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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 9841221" data-attributes="member: 6993955">I don't think it takes anything like that long. The real measure of 'work' is probably the GM - how experienced they are with RPGs generally, and to what extent they reflect on their own efforts and regularly make attempts to improve. A GM with experience in many different systems, and who is very self aware in terms of style, skills, and interests, can digest a new play style quite quickly. Moving to a new style is more a work of interpretation than anything else. The GM interprets the new game in light of her previous experience and her understanding of how RPGs 'work'. Here we see the importance of, first, successful reflection by GM the on their practice, and second the success of the game in question in clearly setting out its expectations, goals, and tool box.We perhaps need to be more nuanced that we currently are when we say 'play styles'.  It's not as though we have two play styles, one narrative, and one not, whose games each share a regular, recurring, and most importantly shared set of mechanics and expectations. Those terms are both pretty fuzzy, and the games we apply them to have a huge range of mechanics, systems, and expectations that aren't set neatly into two boxes. Designers have been crossing the streams for many years already and the resulting RPG landscape is simply too complex to admit of binary definition. I think you can examine a specific game and talk about its influences, its antecedents, and it's expectations, but when it comes to collecting those individual games into groups things get messy round the edges. Not that we can't apply those fuzzy definitions to groups of games, we can, but only with the realization that those definitions rest uneasily and don't perfectly apply to every aspect of every game in the pile the describe.</blockquote>

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