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="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8316431" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, because this process is TOOTHLESS. It is incomplete, except in a highly constrained context. Think about what D&D combat entails. An environment is COMPLETELY DESCRIBED (by convention beforehand, so even any hidden elements are at least predetermined and not open to modification, just discovery). That environment is the 'battlefield', and it includes the enemy. The mechanics include inherently measures of effect and consequences, and have a fixed cost for actions, you burn up your part of the action economy when you use them. This STRUCTURE is what gives the process teeth, not the process itself!As soon as you leave this structured environment then the process is incomplete and toothless. The GM decides what success and failure mean, what is even possible to invoke, whether a move requires a check, how many checks represent progress of what sort and measure in the plot, etc. Outside of combat the mechanics of, say 5e, are ADVISORY ONLY. The GM MIGHT feel bound by them, but time and time again I've had the experience when playing 5e of being disappointed by the impact or consequences of actions that my PC took. Or frustrated that the GM entirely ignored my virtually throwing bricks with notes pinned on them to explain what I was interested in. And if the agenda is say 'Play to See What Happens' that is not possible in 5e. It is literally beyond the capabilities of the system to ever deliver that, because what happens is FUNDAMENTALLY NOT DETERMINED BY THOSE TOOTHLESS MECHANICS. It is, at best, determined by the GM taking the advice given by the dice and creating an outcome that will, hopefully in her humble opinion, satisfy the players in some degree or other. THIS is the dimension of flexibility we are all, I think, trying to explain does not exist in traditional RPG process. You simply cannot do this sort of story/character exploration play. It MIGHT emerge in a watered-down form from play, spontaneously, if you are lucky. After, literally, 45 years of GMing RPGs I cannot swear I can make that happen in 5e on a regular basis. I think I'm a reasonably competent GM, most of the same people that I started playing with in 1980 are still willing to join games I run, so I must be doing something OK. Yet I can make a PbtA variant that will hit the mark reasonably well, most of the time, I'm pretty sure. There's probably already such a variant out there for most things.</blockquote>

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