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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5207438" data-attributes="member: 4937">pemerton: I feel like you keep bundling together things which are different under the same term, and separating things which are similar.You say that as if it was the only way to achieve dramatic play in 2nd edition, and as if the goal in a sterotypical 2nd edition module was achieving dramatic play.  The purpose of vitiating player choice wasn't so much to achieve dramatic play, but to achieve a consistant story so that any group who played the module would start at point A and end at point B.  I would go even further and say that the writer's weren't just trying to communicate a way to make group A and group B's experience of play the same, but that they were trying to communicate there own experiences and own imagined scenes directly to other groups.  They weren't merely trying to create dramatic play, they were trying to create a a particular dramatic experience.  In other words, they were trying to create the experience of being within not just a fantasy novel but a particular fantasy novel.No, I don't think that there is.  The only difference between the two is how explicitly the DM is making clear his goals, and even that doesn't need to differ between the two.  If we can imagine ourselves at the table when first games of Dragon Lance are being played by the original players for the purpose of creating a publishable product, it's easy to see that there is mutual understanding between the GM and players that all the force and overriding of the normal action resolution mechanics is being used in order to frame specific scenes that are desired parts of the story.  You are absolutely doing the same thing.  The only difference is that you aren't pretending, as some DMs running a published story module from the period might have, that you aren't doing that.   Everything else is the same, even the bouncing back and forth between the use of GM force to achieve a particular desired scene and the reliance between the games normal action resolution mechanics.And so does the former, the only difference being you've implicitly or explicitly asked permission to do so.  You apparantly play with a group that gives you the expressed permission to vitiate their choices because they enjoy your stories, or they trust that once they pass through your chokepoint that the gamespace will be reasonably broad, or they just don't have any other choice but to do so.  What ever reason, you seem to have a group happily rides the rails and you've got long experience with presumably eager participationism.Wait a minute... what in the world does bottles on door handles have to do with system?  Assuming that we are playing in a world where there are door handles and bottles or some equivalent (strings and pots and pans, whatever), exactly what system do you play where the option to set up a simple mechanical alarm like this is unavailable to the players due to the 'action/resolution mechanics'?  That has nothing to do with system, unless you are playing in a game where everything that isn't explicitly described by the system is an invalid proposition.And I think in a sense that is actually what you are playing, because your metagame negotiation is apparantly bouncing your group around any of these decision points.  You are effectively saying that certain ways of playing aren't things you can choose to do, and hense that certain actions aren't possible.  You're like a director yelling 'Cut!' when the actor starts to go off script, and saying, "Ok, that's a wrap.  Now, are we all ready to move to scene #3.  In this scene, you've woke up in the dungeon of the Baron.  Roll camera."  Maybe you aren't a heavy handed director who is seeking input from his actors, but that still seems to be what you are describing.It's not mechanics.  It's player choice.  It's extra-mechanical.  It's just offering up choices that direct interactions with the gamespace, rather than with the game mechanics.  I used to play eight hour sessions of 1e AD&D where not a single dice was rolled.  It was very much AD&D, but much of what was being done was play that wasn't governed by system just as a bottle balanced on a door handle will fall off when the door is opened regardless of what system we are playing.  And I think you are going to want to say that we weren't playing AD&D, but alot of this freeform creativity was learned playing traditional AD&D tournament modules like 'Tomb of Horrors' and 'Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan' where you are strongly rewarded for relying on extramechanical solutions rather than luck of the dice.  That and well, role playing, which isn't strongly system governed in AD&D.  Or you might suggest that I'm discarding system, but in fact I'm just playing out in the broad spaces where every system is silent.  You only need system when resolution isn't obvious from context and could go several ways.  No system has a rule 'Walls are solid.'  They only have rules pointing to the exceptions where walls don't have to be treated as solid!I don't think playing 4e would change any of that experience.  The gameplay surrounding famous events in my gaming history like, "The Battle of Starmantle", would have been largely system independent.  The dramatic tension between nationalism and loyalty, and a commitment to a higher ethical standard would have been the same.  The dramatic tension of knowing you are allying yourself with traitors who are motivated by self-interest, in hopes of acheiving some higher good would have been the same.  Questioning whether the ends justify the means still always involves dramatic tension.  These are timeless story questions and what in the world does system have to do with any of that?  And for that matter, why would I need (or even want) system support for that and what in the world would it look like?I just find you baffling.  I don't either.  I'm not exactly sure where you get that from I why you think it matters.  But, just so you'll know how far off the mark you are when you say something like that...I reject Forge GNS theory in one of its most basic tenents - that a system cannot satisfy all three stances at the same time.  I believe that it's quite possible to balance all three stances in a single game, and further that part of the 'inexplicable' success of D&D is that it actually does a pretty good job of doing so.  You can have a player prefers Nar, one that likes a Sim sandbox, and another who is a hard core Gamer at the same table and if you ask them, they'll each say that the game that they are playing is the what they like the most.  The Nar player is getting his big dramatic story with big premises like 'Are the Gods worthy of worship?' or 'What do you do when you love your country but you feel it is in the wrong?' in a relatively low lethality game that supports continuity while engaging in the sort of system independent low drama that any system can support.  The Sim player is getting this big sandbox living world filled with all sorts of esoteric detail, and the Gamer gets to participate in manage and direct these tense tactical combats and over come puzzles in a game that supports the sort of player/GM contests he enjoys.  Win win win.To a certain extent then, I reject the notion of describing play as 'nar', 'sim', or 'gamist'.  It is to me often all three at once and any attempt to describe it as one or the other involves tortured arbitrary distinctions and obfuscation that become absolutely unnecessary when you just dispense with the notion that games neatly divide into categories (or else are 'incoherent', which is just a semi-polite way of saying badwrongfun).   And so the whole question of whether something is a nar game or not, or whether this system supports a particular style of play or not, just seems like so much BS to me.  It also follows that I tend to think many Indie games are exagerrated in one aspect to the point of grotesqueness in a futile attempt to make a 'pure' game according to a bizarre theory.  They strike me as striving to be shallow one note games that are good at only one thing and which satisfy only a narrow range of players.  They are interesting to me mainly as creative design excercises.  For that matter, I see 4e in much the same way - futilely attempting to be a pure focused system when that's the opposite of what makes a game satisfying.</blockquote>

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