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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8317263" data-attributes="member: 16586">[USER=6704184]@doctorbadwolf[/USER]I'm not trying to be difficult here. I'm communicating my perspective as best as I know how. It's also based on a lot of hard fought experience over the course of 20 years of play that involved a fair amount of trying to wrestle with games to get them to do things I found they were inadequate for. I have attempted to run highly social and character focused games using multiple versions of D&D only to have the game's system actively work against what I was trying to do which I believe is pretty different from what you have been doing in your own games.I am glad that traditional RPGs do the things most people want them to do. I even enjoy plying them from time to time. I still hold that the popularity of an approach is not related to its overall flexibility. My own table experience is that most games of D&D and other traditional games like Shadowrun, L5R, et al feel incredibly similar to me at the table in terms of playstyle. I have seen an incredible amount of consistency between the ways different groups play these games across tables despite never meeting each other. That does not mean it's not fun. I have had a ton of fun playing once I was able to accept they weren't going to offer some of the things I wanted out of them.My biggest issue with flexible/focused narrative is that it places the sort of play games like Apocalypse World engenders as a more specialized form of what they are already doing. I think that's wrong. The sort of play described on Play Passionately is not contained within more traditional RPGs. It is fundamentally different in character. The bigger issue is that this results in a sense of erasure within the larger community. The unique play processes seen in both the indie community and OSR community are basically seen as specialized instead of just different. The creative insecurity that causes when people like me are frustrated because they want something out of traditional RPG spaces that they are ill equipped to provided then get thrown back at them. Their creative insecurity and frustrations get treated as their fault. They just need to get good.I acknowledge the use of focus / incomplete text language used in parts of the indie community. I think it was fundamentally based on faulty understanding within the indie community. Many of us just did not get traditional/neotraditional play practices and the unique value they provide. Several things were said based on that lack of understanding I regard as mistaken.</blockquote>

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