Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4096306" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know that they invented it - it's just that it's the only canonical definition of the term I know. From this alone, it's hard to distinguish playstyles - eg both Runequest and HeroQuest might fit this description, but the first is ultra-simulationist and the second extremely non-simulationist in its mechanics.I don't think that's right. 4e has eschewed the attempt to use the mechanics to model ingame causality. The mechanics instead distribute narrative control. It's up to those exercising that control (sometimes GMs, sometimes players) to narrate a verisimilitudinous world. There are at least two ways to depict a verisimilitudinous gameworld. One approach (eg Runequest) has mechanics that model such a gameworld very consistently. Another (eg HeroQuest) has mechanics that distribute narrative control across the player and GM, and the participants in the game use that control to narrate a consitent gameworld. The second is what the Forge calls "narrativist". Hence my wondering whether you had the Forge sense, or some other sense, in mind - it turns out you had some other sense in mind.The point about player empowerment is that if the players aren't empowered to narrate the story (eg via fortune-in-the-middle mechanics) then they are not really participating in the telling of the narrative, but rather having it dictated by a combination of (i) the mechanics and (ii) the world that the GM is creating and narrating.I think that 4e, by empowering players to shape the gameworld (eg via the skill challenge mechanics) will actually increase the capacity of D&D to be a game of shared story telling. More story will actually emerge during play, while (consistently with the whole PoL approach) the role of the GM in pre-determining the story (via worldbuidling, control of action resolution, adjudicaiton of mechanical alignment etc) will decrease.</blockquote>

Verification