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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9774513" data-attributes="member: 42582">Good list!For these two, I think maybe Over the Edge (1992) is the modern beginning. A bit later, Maelstrom Storytelling (1998, from memory) and HeroWars (2000) use free-form descriptors as key tools for describing characters and situations.What's interesting (and here I gently touch on your mention of 4e D&D) is how these sorts of descriptors get incorporated into robust resolution systems like extended contests (in Maelstrom and HW and (as I experienced them) skill challenges) or the action scene resolution framework in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. The way these systems interplay fiction and mechanics is (as best I can tell) a new thing in RPGing. (D&D hit points could, perhaps, have moved in the same direction, but as it turns out they haven't.) And it informs other "modern" RPGs that don't use free descriptors in the same way, like how compromises are established in a Burning Wheel Duel of Wits, or any Torchbearer 2e extended conflict.In the same general space as this, I see a trend towards reducing the fictional overhead on the GM, by adopting a combined approach to fiction and mechanics that spares the GM from having to keep track of a whole lot of fiction that is secondary to, or even peripheral to, game play. Part of what supports this is developing mechanical devices for establishing and evolving salient fiction, including background fiction, that doesn't require detailing everything and tracking it all via imagined granular causation. The example I know best is Torchbearer 2e, and the way it handles camp and town events. I think BitD factions would be another example.Classic D&D dungeon building is not too far from this; but there was no development towards a stylised/scaffolded/structured approach to other setting elements. Rather, in the 1980s, the trend was in the other direction, towards a very workload-intensive approach to building and managing the fiction (see eg Rolemaster's Campaign Law; or the AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide).These are pretty fundamental, and at least in the RPGs I play are pretty closely related - in that, important to the techniques used to avoid railroading is establishing a methodology for rolling the dice - when, why and what follows next - that is not "GM decides" at every moment. Prince Valiant (1989, I think?) is an early innovator here.Anyway, like I said, good list!</blockquote>

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