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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9202483" data-attributes="member: 71699">One thing I took away from it is to reflect on how PbtA delivers genre. When I think about games like Avatar, MotW and DW, I can see how Moves have let their designers crystallise their focus genres into their core mechanics. (I've dropped the "emulation" because I think those same structures would deliver genre even if it were innovative - emulating nothing - notwithstanding that practically every PbtA design I can think of is emulating some preexisting genre. Although many also synthesise between and evolve them.)Separately, I was thinking about the story/discourse split in narratology, and whether that had applicability to RPG. (Story is the sequence of events, discourse is the way they're told.) I was thinking about whether some of the objections were as to PbtA's management of story or its management of discourse. There seemed to be a mix of both, with connected objections around management of time at the table (what we're doing, when.) It's interesting to reflect on what Vincent describes as important to him as a designer - for example in pemerton's post just above - and what his rules achieve. It's not solely that we want to say unwelcome things: we want to say paradigmatically unwelcome things!So while I don't agree with what I initially understood to be its point, I wouldn't characterise the digression as dumb.</blockquote>