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="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8503365" data-attributes="member: 82106">I just have a rather different experience overall with RPGs than you do. What I see in terms of 5e's process is that any interchange in combat between fiction and mechanics outside of someone dies is rather toothless. Yeah, technically the GM could say "the orc hit you with an axe and did max damage, your right arm comes off!" but I guarantee that will raise some objections from the players at any real world table I've ever run! 5e also does has a fair number of things that invoke some fiction, many spells, conditions/effects of things like Battlemaster stuff, but even a lot of that is nailed down enough to be mostly 'boxes to boxes'. I also would agree that it depends a bit on exactly what sort of 5e you play HOWEVER, it still is materially different from a PbtA game, where EVERY action flows in a mandatory loop cloud to box to cloud and cannot work any other way at all. Mostly what I would say is where we differ is in terms of what we think is likely to be actual practice in the real world of playing games. In all my decades of running D&D I have mostly seen 'boxes to boxes' play, wherever and whenever it was enabled (IE most AD&D combat for instance). I think a game is well-served by formalizing the process by which you move back and forth between fiction and mechanical process, and I further believe that good use of cues is potentially one strategy that can help with getting it right in actual play.Again, I am just not seeing how other forms of analysis are helping that much. Whether a rule is constitutive or restrictive doesn't seem to tell me whether or not fiction is 'in the loop'. I'm concerned with fiction's place in play because I'm concerned with the process of story evolution as a principle concern. D&D, as originally conceived, was much more about what characters did to advance in power, which is a purely mechanical concept even if it has some attached fictional significance. I think even 5e is still utilizing fundamentally an allocation of roles at the table and a process of interaction of fiction and mechanics which was built for that purpose. It just doesn't do 'story now' as well. Anyway, in terms of actually building specific RPGs which do specific things it IS useful to discuss the nature of these systems. That is, I'm sure I have a slightly better handle on design concepts and what works than I did even a year ago.</blockquote>

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