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!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8645612" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is a sense in which following rules may be voluntary. I say "may" because (if Chomsky and friends are right) then some rules - eg linguistic ones - are not.Even if there is the weight of a massive institution with armed agents sitting behind the rules, a person can choose to disobey. The consequence might be death, but being shot can't make you follow a rule. (Maybe brainwashing or indoctrination can - but as with Chomsky, I will put that to one side in this post.)I think these examples also show the relative weakness of the claim that following rules is voluntary. There can be all sorts of reasons to choose to follow rules: the desire not to be shot; the desire not to be hated; the desire to get along with others; the desire to successfully coordinate social ventures; and in the case of games, the desire to experience a particular structure of play.As I, and [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER], have posted upthread, this tells us nothing about differences in game play. Choosing to play chess and choosing to play draughts are both voluntary, at least in typical cases. That doesn't mean there's no difference between them as games. Choosing to play charades is voluntary too. That doesn't mean that there's no difference between chess and charades. There's a clear sense in which chess is governed more strictly by rules than charades; that the total "game space" for chess is constituted differently, and more "mathematically", than the game space for charades; that knowing lots about popular culture will be more helpful in playing charades than playing chess; etc.There is a difference, too, between playing charades and playing twenty questions; and the fact that both involve making guesses, often about the same sorts of subject matters, doesn't eliminate that difference.In Burning Wheel, it is the job of the players to (i) hook the GM through certain key elements of their PC building, and (ii) if the game moves away from their preferred hooks, to use their powers of action declaration (especially around Circles and Wises) to move the game back in their preferred direction. I've posted examples upthread of how this actually happened in my play.AD&D 2nd ed has nothing comparable to either (i) or (ii). The game rules set out a quite different expectation, namely, that the GM will hook the players and that the players will follow those hooks. The game does not give the players any means to set their own hooks, nor to force the GM to frame scenes in the way a Circles check can.The fact that both BW and AD&D 2nd ed require the GM to make decisions, and that those decisions include the framing of scenes, doesn't change any of the above.If someone tries to use BW to play in the AD&D 2nd ed style, they will have problems: Circles checks, Resources checks, Wises checks will all be disruptive. You'd have to ignore them, and ignore the instructions to players, and ignore the advice on writing Beliefs - perhaps adopting instead the Torchbearer advice on writing Goals.If someone tries to use AD&D 2nd ed to play in the BW style, they will have problems. The players have no powers or resources to direct play in the way the BW style assumes. It would all have to be done at the metagame/social contract level.I don't see how any of this is controversial.</blockquote>

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