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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6180552" data-attributes="member: 2067">I don't necessarily dispute this, I just think that if this is a goal in design, you need to very strictly lock down what you mean by "interesting stories." Which already throws a wrench in the flexibility department because "interesting" is a subjective value, so if you define what you mean by "interesting stories," you're already limiting the game from what others might regard as "interesting stories." Totally a valid choice, you're just already beginning to abandon the hyper-local strength of the tabletop RPG by dictating that. It's a price that might be worth it, or might not, depending on what you do with the rest of the game. Rather than the nature of story, I think what you're getting at here is the depth of focus. A die roll is always an abstraction of several actions in the story, and the number of actions can be as narrow as "a single attempt to injure the orc" or "one lie I told" or as broad as "the three months we spent clearing out the Dungeon of Dread." Coherent stories can be as narrow or as broad as the people making them want, from Game of Thrones and longwinded descriptions of food to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Micro-Fiction-Anthology-Really-Stories/dp/0393314324" target="_blank">Micro-Fiction</a>, where you have story-arcs in single sentences, in single words, or even in the non-words that are implied by the words that exist. Plenty of stories involve single events, depending on your depth of focus (Leopold Bloom goes for a walk),  and entire novel series can be written about the memory conjured up when you eat a cookie (Proust found eternities in a moment lasting less than a second), so there's no "quantity of events" threshold for stories to meet. So a game that wanted to be about stories should contain infinities in each attack, and also simplicities in entire universes (FATE gets at this pretty well, I think, with the idea of a depth-of-focus for a given scene). I'd call shenanigans on that, too, for much the same reason. What is "trivial" is as hyper-local as what is "interesting," so any attempt to determine that for other tables is working against the hyper-locality of the game. Again, not that it's not a price worth paying sometimes, just that you better have a real compelling reason for people to be into your idea of what is interesting and what is trivial. I'd agree with this, which is why in 5e I see a potential to actually design FOR the hyper-localism that is going to exist regardless of whether not you design for it. I think in 3e, this was mitigated for me in the presence of the OGL and the cacophonous marketplace of ideas it generated. If I didn't agree with what WotC thought was trivial and what WotC thought was interesting, I had other publishers to go to. This is also part of why things like using this Dryad as The D&D Dryad (tm), or things like choosing One Cosmology For Everyone, would seem to be pretty bad ideas to me, and why I bang the drum of "Examples, not definitions" so loudly. Gatekeeping and strict definitions work too much against the localism that is one of the big strengths of RPG's for them to be worthwhile in the case of The Biggest RPG, D&D (smaller games would have different calculus).It's a very limited potential audience to start with, just given the realities of RPG game publishing. I don't think that the trend to being very narrow helps, because it makes the hyperlocality harder to benefit from. I also tend not to think that these categories are very useful things, that they are mostly non-existent as distinct constructs, etc., but I don't think that would hurt the business side of things that much. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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