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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6099890" data-attributes="member: 4937">In D&D, why not just stay back at the Keep?  Why ever search for the Caves of Chaos?   Why are we on the borderlands at all?  Isn't it because if you don't assume risks, you don't recieve a reward?In one game system, you take on risk, get yourself out of trouble, and then recieve a reward.   And in the other game system, you take on risk, get yourself out of trouble, and then recieve a reward.  There is some mechanical change, that direct flow of narrative empowerment for taking on risk doesn't occur, but both system incentivize risk taking (up to a point).  The way you call out metagame markers to the DM changes.  But I'm not convinced it is that different.  You think BW is unique because you think there is no mechanical equivalent.  But mechanical equivalents aren't always the aesthetics of play in an imaginative game.  There is nothing that stops a group of D&D players from playing a character centric narrative about characters struggling with their beliefs and instincts.  As early as the late 1980's, I was backgrounding my PC's with proto beliefs and instincts - things like, 'I'll never avoid an oppurtunity to kill orcs' - that had me acting in ways that weren't tactical because I was interested in the story, and in adding to myself an extra challenge.  There was no rule involved.  There was just no rule that said I couldn't restrict myself.  Equally early I was giving nightly XP awards to the best RPer - partly to encourage it, partly because I was the DM and I could give out any XP I wanted, but partly because I'd dropped the requirement to train between levels where, DING, Gygax had originally snuck in a story award for good RP (shortened training time, therefore faster leveling) and I wanted to replace it.   But even before I started giving out that reward, players RPed.   I think it's a little pretentious to think that no one was role playing until someone invented mechanics that encouraged them to do so, or that mechanically enforced RP is necessarily better than free form subject only to the sometimes hard constraint of what the player believes his character would do.  I've seen a D&D campaign that had intraparty Romance and a player retiring a character because the character had gotten pregnent and the player believed that that is what the character would do.  How's that for beliefs in action or 'failing forward'?If I told the story of the two games in a way that was free of meta-descriptors - no mechanics, no out of game frame of reference - could you tell them apart?Now, don't get me wrong.  I believe BW and D&D can and usually do play very differently.  And I can think of a few things that the mechanics tend to prevent from happening in the two systems because of the different fortune mechanics in them.  But don't mistake, "How I play the game.", for "How the game can be played."</blockquote>

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