Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9263017" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree on your description of the situation, but I'm not clear we are trying to prove the same points.  I think some people think that because they are playing a ttRPG they inherently have more agency than if they are playing a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and in reality unless the GM really works hard to grant agency, they inherently have less.  And many systems to me seem to exist to further that misperception by making it easier to hide the rails from all participants, including sometimes the conscious realization of the GM himself.  Tabletop RPGs heavily depend on illusion and the thing about illusion is that it makes it difficult to analyze what is really going on especially at an emotional level.  You really have to step back and look at things.I think in general few people actually disagree on what the experience of a good tabletop roleplaying session is like.  There are a few outliers like people that want to play fairy chess with fog of war on an infinite game board, or who want to play that game where you pass around a story and add to it, or who want to play "Whose Line is it Anyway?" but most of those people play those things rather than RPGs if they have a choice in the matter.  What we really end up disagreeing over is the theory of how you produce that experience.  And one real sticking point is probably the most misunderstood term in all of gaming - "railroading" ("metagaming" is a close second).</blockquote>

Verification