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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2276380" data-attributes="member: 6533">Right, this started in the Iron Lore thread, but I've transferred it here as its merely a tangent there but I think it's very good here as a specific statement of my concerns at this point.With respect to the other thread and my complaint, which I still do hope to ressurect at some point, I think as a result of it it may be that my complaint is levelled solely at the afficianodos', as you might define it, interpretation of GnG in terms of any context larger than a gaming style.So that a 'typical' GnG player may not find Iron Lore a perfect match, though I would find it hard to believe that a typical afficianado finds perfection in anything that isn't tinkered with, and that's more or less ok, but I have to disagree with the literary readings.I'm revisiting Conan and Fafhrd/GM to confirm this, but I just don't think there's an honest reading of any set of media that fits what has been described to me as a hard core GnG aesthetic. There's certainly a sensibility that has been distilled, but I don't know that that's enough to justify a rigorous reading or criteria. And one certainly has the impression that that doesn't really exist given the variety and exigencies of products that have been touted as GnG, though it may be there are in fact one or two true GnG products and the rest are poseurs, but that's problematic in its own right.The qualification of physics and physical impossibility intrigues me and seems to make it more workable, but I really really balk at the idea of verisimilitude as a criteria given the level of play into probability that would realistically involve. Aside from Napoleanic war gamers who are pursuing a very probability based narrative I don't think it's feasible as a story form.If, as you say, it's simply something you know when you see then it would seem to me to both lack any claim to rigor and require subjective caveats, even to the level where typical probably requires qualification, or to not so much be an aesthetic with any sort of principles or structure as a refined set of rather arbitrary cultural expectations. In which case it would function as a clique dynamic along the lines of various punk subcultures united by markers and internal recognition that develop strange exclusionary identities for brief periods of time before being reintegrated into the general punk melange.</blockquote>

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