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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9197592" data-attributes="member: 42582">This statement, to the extent that I can make sense of it, seems to be false of RPGs.The relationship between mechanics and fiction is absolutely central to RPG design. It is not a matter of aesthetics separate from mechanics. For instance, the mechanics of encumbrance in classic D&D or Torchbearer - as per my post just upthread - produce a fiction in which character count their beans and worry about their load-outs. If your goal is to have a game where the fiction will resemble (say) REH Conan stories or (say) the epics of The Silmarillion, then you will not want to use encumbrance mechanics!This strikes me as obviously false.For the sake of illustration, let's take classic D&D as a paradigm RPG. It differs from a wargame or a Diplomacy-esque competitive scenario by combining some key features:*There is a shared fiction, managed/curated by a referee (ie a non-"player" participant), and that shared fiction matters to action resolution; *Each of the player participants engages and shapes the shared fiction by declaring actions for a particular character in that fiction, with whom they are identified; *There is no straightforwardly structured win condition - the fiction is in an important sense open-ended, and player goals are established and resolved within that context.From this, various things follow:*The only constraint on permissible player moves is what everyone is prepared to imagine their character doing - this is obviously different from a boardgame, is more open-ended than a typical wargame, and doesn't depend upon technical programming constraints in the way a videogame does; *Some method or system is needed to help keep all the participants' imaginations on the same page - this is where mechanics come in, and also other considerations like the role of the non-"player" participants (the referee) in making decisions about what happens next (so "railroading" is a concern for RPGing in a way that is obviously different from boardgames or videogames).; *What counts as good gameplay - both in the sense of being skilled, and in the sense of being fun - can't be completely independent of what happens to particular characters in the fiction. This gives the "game pieces" a significance that is quite different from typical boardgames or wargames.I'm sure other things could be said too, that I'm not thinking of at present. But I think these points are enough to show that the mechanics-fiction relationship (and the mechanics-character relationship as a special case of that) are fundamental to RPG design. The fiction is not just flavour text.Well I think that here you demonstrate a failure to understand what distinguishes RPGs from other games, in something like the way that Vincent Baker (as per the OP) describes as an "ongoing and outstanding crisis in RPG design". You are equating RPGing with a particular participant attaching some imaginative component to their game play decision - "narrating stuff properly" (you are also looking at that through a lens that assumes particular archetypes/tropes correspond to particular strategies for effectiveness).You are not considering at all the issues of generating a shared imagination via play, nor of maintaining that shared imagination during play, in circumstances where the only limit on player moves is what everyone agrees to imagine a given character can do.Again, this seems obviously false.In classic D&D, when I say "I walk down the corridor, and when I get to the end of it I take my hammer and spikes out of my backpack", I am making moves in the game, changing the shared fiction, but no mechanic is invoked.Contrast Cortex+ Heroic fantasy, where to take a hammer and spikes out of my backpack probably does invoke a mechanic (namely, the rule for spending plot points to establish Resources).These two examples are simple illustrations of the different ways in which a RPG can regulate the shared fiction: sheer consensus (as in the D&D example) vs mechanical constraints (as in the Cortex+ Heroic example). Eliding the difference between them is not helpful for RPG design, given that a key question in RPG design is when to rely on consensus and when to introduce mechanics.All I see here is that you seem to be setting out to reinvent Rolemaster, or some of the elements of 3E D&D.</blockquote>

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