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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6181080" data-attributes="member: 6688937">I think most of what you're getting at here is why I was hesitant to use the word "gravitas".I don't think that (if we are designing a story game) that we have to be terribly specific in subject matter/genre. I think that makes it easier, as we can define more elements of that genre, etc. However, I have played at least one game (Capes) in which its mechanics could easily apply to any genre I've ever conceived. One of my players even commented on this, "Its the first game I've ever played where you could do Wuthering Heights." (Literature majors, whaddya gonna do? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) I don't think Prime Time Adventures says very much about genre/premise, either. I have my suspicions about Fiasco's mechanics, as well. To be clear, I think the rampant anonymity of these games would advise against making them the core of D&D, but I think they prove something of a concept. The minimum for D&D would be much simpler, but still "bottoms out" somewhere.I think non-universal premises are okay, when speaking specifically about D&D. We've already drawn a (nebulous) circle around "Fantasy", so a premise about computer viruses is unlikely to play well. But I'd like to pull out a bit from the <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Narrativism</a> essay:Which, in my head is summarized: "fiddly bits narrow the range of stories, rather than expand them." The profusion of classes, feats, (now) subclasses, races, powers, etc. is a proximate cause of losing what you've termed the "hyperlocality". (Something FATE GMs know well. The reason you come up with lists of stunts and other "Extras" rules is to define how it will work in your game, not to enable it. By default, FATE enables almost anything you'd want.)As for "triviality", I think there are significant practical differences between analyzing literature and developing rules for gameplay at the table. I think those differences inform quite a bit about specifically what counts as a good story for D&D. Indeed, I think that disagreement on that is what was at the heart of the edition wars, as WotC (twice!) tried to draw a smaller circle than the audience filled. (Calling everything "core" doesn't help, either.) So, certainly, that circle needs to be very broad (given 5e's goals.)  However, I do think that for practical table-play, there has to be a quality to any theses/anti-thesis that gives us the ability to let it satisfyingly fill gametime and (for a game like D&D) mechanical processes. I'm not sure that I'd call it purely "complexity" either (though that's a part of it). All the very open story games I've mentioned have this property of multiple-player-engaging premises (or perhaps multiple premises). There are other story-generating games (Gumshoe games and Whispering Vault, IME) which thrive on investigative scenarios. Such scenarios, by their nature, invite tangled theories and shifting premises.I very much agree. (Although I don't hold out a lot of hope.) I love these stories, but I think I'd rather see them in a worldbook or something, rather than in the MM. Wouldn't that be a wild idea? Have an MM which is almost purely stats/mechanics, and then the guide to the <setting> would be filled with setting-specific stories.No real argument. I think the trend to be very narrow (Gumshoe, for example) is partially to take advantage of the occasional holes left by traditional rpgs, and also to serve some very specific customer bases with pdfs.</blockquote>

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