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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9835706" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think I'm not as sure that the original game pieces needed a particular trope or exemplar to work. Heroes and Superheroes can be Aragorn, Eomer, Conan, Lancelot, etc without worrying too much about details beyond that. And all we need to know about Wizards, exemplar wise, is that they use magic. The artillery-like effects are a product of wargaming requirements and conventions, plus maybe a dash of Dr Strange.The role of classes, and their relationship to tropes, has changed a lot since Chainmail; and beginnings of that change can be seen even with the Druid and the Monk. I still think that, in the original conception of the game, game function was primary.What I'm sensitive to - most recently, I was commenting on it in relation to Mythic Bastionland - is when a RPG doesn't tell the GM how they should be making framing decisions.Classic D&D does (although it doesn't use the language of framing) - the GM frames by reference to the location of the PCs on the map, with reference to the key; and also by reference to the outcomes of wandering monster rolls. Burning Wheel does too, albeit it's rules for framing are completely different from classic D&D. Apocalypse World is a little bit more indirect, but does set out a method for framing - the interplay between the prep of fronts, and the making of GM moves.But the GM-as-world-mediator approach, at least when explained by its proponents, tends to eschew giving an account of how the GM is to make these framing decisions. It doesn't want them to be done by reference to rising action, or theme; but what approach should be used is not normally explained.</blockquote>

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