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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7656466" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't understand your move from autobiography ("I can take or leave gameplay" to generalisation.Perhaps you don't care about gameplay. But gameplay was important to early D&D - look at a module like Ghost Towers of Inverness, or Tomb of Horrors, or Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and there is virtually nothing but gameplay.Perhaps you can't conceive of gameplay in an RPG outside the context of a dungeon crawl. But gameplay is pretty important for my group, and dungeon crawls are mostly irrelevant. In my <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?400493-Session-Report-hijinks-in-the-Elemental-Chaos" target="_blank">last 4e session</a>, the PCs were trying to capture Ygorl and imprison him in the Crystal of the Ebon Flame. This was an episode of gameplay. Within the rules of the game they came up with a solution to a problem - namely, immobilise Ygorl and thereby slow him down to his teleport speed - and then set about implementing it with the resources at their disposal. They didn't want to know whether or not I thought that it "made sense" that they could capture Ygorl. And I wasn't going to just "say yes", because catching and imprisoning Ygorl makes a significant difference to the unfolding campaign story.In <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?393493-Maiden-Voyage-(Penumbra-d20-module)" target="_blank">the session before that</a>, we were playing the Penumbra d20 module Maiden Voyage (using Burning Wheel as the system). Just to give one example - at one point one of the PCs was trying to Intimidate an NPC under his protection into confessing certain information. The check failed, and so - insofar as the player wanted his PC to continue talking with the NPC - the conversation continued between them as equals, rather than as one cowed by the other. Which then had ramifications for the subsequent choices made by that player, and are likely to have ongoing ramifications when we pick the game up again.The player didn't just want me to make up something that makes sense. And I don't want to just make up something that makes sense. For us, part of what makes it RPGing rather than round-robin storytelling is that at certain crunch points the mechanics will be used to find out what happens, and hence to shape what comes next. Mechanics can be better or worse suited to this task; and when they handle it poorly, it's no good just to say to tell the GM to come up with something that makes sense. That's just reiterating the need to solve a problem; it's not pointing towards an actual solution.I think you are wrong to imply, as you did (you virtually stated it), that   [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and I are an extreme minority relative to the rest of the posters on these boards. There is not even any need to name names, as many people who take a similar view to the two of us about the role of rules, and/or the GM, are posting in this very thread.As for universal views of D&D - I think a "tongue in cheek" flowchart which is summarised, in post 164, as "won't anyone think of the rules lawyers", is an attempt to label all those who don't play in a GM-driven, 2nd ed AD&D style in pejorative terms. I am not the one pushing the "universal view" -   [MENTION=15700]Sacrosanct[/MENTION] is, by attacking those who take a different attitude towards the role of rules, and the GM, in the game.And I am not the only poster in this thread to have made this point.</blockquote>

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