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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 5477872" data-attributes="member: 9225">You guys are getting bogged down in fairly trivial aesthetic preferences. All game systems are arbitrary to some degree, all of them influence the narrative, and all of them make statements about the story world, whether they intend to or not.This is what I mean:1) Arbitrariness means that something other than what seems logical, reasonable or good will come out of any game system for no other reason than some structural outcome. D&D4 power use frequency leads to examples of this, where the "powerup" period can lead to various silly events. It is impossible to design a game system that doesn't do this, but it is possible to try and heavily indoctrinate a community to ignore these issues. Thanks to D&D's current instability, many people are now waking up from this indoctrination.2) All game systems engage the story on a narrative meta-level as well as simulating physics or whatever. The popular notion of a divide between these things is false. That's because even a game that tries to be about fantasy physics must dwell on things that matter to the story (no "bathroom break frequency" rules!) and tune them for a desired effect, and games that are highly "meta" about conflict and story must eventually be rendered as *things* in a self-consistent fashion.3) Game systems impart meaning to the world of the story because they provide our way in. We really cannot ignore the idea that the rules are a machine that makes the world happen, even if the game isn't intended to do that. This is part of our nature as en emotional, symbol-manipulating species. We do not have hard and fast "simulation" and "narrative" boxes.One of piece of marketing indoctrination WotC pushed was that game design was a technology that objectively improved and definitively solved problems. This worked for 3e, because it was an update of a game that had not experienced a major design overhaul since the late 70s/early 80s (2e does not really mess with the fundamentals established by 1e). Then 4e came around, WotC pushed the same message, and you guys sensed something was up. Around the same time, the OSR established that the doctrine of progress was meaningless to them.I think that in any mature consideration of what RPGs mean to us, we must admit that there are problems that *can't be solved* outside of the specifics of one's own table. A designer or design team can tell you what the rules are supposed to mean, and how they are supposed to work, but past a certain point they *cannot* help you. They can develop alternatives that you might not have the time or skill to create yourself, but they can't make you ignore 4e's arbitrary bits, or the weird feeling that a narrative rule makes a statement about the underlying nature of the game world. You can say, "This is how we assume you'll interpret the rules," and talk about tricky points, alternatives and so on, but you absolutely cannot make RPGs drop the three properties I listed above.</blockquote>

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