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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6099934" data-attributes="member: 4937">The resulting story is the only real measurement for me.  How the mechanics work their magic in deciding what stories get made is a very important topic, but the mechanics themselves are meaningless.  The only difference between something like BW, D&D, and flipping a coin to determine whether or not you succeed or fail at every proposition (<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?266857-Elegance-and-the-development-of-game-systems&p=4971353&viewfull=1#post4971353" target="_blank">see the world's simpliest complete RPG rules set</a>) is the sort of stories that are produced by the different systems.Yes, but that's not what I want to do.  I do tell stories without mechanics.  It's a perfectly adequate way to tell a story if you have one author.  The interesting thing about RPGs is that they forge a story together from several authors, or at the very least allow subcreators to experience being in the story living it out with an immediatecy that novels find hard to match.Ok, now that I'll listen to.  Tell me more.  I'm happy to enlarge or refine my theory.  Tell me about the experience of 'how'.No, no, no.  It's not a question of torture.  It's a question of expectations.  It's a question what a GM makes of a system when he approaches it and how he imagines preparing for and playing it, and also the preconceptions that a player brings to the table about everything from a system to how to relate to the GM.  I'm saying that these experiences of play aren't necessarily being done consciously.   Now, I will say that in BW's case the author has gone out of his way to tell you how to play BW in a way that is pretty unique compared to older RPGs.  He doesn't just give you the mechanics and expect you to make play with them, but he presents the expectations and guidelines and agendas of play as if they were rules and alongside rules with equal billing and then tells you THIS is the right way to play.  That is IMO incredibly insightful, and recognizes something that I don't think was really recognized consciously 20 or 30 years ago.So I'm hardly surprised that BW played very very differently than D&D; I wouldn't expect anything else.  But I think it would be a big mistake to focus on the mechanics and the way conflict is resolved as the major reason why it plays differently.Trivial mechanical differences.  I've played different games of D&D that had greater variaty of play than that.   For example, I once played under a DM that refused to let players see their own character sheets or know thier own remaining hit points because he disliked the use of metagaming to that great of an extent.  Basically all resolution was behidn the screen.  Same mechanics.  Totally different play experience, and to a certain extent total shift in story.  Magic missile being auto hit or not; doesn't signify.  There probably were differences in play, maybe even some linked to mechanics, but you aren't convincing me that you've really stepped back and evaluated that idea down to its roots.</blockquote>

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