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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7900617" data-attributes="member: 4937">[USER=6816042]@Arilyn[/USER]: You are probably not wrong, and it probably does work for your table like you describe, which just makes me want to play for a session or two at your table to learn how you make it work.But as for why I think it is incoherent, I think you have to go back to a somewhat legitimate complaint made in the early days of GNS theory, which was that often in the course of the game you'd reach a point where the thing that your character would do in this situation ran counter to the idea of winning. In other words, if the goal of the game was to kill the monster and take his stuff, then the best possible play was the play that most ruthlessly accomplished that goal even if that play ran counter to the declared personality and motivations of the character. Thus, in trad games you often see players with the aesthetic of "Challenge" or 'gamist' aesthetic playing their characters in a pure Pawn stance with only the most feeble justification for their actions, or adopting evil characters just so their ruthless actions won't be questioned. I think it was from that sort of observation that they ran with the idea that no game could satisfy more than one aesthetic of play.The way the FATE designers try to resolve this is remove the motivation to play your character in Pawn stance by rewarding playing the character to the declared type or motivation of the character. So for example, a Compel (a situation where your character behaves in something other than their best interests) is no longer a strict penalty, but something that gives you a potential mechanical reward. In theory this is supposed to remove the need for considering the mechanical rewards or penalties and allow you to focus on just playing your character.But at least in my observation, that doesn't happen. What actually happens is that it all just becomes another mechanic to leverage toward achieving success and that highly thespian approaches to play are actually deprecated compared to even D&D because they aren't actually approaching the problem from a different angle, but just applying more or less the same levers that the power gamer at the table is pulling. Further, my real standard here is, "If this is supposed to encourage role playing, does this actually encourage in character dialogue?" And so often I see mechanics in the social pillar replacing in character dialogue and any other in character interaction with the fiction with rules jargon and metagame discussions. I always say that too often instead of producing the experience of Story, Nar games end up producing the experience of being a creative team assigned to collaborate on a screenplay.  What is created is not the experience of Story, but the process of creating a Transcript or even just an Outline.  Instead of feeling like a participant in the story, you feel like a participant in a business meeting discussing a story.   If I watch a podcast like 'Critical Role', I very much get the feeling that they are creating story (in fits and starts) and feel like they are in a story (although obviously it's impossible for me to perfectly get into their head and know what the experience feels like to them).  I don't get the feeling that something like FATE better creates a story or the experience of being in a story than a game like D&D with no explicit ambitions of creating a story.</blockquote>

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