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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6732659" data-attributes="member: 4937">You are going to find that pemerton liberally sprinkles the description of his techniques with Forge terminology.  But that when you get down to it, pemerton is not actually describing techniques that correspond in any tight way to the terminology as Forge defined it.  In fact, from his examples, the game pemerton actually plays and the techniques he actually describes using are bog standard DM preparation and resolution.  Indeed, even when pemerton actually employs systems intended to empower certain agendas of play, pemerton actually ends up employing them in slightly different ways that end up being functionally not that different from anyone who wasn't consciously trying to be Forge-y.Burning Wheel can be played, and I imagine usually is, as a bog standard fantasy heartbreaker.  You might then be inclined to wonder what in the world is going on here.   I know I have many times.Celebrim's Second Law of Roleplaying (tm) says, "How you think about playing a system is more important than the rules system itself."  What I think actually happened is that reading some Forge essays revolutionized how pemerton thought about playing and preparing to play a game and set him off in new directions.  I don't know much about his pre-Forge preparation or style (but the fact that he played RM for 20 years tells you a lot), but his post Forge preparation and scene adjudication sounds remarkably familiar to a lot of things I've seen done going back to at least the early 90's.  However, rather than describing his normal play in the normal terms that ought to characterize it, he stays stuck in Forge-isms because it was those things that caused him to question his earlier techniques and develop new largely system independent approaches.  But I've heard him describe the process of creating a dungeon backstory while preparing for play as "no myth", and call linear process-sim resolution as "Story First" drama techniques.  So that he describes sandboxes as railroads because there exists content the PC's don't choose to engage with doesn't surprise me either.  Whatever works for him to help him frame the way he thinks about the game.   It seems to be working for all that it baffles me what he means 90% of the time.  I think that the answer might be, compared to how he formally thought about adjudicating play, he's more improvisational, or more outcome focused and less system focused, and so forth.   Its broadened his palette apparently and made him happier with his game, so I'm good with it.Point is, I think we make far too big a deal about the labels we use.  In practice, what most DMs actually do is a lot like what all DMs actually do, whether they want to call it a 'sandbox' or a 'railroad' or not.   The players don't stay at your table if you can't run a fun game.</blockquote>

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