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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8628413" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, I can tell you right now that I have had some occasional struggles with this as a DM. Many groups form from just friends deciding to play together. Mine formed because I had several friends I trusted, and one of them was going through a real tough time personally, so he tried playing D&D and his first group was....really bad. Really, really bad, to the tune of "a player pressured the DM into giving them a ninth-level spell as a level 1 racial feature," among other issues. I saw that and thought to myself, "I may not be confident that I'm a good DM, but I am absolutely 100% certain that I am better than that." So I assembled my group from various friends I know.The composition has changed a lot, as have the preferences of the various participants. I've had a hardcore powergamer/instigator, a player who has shifted from a bit naive instigator/explorer to a more mature, sober instigator/explorer, a very cerebral story-centric/actor/strategist player, a shy powergamer just beginning to test the waters of roleplay, etc. We've got people spanning several decades in terms of age groups. It's a diverse thing with few perfectly shared interests.As a result, I'm fairly sure it hasn't always been obvious from the outset what "cohort" my players belonged to, and it hasn't always been a perfectly smooth experience producing a game that engages everyone. Gaming groups are, very often (but not always), things that form from friendships, which often form from chance associations. Most of my good friends are people I met as a result of having been a member of the old Golden Sun GameSpy forum, or having played freeform text RP back on AvidGamers, or people I met as a result of having met those people. We represent a huge swathe of different origins, locations, cultures, etc. I can almost guarantee that if you picked a random group of five of my friends, even if they all got along with one another, they wouldn't want entirely the same things out of their RPG experiences.I mean, it might. But it also might not--and I lean toward "might not." I find most "race-as-class" or "classes restricted by race" things are exclusively for simulationist reasons, not for "narrative" ones, whether that be "process" Sim or "genre" Sim. That is, it's not that dwarves can't be clerics but can be runecasters because there is a story to be told or a dramatic moment to experience, but rather, because dwarves in this setting are atheist because they killed their gods and stole the rune magic they used ("process" Sim: the dwarves have no living gods, and thus have no way to engage the "devotion to gods" process, but do have a technique they zealously guard from outsiders); or, alternatively, because this is a setting heavily inspired by The Elder Scrolls, where the "dwarves" are the Dwemer, pointedly atheist technologists who believe all beings can (and, from what I can tell, should) ascend to a similar height as the gods ("genre" Sim, featuring the Conceit of technology and Frankensteinian "toying with forces beyond the lot of mortals" type stuff.)A key thing, here, is that "Narrative" in the GNS does not mean "a game where narratives exist," because that statement describes damn near all games ever. If you give anything even a little bit of descriptive text, you have some kind of narrative. Thus, the casual definition of "narrative" is kinda worthless for discussing roleplaying games, because it refers to literally almost anything. A different, more specific, definition is substituted. Specifically: games where the primary player activity is personally creating and exploring narrative events. Hence my emphasis on Value and Issues in my own taxonomy. For the player to be the one who is creating the narrative, they have to be the one defining what protagonism means in context (the scene that the DM has framed), which means deciding what they care about or wish to see, what I called their Value(s), and then facing and "resolving" conflict (quotes because "resolving" it may mean succumbing to it, or deciding it doesn't actually matter anymore, etc.), aka Issue(s) putting those things to the test.Again: "a game where narratives exist" describes essentially all RPGs. "A game where the players themselves create narratives as the action of play itself," however, is much more specific.I had a lot more to say on this but...well, it might have been in excess. So I cut it out. Should it be relevant I have it saved though.</blockquote>

Verification