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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8292035" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think DW/PbtA, and probably FitD games, may be played in more and less aggressive fashion. At least that is what I'm hearing. In the game where I've played or ran there have been intense dramatic periods where the players were seizing the story in their hands and really trying to alter its trajectory. There were also other points where maybe they were taking on some sort of adversity, but it wasn't necessarily a situation where they were so much trying to change things as just to use their resources to get them through to the end of it. The way [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] heavily emphasizes bonds and alignment, and other elements of 'character ethos and values' in terms of every little action they take? I mean, the game definitely encourages that to an extent, but I think we've been less granular about it. I mean, sure, the fighter has some choice between different bonds or whatever, but at some point he's going to act on ALL of them in some fashion. So, the scene he described earlier in the thread, that is certainly a natural evolution of the game towards a climax, but it seems like an unusually fraught moment. It is like any game system, there are people who emphasize different aspects in different ways in their play. I was a player in a DW game which was basically very much a classic dungeon crawl. Obviously the game dynamics aren't like classic D&D, but we still spent our time expending torches, wending our way down into deeper levels of the underground maze, sniffing out treasure, avoiding terrible nasties, and solving puzzles. Tension would build as we'd, for example, trigger a shifting corridor and be unable to find the way out, while our torches began to burn down below the point of no return. One of the PCs got poisoned once, and the way out would take too long to carry them back to the entrance before they died, could one PC race ahead and get help in time? Was he going to risk his neck for that stupid hobbit? I mean, in the end its the same sort of considerations Manbearcat is talking about, but maybe a bit different style of play. AFAICT what we were doing seemed well within the envisaged paradigm of a DW game.</blockquote>

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