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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8598063" data-attributes="member: 7028554">The always excellent and talented designer Jason Cordova does a podcast (Fear of a Black Dragon) that's sort of unofficially about the intersection of story game and OSR play styles. He mentions pretty frequently that he thinks the two communities have more in common than they might realize, compared to trad gamers/play styles. I think that makes a lot of sense--the emphasis on emergent narratives, the notion of letting it ride (leaning into the dice rolls and random factors), and even the fact that both play styles are often openly, unapologetically "hard" on PCs. For all the talk of story games being hippy games or whatever, a typical PbtA campaign tears its PCs up in relatively short order. Sometimes that means lots of deaths by the end, or maybe it means personal tragedies and defeats, vulnerabilities constantly exploited by the GM, not to mention playbooks that say you're doomed, and they mean it, since the GM really is supposed to doom you. OSR and story games really require PCs to not be overly precious about their characters, and definitely not to assume success or survival.I think what you're describing here sounds great, and something like it happened to me, too. I've been pulling elements from Blades and Stonetop into my long-running trad game, dropping more and more mechanics that share narrative control, and my players are diving into those elements. I've also started leaning hard on something like a PbtA-style Die of Fate or FitD-style Fortune roll to let a dice roll determine the overall goodness or badness of a new situation, forcing myself to improvise as much as possible, but letting the game surprise me more.So I definitely agree about applying lessons. The only thing I'd add is something I yammered about upthread, which is that I think it takes some serious work for an experienced trad-game GM to rewire their brain to the PbtA/FitD approach, before they can start cutting and pasting those ideas. But I obviously think it's worth it!(Kind of a tangent here, but One Night Strahd is, to me, an example of what happens when 5e gets infected by PbtA ideas and mechanics. In a good way!)</blockquote>

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