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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9199233" data-attributes="member: 70468">This seems to be conflating the games Baker designed with the design work he did to design them. It’s not clear how boxes and clouds, conflict resolution, etc are limited to genre emulation. I’ve certainly found them useful for the homebrew system I’m designing, which I described <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/rpging-and-imagination-a-fundamental-point.701162/page-3#post-9198549" target="_blank">post #54</a> as being OSR-adjacent. It’s pretty open-ended, and story-telling isn’t even really its focus. We do get to learn about the characters, but the overall mechanical orientation is towards treating the world as a place where they live.I would also cite <a href="https://lithyscaphe.blogspot.com/p/principia-apocrypha.html" target="_blank">Principia Apocarypha</a> as an example in the OSR space of taking Baker’s approach to principles in Apocalypse World and extending it to another style of play. However, this doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with my point (see below).I’m suggesting that tabletop role-playing games address the emergent storytelling problem identified in that sidebar. I mentioned Baker et al because it’s topical to this thread, but it doesn’t follow that I’m saying they offer the only solution. That doesn’t even make sense in the context of my next statement, which was to question why it has to be either-or. I’m saying it should be both or more; there’s no one source with all the answers.I almost included that point in my post, so I guess I’ll address it now: Yes. The book’s statement that games are media-independent is a nice way to think about them in the abstract (much like a spherical cow), but it doesn’t hold up in reality. Different media have different advantages and limitations. Sometimes games that are practical to implement in one medium are impossible (or at least impractical) to implement in others.I don’t think designers should be limiting themselves to what works in all media. Sometimes that’s the right decision, but sometimes what’s right is to design for the target media. I think that’s especially true of something like tabletop role-playing games. Limiting ourselves to avoid leveraging the human element effectively foregoes what makes them unique compared to other games. Losing that would be a shame.</blockquote>

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