Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="maddman75" data-source="post: 4996649" data-attributes="member: 2673">Its not that you call it a storytelling game.  Its that you claim it is not an RPG any more.  I don't know how to take that other than 'Maddman doesn't play RPGs right.'Would you object if I called your style of game 'Exploration games' and say that its all good and fine and its great you enjoy it but you aren't really playing roleplaying games anymore?You are attempting to redefine commonly used terms.In an effort to be more constructive/less confrontational, consider the following.The heroes set off into the Nutzbuster territory to rescue the daughter of the merchant.  They end up in a scene with the orc chief and the tied up daughter.  One player decides that it would be awesome and make for a good ending to the tale if he charged the orc leader, giving his compatriots a chance to rescue the girl.Game mechanically, his character is facing certain death.  He's not getting any drama points or hero dice for doing this, nor are the party indebted to the merchant or anything.  Further, a careful strategic plan would likely work just as well, maybe better.  But the player (and the other players agree) that this would make a cool end to the tale of the kidnapped merchant's daughter.Again, there are no mechanics supporting this.  The GM is acting as 'fair arbiter'.  The player is essentially throwing away his character for no reason other than he thinks it would be an awesome scene.  Are these people, according to you, playing a roleplaying game?  Are the GM and other players being forced to play a 'story game' because one player is making decisions based on what he thinks would be a good story, rather than fulfilling his role?  If the player did it because his background included 'takes dangerous risks' as part of his personality instead of doing it because it was a fun scene, would he then be playing a roleplaying game?  What if there was a rule that doing a dangerous act that the group agreed was cool and fun got a +2 bonus on a d20?  Is that sufficient to render it not a roleplaying game?  What if this wasn't a hard and fast rule, but something the GM just decided to do?What I'm getting at is that you are splitting a very, very fine hair that largely involves reading the minds of the people playing.  That something could be rendered 'not a roleplaying game' based on what one out of four of five players is thinking makes the difference between RPG and not-RPG says to me that this distinction is not accurate, useful, or helpful to understanding what people want out of games and why.</blockquote>

Verification