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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6351311" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think if you describe things at the level of "simple story motivations" you are not going to identify what it is that is being claimed to be new.For instance, if I think of antecedent mechanics to "kickers", I think of (say) taking Hunted/Enemy disadvantages in Champions/HERO-type games. These have the aspect of player choice of adversity. But they are different too, apart from anything else in being framed as disadvantages, which puts a weight on them in relation to gameplay, and a set of motivations for player and GM, that is different from how a "kicker" works.And for me, the fact that Jonathan Tweet identifies the kicker in its specific form - a player-authored situation of opening adversity - as "new game tech" counts as a reason to think that he doesn't regard Ars Magica as already incorporating it.I guess I've not really had that experience.I mean, I've got no interest in playing Nicotine Girls: the tropes don't particularly grab me, and the whole set-up is rather depressing. (If I was younger and still attending cons, and there was a con session on, I might play it - but that's true of a lot of systems.) But reading Nicotine Girls was, for me, what switched on a light about the structure of end games in an RPG campaign. It helped me bring a long-running Rolemaster campaign to a satisfactory close, and I will be using similar techniques and ideas to manage the conclusion of my 4e campaign. I think reading Nicotine Girls has helped me understand, and is helping me as a GM to manage, the epic destiny aspect of 4e play.And I can imagine any number of people not wanting to play Burning Wheel - it is mechanically very heavy (its resemblance to RQ and RM in this respect is part of why it appeals to me), for instance. But I think it is a mistake, from both a GMing and RPG design point of view, not to notice some of the techniques that it uses. For instance, I've seen innumerable complaints from people GMing 4e that players in a skill challenge won't attempt skill checks in which they don't have good bonuses. And I think many of those GMs could benefit from adopting some of the techniques that Luke Crane spells out in his BW books - both ways of framing conflict so that players will engage even if it's not mechanically advantageous to them; and ways of narrating failure, so that the upshot is not shutting down those players' engagement with the game.Luke Crane probably wasn't the first GM to come up with such devices - in my own case, after all, I know that I discovered "no myth" scene-framing as a technique long before I ever read anyone discussing it, although I didn't fully appreciate its relationship to the admonitions to prepare everything that I had read in the GMing books that I grew up on. But Luke Crane's rulebooks give a better statement of these techniques than any other RPG books that I'm personally familiar with.And for me, that's what matters: the payoff for my RPGing. I don't care whether or not Paul Czege thinks my 4e game is shallow; what I care about is that a single forum post of his taught me more about using NPCs in encounters than any thing else I've ever read on that topic. And whether or not he was the first person to use such techniques, or even to articulate them, it was different enough from the standard advice that I'm happy to credit him with some degree of "innovation" or "revolution".I don't really get this thing of "disenfranchising players". For me, AD&D became unplayable as a serious RPG because of what I increasingly experienced as the inadequacies of its combat and magic rules: hit points, spell memorisation, etc. Was I "disenfranchised" by AD&D? The question doesn't really make sense to me. The game wasn't enjoyable for the sort of seriousness of play that I wanted, so I played a different game (Rolemaster). When WotC started publishing a version of D&D that I could play in a serious way, I stopped GMing RM and switched to 4e. I don't think of that as "re-enfranchisement". It's just me following my preferences: I wanted something from a fantasy RPG that 4e was able to deliver.As for critical analysis of 4e - I think it is hard to argue that the game has been under-analysed, or not subjected to scrutiny.</blockquote>

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