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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8963906" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yes, but the ethos which PfS arose out of, at least to a degree, was an early form of narrativism! That is, an attempted narrativism of a sort. This theory DID actually require that there were rules which govern, as much as feasible, all aspects of the world. The theory goes something like this: Role Play in then-current, c1980 roughly, RPGs is often flawed. Characters are shallow and motivated only by fairly unrealistic and trivial motivations (IE a lust for gold pieces) or at most conform to simplistic and rather crude models like "lawful good". This was hypothesized to be an outgrowth of the unrealistic and shallow nature of the milieu, which was largely blamed on the lack of realistic rules which would produce outcomes fairly close to reality. The hypothesis being that the lack of detail and cause-and-effect modeling simply lead to this weirdly distorted world full of bizarre characters (somehow, don't bother to critique any of this, it was nonsense). So, a system like RM was somehow sought which could be so hyperrealistic in at least the areas which touched on the interests of PCs (you can already start to see the problem here) that players would somehow just find that all the incentives would line up to produce some kind of much more fully-realized characters. This was all huge load of hogwash of course. I Personally was more of the opinion that it was the milieu which needed depth and substance, and a constantly changing and highly authentic character. Thus the idea of the highly realistic weather system, for instance. It also extended to a vast scripted meta-plot in which it was envisaged that the characters would become significant actors, should they so choose and should fate smile on them. This too was utter rubbish! I mean, starting in the early '90s I constructed such a campaign, using my existing campaign world that already had 15+ years of continuous play in it by then (so lots of places and details and characters, and lore). I came up with a whole elaborate meta-plot, including a whole bunch of mechanics that could model different things that could happen based on whatever actions the PCs took that would mess with its otherwise appointed course (bad guys taking over the Kingdom). So, it quickly became obvious that the whole idea of such a vast and unwieldy meta-plot was both unworkable and didn't actually matter at all to how the game played out in terms of players role-playing (duh!). We did play a lot of that campaign, though in a more limited form (the players simply refused to get involved in playing out wars and battles and such, lol). It was fun, but it was still just a typical D&D campaign set in a fairly detailed setting, ala Greyhawk or whatever. 2e D&D did its incoherent "I'm a dungeon crawl game trying to be a story game" thing, etc. I had really fun players that did interesting things, and the characters were certainly pretty decent, by D&D standards. It certainly wasn't going to break new ground though!So, I looked at 4e with some interest, given its obvious "I am a game first" orientation. Turns out complex characters with deeper stories and more significant interaction with the world ACTUALLY happened when we had much richer detail about the characters themselves, and easy ways to bring together mechanical stuff and the players motives and ideas about the characters. The orientation on challenges (what you want to accomplish, not how) and things like quests really works! Mooks are OK! I guess hit points are somewhat 'plot armor' too. Whatever, it works, and pretty soon I stopped prepping and started just asking the players which way things were going to go!</blockquote>

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