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="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7637265" data-attributes="member: 996">Sorry to riff off of just a couple sentences but...Seems like "informal practices" could be pretty varied and readily mutable (or set in stone, and violently defended, I suppose). If I'm following, that's an example of 'informal practice,' and - I'm really hoping - neither 'informal practice' nor 'GM stipulation' nor 'consensus roleplaying' have any extra-special precise/unintuitive/reverse-ogive*/confuse-inveigle-obfuscate meanings?  I'm actually free to go with my understanding as an indifferent native speaker of English?Proceeding on that unwarranted assumption...It strikes me that some of the sources of confusion & disagreement we get in these discussion stem from crediting systems with qualities derived from the above sorts of informal practices, GM stipulations, and consensus roleplaying.  Or, falling back on freestyle RP, when the system isn't applicable or gives undesirable results, might be another way to put it.So, back in the 90s, some histrionic wolfie might go on about how D&D is strictly ROLLplaying, and it's impossible to ROLEplay in it, and it's generally the worst game ever.  And some bristling, defensive 30-something (because this was 20+ years ago, remember), D&Der would present a transcript of a lavishly-roleplayed scenario that happened in his campaign 10 years previously (or that he just made up or embellished), as proof that oh, yeah, you can totally RP the effn'eck outta D&D.  Leaving aside the dysfunctional distinction in that era's divisive false dichotomy of choice, the D&Der was appealing to the informal practice of freestyle RPing (talking in character, mostly) by consensus, the vast universe of potential actions & events not covered by then-D&D's heavily magic-centric and combat-focused system (not that now-D&D is all that different).Or am I totally off base?I am aren't I?It's OK, you won't hurt my feelings.But......I do think the above speaks to responses you may get to this bit.That is, systems don't make possible things that are /impossible/ in other systems, they cover things that, in other systems, are handled by falling back to Freestyle RP - GM stipulation, table consensus, whatever you want to call it - in certain obvious cases, handled that way by hoary time-honored convention.If you mean assertions by a forum avatar, no, no meaningful difference.* yeah, I know, that's the point(pi).</blockquote>

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