That was written in mid-2003, and already captures everything that was ever said in all the debates around "dissociated" mechanics. And does so in a way that doesn't take a stand on whether the features Edwards' describes are aesthetically desirable or not - he just points them out as features of some RPGs that tend to be well-suited to certain approaches to play. And clearly, given what he'd already written about sim play, aren't well-suited to other approaches to play.Again, maybe there are all these 4e players out there who think that what Edwards says there is a radical misdescription of their game. No one is stopping them posting.No theory of human aesthetic experience is going to resonate as true with everyone. My test for any critic - and Edwards's essays are criticism - is whether what they write resonates with me, and provides me with new insights that help me make better sense of my experience. Edwards does that.I've never met or interacted with Ron Edwards, or Vincent Baker, or Paul Czege, or Clinton R Nixon, or Luke Crane, or . . .I only know them from their writings which, as I said above, I use as GM advice. They've served as better advice, to me, than nearly anything else I've read. (Ch 8 of Tom Moldvay's Basic, and Robin Laws in his various HeroWars/Quest books, are the only things that come close.)I never played Vampire more than a few times. I played quite a bit of AD&D 2nd ed (almost always as my "second" game, back in university days when I had a lot of spare time), and a lot of those people did play Vampire.But I didn't need Edwards to tell me that railroads and metaplot suck! I already knew that from AD&D 2nd ed experiences: both the first and the last AD&D 2nd ed games I was involved in broke up because of GM's trying to assert control in the face of players who weren't interested in just going along with whatever the GM was narrating. I was never bothered by "roleplaying not rollplaying" because I knew that my Rolemaster (hence dice-heavy) game was more serious from the story/theme point of view than any of the AD&D 2nd ed and Vampire games that I was involved in or new about. And back in the same period when the group I played with had time to go to local conventions, we would win prizes for best team and best individual performances. We never saw any conflict between rolling the dice to find out what happens, and expressing the character of the PC by engaging the ingame situation. I found the Forge - and, in particular, Edwards's essays - by following some links (probably from a thread either here or on rpg.net) in 2004. The prose was somewhat tortured, and the terminology a bit baroque, but it made sense to me. It helped me clarify some issues that I had with Rolemaster, which I continued to play for another 5 years. Reading the endgame rules in Czege's Nicotine Girls helped me achieve a more indie-style endgame for that campaign, within the RM framework (and far more sentimental than anything that Czege would seem to be interested in).When the RM campaign finished and I decided I wanted to try a new system, 4e had just come out. Edwards essay from 2003 (quoted earlier in this post) did a much better job than the 4e designers of setting out the workings of that system. Without Edwards, Robin Laws in HeroWars/Quest and Luke Crane in the Burning Wheel books I doubt that I could have run a successful 4e campaign for 6 years and 30 levels.I'm not offended that other people don't find insight the same places I do. That's normal. People are looking for different things, and come to critical writers with their own experiences and expectations.But that doesn't mean that I'm going to deny the importance Edwards' essays have had for my own RPGing.</blockquote>

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