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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7121710" data-attributes="member: 4937">[MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION]: I think that's largely fair.For me, the one way D&D gets in the way of story is that in addition to narrative it is also trying to serve the aesthetic of challenge.  And sense it is trying to serve the aesthetic of challenge, then it provides for the possibility of failure - without which there would be no challenge.   But the problem with providing the possibility of failure is that the timing of failure in a game serving the aesthetic doesn't always - and usually doesn't - well serve the timing required of narrative.  One problem that you run into trying to recreate narrative in a game is that in narratives the protagonists can't fail unless it serves the story for them to do so.   But in the game, characters just die off at random leaving plot threads dangling unfinished.   It's not easy to remove that.  A game without challenge becomes like watching reruns of a sports competition.   The linearity of the game - the fact that you don't know what is going to happen - is I think the largest part of what makes a game exciting.   If you don't have that aspect, and instead want to serve an aesthetic of perfect narrative timing, exquisitely aimed Chekov's guns, narrative circularity, foreshadowing, and all those other literary techniques that make for a good story, it's not clear why you are playing a game at all instead of just writing narrative.  Because one of the most certain facts regarding such well told narrative is that the author knows what is going to happen and writes in such a way that they make that vision true.   If you look at authors with great narrative structure - Victor Hugo, JK Rawlings, Vernor Vinge, Lois Bujold - they often begin with the ending they've envisioned and plot their story backward from that point.  But why should this process be an exciting experience for a collaborative group?   It may be satisfying to write a good story, but it's not the same sort of experience and pleasure that comes from playing a good game.My own now six year long campaign has been I think a pretty good story thus far, with many exciting moments and occasional narrative payoffs.  But it hasn't been a great story because it has also inherently been a game.   Judging it as a story, one of the things that would stand out is that it has had far too many characters - 16 protagonists, 10 of which are now dead, and only 1 of which has survived from the beginning of the story.   And this has occurred despite the fact that I haven't been trying to run a particularly deadly campaign, and my house rules have tons of 'get out of jail free' cards built in to buffer against bad luck.   One problem here is that we have ordinary people trying to be storybook heroes without the protection of plot, and without the perfect choices and cunning that heroes are supposed to have.   Of the 10 deaths, 9 of them in my opinion were preventable in the sense that the player earned his death through a series of poor choices (separating from the party, taking roles in scenes that didn't match their skill set, acting boldly but failing to account for the fact that they are already severely wounded, ignoring the "look at all the bones" warning signs, and usually all of this at once).  Learning to play well and make good tactical choices is a skill, and some players never master it.   Others are natural born commandos and killers that overmatch the tactical abilities of their GM.   But the whole point of simulating a story is that the players all want to be those heroic figures even if they aren't, and it's not clear to me how you can deliver on this while still giving them free will in the story.</blockquote>

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