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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6248085" data-attributes="member: 17106">I don't think it's particularly feasible for any playing group not to be generally on the same page. I also suspect that most every group approaches the game from a general understanding that the players are their characters and the DM is in charge, and then riffs off of that to their taste.Well, for those of us who bought our games from retail stores and depended on a community to furnish players, being a connoisseur of rpgs isn't really viable.I also don't see that immersion and naturalism contradict the idea of "escapist action movie fun". That's just another thing one can immerse oneself in. Those ideas don't mandate "realism" per se, and indeed the D&D world is clearly not real.It doesn't require that. I think that as shared narrative control is unnatural to me, you must not have mastered the auteur side of DMing.To be fair, I am probably much better at storytelling than most people, but I don't have any trouble in getting players to do interesting things, or in weaving those individual events together in a coherent manner. I also don't have any trouble seamlessly integrating various influences and making it flow together naturally. Now, was this true when I was doing this at fifteen? Not so much. Effectively leveraging the full potential of the rpg medium is a skill acquired over time.I don't see that at all. I think it works best when the DM is very strong on setting, and knows how the world will react to players and can improvise cogently. I think it also requires that the DM not get married to a particular story, and instead treats DMing as more of a sensationalist experience.Not that it isn't an interesting list, but without a reservoir of books to browse through, a bunch of money to buy some of them, and a ton of free time, it's not much good to me personally. And what does do fine for me is the version of 3.X mishmash I run now.In fact, if I were going to try something new, I'd purposefully not do another fantasy simulation engine, I'd go somewhere very different.I don't think D&D has that strong of an identity. To me, even fantasy is somewhat tangential to what D&D really is.I referred to it above, but I think since Star Trek fanship is common enough in my community, it's very natural to us that world-breaking powers and a huge power curve can be managed into something that feels natural (even if on some level it is nonsense).As to D&D, real castles were inhabited by inbred dilettantes, not the best and the brightest. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the D&D world is likewise not a meritocracy, and that complex social forces keep everything in balance. D&D also has a strong tradition of humanlike interventionist deities, so deus ex machina is hardly out of the question.I sincerely doubt that Gary Gygax invented hit points.</blockquote>

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