Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8410238" data-attributes="member: 42582">Upthread I explained that I think AW is brilliant but not completely novel. Part of its brilliance is that it brings to the surface ideas and approaches that have been implicit in (some) RPGing for a long time, and explains and celebrates them, and pushes them beyond previous limits and understandings.It's as if Baker realised he needed new words to describe what he was doing, and what he was inviting us to do. And he melded that into his presentation of his imagined world and all these protagonists in it for whom this real affection, and sometimes pity, shines through - he doesn't read like an author who hates his characters!Consider this example, of Uncle the Hardholder leading his gang who are under attack from Dremmer (it's on pp 169-70):Uncle rolls+hard for leadership and hits with a 10+. “Great. We hold firm against a hard advance. It’s a hard advance, right?” . . . With him as its strong, present leader, the gang will hold together just fine through this exchange, and through another one like it. The danger to this gang is that they’ll be massacred, not that they’ll break. “Well, you hold firm,” I say. “Mifflin and Putrid go down— Putrid’s guts are all over you — and Pallor and a couple of others are badly hurt. You take a bullet yourself for 2-harm. Your gang badly wants to bug out, not endure another strike. As far as you can tell, you’ve done no damage at all to the attackers, you’ve just broken their momentum. They go to ground all over the place, you’re coming under fire from 3 directions. What do you do?”That shows us how the game works. And it shows us how the game puts humans, and their humanity, front-and-centre. Like I said upthread, the only RPGs I can think of that are anything like this are Burning Wheel and Over the Edge.</blockquote>

Verification