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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7325251" data-attributes="member: 42582">A slight tangent:Not really. It's a weakness (or flaw) in a hammer that it's handle is brittle, or that it's head is not flat - because that is an obstacle to the hammer serving its core function.I'm not much of a carpenter, but I can imagine it counting as a weakness in a hammer intended mostly for driving nails into timber that it lacks a claw on the back for pulling out nails. But such a lack is not a weakness in eg a sledge hammer, which is not designed for such use.It's not any sort of weakness at all in a hammer that it not very good for eating eggs off - and if you ever found yourself in a situation where it was crucial to eat your eggs of something and a hammer was all you had, well you may well be grateful for the hammer as being better than nothing at all!I just find this quite unhelpful and even obscurantist.If I want to play a no myth game, it makes sense to ask whether the formal approach of FATE-based games, or the more informal approach set out in Burning Wheel, and that I also have used in my 4e game, will work. And you might say of these that each has strengths and weaknesses - the existence of a structure in FATE is probably a strength as such, as in game play structures help mediate expectations and manage or eliminate conflicts - but the output of the structure in FATE might count as a weakness if it leads to "Aspect bingo", whereas the more informal and somewhat organic approach in BW might be seen to produce a more intimate and visceral engagement with the fictional positioning.Now maybe all the above is wrong about strengths and weaknesses - I've never played FATE, and what I've said is the barest of conjectures - but it makes sense.But to say that a weakness of the Burning Wheel approach is that it doesn't allow for a GM driven metaplot is just nonsense - like saying that a weakness of a hammer is that it's hard to eat with. No one who wants to run a GM driven metaplot-type game would pick up Burning Wheel and try to use it for that purpose.Or just purpose or utility. Different tools and techniques are useful for different things.</blockquote>

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