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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9198601" data-attributes="member: 7040941">Ive said more than couple times now that this isn't about making value judgements. I'm sure theres some unintended idiosyncrasy in how I talk thats leading you (and others) to believe otherwise, but after Ive explicitly said I'm not making judgements more than once, one has to either accept it and move past whatever the issue is, or stop engaging, because continuing down this path, not acknowledging what Im saying my intentions are, is just going to spill over into an argument and eventually Red Text. I can grant that I don't always communicate as well as Id like (consequence of just not having the energy to better emulate how I speak in person or write in a more formal setting), but I'm being pretty forthright about what Im trying to say, so picking apart my statements to find ways to disagree is just uncalled for. At this point I don't particularly care to keep going down this rabbit hole, as I don't see continuing to fight imagined value judgements to be worthwhile. Sure, but I'm speaking from a perspective of what counts qualitatively as a player, which if we go by the Merriam Webster definition is defined as "a person who plays",  with play in turn being defined as "a particular act or maneuver in a game". A GM by definition is a player (in addition to the referee roll), and ergo they can and should be able to drive the game through their own agency. Which is why I keep bringing up the improv game. The improv game is literally what you're talking about. Improv games break if the players cannot or will not agree on the shared reality. The overall split on who says what doesn't actually matter, whether its writers room, the classic GM/Player split, or some other mixture; that comes down to taste which is preferred. What matters is that improv games break if one player is able to monopolize the spotlight. (Never mind all the other possible breaking points like blocking)In older DND, this was actually less of a problem because the Exploration/Dungeon turn structure reinforced a shared spotlight when it came to whatever improv was invoked. As those things disappeared, right around the 90s, not so coincidentally, its hardly surprising more and more tables started running into these issues. If any DND had ever made an effort to be explicit about incorporating the improv game properly, all of those problems could have been avoided, including the perennial issue of GM railroading. GMs have more than a few characters they're in charge of, and I'd actually argue its very easy to play an RPG without actually having any PCs. Hell, I do it all the time in fact because Ive taken quite a shine to just running my gameworlds on their own, and I've come up with some pretty clever ways to do it too. Course, I also controversially don't consider GMPCs to be a fundamentally bad thing to begin with, so that does influence my thoughts on this particular train of thought. Since around 2018ish nearly every major villain I've ever used in any game has been a solo character I introduce and run no differently from any other PC. And thats before you get into something like Dialect or Microscope, where whatever "PCs" that exist are no more substantive than the common NPC a trad GM would be using.As related by the examination of a PBTA gameloop, I still believe it to be playstyle reinforcement, and there isn't an RPG I've examined that doesn't utilize it in some form as, at least one, core of the gameplay. Exactly, if we want to use some other language, the crux of what we're talking about is choices and consequences. An RPG will give you X probability space to perform actions in, and it will provide Y feedback in response, which reinforces you to follow Z playstyle. If you kill, people hate you, you either kill more because they hate you or you stop killing because thats not the style you intended. To use a video game example, take Mass Effect. This is recognized as an RPG, and it uses much of the classical elements like Classes, XP, etc. But what Mass Effect is known for in particular is its Paragon/Renegade system, which is a playstyle reinforcement mechanic thats specifically tuned to make the player, acting as Shephard, still come out in the end as more or less a pulpy Sci-fi action hero. While the beginnings and end are mostly prescribed, you're given a wide probability space  in the middle to play with as you work your way through the narrative, and thats where the bulk of Mass Effect's fun is. You're allowed to be as much of an ass or boy scout as you prefer, and the game responds in kind. Now, Mass Effect does go wrong individually in terms of following through on its consequences, and thats how the franchise drifted into Mass Effect 2, where it mattered for a lot more, and how we eventually got to the travesty of 3's ending. While Bioware always seemed to have issues sticking the landing, the middle was always consistently fun. Now I pointed to that example because its a progression game; it follows a fixed, linear narrative that tightly converges towards a prescribed ending. While most TTRPG types would expressly reject this style of RPG (and they did, hence the Forge), Mass Effect is still an RPG at the end of the day. That in of itself speaks to what elements are core to the RPG as a genre, and while there's a clear split between Progression RPGs (like Mass Effect and most cRPGs) and Emergent RPGs (see most TTRPGs and arguably sandbox RPGs☆), the common thread is playstyle reinforcement, which in turn has many different flavors depending on intent. Classes and Playbooks for example serve similar functions, but diverge in intent. Playbooks reinforce genre emulation, while Classes traditionally reinforce combat rolls(☆☆)☆I'd argue that a game like Bannerlord is actually an example of a truly emergent cRPG, when played in Sandbox mode. While the medium fundamentally restricts the probability space to a real number, as does the game's focus as a mildly arcadey medieval warfare sim, the probability space for that specific kind of story is gigantic. ☆☆I certainly know Im not going to be continuing that tradition. Im going to post the diagram separately.</blockquote>

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