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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6743753" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is a complete tangent, but this is yet another reason why I disagree with Ron Edwards as a designer and commentator, and for me the quote does the opposite of bolster your point.  What gets me about the assumption Edwards makes is that it assumes I write Bushido on a sheet because it isn't a an expression of who the character is.  It assumes that the who the real person is, invariably is found in their relinquishing of honor, morality, dignity and so forth and that is what makes for an interesting story.  (See Sorcerer.)  The real "you" in this case is the one that abandons what they believe, what they hold dear, in favor of something easy because - as Ron Edwards makes clear explicitly - they fear "suffering for failing to do so".  It's as if I put Bushido on my character sheet because I don't really plan on playing that character at all, but with the assumption that it's inevitably going to fail because it reaches "functional limits of his or her behavioral profile".  I put it on my sheet not to explore what it would be like to adhere to an idealistic code, but to express my disgust with such a thing.  It's as if everyone that ever played a Paladin did so with the desire for the Paladin to fall because they believed good or honor was dysfunctional.  Of course the person playing someone with a code of honor of some sort expects to suffer at times because of that code.  That's the point.  The true character of the person isn't revealed when they depart from the code, but in how they suffer for it.  If you don't intend to suffer for it, you shouldn't have it on your sheet in the first place because it doesn't actually in any meaningful way define who the character is.  You should have a quirk on your character sheet that reads something like, "Always speaks of Bushido as if he believed in it and lived it, but doesn't really."I suggest that in GURPS, the expectation is that character will encounter hardship resulting from his behavioral profile, and NOT necessarily break one or more formal tenets as an expression of who he or she "is", and possibly (but not necessarily) suffer for doing so.  I didn't realize telling a story and prioritizing the telling of a story required me to expect all honor to be false or frailty. But then again, his definitions in that paragraph are so slippery that it's not even clear he knows what he's talking about.  What he calls 'narrativism' looks to me like 'exploration of character or theme' and a sort of what he elsewhere calls simulationism.  Exactly how you clearly and cleanly separate character and story from setting I've never been sure.   Is "Dare to Dream" really so different than "Story First"?  What sort of story about a fictional world (and every work of fiction is set in a fictional world) isn't daring to dream?  Even a game like Fiasco has a "Dare to Dream" component to it of being someone other than who you are.  It has always seemed to me that the above definition of narrativism is actually not defining a desire for story, but defining incidental properties of a setting or properties of a character within a setting and then claiming this is the one true way to get a story.Well, in theory, yes, it could.  And I wouldn't be terribly surprised from my experiences to find things rise to that level of hypocrisy, even if with particular groups or players it didn't.   But, more to the point, I see it as a fundamentally poor simulation of what it means to be and how you would experience being a paladin, which you would expect to create stories that poorly resemble how someone with a deep commitment to their beliefs would behave.  This is because the player's experience of "being a Paladin" will fundamentally be the experience of being your own source of truth, whereas the character he is playing fundamentally has the belief and has the experience that he is not his own source of truth.  The fundamental experience of the Paladin is that he's in humble submission to some higher power.   The fundamental experience that the player who determines for himself what the code requires is of being ones own highest power.  You can't reasonably expect to create stories which resemble stories about paladins, if the character is fundamentally at odds with the character of a paladin.  If you actually want that experience, then by all means play a CG champion and not one that is Lawful.  A CG champion is of course free to reevaluate his beliefs or act inconsistently simply because he sees what he has formerly done or what he would be inclined to do is non-functional.  But this is a fundamentally different experience from a player that has decided to commit to a code.  What Ron Edwards claims is a matter of system to me strikes me as really being what D&D would consider a matter of alignment.  It's an expression of some core beliefs about how the world really works.  He's expressing the core belief that a story lacks certain positive attributes (typically called "mature" or something of the sort by Edwards), if it does not express that the world works the way he wants it to.  One aspect of this approach conceived from Edwards ideal of what Narrativism means, is that seems to encourage the GM to create an explicitly perverse universe which acts to entrap or ensnare anyone that holds to a belief in an impossible situation, ostensibly to create drama.  Techniques of this sort even have names (though I forget exactly what the terminology is), but in effect what they are is a sort of anti-providential nature to the universe, such that the universe always perversely twists to disprove any assertion of nobility or goodness with the expectation that caught in such a trap the character will relinquish their "immature" beliefs in favor the "mature" beliefs Edwards seems to admire.  Especially if Sorcerer is any guide, I'm not sure his idea of maturity is compatible with mine.This assumption I even see tainting my more experienced players who have no "nar" background, but not tainting my inexperienced player.  My inexperience player playing a 'Paladin' does what he believes to be right, because that's who he really is.  He's not faking it by playing the character.  And every time he's in the process of trying to decide what the right thing is to do, my more experienced players are screaming at him, "Shut up.  Don't do it.  Don't be involved".  Why?  Because they think that regardless of what the Paladin does, the game universe as represented by me is going to hate him for it and I'm going to take every single opportunity to make him pay for adhering to any standard of basic decency.  This is the viewpoint of the GM not as the God of the game world, nor even as neutral impersonal referee, but as its Satan.  And it doesn't matter how many times that being merciful is received with gratitude, expressions of honor result in admiration, expressions of truth are repaid with trust, purity is paid with invulnerability, valor wins the day, a self-sacrifice earns someone's loyalty, and so forth, the long time players still have the ingrained belief that the DM's role is to play 'gotcha' to anyone with a code of honor and to break them and make them suffer.   I'm not saying that he doesn't sometimes suffer for his beliefs or that the character is always played wisely and makes the right choices - he's lately been overly brash and vainglorious, and suffered for it, not because I wanted it that way but because that's usually what happens when you split the party.  But the universe as created by me isn't actively out to renounce him or his beliefs, and to the extent that there are agents that despise everything he stands for there are forces of good who favor him balancing that.</blockquote>

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