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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9771992" data-attributes="member: 42582">To me, it seems that a RPG can have an opinion, or an intent, even though it doesn't set out to have one. I say this not to disagree with the two quoted posts, but to elaborate upon the perspective from which I agree with them.<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/what-do-you-think-of-as-modern-ttrpg-mechanics.715583/post-9771016" target="_blank">Upthread I said that GURPS has a theme/goal</a>: "to express a certain way of thinking about the world, and how action within the world produces results". I could equally have called that an opinion. And it colours what sort of play is possible with GURPS. Just as one example, I think GURPS will not provide a play experience in which providence, or divine purpose, is an essential part of the fiction, because it brings with it the idea that events unfold through impersonal, "merely" causal processes. Even if the participants decide to suspend the rules to permit a "miracle" to occur, that is the intervention of a miracle from outside the normal way the world works; it doesn't make the miraculous a part of the everyday workings of the world.[USER=5142]@Aldarc[/USER] gives the example of normalised combat in Daggerheart; and [USER=7044197]@RenleyRenfield[/USER] the example of normalised melee (vis-a-vis gunfire or even, to be honest, bow shots) in D&D. These are ways those games have opinions (in this case, about the significance and the nature of violent confrontation) that colour the experience they are able to provide.[USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER] gave another example upthread, of how ignoring these sorts of implicit opinions can lead to games that don't deliver what they purport to deliver:And probably the most famous example of a game that contained an implicit opinion that contradicted its purported design goal was V:tM (which has also been discussed in this thread).One thing that "modern" RPG design involves, when done well, is being highly sensitive to these "opinions" that are implicit in a system, and (to mix my metaphors) going with the grain rather than against it. The game is coherently designed so that (to further mix the metaphors) everything about it pushes in the same direction.The typically-offered solution to a game that is not designed so that everything pushes the same way is the GM: the GM will make the game their own, by picking and choosing, by foregrounding some bits and backgrounding others. But this doesn't avoid opinion: it just offers another, particular, type of play experience - the GM-driven story or the GM-mediated world. Which is neither the pinnacle nor the totality of what RPGing can be.What I've written above in this post explains why I'm reasonably sceptical about this idea that some intents are wider in scope. I mean, they can vary in the range of fictional situations they will support (Burning Wheel is probably a bit less narrow than Agon 2e in this respect, though the latter can be and has been adapted to other sorts of fictional situation than Homeric Greece). But their implicit opinions/intents will still tend to produce a particular sort of experience.</blockquote>

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