NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9083868" data-attributes="member: 42582">I would hope there is something at stake, if we're going to spend 10 minutes on it! I'm not really a big fan of low-stake, just-for-colour roleplaying through this sort of thing.Surely you can see that there is a difference between the two constraints:*Must conform to a shared fiction that has been established at the table and is known to all participants; *Must conform to a fiction that is known only to the GM, and is being extrapolated by them from notes and ideas that are authored by and known only to them.I don't understand this at all. Playing RPGs is something I do in the real world - as [USER=6901101]@Scott Christian[/USER] noted, it is a real activity that takes up real time in my real life. So the question for me is Is this a worthwhile way to spend some of my time? There can be many factors that help answer that question. One of them is Will I enjoy the experience playing this game? And one of the factors that helps answer that question is Will it be a gripping, intense, immersive play experience?I think someone upthread - or anyway, something I read recently - talked about play in which the player character is just a device whereby the player is inserted into the imaginary world and situation, and learns about it. That seems to me an accurate description of some RPGing - eg it seems to fit with how some classic designers (eg Gygax) describe their sort of play - but it's not an approach to RPGing that is of much interest to me. For me, what makes a fiction gripping, intense and immersive in general is that the situations and their resolution are compelling. In the context of a RPG, where I engage the fiction via a particular persona - the player character - what makes a situation and its resolution compelling is that it speaks to me as my character. Among other things, this makes me feel like I am living this character's life. (In some metaphorical fashion at least.)This, and more.If my character is a farmer, then the local land, the crops, the clouds, the weather, the way of baking bread, what happen when an animal gives birth - these are all things of intimate familiarity to me. Likewise the prayers and customs and rituals that attend all these things.If my character is a hunter or a forager or a scout, then the nature of the local woodland, what trees are easy and/or safe to climb, the animal ecology, where to find eggs, how to take cover - these are all things of intimate familiarity to me. And, again, so are all the social practices that go with them.The same is true if my character is a knight, or a magician, or whatever, in respect of the worlds of those characters.To relate this to the Noble background: it is me, the player, who is portraying this Noble. Every time I declare an action - including the seeking of an audience - that flows from that background, and another participants (eg the GM) tells me that it can't happen, that is contradicting the proposition that I am intimately familiar with the world of my character. It is telling me that I am, in effect, an alien, a self-insert, in an unknown world. For me, that's not a play experience that is worth turning up for.</blockquote>

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