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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8512214" data-attributes="member: 42582">Is the timing of world-establishing fiction any more salient than whether we use d20, d%, 2d6 or dice pools?Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I think some explanation needs to be given of why. In my Prince Valiant and Burning Wheel play (both coin-toss style dice pool systems), and even in Classic Traveller (2d6, often with only modest modifiers) I notice that ties come up a lot more often than in D&D or Rolemaster. And in BW the system is specifically designed to make ties matter, whereas in 4e D&D the approach is to treat ties as an impediment, with standard tie-breaker rules.What about deciding what the stakes of a unit of play will be? (where what counts as a unit of play - an "exchange" (like, say, a D&D combat round) or a session or a campaign or the life-in-play of a particular PC might all be candidates - is of course itself something that can vary, in ways that affect the play experience). Different answers to that question have driven swathes of RPG design - to pick two contrasting RPGs, 5e D&D and Burning Wheel answer that question pretty differently, I think.The point of this post isn't to dispute your list's contents, but rather its completeness. And I didn't come up with my possibilities of lengthening it from nowhere. They come from games I've read and played, and from having read Edwards, Baker, Czege, Laws, et al.I guess I just don't see what is being gained from trying to rebuild RPG analysis from scratch. For what it's worth, I also don't see what is at issue in the ontological and legal questions - what counts as a rule of system X is often an important question in a legal context, because both ordinary people and officials have special obligations, given their particular circumstances, to defer to and/or apply rules of some systems but not others, but I don't see why this matters in the case of RPGing. But taking it as given that one wants to undertake this task, why discard all the work that has been done on classifying the elements, and interactions, and processes, that make up RPGs and RPGing?</blockquote>

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