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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6097618" data-attributes="member: 4937">Then let me rephrase my quibble.  I'm not sure that the games which are designed to drive drama/story-centered play are necessarily well designed to achieve that.  The open question is, "What sort of rules really do drive good drama/story-centered games?"  I'm not entirely certain that it is even a rules issue, and to the extent that some one has experienced drama/story-centered games in rule sets intended for that purpose, I'm not sure that that isn't correlation rather than causation.  It could simply be that the sort of groups that are interested in and capable of story drive play are also the ones that seek out game system supposedly designed to support that.   As you say, narative driven play doesn't require a lot of rules.  I know I've played sessions of D&D were for 4-6 hours we didn't pick up the dice or reference a single game rule.  Even recently, in my current campaign with a group of players that are about as far from Thespians as I've ever dealt with, we managed an entertaining 4 hour session with lots of laughs and maybe just the first glimmers of some much deeper narrative engagement that had just a handful of skill checks, one saving throw and one attack roll the whole four hours.Some very good points, and I may have to send some XP your way for that.  I have ran an 'all elf' and an all 'goblinkind' campaigns before specificly because I wanted the campaign to address certain ideas about those races I found interesting.  I think the main difference here may be that for the most part, the expectation is that the DM in D&D will pick whatever the main theme of the campaign will be, which may or may not have a dramatic element beyond simply 'kicking butt and getting loot', and the players are expected to find play within that.  Although, even within that, if you have players with a Thespian inclination, you can end up having subplots that revolve around the particular things that the player signals he is interested in, either through backstory or table play.  A player with a 'Raistlin' type character is signaling he wants to explore the price of power, for example.  Whereas, a player with a 'Dritz' type character may be signaling he wants to explore the ideas of alienation and toleration or perhaps the issue of racism.   I don't find it unusual in D&D play for their to be at least one player at the table who has his own agenda like that, and I personally try to encourage it in my players.  That's slightly different than a game that is actually about The Character - which a game like BW seems to be trying to achieve - but I find that games about The Character really only work 1 on 1 or in similarly small numbers because when you have an ensemble cast you can't spot light too much attention on one person's story.</blockquote>

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