Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9045543" data-attributes="member: 42582">100% agreed. The sort of things that [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] describe have basically no bearing on my RPGing. There is a degree of unreality and contrivance in it that I find completely unappealing.In the context of a discussion about contrivance, this all reads like special pleading for a particular sort of RPGing.D&D takes REH's model of Conan - the rootless wanderer, who comes from a land ("Cimmeria") that is purely mythical in the context of the stories themselves (we meet no other Cimmerians, we never see Conan living in Cimmeria) - and generalises it across the whole player character population.It also takes B-movie conventions, including "the villain", and generalise these across much of - it seems often the whole field of - gameplay.These are contrivances, whose origins in literature and film are obvious to anyone who looks for them. To note that they are contrivances is not to criticise them. It is, though, to express incredulity that RPGers who are committed to those contrivances would then try and argue that their RPGing is in some distinctive fashion relatively free of contrivance.And yes, it is possible to adopt a "simulationist" orientation to these contrivances. There is a whole genre of fandom premised on doing this: it's the genre that produces histories of the Time Lords, gazetteers of Galifrey, debates about the precise command structure of Star Fleet that will explain why James T Kirk is able to get away with doing the things he does, a demand to know the xeno-biology of all the musicians in the cantina in Mos Eisely, etc. That doesn't stop them being contrivances. And often, the result is a host of post hoc rationalisations that do little but blunt the thematic force of the original fictional elements. (Sometimes this happens in the production of further works themselves - see eg the Star Wars prequels.)As [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] has been posting for pages now, it is possible to have RPGing that does not use these devices: in which the PCs are not rootless wanderers whose only concerns are wealth, power, and a barely defined code of honour; in which antagonism does not predominantly take the form of "villains" in a B-movie sense. This sort of RPGing uses different techniques to generate dynamic play, and different techniques to establish setting.That does not make it more, or distinctively, contrived.</blockquote>

Verification