NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8290898" data-attributes="member: 6790260">If this is true, then we have answered the original question without any need for my (apparently faulty) "there are no hybrid sports" argument. That is, the reason people try to combine TTRPGs together is, quite simply, that most TTRPGs are remarkably similar things. Combining them together is both easy and, oftentimes, fairly natural.Assuming people agree with this sentiment (and they might not), this implies that TTRPG merging is common for exactly the same reason that hybrid sports are (apparently) a thing: people with divergent-but-not-incompatible interests trying to do a thing together. Which is exactly the situation I've described several times, a GM trying to include their actor (or a simulationist, or whatever) friend in a game because they don't want to leave that person out.I would absolutely consider "love" an abstraction: while it is quite common to discuss specific instances of "love," we very frequently speak of it in terms shorn of context and without specific individual examples. "He'd had a bad breakup, but after a grieving period, he went out to find love again." That's "love" in a clearly abstract sense. Or, despite the definition being EXTREMELY specific and useful, 1st Corinthians 13 is very specifically about "love" in an abstract sense, not tied to any specific relationship between individuals but describing the general character of "love" wherever it appears: We are not given, "In <specific trying situation,> love <does patient act.>" We are given, "Love is patient." That is, clearly and explicitly, an abstracted quality--patience--that reflects the pattern of behavior called "love." (Or Charity, if you want to be old school on this one.)Ironically, we seem to have a clash of definitions here. That is, as a verb, "to abstract" has the idea of "removing" properties from things as its primary sense, and the sense of considering an idea alone without specific implementations or instances is distinctly secondary. But as a noun, "abstraction" primarily refers to "the act of considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances" (per Dictionary.com), while the "take away stuff" sense is secondary.In one sense, TTRPG rules are absolutely abstractions: they literally exist as general qualities and characteristics apart from concrete realities, because you use those rules in order to generate "concrete realities" (for a given definition of "concrete"), aka statblocks, character sheets, items, spells, etc. In the other, they are not abstracted, in that there is nothing being "removed" from them--indeed, they are your foundation, which you them build out from.This is a genuinely interesting comparison, but I feel you are excessively broadening the software development use of "abstraction" to apply everywhere else.Well, part of my thesis is that we have at least one answer to "what am I trying to accomplish?" right off the bat: I am trying to bring all my invited together in a TTRPG experience they can all enjoy. Because of that inherent goal before any previous considerations, THAT is why you would think about adding wandering monsters to a game, or spells, or whatever else--because you think that, by doing so, you might ameliorate the group's overall play-enjoyment without compromising the pre-existing enjoyment of specific players.I can--on occasion, with reluctance--get a good idea out quickly. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />IMO, the player-facing agendas are found in the inherent moves of each class, especially the alignment moves, and to a lesser extent the common moves everyone makes use of. The very existence of a move called "Undertake a Perilous Journey" implies that players have an interest in travel--some of it dangerous. Likewise, alignment moves specifically incline the player toward certain behavioral attitudes, rewarding them for fulfilling those behaviors. It's somewhat softer than a direct, explicit "YOU PLAY THIS TO DO X," but these things and their names/phrases communicate something to the player.Well, actually, I'm pretty sure there is some kind of shopkeeper Compendium Class out there. It could happen. You just wouldn't be the medieval equivalent of a 9-to-5 office worker. You're more like the player character of Recettear: yes, you run a shop, but you go adventuring off-hours to find the stuff you sell to people.I hesitate to default to "it just means be a good player," as that has some unfortunate implications (e.g., that for other games, "skilled play" is unrelated to being a good player...or worse) and is distinctly uninformative. That said, many of Dungeon World's rules really ARE focused on producing "good play," making "be a good player/DM" a more inherent and natural result of following the rules, so there is some merit to speaking of it this way.I guess what I'd say is, "Dungeon World skilled play" is play where you live out the character as who they are, where they are. That's why (for example) people are supposed to always use character names, not player names. "Skilled play" involves keeping your head deep in the fiction, and knowing ways to leverage, expand upon, or push forward that fiction, while staying true to the tone and style of your group's game. E.g., my game is high on intrigue and low on grit, full of "learn about the ancient past" and mostly devoid of logistics-heavy stuff, serious in terms of storyline and morals but lighthearted in terms of humor/silliness and non-zero-sum results. Other games will differ, and part of "DW-SP" is learning, internalizing, and applying your table's tone+style effectively.E.g., in a much more gritty (bordering on World of Dungeons) game, the party bard taking on his great-grandmother's succubus powers would have been a Start of Darkness moment, a terrible deed done for noble reasons. Or the time that the party helped some escaped girallons--the consequences of unleashing dangerous, fairly intelligent wild animals would be significant. But because this is a lighthearted game, the bard was doing a noble thing, allowing his great-grandmother to die as a mortal and eventually reunite with her human husband in the afterlife (presumably; nobody knows for sure how the afterlife works). And helping those girallons escape just meant they would, eventually, make their way back to the northern jungles they came from, avoiding settled areas because settled areas = people who might try to capture them again.For games where a given character's story is central, being a good player does mean keeping yourself grounded in that--and DW is good at encouraging this. But I would be careful about just calling that "be a good player"...in the abstract. (Boom, tied it all together! hah)</blockquote>

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