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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8630581" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I'll try and go into some more detail tomorrow when I have more time, but in an abbreviated form: Since at least AD&D2e there's been a strong thread of Dramatist concerns that ran through it, starting from the more fiction-emulation parts of the hobby that came in from SF/fantasy fandom, and probably started cresting hard in D&D as a whole because of, well, Dragonlance.  It was particularly noticeable because some of the old-school Fantasy F**** Vietnam types got really soggy about it when it started to happen, and still, in some cases, speak about it with disdain.But that concern only modestly touched the actual mechanics of the game.  At most it may have made some of the pseudo-Simulationist elements in prior editions become less prominent, but the closest thing to Dramatist mechanics you got was the integration of some things to provide more character distinction (the kits, the more full-blown integration of Non-Combat Proficiencies).  I'd speculate this is because for all that parts of the fandom who wanted an experience more like the fiction they took in, they were still seeing it mostly through a Gamist sort of lens; that was late enough that people for whom something more on-target for them had other options starting to show, and they'd started to migrate off to them.(As an example of this, consider how late in the day it was until there was even a basic metacurrency in the game, and that's a pretty minimalist plot-steering tool).  For the most part any input in steering plot outside of in-character actions was done in an ad-hoc fashion.  On the other hand, the game progressively was shedding anything but relatively superficial (in GDS terms) Simulation elements.  (These were always kind of secondary to the actual mechanics in the game which weren't notably simulationist, but several of us went into that in the other thread so its probably not useful to repeat it).</blockquote>

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