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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6397962" data-attributes="member: 2067">Right, because we're comparing two things that people like, rather than something that one person likes and another person doesn't like because they've had different experience.Feelings aren't something that are debatable. If someone thinks they liked something, then they liked it. They can't be "wrong."In absence of some actual product, I think judging the setting on some hypothetical future possibility is reaching a bit for excuses to dislike it. And hell, even if the factions came back, the other stuff still happened. I dunno, man, shifting infinities and raising dead demon lords feels pretty effin' big to me. Far-reaching, epic campaigns have certainly been built on smaller. Dragonlance only involved saving one world. Dark Sun's big transformation was only one city. You sound kind of like someone who hears about how Harry Potter had a war in his wizarding school and sniffs that it's really pretty insignificant because all it is is one little school in one little secret wizard enclave and it's not like anything of NOTE happened.But, look, this isn't a wang-dangle, I'm not trying to prove that the size of this change is somehow "big enough" to pass some arbitrary bar you're setting. You said it was static, I cave a few canonical examples of pretty dang significant change in the campaign, and your only reaction was to dismiss them as not significant enough (which is moving the goalposts if I've ever seen it). If you don't want to like PS, I'm not really trying to convince you -- your feelings aren't wrong. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I'm not one to sell bacon to an imam. But I do LOVE bacon, and no matter how much that imam tries to insist that pigs are inherently dirty animals, I am going to continue to love it! The first part I don't really understand is what you mean by "learning about the setting." You go on to describe three actions that fall under that umbrella for you, the DM reading a description out loud, the players taking some action to provoke the DM to read a description out loud, and the players declaring an action with the GM adjudicating the results. All of these things just sound like playing any RPG to me. The DM describes the approaching orcs, the players say they charge the orcs and the DM describes what happens, and the players declare that they're attacking orcs, and the DM adjudciates the results of their attacks. That counts as "setting exploration?"You also mention that it is "learning what content the setting contains," which is a little confusing to me since I can't imagine what the alternative would look like. Being ignorant of the content the setting contains? But then how are you pretending to be an elf wizard in a standard D&D campaign, since that is learning that the setting contains elves and wizards (and the ways in which they are different from other creatures)? How are you going into dungeons in a standard D&D campaign, since that is learning that the setting contains dungeons (and what lurks in them)? How are you interacting with NPC's, since learning what the barkeep is going to say involves learning that the setting contains barkeeps who talk to you about stuff? Perhaps it is more about "devoting energies" to that as a goal, and it's more a matter of emphasis? But then clearly, goals like breaching a plane, sharing divine energy with people, and gathering a personal cult don't emphasize gaining knowledge about the setting any more than beatin' up some orcs does, and you said those three things fall into the camp of "setting exploration." There's not a lot of energies at the table devoted to just learning about the setting for the sake of learning about the setting, there's some clear intents that are explicitly expressed there that demand to be satisfied primarily. You also mention "constraints on authorship" and "fidelity" as factors in having PC's declare actions and having DMs resolve them, but as  [MENTION=11697]Shemeska[/MENTION] mentioned, there's no goal of setting purity in play, no requirement to remain faithful to some canon, and the PS books are even explicitly written from an "in-universe" perspective to encourage individual groups to vary from the source material where appropriate. So I guess I still don't really understand why you imagine that PS play falls into setting exploration, or what, really, functionally, setting exploration is for you. Perhaps some contrast would be useful -- what is the opposite of setting exploration? What does a game with zero setting exploration (or a "de-emphasis") look like? It's worth noting that the "belief defines reality" aspect of PS means that NPC's come to share the perspectives of the PC over the course of a campaign. If your character believes in the fundamental incoherence of the multiverse, as they gain power and influence, the multiverse actually becomes less coherent, that fundamental truth that they believe in being expressed through reality, so that people who may have disagreed or doubted them no longer disagree or doubt, because the evidence is mounting and more obvious. It becomes more true, because their power and influence has made it true, thanks to the setting's rather unique take on how reality is created.  I don't necessarily follow all the obfuscating jargon-speak (life choices reinforced today: I would have made a horrible academic), but PS presents an existing universal perspective to which everyone has access, but notes that this perspective is actually only something of an aggregate of the perspectives of the people within that universe. That's how belief engineers change in the setting: by changing the views of the people that make up that aggregate, you change the universal perspective to align more with your personal perspective. The Great Wheel is objective reality determined subjectively, and is only true because most of the campaign's NPCs accept it to be true. Part of what the PC's do is change what the campaign's NPC's accept to be true, thus transforming or even eradicating the Great Wheel. Certainly our character who believes in the fundamental incoherence of the multiverse might end the campaign having erased the Great Wheel, leaving a bubbling, frothing, multicosmic chaos in their wake, because that is now what most people accept to be true. And they'll face great opposition from those who believe that the multiverse is fundamentally ordered, or from those who believe that the multiverse is a creation of their own minds.</blockquote>

Verification