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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9253287" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think there's a good reason that some more recent RPG rulebooks characterise the game as a conversation.Conversation is a very common-place human activity, in which participants make spontaneous contributions, building on the contributions that others have made, and taking pleasure in the sharing of ideas, hopes, disappointments etc that results.Ordinary conversation is structured by understandings of social convention - how to talk about sport, or films, or the weather; or for more intimate conversations how to talk about relationships, feelings, dreams and aspirations, etc.RPGing, as a conversation, is structured by different conventions - what sorts of things to talk about, who gets to say what sort of things about which elements of the shared conversation (the "fiction"). So learning to RPG means learning a new way to converse - which can be a challenge - but it is not wildly different from ordinary conversation.The most immediate implication of looking at RPGing as a conversation is that it contrasts the activity with the recitation of a script. And that in term changes the way we think about prep in RPGing - prepping in order to have something interesting to say is different from writing a script, or a story, or even a piece of descriptive text that is to be read aloud.Thinking about the setting, and world-building, in terms of conversation also has implications: instead of something static and "fixed", we can have a world that unfolds via the conversation: the conversations we have in preparing for play, and the conversations that make up play.RPG as conversation is not the only possible approach. But I think it is a rewarding one, that harnesses some of the distinctive features of our peculiar hobby: its sociality; its spontaneity; the way it unfolds in real time with multiple contributors and with little or no editing of their contributions. To me, some traditional GMing advice seem intended to teach GMs how to stifle or work around the conversation, rather than to embrace and participate in it. The approach suggested in the OP, quoting from Burning Wheel, departs from that tradition.</blockquote>

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