NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6179737" data-attributes="member: 2067">See, I think as defined by the "first school," every game ever created has a story. Tetris and Pong and Tag and Poker and every test you took in grade school and........because those all pass the threshold of the "intro -> rising action -> climax -> aftermath" requirement. It's really a feature of human psychology when interacting with a conflict, which is really all a game is: endless, cyclical conflict. Every time you roll a dice, you have something you want to do, and an outcome that comes from it. Which is actually at the heart of the "second school," too, though couched in more arcane jargon. Thesis? "I want this pie." Antithesis? "There is an orc in front of the pie." That forms your introduction. Rising Action? "I attack the orc." Climax? "Roll to see if you hit." Aftermath? "The orc is dead, and you take the pie," or "The orc is not dead, and you cannot have the pie."D&D's flexibility -- in allowing people to choose their own theses, to choose their own rising action, to define their own climax, and to define what they'd like their aftermath to be, at the micro level -- makes it hard to impose a structure from the outside. You can't easily say, "D&D is ABOUT going on dangerous adventures!" because then you have a PC more interested in running a shoe shop than in slaying the dragon, and that's D&D, too. I think that's a strength of D&D in comparison to most RPGs, because it enables a hyper-local kind of structure to develop, which is how it recognizes the hyper-local nature of the tabletop RPG in general. Which is why I think stories like this are great options, but lousy assumptions. The more and stronger assumptions the game carries, the more it works AGAINST that hyperlocality, which ultimately weakens it, often critically IMO, because we've got millions of entertainment options where we show up to be told or participate in a story of someone else's telling (like this Dryad story as The Dryad (tm) would be), but precious few where we show up to tell our OWN stories, using a toolbox given to us (like this dryad story as one of many possible dryad stories would be).Because it's hard to say "D&D is ABOUT going on dangerous adventures!", but D&D should make it easy to say, "Tonight, your characters are going on a dangerous adventure..."</blockquote>

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