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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6112675" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree too, but I still think I'm looking for a different game from the one Mearls is delivering (and maybe from the one you're looking for).For me a big part of the RPG experience is joint participant creation of the shared fiction; and by "joint" I don't mean token - "I got to play an elf rather than a dwarf" - but rich and genuine - "I got to choose what matters to my PC and what s/he will strive for in the gameworld, and to shape whether or not s/he achieves that".  RPGing that doesn't involve that is, for me, resulting in particpants not getting all that they might out of the experience.The function of the rules, then, is to mediate and channel that joint creation of the shared fiction. As a result, the rules will always determine, in some part, the story - the most prosaic examples come from classic D&D, where the rules determine that the story will never be about a dwarven mage, or an armoured mage (unless elven or half-elven) or a sword-wielding cleric.The test of the rules, for me, is therefore not whether they (partly) determine the fiction. It's whether they allow the fiction I'm interested in to emerge (for me, when RPGing, that's almost exclusively fantasy), and whether they let it emerge by the process I want (namely, genuine, rich joint creation by all the participants in the game).No doubt others want different sorts of play experiences, produced in different sorts of ways, and hence want different sorts of rules! And that's before we get onto what are for me secondary considerations, but nevertheless important, and perhaps primary considerations for others: things like search-and-handling time, mathematical crunchiness, ease of memorisation, etc.</blockquote>

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