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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9199343" data-attributes="member: 70468">That Baker has created a certain type of game as a product of his design work doesn’t necessarily mean his design work leads only to creating that type of games.Sure, some tabletop role-playing games concern themselves more with playing through or experiencing a curated experience. The GM is still in charge of things, but they’re not trying to create an emergent story. I’m having trouble seeing how that relates to “Genre Emulation” mechanics.Since you mention later wanting to make sure we’re all speaking the same language, I’d like to get some clarity. When I think of “Genre Emulation”, I think of recreating and mechanically reinforcing the tropes of literary or film genres, which seems more like physics or perhaps internal economy, tactical maneuvering, or even social interaction mechanics —all of which are emergence mechanics.Would you also include mechanics like conflict resolution or progress clocks?We had a <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/games-as-story-machines.699578/" target="_blank">thread about that</a> a few months ago. Sadly, it didn’t get much traction. I think what the text means by “emergent storytelling” is something different than the various stories that emerge from the interaction of mechanics (like the example of Elden Ring in the video discussed in that thread). The sidebar is specifically talking about progress-as-journey, particularly how it can be useful for stories (versus progress-as-resource).There are certain elements it identifies as required for a good story (coherence, novelty, causality, credible characters). It observes a difference between dramatic tension and gameplay tension, then it touches a bit on how games (particularly video games) can adopt mechanics to create the feel of being storylike. It does this to try to explain how progress-as-resource does not necessarily conflict with storytelling. The rest is as-quoted above.The issue with relying on emergent mechanics alone is they need something to tie them together to provide the expected dramatic tension because that won’t happen naturally. I pointed to tabletop role-playing games as having a solution because they typically designate one participate whose job it is to take care of those sorts of things: the GM. Baker’s games show one way of operationalizing that, but it’s not the only one.This seems to imply a similar definition to the one I’m using, but the conclusion is very different. Can you give an example of a Genre Emulation mechanic and how it relates to the progress of the player?Railroading is fine if people understand that’s what they’re doing. It’s a problem when it’s hidden, and the players wouldn’t be cool with that.Fair enough. I’m still skimming through it and focusing on different sections. It seems like there needs to be an another exception made for what the GM brings to tabletop role-playing games.</blockquote>

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