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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9253535" data-attributes="member: 6696971">There is some of that bolded bit above.  But that isn't what is generating pushback/response.  What you can find here in this thread, and plenty more elsewhere, is what I saw back in the late 80s through early 90s (which is why I brought up that particular angle...there are plenty of others I could have brought up by the Wandering Monsters and NPC Reaction Rolls and the attendant requirement of improvising backstory is related); declarative statements and then explicit or implicit condemnations.  The declarative is "TTRPG systemization that requires improvised backstory (like Wandering Monsters + NPC Reaction Rolls) will invariably lead to Nonsense World TM or fubar continuity."  The explicit or implied condemnation is "GMs that don't opt-out of such system architecture and/or games that promote/require it will lead to silly, incoherent play."The dislike is fine.  No big deal.  Its the declarative and the explicit or implicit condemnation that rides with it which is the problem.  You can sub in other things as well; "if x, then y."  Like "systemitized, collaborative content generation will lead to Nonsense World TM, fubar continuity, and, therefore, silly incoherent play."  Or even "TTRPG procedures that allow the table-at-large to develop, systemitized antagonism for PCs and then the GM plays that roster/budget of enemies as hard as they can to foil PC goals will nonetheless invariably lead to degenerate challenge-based play."I not only don't agree with any of those, I'm certain they're not true (and that last "if x, then y" isn't just untrue for TTRPGs, but its untrue for all manner of challenge-based play including martial combat, situational ball sports, climbing, etc) because of an extremely large dataset of confounders to those hypotheses.  But I'm totally cool with someone merely saying the uncontroversial "playing that way isn't intuitive to me and I don't want to invest the tradeoff of time so that it becomes intuitive" or "I don't like that form of play."  To that I would just say "cool, you keep doing your thing /hat-tip."</blockquote>

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