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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8304180" data-attributes="member: 42582">Then I'm puzzled by your frequent references to Elo rankings of chess players.When I've posted that I don't think I understand what point you are trying to make with your posts, I'm not exaggerating or speaking in rhetorical terms. I can't work out what's going on in them.This is another example of me not grasping your claims.For me, the claim that ToH might just be run using RQ or RM, but not using HeroQuest, is grounded in my understanding of the different systems. For instance, RQ and RM focus primarily on task resolution; HeroQuest doesn't; and ToH is written assuming task and not conflict/scene resolution. RQ and RM - like classic D&D - both include "gear" and "spells" as discrete packets of change to the fiction, which can be used to "poke and prod" the elements within a scene, obliging the GM to narrate further fiction that reveals information that may help to solve the puzzles (eg what happens if we use a torch, or a firefinger spell, to set the curtains alight?). HeroQuest, perhaps even moreso in its revised form (I know HeroWars and HeroQuest revised but don't have a complete sense of where HeroQuest unrevised sits in the evolution of the system), doesn't include such things and hence doesn't lend itself to that sort of approach to engaging with the fiction and hence generating information.Given that this is, in fact, what my intuition is grounded in, I don't follow your suggestion as to what my intuition might be grounded in. And I also don't really follow what it would mean to assess dramatic mode from the perspective of Gygaxian mode, or vice versa? As far as I understand, the modes are approaches to playing RPGs - so I'm not really sure what it means to treat them as frameworks of assessment.Is this an example? I'm quite comfortable to say that, just as I don't think HeroQuest can be used to run ToH, nor can Prince Valiant. The suggestion is just bonkers. And I'm quite comfortable to say that one reason for this is that playing Prince Valiant just isn't an exercise in manifesting player skill in the way that ToH is premised on. Nothing could be more at odds with the whole tenor of Prince Valiant as a RPG then for a player to narrate his/her PC's passage down a corridor poking things with a 10' pole.If that's an example of assessing "dramatic mode" from the perspective of "Gygaxian mode" than I'm very confident that it can be done, because I just did it! The way I would describe it, though, is this: there are certain processes of play - techniques, principles, expectations - that are central to Gygaxian play but are largely absent in the play of Prince Valiant. The way that Prince Valiant invites players to make choices about what their PCs do, and to think about the shared fiction, is almost completely different.</blockquote>

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