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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9319466" data-attributes="member: 7040941">Absolutely, but thats why communications important, and why being cognizant of body language matters too. These aren't things a new system can really address short of the rules obligating somebody to make a vibe check, which would just be a weird and obtrusive thing to do. Thats why one of the best perrenial tips for GMs in all games is to call on somebody who might not be participating much and having them (as their character) weigh in on whats going on, and depending on how they go on to respond you can tell a lot of about where they are in terms of actually enjoying the game.What a system can do though is be designed in such a way that certain kinds of gameplay doesn't become obstrusive to the collective experience. Thats how my crafting system works; its explicitly meant to occupy the Crafters time so that others can take turns and do whatever it is they do. The crafter gets a robust mechanic to engage with, but the rest of the table doesn't have to sit there and watch them. And with some kinds of crafting, like Cooking, I put in a rule that heavily encourages the whole table to participate in making a meal together, and that is a wonderful thing to witness. So much so the next time I sit my group down to playtest I'm gonna have a KPC with them so I can get in on that too. Ultimately though, no one here is discounting that people are going to have preferences. My overall contention, and that I think of others, is that games we call trad or what have you are a lot more flexible than they're given credit for, particularly when they are run as sandboxes, which they always should be. A trad game and/or GM may not always grant or guarantee a large amount of Authorial agency to Players, but they are never obligate limiters of general Agency. Such a game may lack an appropriately universal resolution mechanic, or perhaps what it does have isn't at a high enough resolution to be satisfactory, or a GM may have gotten taught poorly and learned to enforce a railroad. The latter is never an issue of how the system itself works, and the former can be a genuine design problem, but not one that necessitates an entirely new system. And then of course we can delve into more specific edge cases, like how Death is often poorly designed or how the rules might inadvertently limit the perceived scope of the game due to whats given mechanical weight (ie, 90% of the rules are combat and everything else is incidental). In those, particularly the latter, we may well be talking a whole new design and not just a revision or GM intervention. But that doesn't make a narrative game the only answer.</blockquote>

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