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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7098133" data-attributes="member: 16586">[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION]I think this goes back to my own concerns about group creativity over individual creative expression. When I make contributions to the fiction in a role playing game I have the expectation that the other people sitting at the table will be actively interested, have regard for what I am saying, and build upon it rather than negate it. My efforts to describe a given character's actions are not meaningful if there is no expectation that the other people sitting at the table will take that into account when making their own contributions to the fiction. If my efforts to establish fictional positioning can be freely disregarded according to the assumed social contract than playing the game loses all meaning to me. When playing my bard and I use Vicious Mockery and the rules say the words cut my expectation is that the actual words I speak for my character affected that character beyond the mechanical impact of losing 1d4 hp and getting disadvantage on the next attack. In turn I am socially obliged to actually speak words that should cut.This is in part what I was speaking to when I said many mainstream games are played with Walled Off Gardens between players where we are only allowed to interact with each others stuff in ways that are explicitly approved. When we are socially free to disregard contributions to the fiction other players make and there is no need to actually establish appropriate fictional positioning to mechanically affect the play space there is no shared fiction - there are individual fictions that we sometimes allow others to impact when and where we choose.This presumption that the mechanisms are meaningfully independent of the fiction and that one player's fiction is independent of another player's fiction results in play I have zero interest in. Furthermore it results in the sort of experience where in order for something to really have an impact it must be represented by mechanics. There can be no fruitful voids where we have fictional positioning that impacts play without going to the mechanisms.What I Want  Fiction -> Mechanics -> Fiction -> Fiction -> Mechanics -> Fiction -> Fiction->Mechanics->Fiction Fiction -> Fiction-> FictionWhat I Do Not WantMechanics -> Mechanics-> Mechanics<Fiction> <Fiction> <Fiction>Colors are used to show different contributors. Diagrams are not perfect. In reality for the sort of play I am interested in the Fiction and the Mechanics are meaningfully shared by all participants at all times. The reason I enjoy doing this thing we do is because we play in a dynamic shared collaborative fiction that belongs to us all equally - where we are creative peers.</blockquote>

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