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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9215352" data-attributes="member: 70468">[USER=7040941]@Emberashh[/USER] I apologize for not replying earlier to your response in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/thinking-about-the-purpose-of-mechanics-from-a-neo-trad-perspective.697190/post-9214927" target="_blank">post #267</a>. I was busy this morning preparing for and then this afternoon with running my homebrew system for my group. It’s the first session we’ve had since early November, so I didn’t have a chance to check the forum until after dinner. Seeing how the discussion had progressed, I wanted to catch up before replying and dragging things back to where they were.First, I would like to thank [USER=6801252]@The-Magic-Sword[/USER] and [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] for explaining things better than I could have done, though I regret how the conversation ended up so focused on the language issue. Maybe I was too hung up on it myself, but being put on the defensive due to the shift in attitude wasn’t helpful either.Regarding the issue of improvisation in tabletop RPGs and its centrality to play, I would agree that it’s important. Coming up with and responding to things in the moment is pretty fundamental when playing a tabletop RPG. I even agree with the sentiment that games could do a better job of communicating how and when and why you should be creating or doing things on the fly. Note that I’m avoiding the question of centrality because I want to provide space for playing with that assumption. Or to put it another way: No, not central but important.That’s not because of some issue I have with improvisation. There were a number of things I created on the fly today during our session. It’s critical to the functioning of my homebrew system. The whole point is to run a hex crawl without actually having to prep a hex crawl. What I don’t want to do is to classify some play as wrong¹. If a game is ignoring or subverting or messing with improvisation, and people enjoy it; then I want to incorporate that into my my model. I was trying to generalize by shifting to “social interaction mechanics²”.[HR][/HR]1: There’s too much Bad Wrong Fun™ BS in the hobby. That’s not to say one shouldn’t look at a design and evaluate whether it succeeds at what it is trying to do, but I want to refrain from passing judgements.2: If one wants to suggest I’ve appropriated Adams’s phrase for “social interaction mechanics”, they can. It’s not exactly untrue, but I’m not wedded to it. I can use something else as long as it’s appropriately evocative and its meaning follows intuitively from the plain meaning of the words.</blockquote>

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