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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8873722" data-attributes="member: 4937">But then you abandon a naturalistic approach.  Instead of crafting the world according to what might be in it and things persons in it might do and build, you are making a world that is constrained to be like a game.  Instead of setting your players loose in the imagined environment, you'll handwave them through sections and lay rails over all the troubled and dangerous ground.  And that's not always bad, but when you are forced to do that the game suffers.   It's like one of the several reasons Mass Effect 1 is so much better than Mass Effect 2.   In the first game, the environment was natural, the levels crafted according to verisimilitude.  Monsters could jump out at you anywhere - in a staircase, in an empty room, even while you were in a haven talking to NPCs.  But in Mass Effect 2 they embraced a game focused combat system, and then combat could only happen in arenas designed for it, and so even before combat happened, you could look into the next room and go, "Yeah, that's a combat arena.  Looks like combat is going to happen."  Emersion was broken.  The game was more limited.  A lot of people liked Mass Effect 2, so it's not like there aren't other ways to play, but the problem is that if you play your TTRPG that way, you become strictly inferior to a video game.  I can make the video game with the two paintings puzzle, one of them trapped, and there is no ambiguity.   So now you have a TTRPG that sacrificed the one thing that gives satisfaction no video game really can, the truly open world.All the time?  Certainly not.  Two hours of Indiana Jones in the trap filled tomb that opens 'Raiders' would have been too much especially if it came to the exclusion of the rest of the movie.   But I don't want to sacrifice that sequence either.  It's as iconic as the first scene of A New Hope where the Star Destroyer fills the screen, and I don't like the idea that there are some thing I just can't do in my TTRPG.</blockquote>

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