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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2253251" data-attributes="member: 26473">With all due respect, Dr. Strangemonkey, I have a much easier time understanding what people are talking about with respect to 'grim 'n' gritty' than I do your perception of "prejudice."Prejudice against what, exactly? That what some people call the "high fantasy" of D&D, which I prefer to think of as "abundant magic," can't also be "grim 'n' gritty"? Because some people equate "grim 'n' gritty" with "low fantasy/magic," or what I call "rare magic"? That "grim 'n' gritty" isn't defined adequately for your tastes makes it a "prejudice"?I'm sorry if this sounds challenging - it's not meant that way at all. I'm just having a hard time following your argument, which of course is my recurring defect, not yours.In your response to one of my earlier posts, if I understood you correctly, you talk about death serving the storyline as a means of identifying "grim 'n' gritty." However, that's a literary device which may or may not have anything to do with a roleplaying game. Now I know some GMs like to run their games with the adventurers playing out their parts in some grand storyline, but personally I don't know the outcome of the story of the game until I see what the dice show - death may come at a moment that some might consider heroic, or it may happen somewhere in the middle of nothing special. Since I'm neither writing nor telling a story when I run an adventure, death is something left to chance, just like acts of heroism.It certainly didn't serve "the story" when our tabletop Modern adventurers ended up in a TPK. It does nothing to advance the story that an important NPC in one of our Modern PbP games died from a bullet to the face - it was just the vicissitudes of a game in which chance is resolved with a roll of the dice. The fact that the characters in another PbP game are in all likelihood about to be arrested is a function of their actions, not some story that I'm trying to tell.For this reason I'm unsure about using literary analysis as a means of describing game-play, short of a rail-baron GM's adventure in which the characters are moved from act to act, scene to scene with little of no input from the players except to roll dice when called upon. That's just me, however.Coming back around to the original subject, I have used grim 'n' gritty to describe a style of play where magic is rare and does not have sweeping effects on society for any of a number of reasons, where death is often final (though the game itself may be no more or less lethal than any other), where people of the game world subsist by means that are quite similar to our own historical past and often suffer the same challenges and set-backs that would be familiar to all of us in that context.I'm not a fan of 'genre D&D', but that is a preference, not a prejudice. I don't think ill of games that adhere closely to the tropes of the core rules or the gamers who play that way - I simply prefer fantasy with a different flavor. I think your use of the term "prejudice" is way over-the-top in this instance.</blockquote>

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