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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5613270" data-attributes="member: 42582">Just adding to what Balesir already said - there's a difference between pre-packaged theme or genre (Dragonlance, Cthulhu, Planescape in my reading of it etc) and theme generated during play by the participants in the game.The Forge calls the former high-concept simulationism, the latter narrativism. Nothing much turns on the words chosen (though I don't feel any great pressure to depart from a fairly clearly established usage). But the difference between the two playstyles is very big.In Call of Cthulhu, it's a presupposition of the game, which then shapes the flow of play, that meddling in things humanity was not meant to know will put your PC on an inevitable downward spiral.In my current 4e game, one of the PCs is a chaos sorcerer who is a Demonskin Adept. A question on the table is whether this meddling in things we weren't meant to know will put that PC on an inevitable downward spiral. I don't want the mechanics or the fictional setup of the gameworld to already answer that question. It's something that the whole table (including the player of that PC, and me as GM) will discover by actually playing the game. One method used to force the discovery is me (as GM) putting the player's PC in situations where spiralling downward is a possible option and consequence.Achieving the second sort of playstyle, rather than the first, depends on a mix both of mechanics (getting rid of mechanical alignment is, in my view, an important first step) and GMing techniques.</blockquote>

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