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="clearstream" data-source="post: 8500322" data-attributes="member: 71699">[USER=6787503]@Hriston[/USER] to tie things back to your concerns, a fable.In the unlit time before, a group of wargamers were playing a tabletop armies wargame. As they played, they told themselves stories about their white metal miniatures. This officer was impetuous, that allied detachment that broke early was in the pay of their enemy.One day they tried a skirmish level tabletop battle, and noticed that it was even easier for them to tell stories to themselves about the individual figures as they played. When this first happened those figures were still not much more than Chess pieces. In a way, they were making a a story for each piece as it traversed the board. The bold Pawn, who hoped to discover himself really a Queen. The dashing Knight. (Later, across the sea, some other wargamers made much gold from writing expansive stories for each figure.)The wargamers enjoyed their stories so much that they came to play only skirmish games, and shifted their settings into the pretend worlds that they had loved to read about. Being wargamers, they came up with detailed parameters for their figures, that were mostly about fighting... and doing some of the other things heroes did in the stories they had read.Several of their number set out on great quests to make the whole pretend world. Long years passed, and each returned with broken armour on lathered horses. But elsewhere, a new light was dawning. Some players had become very interested in their characters. They hoped to get an experience from RPGing that more closely resembled a story in the sense studied in schools and drama. Protagonists, antagonists, emotion, inner progress.The parameters and rules that had satisfied the wargamers got in the way of this, or at least didn't fulfil it. So they added bonds and flaws - things their characters would care about - that could change them. Behind them, however, was a dreadful spectre. A revenant of a wargamer in each group who had been crowned high-ruler. The spectre saw that if it was high-ruler of everything wargamers cared about, and everything dramatists cared about, then it would control everything. It would say who did what, and why. But it was defied. Some dramatists saw that they could choose what the spectre controlled. The spectre had grown used to saying what was in the world, but the dramatists saw that they could share this power among themselves, so that even if they submitted to the spectre (in its many forms and proxies) on deep, moving, and personal change to their now dramatic characters, they might still play a crucial part in saying what happened.The stories they could tell were no longer those of simple pretend battles, or vaster pretend worlds, but now of the dramatic spaces inside themselves. Those spaces had always been compelling to explore.But it was a choice: they could not banish the spectre, because the spectre was also what made their stories into games, rather than pre-told, linear narrative, or theatric improv.Some asked if this land they had reached was the last land, or might there be other lands beyond? And they were rightly reviled, for what good had ever come of defying that which is known.</blockquote>

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