NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5627600" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe that was a bit cheeky - if so, I apologise for it. I was just trying to make the point, by showing rather than just saying, that the same sorts of table conventions or understandings that can preserve immersion or simulation for those who want it, can make narrativist play smoothly for those who want it.When I read this, I feel that you are confusing the "we" of the participant/audience and the "we" of the fictional protagonists. When you say it, I imagine you don't feel that there is a confusion of the sort I feel when reading it.If I'm right about the difference of your feelings from mine on that particular point, that may explain (in part, to some extent) why we have different preferences in RPGs.I think you intend this to have a force that I'm not feeling. Which is not to say that you've forgotten something, or mispoken, or made a mistake. But something is resonating for you that is not resonating for me.To try to explain, as best I can from my side (which, of course, may not resonate with you!): when you talk about the plot adjusting to meet the mechanics, my first thought is "In a game of AD&D, or 3E, or Rolemaster, or Traveller, an important part of the plot might be whether a PC lives or dies in a fight, or has his/her pocket picked by a street urchin. And these questions will be determined mechanically - by rolling attack and damage rolls in combat, by rolling a Pick Pockets check for the urchin."Generalising that thought - part of the point of action resolution mechanics, in an RPG, is to structure or guide or help settle the question of "what happens next", "does this attempted action succeed or fail". And the answers to those questions give us the plot (either directly, or as a sort of substrate on which richer stuff supervenes).So when you talk about the mechanics driving the story, rather than vice versa, I feel that there must be something more you have in mind some manner in which the mechanics drive the story. The topic of this thread naturally makes metagame mechanics come to mind, but (without going back upthread to check) I think you said earlier that you use some metagame mechanics (hero or action points of some sort?).The point of this post isn't to trap or trick or twist words. But I do want to try to convey that there is some experience which is important to you in RPGing which I'm not quite able to discern from your post, although I can hazard some general guesses about the significance to you of immersion, and therefore probably Actor Stance (although if that's right, I'd find it interesting for you to say how hero/action points work within Actor Stance, because my default assumption is that they are a metagame thing - do you envisage them as the PC making an extra, heroic effort?) and also simulationist priorities along the lines I quoted upthread from Ron Edwards.I think the "easy" part may be a red herring, because it may be that, at least for some, the problem with 3E isn't that it is hard, but that it is needlessly complex. Many people make that criticism of Rolemaster, for example. (And as someone who GMed Rolemaster for many many years, I can see why someone might think that. On the other hand, my pretty entrenched lack of interest in 3E isn't because I see it as needlessly complext. It's because I don't see it as offering me anything in a fantasy game that I can't get from Rolemaster or HARP.)Equally, it may not be a red herring - at least as far as marketing 4e is concerned. It's not personally how I would market the game, but then I don't have any experience in trying to market commercial cultural products. Even if it's important to marketing, though, it's not necessarily at the centre of analysing how the game plays.Anyway, moving on, I think the bit about being inside a novel is probably central. But complicated. I sketched the character sheet for a dwarf fighter PC in my game upthread. There is no salient ability that that PC can perform only once per encounter or once per day, even though the player's mechanical access to those abilities is mediated via the power mechanics. So, at least in relation to that PC, I feel that your comments about the power system are themselves decontextualised and therefore missing the point.But when playing that PC I think the player probably has some sense of himself as author as well as protagonist. To that extent, then, maybe he doesn't feel like he's in a novel - presumably the protagonists of novels don't experince themselves as authors also.But even if this is right - and as I've said upthread, "immersion" isn't a category that I use very much - I'm certainly not prepared to concede the language of "standards" or (not used by you, but by innerdude) of "levels". I don't concede that merely being a protagonist is "higher" roleplaying, in some sense, than authoring one's PC's protagonism. (What are the relevant qualities that would determine this? Purity of experience? Sophistication? Actor stance perhaps, in a formal sense at least, is more pure. But strikes me, again at least in a formal sense, as less sophisticated. And I use the qualifier "formal" because when we look at the substance it's going to be very variable. For example, I personally don't feel that the "pure" experience of being a flying thief tied to a rope grind-scouting the Tomb of Horrors has much aesthetic value at all. It strikes me as rather tedious.)</blockquote>

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