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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6591147" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is where the Forge (or its predecessors) had got to when Edwards wrote his "Right to Dream" essay!Your comments about computer gaming are interesting but not anything I can add to. (I'm not a computer gamer.)The bit I've quoted is interesting too, because it highlights the role of the GM (setting initial parameters, adjudicating changes and developments in the gameworld). But it leaves rather unclear what the role of the players is. What exactly are they doing? And how are they expected to think themselves into the mind of the GM? Is it a type of puzzle they're meant to solve? Or is the goal some convergent aesthetic experience?I'm trying to channel myself of 25 years ago, which was when I had abandoned D&D out of the usual dissatisfactions (AC, hp, classes, poor skill system, etc) and started running Rolemaster.I (and those I was playing with) definitely wanted a verisimilitudinous action resolution process (or, at least, what seemed verisimilitudinous to us) - armour makes you easier to touch but harder to hurt (RM combat tables); a combatant can shift his/he emphasis between attack and defence (RM parry rules); injuries taken cause debuffing (RM crit rules); caters can choose to parcel out, or alternatively focus, their magical power (RM spell point rules).But we never assumed a neutral world or neutral/algorithmic motivations for play. Players were expected, and allowed, to make decisions about risk and effort (in melee combat, spellcasting, etc) which reflected not just the PC's ingame motivations but the player's own tolerance for risk vs reward, taking a fun gamble etc (though of course there is bleed, here, between player and PC motivation/personality). And as GM I was deliberately setting up situations (with mysterious strangers, etc) that would engage the players, and was accommodating their expressed play preferences demonstrated via PC build (so the PCs with illusion spells, performance skill etc got to make money busking, to succeed by way of infiltration/disguise, etc) and via PC play.So it was a type of proto-scene framing world and scenario design, mixed with purist-for-sim resolution procedures. These two things come repeatedly into conflict, and nearly 20 years of handling that, with the conflict becoming more and more evident, is what prompted my move to a different system!I think these are both pretty spot-on, at least for a fair bit of play I've engaged in!The "tour the GM's world/story" is very common. I think it works in CoC but pretty much sucks in D&D (which is a game of heroic protagonism).The "have it come out 'right'" I think is also fairly common - for instance, you can see [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] in this thread dismissing fictional contrivances as inappropriate for RPGing.This is one source of the conflict I mentioned in my RM play: the purist-for-system resolution tends towards things "coming out right", but the approach to world and scenario design was looking more for a genuine genre feel.</blockquote>

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