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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 8440176" data-attributes="member: 6802765">I see. Well, if you aren't willing to take me at my word regarding my intentions, then I'm not sure more words are likely to help. I'll go ahead anyway and try to provide a specific response to your objections, but if you're convinced I'm being disingenuous then I can't be sure how my answer will come across to you. I'll just lay it out as straightforwardly as I can and hope you read my explanation the way it's intended.I haven't engaged the play analysis/reports because they don't appear to answer my question regarding the broader utility of the "Backstory first" categorization.The analysis/reports instead seem to be focusing on emphasizing the distinction between Situation-first play and Backstory-first play. I agree with that distinction and appreciate the effort that went into conveying such detail. Even though I'm generally less willing to draw conclusions from anecdotal data than I suspect those posters are, I agree that the play analysis/reports establish that Situation-first play exists, and is a broadly useful category because it appears to identify a range of playstyles that lead to similar play experiences. (I think it could have been more-intuitively named, but that's strictly a question of terminology.)What I don't necessarily agree with is that Situation-first being a broadly useful category necessarily makes Backstory-first similarly useful. As [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] noted <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/respect-mah-authoritah-thoughts-on-dm-and-player-authority-in-5e.683302/page-64#post-8440008" target="_blank">here</a> (after your post that I am replying to), they don't do much Backstory-first play, and as they are the most prolific poster of actual play reports there's a comparative dearth of such reports for Backstory-first play. Indeed, if there were any reports or analysis in this thread intending to show that Backstory-first play identifies a range of playstyles that lead to similar play experiences, I missed it. To the contrary, there have been claims that Backstory-first does not necessarily lead to similar play experiences, and I am not aware of anyone who has asserted otherwise. So, because I agree that Backstory-first has been effectively contrasted with Situation-first, but has not been otherwise claimed to have descriptive power on its own with regards to expected play experiences, it appears to me that Backstory-first is effectively defined as a residual category. Residual categories are useful! They're particularly useful as a label when discussing the category or categories they are a residual of. But a residual category of playstyles whose members' primary commonality is that they don't fit into any of the other categories--and don't otherwise lead to common play experiences or have some other descriptive trait in common--is necessarily an axiomatic category.That's the explanation for why I don't think the existence of the analysis/reports of Situation-first play makes it in any way unreasonable to observe that Backstory-first may be defined axiomatically. Next I'll address your perception that I'm implicty casting aspersions.First off, I do not in any way intended my observation that Backstory-first may be defined axiomatically to imply bad faith or untruthfulness on anyone else's part. As I see it, it's a natural consequence of focused interest in any category A (of anything) that the residual category B takes on salience as a point of comparison. Pointing out that the residual category B is apparently defined axiomatically merely helps explain why others whose interests lie within B may quite reasonably not consider B to be analytically useful. In other words, from their standpoint, if B is axiomatically defined broadly enough to encompass the entire range of their disperate interests, B necessarily lacks useful descriptive descriptive power for them. That doesn't mean that those instead focused on category A are in any way wrong or acting in bad faith when they quite naturally describe A in terms of its differences with B.Sure, my observation that Backstory-first appears axiomatically defined implicitly suggests that it's not as broadly useful a category as it could have been if it instead had more descriptive power. But I see a large gulf between questioning the descriptive power of the residual category and accusing its proponents of bad faith.(And for the record, I only brought up the broader controversy when you strongly implied that I lacked the necessary historical context to make my opinion valid. I was trying only to rebut your implication, not use the reference to the broader context to attack anyone else.)Does any of that help you understand where I'm coming from, or help you to believe me when I describe my intentions?</blockquote>

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