Recent content by Neonchameleon

This brought to mind that a whole lot of fights in D&D are "second unit" fights - the sort of fight scene is handed over to the second unit director to shoot with some basic notes to make something interesting and flashy out of, and the story resumes after the fight is done. Yours wasn't one of...

In my experience if the GM has done "a boatload of prep" that tends to move it outside the realms of a collaborative table and into the realms of "The GM's table with some other people". The GM should prep and the GM should normally do more prep than any one other player but if the GM is doing...

Burning Wheel on the other hand is at a minimum Forge-adjacent or possibly actual Forge. It is not a normal baseline. This is a slightly different point. I'm not referring to inventory management here so much as I am to the acquisition and proportion of your power held in random loot

I'm going to partially disagree. Terry Pratchett described humanity as Pan Narrans - the storytelling chimp and story is an inevitable result of humans doing complex human things. It was not the goal but oD&D even had significant mechanics that strongly encouraged the growth of stories and were...

For the record: Daggerheart: rules light D&D meets PbtA. No moves, but success-with-consequences as a possibility on the basic roll; Genesys inspired. (IMO it does just about everything Dungeon World or 13th Age do better). Out of combat it reminds me a lot of 4e - but it's theatre of the mind...

Then possibly you'd care to give your definition? As well as your definition of "story mechanics". Mine considers e.g. most Adventure Paths to be inorganic. Because they involve pre-scripted events rather than are able to respond to the in character actions of the characters in the setting.

Not affecting casting doesn't mean it wouldn't matter at all. Arcana and Search are IME two of the most important skills in the game for the party to possess and History is pretty useful. Now the score I find annoying is Constitution. It's too passive.

Yes - and the trad games (especially D&D) are the most inorganic of the ones I run, with the scenes pre-scripted to a degree. Meanwhile neither the Daggerheart nor the Crash Pandas or Honey Heist games I've run have needed pre-scripting. Instead the players have more agency than they do in more...

I'm not being obtuse here. I can think of games with what I'd call "Story mechanics" (Fiasco springs to mind). But what I would think you mean by them are absent in the games I've mentioned.

What exactly do you call "story mechanics"? And why do you think the games I've listed have them?

No one is saying they don't produce stories. But they produce them far more slowly. Given the amount of GM force involved in trad RPGs (as opposed to old school ones) I'd also say that Apocalypse World and Masks for example produce stories significantly more organically than most trad RPGs.

And there's something we can agree on :)

Which of my groups? My main historic 4e group has one member dead and another in another part of the country. My most recent 4e group did well until someone didn't just move over 100 miles away but stopped commuting that far each way every weekend just to play at the end of the campaign (about...

What actually happened was I pointed out that DH was a better Grimdark game than DH and provided a reason why. You apparently found a comparison to 5e here too much to bear and threw not particularly good rules against the wall in a desperate attempt to prove otherwise. I pointed out these were...

Where "a very small minority" is just about every table I have played with as player or GM. I wonder what I was doing that you aren't.