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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5636577" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yep, I saw you post that upthread. I think I had a reply, but have forgotten what it was! (I've just found it - post 181 - it's a bit condescending (oops - sorrry - written after a long day at work!) but argues for an important difference between play where the PCs' goal is looting, and the players' satisfaction comes from their PCs successfully looting - what I think of as archetypal classic D&D play - and play where the PCs' goal is something more thematically evocative, and the players' satisfaction comes from realising that theme in play.)Agreed with this. Someone might quibble with the "most of the time" in the second paragraph, but your point clearly goes through even if it's just "a lot of the time".But I don't agree with this. Monopoly isn't about producing a narrative or artistic object that expresses a conflict and it's resolution. There is a real life confilct at the game table - in that everyone wants to win - but the game of Monopoly isn't itself about that conflict. It's not a comment on it, or an expression of it, or anything else. A game of Monopoly isn't a work of art, or a process of producing something that can be evaluated in aesthetic terms.Which is really me restating my objection to Doug's earlier war analogy. War isn't an artisitic medium either.I think it is this artistic, communicative, expressive dimension to D&D that makes a difference, and that therefore makes the issue of "aboutness" - What is the subject matter that this expressive activity is engaging with? - interesting.I can see that. It makes me want to say - you need to play more narrativist D&D! Certainly the way I approach the game, plus my other background views in philosophy of language and aesthetics, are influencing my approach to this issue. But so are my experiences with other narrative forms - as I'll try to explain in the next paragraph below.Like I said upthread, does anyone really think that Claremont's X-Men is about fisticuffs? I mean, there are fisticuffs on every second page - they're the dominant mode of expressing and resolving conflict - but is that what it's about? A big part of the criticism of the 1990s decline of Marvel is precisely that the comics went from being about worthwhile things - with fisticuffs as a genre trope used to explore and express those things - to being about the fisticuffs themselves (and obviously Cable and Rob Liefeld would be mentioned as the lead villains in this sorry tale).Or to give another example, where a camera is involved - Star Wars has a lightsabre duel scene in which the camera is focused almost entirely on a fight. So do the prequals. I get Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith confused in my mind, but one of them has a fight with a four-armed lightsabre-wielding robot (cyborg?) and one (or both?) has a lightsabre duel with Christopher Lee. In my view the first scene is not about combat, although combat is what the camera is focused on. In my view, the prequel scenes are about combat and not much else, and this is part of the explanation why those scenes - and the prequels generally - lack the emotional power of the original film.I can't help feel that if you and Dannager were really right, then this sort of criticism of the decline of the X-Men, or the Star Wars films, would be incoherent. Whereas I lived through the period that that criticism describes, and I saw the decline taking place in the comics I was reading. My own experience tells me that the distinction is a real one. And you don't even have to agree with my criticism to accept my overall point. Once you knowledge that it is a coherent, or conceivable, criticism, you have acknowledged that a work can use combat as a means to express whatever it is that it is really about.EDITED TO ADD:At least for my part, I don't disagree that combat looms large as an activity that D&D PCs engage in.In my view, if a D&D player can't tell the difference between his or her adventures except by bringing to mind what the narration was from the mysterious patron at the beginning of the module, and then asking his/her fellow players to remind her what the prize is that they're hoping to recover at the end of the module, then I agree the game is about combat.But I answered "No" to the question because, at least for me, this isn't what D&D (or fantasy RPGing more generally) is like. And there are a range of techniques I use as a GM - at the character building stage, in desiging situations at the thematic level, in building encounters at the tactical/mechanical level, and in resolving those encounters - to help make sure of this.</blockquote>

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