Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9333933" data-attributes="member: 42582">The GM deciding when to invoke rules or abandon them or whatever is, in my opinion based on my experience, not a good fit with player-driven play. For instance, if the GM is at liberty to suspend the rules, then instead of the rules bringing unexpected results, driving home the consequences of failed protagonism, etc, it just becomes the GM making a decision to hose or not hose the player. Which isn't much fun for either participant, in myexperience.When it comes to "completely changing all mechanics" I don't know what you have in mind. 4e D&D, for instance, doesn't completely change all of AD&D's mechanics. It doubles down on some of them and changes others.Burning Wheel doesn't completely change all of RQ or RM's mechanics. If you're a RM or RQ player, and you look at a BW PC sheet, you're going to recognise the significance of the long list of skills, the derived attributes, etc. You'll quickly work out that spell tax is like PP or POW depletion.But there are key elements of BW that differ from RQ and RM, and that make it better suited for narrativist play. As I've already posted in this thread, I doubt very much I'll ever GM RM again, having found a game better suited for my purposes.I honestly don't know what the spectrum is that you (and [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER]?) are trying to articulate.I mean, either the session of play addresses premise, or it doesn't. Either the way scenes are framed, and resolved, generates theme, or it doesn't. Either there is rising action across a moral line - driven by fit characters and apt antagonism - or there isn't.Well the goal of my posts is not to characterise your play. That's up to you.But it seems to my implausible to deny that map-and-key play is not a big thing. I mean, I have CoC modules that are full of maps and keys - what the heck is that about, other than being a massive marker of the enduring cultural footprint of D&D's map-and-key approach across the whole hobby.Another enduring thing, related to map-and-key, is that play should start "at the edge of the map" or "at the entrance to the mapped place" - that is to say, that play should being in a low- or no-stakes situation, so that the players' first move is to enter the "gameboad" and thereby being the process of enlivening scenes.This is why any discussion of starting in media res gets labelled as railroading by many people, even if the "res" of the scene are things that the GM has directly taken from the players' cues. For instance, I've often posted - as an example of narrativist play - my first session of Burning Wheel: one of the PCs had a Relationship with his balrog-possessed brother, and had a Belief that he would find a magic item to help end that possession, and I opened play with that PC in a bazaar in Hardby with a peddler offering to sell him an angel feather.Multiple posters have told me that that was an inappropriate way to start, and that the session should have started at the gates to the city, so that the player has the choice to go to the bazaar or not. That criticism makes no sense at all unless one takes as a premise that play should begin at the edge of the map with nothing at stake. Which is to say, the criticism both reflects the cultural legacy of map-and-key play, and is directly at odds with the goals of narrativist play.</blockquote>

Verification