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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vaalingrade" data-source="post: 9506208" data-attributes="member: 82524">Wait... that's what you think plot coupons are?That's like an actual term used for items or checkpoints characters in a story need to collect to complete the plot. It has negative amounts to do with metagame elements.Anyway, this stance-stance thing makes zero sense because most games are a mix of what those empty terms are referring to. There are diegetic parts of the game and non-diegetic parts. Characters aren't aware of their HP for example: HP is an element that's there for the players to tick off attacks until they 'lose' the encounters. Nor are characters actually aware of their class. Like people don't know that the little guy with a knife is doing the kind of damage a knife to the kidneys should do instead of a d4 because he went to Rogue school with a major in Thief.Much like Healing surges, these are things that exist for use the players to make sense of elements that aren't present in other fiction because it's normally controlled by author fiat. Characters don't die because they get hit too much in a story, they die because the writer wants them to and probably because they misunderstood something Steven King wrote long ago.Characters in a story aren't good at shooting a bow because they were born a Ranger; the author chose and then decided what they're capable of.In short, the metagame parts of the game are filling in gaps for the fiction we're collaboratively creating as part of the game. This is a not a separate and alien concept that is opposing roleplaying, it's a part of the game that works harmoniously with it to let the game work.The problem is that decades of arguments and talks and dissection of the game have created all these categorizations without actually thinking or being concerned with how it works in making a working fantasy game and instead tricking people into thinking the goal is some sort of gaming 'purity' they try to achieve by just deleting whole swathes of how the game works, be that the metagame or character-based skill, or what have you.We've become Theory Brained.</blockquote>

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