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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7471614" data-attributes="member: 42582">A discussion about cars vs trucks, that assumes there's no such thing as motorcycles - let alone (say) air, rail or water transport - might sometimes benefit from noting that those other possibilities exist out there, and that the discussion is not covering the whole of the field of motorised road transport, let along transport in general.Also,, these discussions suffer badly from an excessive reliance on metaphor and hyperbole rather than literal descriptions.Eg "the characters can do anything" doesn't tell us whether a game is a railroad, a sandbox or something else, because it tells us nothing aout who decides what the characters do.But "the players can do anything" is obviously false in any RPG. Even if we confine it to "the players can establish whatever fiction they like", it's obviously false - eg a player in the opening session of KotB can't just declare "I'm in Geoff fighting giants" or "I'm on the starship Warden chatting with my clone pals!"And "the players can explore whatever they like" is also obviously false. Eg for a player to just pick up the GM's notes and read them is, at many or even most tables, cheating. If the fiction specifies that a player's character is in place A, and the player wants to know what is happening in place B, there are quite strict rules that govern how the player is able to learn that information (assuming that they are not allowed to just stipulate it).So the meaningful discussion is about who gets to author what elements of the fiction, under what conditions, at what time relative to play, etc.</blockquote>

Verification